Welcome to my [Dumb] Passive Income Report! This blog is all about what I am doing to create several different passive income streams. This monthly income report details my results. I work very hard and dedicate many hours each week to working on my different online endeavors in an attempt to create passive income. So why do I consider it passive income then? Because I am not trading specified amounts of time for a predetermined amount of money like I do at my day job. Most of the income you will see in this report results from work I have done in the past.
Why am I sharing my income publicly? Hopefully to gain credibility with you (the readers) and to maintain a certain degree of accountability for myself. I could blog all day long about what I am doing to create passive income online, including some of my unique strategies. But why would anybody trust me and believe that what I am doing works if I don’t prove it by sharing my results? This is what I mean by gaining credibility and this is one of the main purposes for sharing my income. I also share my failures on the blog, which holds me accountable. Knowing that I will be publishing a monthly income report will keep me motivated to keep pushing forward and plugging away on the things I need to do to create future passive income.
Happenings in October
A couple of cool and interesting things happened in October. Number one – I finally managed to get some content creation outsourced for very cheap. I did this as part of an experiment. I knew others were successfully getting content written for about $2 per article and I wanted to see if I could do the same. I also wanted to see for myself how the quality of these articles turned out. I was pleased and I definitely plan to utilize this strategy again.
Around the middle of October, Jon Haver (from Authority Website Income) contacted me with a request. He was thinking of starting up a new case study where he builds out a niche site using done-for-you services and putting in as little of his own time as possible. He knew that keyword research was kind of my thing, so he asked if I would be interested in doing the keyword research for the site. He already had the niche and the domain and he wanted to pay me to do extensive keyword research to find topics to have articles written on. I didn’t accept payment, but I did the research in exchange for some help with finding a few expired domains – which is Jon’s expertise.
Long story short – this service exchange led me to launch something I had been thinking about doing anyway. A completely done-for-you Keyword Research Service offered by me. I beta tested my service by offering it at a deeply discounted rate to subscribers of my e-mail list only (sign up here or over there —–> in the sidebar). I got some really good feedback and plan to open up the service to the public real soon. By the time you are reading this, it may already be available.
And this is the DUMB part…
Apparently, my understanding of the term “passive income” has gone awry. Offering a service means I will be trading my time for a predetermined amount of money. This is not passive at all and is most commonly known as active income. The entire premise and goal of this blog is to show what I am doing to create passive income streams online. So what gives?! In fact, this is why I added the word [Dumb] to the title of these reports. I previously just called them, Passive Income Report for… And I also added a section below called Non-Passive Income.
Here is how I can best explain and justify what I am doing and how it will eventually lead to more passive income. If you haven’t noticed, the passive income that I’ve been able to generate from month to month isn’t all that impressive. I’ve been dabbling with building niche sites for over a year. I would say that I am really good at the keyword research now. I’m pretty good at site setup, layout and design. I’m also pretty good at either creating content myself or getting it outsourced and properly optimizing it for on-page SEO.
What I am not good at is building backlinks. I know link building is necessary to get sites to rank well in the search engines, but I’m not good at it, I don’t like doing it and it’s just too time consuming for me. For these reasons, I just don’t follow through with it. So, I have these great niche sites out there that simply aren’t ranking well because they’re not getting links.
