Categories
Passive Income

Passive Income Online – How Much Does It Cost To Start

Passive income – to my way of thinking is the best income to have. Why? Because I’m bloody idle that’s why!

Labradors have the right idea! Oh and because I know its possible to. My partner and I own several rental properties in New Zealand, we bought them several years ago and every month we get paid the income from them. Is it passive income – sure it is – we’ve never met our tenants, we don’t mow lawns, we don’t take calls about broken toilets at 2am – my property manager does.  Property investment can be as active or as passive as you want to make it – but you have to pay someone to do the work for you.

Property investment is not risk free either. Our rental properties are exposed to interest rate risks, tenant availability, natural disasters, property manager going bad etc etc. If we’d borrowed the amount the bank was prepared to lend us a few years ago we would be in a nasty position now.

Making passive income online, to my way of thinking is a much better thing than making passive income from property investment. Why? The risks are lower much lower. The investment required is much lower. It’s not zero though – this is what I think it takes to start making passive income online.

BTW I am not talking about working from home jobs here or freelancing – that’s not passive income – if you are unclear about the difference check out my analysis of what’s the difference between passive income and work at home jobs.

Personal Attributes

  • be teachable – that’s it really if you can take on new attitudes and learn new skills – you’ll make it. That’s it really I listed a long list of skills I’d developed working online, previously – but if you are teachable none of this will be an issue.

How Much Money Do You Need

  • if you don’t have a reliable computer you need one. You don’t need anything fancy though and my 4 year old 14″ laptop does just fine.
  • you need a fast broadband or cable internet connection. I really don’t think you can do this with dial-up though some may disagree, the time you waste on a slow connection more than justifies the cost of a faster one IMHO
  • you need enough money to support yourself for the first 12 months and enough to subsidise your expenses (assuming you want to live about the poverty line ) for the next 12 months. Or a helpful spouse/partner/SO who will do same.

That’s it so basically the right attitude and 18 months worth of living expenses. That’s a pretty low cost entry point for a business. If you can’t afford the time without cash coming in you can always start part-time while working a “real” job

But you say – what about special software? what about hosting ? what about domains? what about paying for links? what about  mentoring programs? what about e-books?

What Software Do You Need to Earn Passive Income?

The first software I  bought for this business was Dreamweaver its a very nice piece fo software and I used it to build my first site- nice software does the job – but so does WordPress and its free.

I use OpenOffice to write in and often a simple text editor called Q10 – both free.

Yes I use other tools – I use SEOElite, Keyword Elite for research and other services and tools to create links for me – but you don’t actually need any of them.

Do I need Domains and Hosting

Nope – but I would probably pay for them before I paid for software.  I buy domain names from time to time – like this one, I have a reseller hosting plan with Hostgator which I recommend.

But you don’t need any of it – you can create money making sites of free hosts such as blogger.com

But How you ask – well for that you will have to buy the e-book – but because you are my valued reader I’ll give it to you for a special price…Well I’m a beginner at this so I’m not going to tell you.

Instead I can point you over to Frank Carr’s blog and check out his post on how to earn online cash with a niche blog. His method is not original, in fact its similar to how Grizz makes money with Adsense – but it works – its not sexy, it may be differnet from what the A-listers tell you about list building – but it works. Oh and it won’t cost you any money either! And Frank doesn’t even want to collect your email address – and neither do I!

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Categories
Passive Income

Can You Make $1000/month With Adsense?

The title of this post is a quote from a question which was posed by an new writer over at hubpages – the question was naive – the questioner probably actually wanted to know how to make money online, or even how to make passive income online,  not with the specific Adsense program.

The reality is that Adsense is a tricky beast. It appears deceptively easy to earn a little money with Adsense, most people at HubPages make more from Adsense than the other options available there (eBay and Amazon particularly), $50 a month, $200, $500 even -but a $1000 is it possible?

Sure its possible to earn that sort of money -some make much, much more than that.  One of the few sources of reliable information on the internet that I’ve found is a Canadian who lives on a frozen lake who goes by the name of Grizz and writes all about how to make money online with Adsense – go on go and have a look, here’s a nice bear picture while we wait

Take Care in the Woods!
Take Care in the Woods!

