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Passive Income – Leaving Australia – the Practicalities

Written by Lis on November 30, 2009 · 27 Comments

OK I have confession – although I love travelling I bloody hate packing – and leaving a country is like the worst packing in the world because everything has to go or be shipped. We have only been here two years – why we have so much crap is beyond me! Oh and its Christmas so we are into the usual social round of Christmas – Australia style. i.e. lots of drinking and eating really. Oh and the weather has suddenly come good so I would rather be swimming to be honest! Does this have anything to earning passive income – well it seems that working from home is a bit like being the stay-at-home mum/wife – you get to do all the running around. Partner went to work today I spent 3 hours selling the car – successfully but still. And then I came home and cancelled the insurance and arranged the rental car – which I will pick up tomorrow. Over the last few weeks I have found us a sub-let for the first two months home – our house is still rented to tenants – arranged for the New Zealand car to go to the garage, though [...] Read more »

I joined the cloud – do me a favour and join too!

Written by Lis on November 23, 2009 · 31 Comments

(cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com

I joined the Cloud! You know cloud computing, personal PCs are so 2008 and now everyone lives in the cloud – well that’s what the Economist said a week or two back so it must be true. Seriously though – I have just migrated all my important files onto an online backup system and I think you should too. I am seriously old and remember when hard drives broke – a lot! I remember when tape backups took hours and hours to restore your files – and then you discovered that the tape was corrupt … Lets just say telling someone the file they have been working of for weeks is unrecoverable is not something you want to have to do too often in one lifetime. Now I do have a backup system- I have a portable hard drive which I back up to on a hmm semi-regular basis – and always before the laptops go travelling. But I was becoming more and more aware just how stuffed my business would be if I lost some crtical files. I have a client who raves about googledocs and I use googledocs from time-to-time – quite honestly if that is what the [...] Read more »

Is It Worth Trying to Make an Income Online?

Written by Lis on November 7, 2009 · 50 Comments

I quite often get people emailing me because they saw my semi-illiterate ramblings somewhere on the Interwebs. I had another one recently which asked – “are my efforts going to be worth it?” – or in other words – is worth trying to make an income online? What I wrote back was – in part: I can’t tell you whether your efforts are worth it? What are your income goals/what’s your time frames/ do you have financial support on the learning curve? What are your cost of living? To be honest I would never have made this a full-time income if I was doing it part-time – the motivation wouldn’t have been there and I would be too burnt out after working for someone else all day. Full-time though has its issues though – I now tell people they should have enough savings for 2 years living expenses if they are contemplating doing this full-time. Then there is the isolation of doing this alone (that’s driven more than one person I know back to employment), the sheer frustration of seeing a site take up to a year to settle down and be a consistent earner. For me going back to [...] Read more »

Need to Make Online Cash Now? Consider a Freelancing Business

Written by Lis on November 4, 2009 · 31 Comments

Yup you read that right- if you are desperate to make an income right now. You have been told your job ends in two weeks and you don’t know how you will make next month’s mortgage repayments – then making passive income online won’t help you – yet. I have been playing this website building game for two years – my income still fluctuates – I wrote that in July I had made $2000 online- I am yet to get past that approximate figure again – in fact my passive income was significantly down in October – but overall I was up because of a domain sale and some more freelance work. It swings-and-roundabouts – it doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But it might – soon. My partner’s contract finishes at Christmas and we are moving back to New Zealand. My income suddenly becomes our only income – at least for a while – the pressure is definitely noticeable i.e. my partner now asks every month how I am doing LOL – see partners are interested when the money starts rolling in – or not! So what do you do if you really,really need the income and you [...] Read more »

Buying and Selling Websites

Written by Lis on October 26, 2009 · 25 Comments

Well its done – my first eBook is about to hit the stands! Well I decided I couldn’t really call19 pages a book – more like a long short story. I could have upped the font to 24 pitch – and triple spaced all the lines, added fluff and lots of pictures and got it to 60 pages. But that seemed utterly pointless – so instead its a 19-page eReport on Buying and Selling Websites: A Beginner’s Guide. I hope it has something of use to anyone who signs up for it. It is of course the classic bait to get you to give me your email and then spam the hell out of you. Except I am indeed using Aweber (now that was a learning curve) – so its all legit and above board.And I won’t be offering you every Make Money Online product every month. Instead I intend to offer a “Quiet Listings” Website Selling Service And the idea is that the mailing list will turn into a way to have “quiet listings” of websites for sale. What on earth is a “quiet listing” you might ask? Well I don’t know if its a term ever used for [...] Read more »