The win-win plan…
[blur]A light bulb kind of went off for me as a result of this service being born. I figured, people are willing to pay me to do keyword research – meaning that either they don’t like doing it, they are bad at it, or it is just too time consuming for them. Sound familiar? I could take the income I create from this and use it to pay other people to do link building for me! I get paid to do something that I like and I am good at – and in turn I use some of the income from that to pay for something I don’t like and I am not good at. Win-win! Plus, the keyword research income should be more than enough to pay for outsourcing some link building – which will add to my bottom line and make these income reports look a little more impressive. Speaking of that, let’s get to the numbers![/blur]
Update: My Keyword Research Service is live and available now! Click Here to see the sales page…
Income and Expenses – October 2013
Passive Income
Affiliate Income from Dumb Passive Income
- $185.44 – Long Tail Pro sales via Clickbank (why it is better than the competition)
- $0 – LeadPages sales for this awesome lead generation software (I EASILY created this squeeze page with LeadPages)
- $3 – SocialADR sales (go here to learn more and access my custom 20% off coupon code)
- $5.70- Aweber signups ($1 for your first month)
- $0 – Niche Website Theme sales via JVZoo (reviewed in detail here)
- $0 – Lending Club leads via Commission Junction (exactly how to sign up explained here)
- $0 – ManageWP signups (easily manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard)
- $0 – Carbonite Referral (explained in detail here)
Other Income from Niche Sites, Old Blog, Article Writing…
- $35.57 – Google Adsense
- $4.88 – Yahoo! Voices for articles I wrote a long time ago
- $4.24 – Amazon Associates for sales on Amazon.com (explained in detail here)
Non-Passive Income
Services by Matthew Allen
- $185 – Keyword Research Service (beta test at deeply discounted rate which I offered ONLY to people on my e-mail list)
Expenses
Hosting and Domains
- $9.95 – Hostgator (how to purchase a domain and set up web hosting)
- $1.17 – GoDaddy for domain renewals and purchases
- $0 – IXWebHosting – (up to 15 separate IP’s on one hosting account!)
- $0 – NameCheap – domain purchases (expired domains)
Tools, Plugins and Themes
- $12.00 – Long Tail Platinum monthly fee (if you have Long Tail Pro – upgrade to Platinum here)
- $12.00 – Long Tail Platinum monthly fee (why I ended up with 2 subscriptions –details here)
- $19.00 – Aweber monthly fee for e-mail list management (first month trial only $1)
- $4.90 – ManageWP monthly fee for WordPress multiple site management program
- $38.00 – SocialADR fee for social bookmarking for my niche sites (proven results within this post!)
Outsourcing
- $70.00 – to my private writer for article writing for niche sites
- $76.66 – to oDesk for article writing (how I paid only this much for 40 articles!)
Miscellaneous
- $7.96 – Paypal fees
Totals and Thoughts
Total income $423.83 minus total expenses $252.64 equals a net profit of $171.19 for October 2013!
Last month I shared three of my monetary goals for 2013. I’ve decided to leave these up on the report until the end of the year in order to hold myself accountable and track my progress.
- $100 in monthly Adsense income – I want Google paying me every single month!
- $300 in monthly Long Tail Pro affiliate sales – this tool has made too big of a difference in my internet marketing journey. I have to show others why and hopefully generate some decent affiliate income for all of my efforts.
- $1,000 total monthly income – I want to reach this for at least one month in 2013 and build on that into 2014 and the future
As you can see, I’m still not there as far as Adsense income ($35 in October). I do have one niche site that has it’s 4 main keywords ranking strongly on page 2 of Google. The main keyword has been at #11 or #12 for the past couple of weeks. With just a few strong links, that site should make it to page one and I think it has potential to be a $100/month minimum site with just Adsense.
I’m getting close with my Long Tail Pro affiliate sales. $185 is pretty respectable. I don’t know how much more I can write about the software to try to promote it. I think if I just spend the time to produce a few more instructional videos, that alone could boost my affiliate sales up above $300. C’mon Matt – let’s do it!
$1k/month in total income generated online. If all goes like I think it will, I should be able to accomplish this pretty easily in November with the launch of my Keyword Research Service. I got a number of people to pay the discounted price by offering it only to my small email list. When I go public with it, those numbers should translate to a similar percentage of people who will be willing to pay the full price. We’ll see.
Thank You!
Thank You for taking the time to read through my latest income report and Thank You for contributing if you have previously purchased something through one of my affiliate links! If you wish to support this site, but don’t have a need for any of my affiliate products, you could simply do your regular Amazon shopping through any of the links on this site that lead to Amazon.com. You won’t pay any extra and I will receive a small commission. Thanks so much if you do so!
Remember that there are several dumb ways to create passive income online, but only one site that is blogging about it! Dumb Passive Income… dot com.
-Matt
Many of the links within this income report are indeed affiliate links. I will receive a commission if you choose to purchase after clicking through via any of these links. Thank You if you do! To your success and mine – may we all be profitable online. Good Day!
Matthew Allen
good job Matt! I have been busy with family things and fell off of my niche site efforts (i know excuses excuses) but I am starting to get back to it now and hope to finish my site and start earning. I can attest that long tail pro / platinum are well worth the money!
