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I See Video In My Future – And Its Very, Very Scary!

Written by Lis on November 29, 2011 · 38 Comments

Let’s face it – I am scared of the camera – well one that takes moving pictures anyways! I don’t really have an issue with photos of me per se, particularly if they are stored on my computer so I can delete at will. But video has always made me nervous. I’ve tried it a couple of times – and I dislike the sound of my own voice. A lot. Talking the camera is also perilously close to talking to an audience which is alive. And that gives me stage fright. But the case for audio and video is becoming a bit overwhelming. For example. No prizes for figuring out that both this blog and Pat’s over at SmartPassiveIncome.com go after the same main keyword. There’s not much in it – at the moment he’s #2 and I’m #4 in the SERPs. But I’ve never been able to figure out one little thing – why the hell does he have so much more traffic than I do? According to SEMRush he doesn’t rank for another huge keyword in this niche – so WTF was going on? Now there are a dozen ways to game social media figures and subscription numbers, but [...] Read more »

An Apology – I Need To Come Clean – A Z-List Blogger Is Born

Written by Lis on November 8, 2011 · 39 Comments

This stupid MMO blog is a curious thing. It started as my online learning journal/personal diary thing. But its become something a lot more than that. You see, while publicly, calling out the A-List bloggers – I have somehow become one: a C-lister anyways, woops no, now a Z-List Blogger! I am making money from you guys, that’s the truth of it. Its not what I set out to do – but over the years – its just kinda happened – and an incident over the weekend really highlighted it to me. I’m sorry – that’s my dirty little secret, it would have been obvious to some of you for some time, but not to others and its always made me feel apologetic and uncomfortable. I have probably been reading way to much personal devlopement stuff recently – but I’m not happy with my record here – so I’m putting that record straight. It Started With A Cashflow Crises My cash flow was ugly in October, and not looking much better for November – HubPages is not playing nicely, and come the new year will be screwing me out of significant Amazon earnings. Late on Friday night I did the Oct [...] Read more »

Passive Income – There Is Such a Thing – Who Want’s a Business?

Written by Lis on March 8, 2011 · 29 Comments

Had to engage in the conversation here – Leo – says there is no such thing as passive income he argues that we all should be developing businesses not just relying on SEO to climb to the top of the rankings. Funny how my name has got associated with passive income – as friends pointed out to Leo (and not saying Leo isn’t a friend - merely wrong ) I would be in for the argument. Not Passive Income OK so lets step back. In the dark times pre-passive income – I used to be a highly overpaid IT consultant – I was paid a nice hourly rate by companies who wanted to upgrade or replace software. I used to work on a salary – a “safe” job right. Yup, it was – I never got fired from a permanent job – but it was huge, huge millstone around my neck. You see turning up 40 hours a week – even if the hours were somewhat flexible – meant that I could only travel in the holidays- I only got 4 weeks annual leave so even with creative use of leave without pay, public holidays and anticipated leave – I could only [...] Read more »

What is a Content Farm and Why Does Google Hate Them?

Written by Lis on March 1, 2011 · 18 Comments

Matt Cutts has the best job in the world. He writes one little blog post and puts the whole of the Internet Marketing community into a tail spin – and his latest is a good one – in fact when googling “what is a content farm” the first result was a news result – indicating that the term is hot, hot, hot at the moment. But WTF is Google doing? Are they trying to destroy all of us who want to make a few dollars of passive income a month? Is the era of making a living online gone forever? Google search is failing – and what Google is doing is a public relations exercise in order to recover some credibility – and the evidence is in the results of the above search. So what is a content farm I thought? I asked Mr Google (using US results via the nifty Chrome Google Extension tool) – and Google told me - News results: according to joisic.com: The term “content farm” is commonly used to describe these sites that add pages and pages of unoriginal, useless information to the search engines database. and gigaom.com thinks that: Companies that do this have [...] Read more »

We Don’t Need No Stupid Badges!

Written by Lis on January 31, 2011 · 42 Comments

View From Our Hotel Window, Royale Chulan, Kuala Lumpur

The Keyword Academy has this absolutely infantile, ridiculous scheme where you can apply for badges to match your (verified) income – I mean its like pre-primary school right? Except for some odd reason it does seem to matter to me – and today I made it – I made the next badge up – in the last month I earned $2500 in passive online income and I have nice pretty badge to prove it. Half of that was from Adsense and that figure represents a 50% increase over December’s Adsense figures. So how long does it take to make at total of $4000/month of online income? So in answer to the question “Can You Make $1000/month with Adsense” (written almost exactly 2 years ago) – is YES, I DO. And yes at the time, I really didn’t think it would be ME that did! In fact I blame Mark Butler (from the Keyword Academy – yup you can get a personal consult for free within the Academy – its smart move by them – but unbelievable good value for members) – I had a consultation with him a few weeks ago – and I wrote on my white board – make $2500 by April [...] Read more »