Its Spring! End of a Quarter Report – How To Manage the Dollars

Written by Lis on October 3, 2009 · 44 Comments

So its the end of another month – another quarter anywhere so how is my journey to passive income online. Well to be honest its been flat-lining since my record of making over $2000 in one month – in July. Bouncing around at the same level give or take in US$ terms, dropping in local currency because of the strength of both my local currencies (yes I run accounts in two countries – I don’t recommend it!). Oh and finally spring has sprung – downunder in Perth anyways – finally I might add, so much for global warming its been freezing here for far too long. The photos in this post were taken in King’s Park, Perth a couple of weeks ago – yes we have quite a display of wildflowers at the moment. New Custom Thesis Theme I’ve been spring cleaning this blog too – a couple of you have noticed that the design has changed a fair bit. None of my doing – Costa who makes cool custom WordPress themes at blogigs.com wrote to me saying that my previous design hurt his head and here is a new one. Well OK I can take a hint – I [...] Read more »

Building a Legitimate Online Business – Two Years On

Written by Lis on September 29, 2009 · 17 Comments

Its been two years that we’ve been based in Perth, two years since I got my partner to agree to support me while I developed my online passive income business – he asked how long – I said Christmas… In fact this was the blog post on my long-defunct blog of the time: I think it just hit me that we’ve signed a 6-month lease on the flat! It seems a bit odd being in one place, but it feels even odder not going out and looking for a job. Although I have done the odd bit of travel in fact since I left uni I have either been employed or travelling. So its a little strange to be sitting here on a laptop trying to develop a self-employed online income without actually having an employer! It does have some benefits, like no starting time, but also some disadvantages, like no finishing time. Its weird to be honest – but I do “know” (in the virtual sense) people who are making over US$1000 month doing this so I think its worth a try. I seem to be able to write but at the moment I having problems with the technology [...] Read more »

How Can I Make Passive Income Online?

Written by Lis on September 23, 2009 · 32 Comments

We were talking last night, my partner and I, considering what we want to do in 2010 when his current contract comes to an end and the obvious question came up – do I make enough passive income online for him not to work anymore. The short answer is not quite – but we are getting close. What’s more I am definitely now of the opinion that it would be a huge financial risk for me to go and get a job now compared to my making money online – and here’s why. Passive Income in the Real World Every month no less than eight groups of people pay me – they are tenants in various properties we own in New Zealand. I hire a property manager so I count that income as passive – every month money goes into our account at home. There is a catch though – every month money goes out of that account too – usually just a little more than went in – all going well it will balance – but if you have a month where you need to replace not one but two hot water cylinders – it does not! We didn’t [...] Read more »

Do You Have a Plan B to Support Your Passive Income Business?

Written by Lis on September 4, 2009 · 54 Comments

Now I like planning – its so much more fun than doing. I’m quite good at planning too -just ask anyone who has been travelling with me. But business planning is a whole different game – I know the theory: Decide what the end is – say $1,000,000 in round figure and by when. Work out where you are now – that’s easy just done the taxes Work out how to get from 2 to 1 Hmm yeah oops – 3 is kinda the problem in my experience. This blog started as my attempt of at least an online diary of my journey of 100 sites – but got re-named when I figured I was the ONLY person who ever searched for that keyword LOL.I thought that might be close enough to a business plan – I may have been wrong … Last month I wrote about making $1500 from Adsense and Affiliates this month its pretty much the same – slightly different winners and losers but generally, overall add up to about the same figure. I’m actually fairly happy with that – August is usually a very slow month online and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to [...] Read more »

Online Income and Work Life Balance

Written by Lis on August 24, 2009 · 20 Comments

I took the weekend off – I drove 300km and checked out the golf course at Augusta, went whale watching, ate too much, drank too much local red wine. Did I login? Did I check my email? Did I approve comments? Did I check in with clients that it was OK to take the weekend off – no to all of those above. You see I used to have a J.O.B (Just Over Broke) – I used to have to apply for leave or arrange not to be on-call to go away for the weekend. I don’t do that anymore. Instead, I put an “out of office reply” on my main email account and disconnected. It wasn’t that hard for me – I must admit taking breaks and travelling is what’s important to me. Yes sure I’d like to make a zillion dollars a week – but only if I can still take off every month or so for a holiday! Although I now have a lot of American friends online, I still don’t understand the need to work 24/7 – if you are desperate to pay the bills sure – but for those who aren’t? To be honest if [...] Read more »