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 Last 2 Months and Looking Forward
Looking back, it doesn’t seem like I really accomplished very much during the months of July and August. I know I got up early every morning and sat in front of my computer. I know I was experimenting with different things I’ve learned recently to try to improve my websites, their rankings in Google and the overall user experience for visitors of each site. In other words – I’ve been dabbling! This has been my curse ever since I started my internet marketing journey nearly two years ago. Two years! It’s ridiculous really, that my income isn’t higher at this point.
Looking at my numbers below, I was definitely trending in the right direction – but not with reliably consistent forms of income. Most noteworthy of these is the sponsored post deals I had been getting for my old personal finance website. These made up for large chunks of my income over the past few months, but I didn’t get any deals for the month of August. I started to write an entirely separate blog post on this topic, but never finished it and don’t plan to do so. Here is how it was going to start out…
One interesting thing to note is the number of sponsored post deals that have come through in the past few months for my old money blog. It’s funny, because the blog is not active and gets hardly any traffic. But, it still has decent domain authority and has a PageRank of 3 (PR3). Because of these stats, advertisers are willing to pay for links in sponsored posts for that blog. Talk about passive income! They e-mail me the post. I copy and paste it, add a picture then publish it and then sit back and wait for the payment to arrive in my PayPal account. Okay. So it’s not totally passive. I do have to do a little bit of work. But, I timed myself on one of them. The one in May that paid $100 (minus $25 to Budgeting in the Fun Stuff for advertising fee) took me exactly 7 minutes to copy, paste, add picture and hit publish. 7 minutes for $75 in profit. Passive enough for me! Admittedly, the quality of these articles is crap – but I don’t care. I don’t have an audience on that blog anymore. The advertisers are simply paying for the link juice.
I was actually thinking about pursuing this business model further – but have since written that off as an illegitimate plan that would be temporary at best and has no long term income potential that would be reliable.
So, what am I working on now? I still have a few smaller niche sites that are bringing in a little bit of income and still have potential to grow. I’ve been adding a little bit of content to those and have been building up some backlinks (even though I dislike manual link-building) when I can. What I’m really excited about though is the “next big site” I am working on. Without going into details here, I’ll just say that I am counting on it to get me to my goal of $1,000 per month in online income before the end of this year. It is the site that I am using for my participation in Pat Flynn’s NSD 2.0. It is a niche site – but it definitely won’t be a small niche site. I found a great main keyword that has tons and tons of long tail keywords that get lots of searches and are very low competition in Google. This site will be monetized primarily through the Amazon Affiliate program and there are literally thousands of products that come up in Amazon when I type in the keywords I am targeting.
FOCUS
Follow One Course Until Success – I hear John Dumas repeat this acronym over and over on his podcast, Entrepreneur on Fire. It is time that I actually take action on this strategy and stop my dabbling. I set a goal for myself to get my internet derived income up to $1,000 per month by the end of 2013 and the only possible way I am going to make that happen is if I focus on one thing. So that is exactly what I am going to do for the rest of this year. I am totally focused on my new website – meaning no dabbling with my smaller/older sites. No dabbling with different techniques and plugins. Not even much more dabbling with this site or any changes to it. Not until I gain traction and start to see results with my new site. Spencer Haws was able to get his survival knife site (for his first public niche site project) to nearly $500/month in only about 4 months. There is no reason I shouldn’t be able to do the same or better with this site. My keyword gets a lot more searches than his did and it is much less competitive in Google!
Financial Freedom
Recently, I finished reading a book called [simpleazon-link asin=”B003L6XGUQ” locale=”us”]”Why We Want You to Be Rich,”[/simpleazon-link] which was co-written by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki. Great book! Towards the end, I learned the difference between financial security and financial freedom. I no longer strive for financial security. Financial freedom is my goal. My family is the reason that I strive for financial freedom and my desire to spend more time with them is the number one thing that is pushing me. I know that my financial freedom will result from something that I create on the internet – and this blog is all about my journey to accomplish just that – whatever that is. I’ve had plenty of failures along the way, but I refuse to give up. I keep pushing forward and trying different things until I find what works best for me. Listed below are results from some of my accomplishments from the past two months.