Hey Bryan! Good to hear from you. I know you don’t blog about it anymore, but definitely check in when your niche site(s) becomes profitable and let me know how you’re doing.
Hi Matt. Nice idea to start the keyword research “side line”. Hope it goes well for you!
Stew
Hey Matt!
I think your offer of a KW research product is a good idea. Adding our Products/Services section to EF has added a healthy overall cash-flow to our business. It might be a good idea to team up with others in our niche that have different skillsets so that you guys can cross-promote what you have to offer. (i.e. Tung Tran’s linkbuilding product) That way, you can share audience and promote your strengths, eh?
Thanks Stew! I hope so too. Only way to find out is to try, right?
Yeah Justin – that is a great idea. In fact, Jon Haver and I briefly entertained doing something like this with his expired domain service.
I knew Tung was previously doing his own keyword research service (last time I looked it was sold out), but I had no idea he had a link building service! He must have just started it. I just looked at his site and I don’t see the KW research service anymore. His link building service actually looks pretty sweet! Thanks for pointing that out. Once I get my service offering finalized, I’ll definitely look into cross-promotion with Tung.
Sweet, man!
I mention Tung’s linkbuilding service because we were thinking about doing something similar with him. We want to test it out first, though, so we can get an idea as to how it works, how effective it is, etc. before we recommend it or offer it ourselves through our site.
I think that’s an interesting idea, actually. A product/service platform that vets the products/services and offers them up for sale (with a discount). A curated product/service site that offers a discount because of their bulk purchases…
After carefully looking over Tung’s link building service offering – I too am interested to see how it works. I might just buy a package if I get a few keyword research package sales soon. Otherwise, I would love to hear how it goes for you if you end up testing it out.
That curated site idea is really interesting! Done-for-you services from different folks who specialize in certain areas… could be a killer site/business idea!
Matt –
Great report. I’m pumped to see you roll out the keyword service! Keyword research isn’t an easy task and it is so important for any niche site project, no matter the monetization method. Cheers!
Thanks Doug. Keyword research is definitely a skill that takes time to figure out. I think I may be on to something, because there are many people out there who are either unwilling or unable to spend the time to figure it out properly. Now I’ll just need to attract those people to my site/sales page!
As you may remember from emails recently i am looking to do something very similar in my area of expertise. I think the key is to provide free content to your readers as you are and up sell from there. If they can see you as some form of authority they are far more like to buy from yourself.
Mind you as long as the quality of service you are giving is good i am sure you will have plenty of buyers.
An idea might be to give the service free to people such as Tung Tran and others in this area to show them what you are offering, as if they can see its quality they can no doubt work with you to provide and even better product.
Great tips James. Thank you! I’ve got a couple of other promotional tricks up my sleeve that I plan to implement as well. I’m pretty excited to get this thing launched.
Stay strong Matthew! These things take time but at the end they are really rewarding. The good thing about your service is that you can create a process that would have you involved. I mean, not 100%.
I’ve thought of that Miki – the possibility of outsourcing part of my keyword research service. To start off I’ll certainly be doing everything myself. If I start to get too busy, I’ll either have to limit the orders I take or consider outsourcing part of the process. If I end up outsourcing, I would still look over results personally and only send out ones that meet my metrics and standards.
Nice work starting a side business with keyword research. I had at one time considered doing that, and I’m guessing by your revenue that I probably should have gone through with it!
Looking at this, I am excited for you! I believe your goals are within reach soon. Don’t quit, stay at it!
Great blog Matthew! I share your frustration with link building, but my thought is that as long as you develop great content and promote it out there via social channels, the links will come naturally over time.
I had a question, what tool do you use to make a paragraph blurred out in exchange for a social share?
Link building vs. Social Media – that could be a post by itself! Both take time. If the goal of one is to get the other, maybe it’s better to focus on the other in the first place, eh? But yeah, social media is a LOT easier with no black, white and gray areas to worry about.
I e-mailed you the plugin that I used…
You do realize that the blurred content cannot be seen as there is no way to “like” “tweet” or “+1” it.
The share buttons are showing up right above the blurred content on my screen…?? Not sure what the issue is on your end Jae…