You see I knew you’d come back pretty quick, or you won’t be back for weeks one way or the other 🙂

If you came back quickly you probably thought I sent you to the wrong blog eh – I mean its a blogger blog for goodness sakes!  (EDIT  not anymore – long story) Its UGLY, its hard to navigate (hint use the archives to navigate there’s no other way!). It looks boring -there is no visual interest- its not pretty. Did you notice the comments – did you notice how many comments each post has – do you notice how rarely Grizz posts? He has 2500 subscribers too. And makes a lot of money from that ugly blog – and he tells you how to make it using Adsense only. But guess what – those subscribers don’t make him money – its the search engines that do that.

Oddly I see a parallel between making $1000/month with  Adsense and ballroom dancing (that would confuse Adsense if I ran it here!).  Its easy to learn to waltz a little – anyone can learn to do it – a little.  Its easy to look good in your average social dance, and yes my partner and I do – people tell us so and ask us how we learned to dance so well.  Its quite simple – we’ve taken 1-2 hours of private lessons and practiced another few hours, every week , for the last 10 years.   Are we going to be Australian ballroom champions anytime soon – no – we’re too old, too fat, and my pain threshold is just too low. We don’t have the talent – however much we practice.

And learning to waltz is easier than learning how to make a $1000/month with Adsense – why? The waltz has a set of very,very strictly defined rules, the way to hold your partner, the timing, the position of the head, the footwork – its all defined, its all written down – there is no debate, there is only one way to dance the waltz properly.

Adsense is different, making good money from Adsense is much harder, because Google, who owns Adsense, doesn’t publish how to make money from Adsense – how to get $4 a click instead of 4c.  Google won’t explain where to place the Google ads for the best revenue, the best type of content to write, or the best types of visitors to get. Neither will I – go back to the ugly blog and find out how to make $1000 a day with Adsense from Grizz. Oh and yes its a a PR0 blog now – because Google really doesn’t want this information out in the public!

No you won’t be seeing Adsense on this blog anytime soon!

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Categories
Blogging

Why a Blogger blog?

Update: I moved – this is no longer a blogger blog: and heres why I moved from Blogger

Some of you may be wondering why I am using the free blogger hosting to run this blog. After all I pay for hosting which effectively allows me to run unlimited domains so why would I not just run another blog there: after all all I need to pay for the domain nae – which can be had for $1 if I don’t mind a info tld.

I started on blogger but moved away from it when I discovered the power of


Thanks Blogger.com
Originally uploaded by Shavar

WordPress. Now for some purposes I think blogger has a place in my empire. Horses for courses and here are some of the pros/cons that I can see.

Advantages of Blogger (Blogspot) Blogs

  • they get indexed quickly in Google: not surprisingly because Google owns blogger! This blog got indexed inside about 48 hours.
  • out of the box bloggers are well optimized for SEO purposes. You can do the same for WordPress blogs of course: but that’s the point you have to do it – and many people don’t;
  • it’s idiot proof: its very,very easy to set up a blog. if you can write a HubPage you can set up a blogger blog, even my Internet challenged brother could do it!
  • you can easily add Adsense and other Affiliate advertising: in contrast free hosted WordPress.org blogs don’t allow you to monetize;
  • for those looking for a keyword focussed domain name it might be easier to get cheaplaptops.blogspot.com compared to cheaplaptops.com (don’t bother they are both gone and no they are not my sites!)
  • blogger blogs are hosted somewhere different from the rest of your empire – if something happens to your web hosting at least your blogger blog will still work;
  • you get traffic from blogger itself: people seem to surf blogger looking for something to read – though I doubt that its very well targeted traffic.
  • its free and I doubt that that will change

Disadvantages of Blogger (Blogspot) Blogs

  • its not an open interface so you don’t have the huge range of plugins and themes available for self-hosted WordPress. if you want a super-slick, beautifully designed blog then stick ith self-hosted WordPress. If you just want something functional that works blogger will do fine;
  • all domains include .blogspot.com as in http://100sites-lissie.blogspot.com: if you get good rankings and backlinks for that url and them decide to move later to your own site e.g. http://100sites-lissie.co.nz then you will lose all that age, backlinks and SEO advantages and have to start again. If you expect to move to your own domain later then do so, sooner;
  • you are basically renting, or squatting as the rent is free, on someone else’s site: they have no obligation to keep on providing the service and one day your whole blog may just go away, I tend to think if that happens we may have more serious things to worry about than a blogger blog!

For those interested in the use of blogger blogs with Adense to make money from Niches check out Grizz’s: Make Money Online Blog: Check out the “Make Money Online Lesson’s” series towards the bottom right of the main page: don’t be put off by the length of his posts: its deliberate and he explains why.