Making Passive Income, Record Keeping and Online Income Taxes

Written by Lis on January 22, 2011 · 13 Comments

Managing Tax Records Across Two Currencies with GST (VAT)

There was a recent thread in the forum at TKA regarding managing your Internet Marketing income which I added my 2c to. I then got quite a number of PMs from people asking me follow up questions – given the thread wasn’t even mine – I guess my commonsense approach to record keeping and taxes are not so common. So here’s what I think is important – your mileage may vary. My approach is quite simple – I’m not an accountant – though I did pass ACCY101 a million years ago. I have never found a “system” which manages multiple currencies the way I need to – so I developed my own. I use an OpenOffice spreadsheet – but any spreadsheet program which can sum figures and do the odd bit of multiplication will do just fine. The system has evolved over the years – but I’ve never had to start again. If I didn’t have some complex real estate investments I could do my own taxes off these figures – as it is I give them to my accountant. Having a system to record your expenses and payments is what’s important – once you have that you can do [...] Read more »

Passive Income and What People Think

Written by Lis on December 31, 2010 · 23 Comments

Prague Castle, St Vitius, Praha in the Snow, Czeck Republic

Making an online passive income from Internet Marketing is the strangest thing. When I had a job as a geologist few people understood what I did – but no one doubted that I was well-paid for it, when I worked in IT even fewer people understood my job, but they took for granted that I made money. Now I do something really simple – I put up websites, based on topics people search for, I use SEO techniques to rank my sites and I make passive income. And even now that I make enough passive income to go travelling for 2 months they don’t understand how I make money. That’s OK – I’m used to that. What kinda of amazes me is that – they don’t believe that I make money either! Now frankly I don’t give a shite whether they believe me or not- my partner believes me – he sees me pay the bills, my bank manager is happy, my accountant is advising me to make provision for tax – but the other people – they seem to think I’m delusional. If you are starting out this game – here’s some advice. Don’t expect anyone to be supportive [...] Read more »

Passive Income and Travelling

Written by Lis on November 27, 2010 · 18 Comments

This picture is a fake! Its really me, and its really Ko Lipe, Thailand - but there is no way I could use the screen in the glare!

I had actually had doubts about whether having my own passive income business would ruin travelling for me. I have a full-time writer and a number of my sites have suddenly decided to rank just before we left home so I decided to buy a 10″ emachine netbook and keep an eye on rankings and progress while on the road. I was worried about the practicalities though. I know quite a number of people who do this successfully – for example Kirsty from Nerdy Nomad, Matt from NomadicMatt, and Dave from GoBackpacking – but they all have a common characteristic – they are all single and travelling solo. I’m not single – I have a partner, who having just done 10 months of contracting was definitely in holiday mode. So how is it working out – do I resent that I get up early to login while he sleeps on, that I hide out in the aircon room while he scouts out the local town? In a word – no – its working quite well. Just as I’d read that people with kids are more efficient online when they can’t be online 24/7 – I think I’ve become more efficient [...] Read more »

Passive Income: 2010 In Review and The Two Day Work Week

Written by Lis on November 9, 2010 · 40 Comments

eMachine EM350 1.66GHz N450/1GB/160GB/Windows XP

Yeah I know – there are nearly 2 months left until the end of the year – but I am about to hit the road for a spot of independent travel so I will probably have more important things to do than to consider my business position – like spending the loot! Yeah I now make $1,110,223.21 a month in my sleep – and could too – if you would just sign up … Anyway about a year ago I had some passive income goals for 2010. By the end of March I reported an income of : Total income of around US$3000/month – of which about 1/3 is passive;; In the last 6 months (May – October) I earned an average of US$3500, the 6 months before that $3200, and the 6 months prior to that US$2156. My all time record was last month, October, where I was just $8 short of US$4000. The individual months bounce around but the general trend is definitely in the right direction. Still short of my US$5000/month goal – but not so far off as to be depressing. But the really exciting bit is that in the last 6 months I have never [...] Read more »

Build My Rank Review Compared to Postrunner

Written by Lis on October 4, 2010 · 45 Comments

OK short version – BuildMyRank.com is the best thing since sliced bread - will make you millions in your sleep without doing anything – can’t imagine why they are giving it away at the current price – but I am sure it will go up – ACT now to lock in the currently insanely low price, BUY IT now! SELF SERVING HONKING BIG AFFILIATE LINK HERE! You still here? Darn – oh you want a real review ? Sorry I can’t actually give that to you – cause I haven’t been using it long enough to give you months and months of stats. But I’ve used it long enough to be hugely excited by it. UPDATE: May 2011 – buildmyrank still works well – and I am still using – the price has gone up a little – details below. UPDATE: November 2011 – I’m still using BMR and am happy with it but also check out a Build My Rank alternative that is a new service - SEO Cobra Backlinks As I wrote recently – I am not 100% happy with Postrunner – mainly because of the percentage of articles which aren’t getting indexed. So when I was [...] Read more »