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

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Passive Income - New Zealand Style

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 »

We Don’t Need No Stupid Badges!

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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

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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

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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: 2010 In Review and The Two Day Work Week

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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 »

Shake Rattle and Roll

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Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald

Drizzle with a chance of earthquakes in the afternoon… On Saturday morning I was asleep – I usually am, but I was late getting up and getting online.  I noticed that Skype was flashing a message – it was SY from Hospitalera Blogs asking if I was OK. Hmm I thought yes – why? I turned the radio on – it was talking about the big quake – obviously not  the long awaited Wellington earthquake, and was in fact a huge quake of 7.1 in Christchurch. Its been an interesting few days – and I don’t just mean the minor earthquakes that we  have had in Wellington (and yes quakes do come in swarms, and no I didn’t even notice them).  Two things came out of this: trends blogging and business continuity and communications in the Twitter world. Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald Trends Blogging OK in my defence I knew no one was dead – but my second thought was – hmmm wonder what happens if I Google “earthquake insurance New Zealand” -ah I find my own Earthquake Insurance  hubpage (which was written almost a year ago after Hubpages did a disaster hubmob) ranking just below the [...] Read more »

Online Income – The Secret to Success Is …

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New Plymouth Gardens

Online income is something many people profess to want – but few actually achieve it. Why? Isn’t terribly technically difficult – nope, is there really a secret – yes but not what you think. Online income, passive income whatever is a business – and a business is all about YOU. I read a couple contrasting attitudes today – which I thought were relevant. Chris posted on The Keyword Academy forums: To anyone whose article got returned on http://www.brightfluid.com,  I apologize, it definitely isn’t my style. With the craziness going on with the Iraqi government formation and the troop withdrawal, our base is taking a lot of mortars and rockets, and one just happened to nail our internet satellite. They just installed a new satellite, and I worked through the 119 articles pending, but I know some got returned, and I’m sorry. For the next 24 hours I’m doing hourly submissions to make up for it (besides sleeping of course), so hit me with your best shot. Just to explain – Chris owns a article directory on TKA’s postrunner system,  and if you don’t approve articles submitted within 7 days they are automatically returned to sender- something some people whinge about a [...] Read more »

Is Lis Lost Down Under?

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Taranaki Egmont New Zealand

Life is for living has always been my motto – its one of the reasons I now own my own business rather than make obscene amounts of money as an IT contractor.  Being that miserable isn’t worth any amount of money. And sometimes going to work just seem too trivial to be bothered with. Unfortunately my online business has felt a bit like that over that last little while! Well life went from interesting to worse really. After I wrote that post (when we had sold the house, and my partner’s mum had died) – we found a new place we liked and bought it. There was gap of about a month between during which we stayed with friends – which was very nice and saved us a fortune. In the 4 weeks we stayed I managed to write-off our car by running  it into a bus – no serious damage to me but the back is only just about recovered from the whiplash now. My partner’s uncle died in Australia so he  had to fly over for that funeral (its only 4 hours flying from here though – slightly shorter than if we’d still been in Perth). My partner [...] Read more »

Passive Income Online – Where Has Lis Been?

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house in khandallah

Sorry I don’t usually do purely personal posts of Passive Income Online – so you may want to skip this one – unless you were wandering what happened.  Well first off from the online point of view – nothing bad has happened – in fact its looking like a record breaking month on my passive income goals – and I mean truly passive income because I have really done very little focused work this month.  We’ve had a month of it. First we finally sold our house in Khandallah (BTW ranking #2, #3 behind the major Real Estate Institute in the country – just wondering how much an Agent will want to pay for the site …). Got pretty much our price in a very slow flat market which was freaking out about the budget (now been and gone). We move out in a few weeks. Where to – who knows I’m  no fan of bridging finance – we may have to rent for a wile or we may win the tender that closes today – something will happen. I don’t know how it is in your country – but in New Zealand the Internet has been a game-changer for [...] Read more »

Passive Income Online: Best Posts of 2009

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An Online Business in 2009

Well this seems to be the tradition at this time of the year to look back at your “best of” posts of the previous year. In fact its not a bad idea because internal linking is really a good idea – and hey some of your visitors may even find some benefit. To (mis)-quote Dickens it was the best of times, it was the worst of times… My optimistic 2009 goals are a fairly embarassing example of now NOT to goal set – they are too vague, not tied to abig picture aim really – but at least I had some. I did at least realise that yes, you can make $1000/month with Adsense This post was pretty much when I hit rock bottom with my hopes for making passive income online – I figured out that all the options were worse than bad – and oddly enough once I understood that  if I didn’t believe in my business no one else would things really turned a corner – mainly because of one my worst written posts ever! May was the month of the infamous 100 hubs challenge and although I boosted my hubpage earnings significanty. They have since dropped [...] Read more »

Is It Worth Trying to Make an Income Online?

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Freedom...

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 »