Passive Income and Expenses – July 2013
Income
Affiliate Income from Dumb Passive Income
- $4.55 – Amazon Associates for sales on Amazon.com (explained in detail here)
- $0 – Carbonite Referral (explained in detail here)
- $71.09 – Long Tail Pro sales via Clickbank (why it is better than the competition)
- $12 – Lending Club leads via Commission Junction (exactly how to sign up explained here)
- $0 – LeadPages sales of this awesome lead generation software
- $71.20 – Niche Website Theme sales via JVZoo (reviewed in detail here)
- $0 – ManageWP signups (easily manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard)
- $30.42 – Opt-In Skin sales via Clickbank
- $0.30 – Aweber signups ($1 for your first month)
Other Income from Niche Sites, Old Blog, Article Writing…
- $87.41 – Google Adsense
- $7.69 – Yahoo! Voices for articles I wrote a long time ago
- $305.00 – Sponsored post on my old money blog via Budgeting in the Fun Stuff
Expenses
Hosting and Domains
- $9.95 – Hostgator (how to purchase a domain and set up web hosting)
- $22.74 – GoDaddy for domain renewals and purchases
- $91.29 – IXWebHosting – hosting for one year for my expired domains (up to 15 separate IP’s on one hosting account!)
- $10.87 – NameCheap – domain purchases (for my expired domains)
Tools, Plugins and Themes
- $12.00 – Long Tail Platinum monthly fee (if you have Long Tail Pro – upgrade to Platinum 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
- $14.00 – SocialADR fee for social bookmarking for my niche sites (proven results within this post!)
- $20.05 – PulseHover plugin for WordPress (explained and displayed at the end of this post)
Outsourcing
- $61.00 – to my private writer for article writing for niche sites
- $76.25- Budgeting in the Fun Stuff fee (25%) for handling my advertising/sponsored posts on my old money blog
Passive Income and Expenses – August 2013
Income
Affiliate Income from Dumb Passive Income
- $1.24 – Amazon Associates for sales on Amazon.com (explained in detail here)
- $43.06 – Long Tail Pro sales via Clickbank (why it is better than the competition)
- $92 – Lending Club leads via Commission Junction (exactly how to sign up explained here)
- $0 – LeadPages sales of this awesome lead generation software (Pat Flynn just started promoting this software BIG TIME!)
- $13.60 – 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 – 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…
- $48.55 – Google Adsense
- $7.86 – Yahoo! Voices for articles I wrote a long time ago
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)
- $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
- $14.00 – SocialADR fee for social bookmarking for my niche sites (proven results within this post!)
Outsourcing
- $50.00 to my private writer for article writing for niche sites
Totals and Thoughts
Total income $589.66 minus total expenses $342.05 equals a net profit of $247.61 for July 2013!
Total income $212.01 minus total expenses $111.02 equals a net profit of $100.99 for August 2013!
July was a great month – my best to date! I had record income, but also record expenses to go along with it. I was hoping that my income would continue to trend upwards like it had been – but you can clearly see what happened in August. This is proof enough for me that what I am doing to try to create passive income online may not be the most effective or best strategy for me. Many of the things I’ve attempted would definitely work if I were to see them through and stick with them. I always seem to drift in so many different directions with my internet marketing ventures and only partly complete the projects that I start.
This is why I’ve decided to really focus and dedicate most of the rest of this year (2013) to building out one large niche site that I think has potential to make a great income. Although I’ve dabbled with the Amazon Associates affiliate program, I’ve never built a site intended to be monetized solely with it and around a specific product or product category. My next big site will do exactly that and I’m very excited to see how it will go. If it works like I think it will, I’m looking forward to creating outsource-able processes to be able to duplicate it and create more sites like it in the future.
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
Hey Matt, glad to see you have decided to get focused on building out a niche site. I thought I’d mention, in regards to that PR3 financial blog. I would create a Fiverr gig offering to publish finance articles on a PR3 blog.
I saw one guy created a gig doing this for ‘general business’ articles and got over 120 orders in less than a month. That’s over $500 a month just for publishing other people’s articles! The blog will probably also see more traffic giving you an opportunity to monetize with Adsense on it if it’s not already. I was thinking about buying a domain just do this since it’s so easy.
Interesting strategy John. Definitely something I’ll keep in mind for when my “focus” period is over. I’m pretty sure that would be considered dabbling. But then again, doing something like what you suggest could just be a last resort tactic I could use in December to ensure that I hit my goal of $1k in income in a month!
Matt, I always enjoy the monthly income reports. Aside from aWeber (which, unfortunately, I barely use) and my site hosting fees, I’ve really got no other fees to cut into my monthly profits. As LTNE competes for time with everything else, I’ve come to find that a lot of my “back catalog” of articles push an increasing amount of traffic. We’ve talked before about SEO (staying on Google’s radar has never worked out for me), but I can’t underestimate the ability of YouTube videos to push traffic to the site. How is your mastermind group working out? Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the build out of your Amazon affiliate site. Good luck!
Matt, keep up the strong efforts! I can really identify with the struggle of what to spend my time developing in terms of real income. Guest posts and private advertising are okay but they are not a long term strategy. Like you I’m starting to think that maybe focusing my time on a bigger authority site may be where the best oppertunity lies.
Mike – thanks for stopping by. Glad you enjoyed my report. I’ve been keeping up with the little bit of content you’ve been putting out as well (via RSS on my phone).
Mastermind group is still going strong! We’re all committed and we still meet weekly. I still believe that it is the number one reason that I will eventually achieve the success that I desire online. Thank you for the well wishes.
Larger sites are definitely the trend MMD. I still like the little bit of income from the smaller sites. It helps me justify the increasing monthly expenses that I keep incurring. But you’re right. The type of success that I am shooting for is probably going to require a larger site – which is exactly what I am starting to build right now.
Matt, I enjoy the income reports and keep rooting for your success. To me, as long as you learn from setbacks and mistakes, then it was a good month. Too often we focus on dollars or likes or followers and not on the real things we learned.
Good luck with the focus and one major new site. I like John’s idea for Fiverr. That sounds like an interesting possibility. I know you want to stay focused, but 7 minutes for $75 sounds like a good proposition to me.
Good luck with the final months of the year. Hope to see continued success.
#NOI : Your income reports is hardly making in the three figures 🙂 no offense mate just curious 😀
Hey Mathew in the beginning it’s always tough. I’m just starting out again, but I have had experiences in the past with building microniche sites…i’m hoping to recreate that success, but on a much more stable platform.
Thanks for the encouragement Brian. I think you might have misunderstood John’s Fiverr idea – or got it confused with what I had written in the post. Yes – I had a sponsored post sent my way that took me only 7 minutes to post and netted my $75. No – that is not possible with John’s Fiverr idea. I would only receive $4 per post for the Fiverr gig thing ($5 and Fiverr gets the other $1) I would have to do 19 of those to reach $75 and I would likely spend more than 7 minutes on each because they would certainly require some proofreading and editing. That is definitely not passive enough for me and probably not a good use of my time. Low return for time invested.
Impressed are ya? Go check my archives from about a year ago. I was reporting even when I was barely breaking two figures! haha 😉
Sounds interesting Josh. You’ve piqued my curiosity – what do you mean by recreating micro niche site success on a more stable platform?
Cool to hear that you’re starting out again… which means that you haven’t given up despite some (I’m assuming?) setbacks. Not giving up and always pushing forward is the sure path to future and continued success.
Oh yeah, I definitely misread that Fiverr idea. Not worth the time investment for that. Stay focused on your path and forget what I said as I run around chasing the new shiny object, like a dog chasing his favorite ball, only to be distracted by a squirrel. Hey guys, did you see the…wait…SQUIRREL!
I think my last statement was a little deceiving. I simply meant that I’m planning to take my experiences from the past and utilize that to create an authority site that matters. I’m not really planning on getting into microniche sites again at the moment.
And yes, I have not given up 🙂
Nice write up Matt! As long as you are happy and seeing progress that’s all that matters. Cheers
Good attitude! 🙂
I agree it can be discouraging….but you are actively moving ahead on it. I also agree that the beginnng can be the toughest.