New Passive Income Stream: RevResponse

June was a record breaking month for me. I made $3,354.41 last month from various different sources, of which $2254.93 was online revenues. You can read about the compelete breakdown at Living Off Dividends & Passive Income.

Last month I introduced yet another source of online income, a company called RevResponse. I only made $17.50, but I didn't do anything to promote it either so I can't really complain. Making an extra $200-250 a year for an hour's worth of work isn't too bad! Plus when you combine it with the other sources of income, they all add up to a significant amount.

RevResponse gives away free magazines and white papers on a slew of topics ranging from Global Finance and Banking, to Autmobiles and Internet Marketing.

They also offer free trials to popular magazines like free trial to the the Economist. Old School programmers might remember Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Well, it’s available for free too.



RevResponse co-brands your site so your readers are taken to a site that replicates the look and feel of your own website or blog. This picture replicates the Living Off Dividends & Passive Income site.



For every qualified subscription request your site generates, you get minimum of $1.50. You can run this in conjunction with adsense and other affiliate programs. They make their payments via paypal. They also pay for referrals. And best of all, its free content!

If that wasn't enough, they’re also giving away $50 for a plug to their site in July. So if you’d like to make an easy $50 for 10 minutes worth of work, plus have an on going passive revenue stream, all you need to do is sign up with them and write a brief post on their services. So what are you waiting for? Join RevResponse Now.

Made $1645 In Online Income

For March, the break of online income is as follows:

• Online Income: $1645.30
  
  
  
  • Adsense: $339.28
  
  
  • Linkworth: $456.70
  
  
  • TLA: $103.61
  
  
  • Kontera: $62.07
  
  
  • Direct Ads: $330
  
  
  • Prosper Referrals: $175
  
  
  • Amazon: $117.82
  
  
  • Domain Embarking: $60.82
  
  
  
  

Revenue from Adsense seems to be on a slow decline. It looks like I was smart-priced. In a few blogs, I've modified the code so adsense ads are only displayed to search engine viewers. I don't think other kinds of traffic click on the ads anyway. I also signed up for Adsdaq to display in place of adsense on these sites.

Surprizingly, Linkworth has started performing really well on my sites. March's income was almost double of February's and I expect April's income to be a lot higher too. Its been a long time coming, but now the income is starting to be substantial. I'm very happy with their service and I strongly endorse it.

Text-Link-Ads is also doing moderately okay although its making less than Linkworth. I don't think you're allowed to use both services on the same site, so see which one works better for you. Between the two, my favorite is currently Linkworth. It also has a good affiliate program so if you sign up, make sure you put an affiliate ad on your site too.

This year,I accidentally stumbled upon Amazon affiliate income through a post I wrote. Hopefully it will continue as I learn more about affiliate marketing and try out different techniques to boost it.

Surprizingly, I found out that I had earned ~$60 from Domain Embarking, a site that helps you earn money from parked domains. I had a few sites that were parked with Sedo.com. In over 2 years, I make about 24 cents with Sedo, but with Domain Embarking, now I'm making some money atleast. To be fair, the $60 was earnings for the year till date, so it could have been only $20 for March. I'll find out how it does in April to get a better idea. Regardless, its still a whole lot better than the $0.01 per month I was making with Sedo.

I also just registered about 20 .info domains with godaddy. Godaddy is currently running a 99 cent special Actually is about $1.25 after taxes but still a great deal.
Parking them with Domain Embarking should earn me more money than that during the course of the year. The sites will also get PR and backlinks, so I might be able to sell them for more than $10 in a year. Or I might decide to host them myself and set up a BANS store on them. I use Dream Host for hosting and its really good. I can host multiple accounts on the same account for the low fee of $120/year. Use the coupon "passiveincome" to get a $20 discount on it.
Prosper is still handing out $25 signup bonuses to new lenders. When lenders who sign up through my link and fund their account, I get $25 too. That's how I made the $175 in referral fees. I also made around $30-$35 last month in prosper loans but since they usually issue a statement around the 5th of the month, i'll exclude that income. I usually get around $180-200 every month from the loans, of which 70% is return of principle. Calculating it manually is just too tedious.

$1,400 In Monthly Online Income

February 2008 was a record-breaking month. I achieved over $550 in stock and canroy dividends, ~$275 in oil revenue and ~$1400 in online income.

Here's the breakdown:

• Online Income: $$1399.29
  
  
  
  • Adsense: $416.22
  
  
  • Linkworth: $221.99
  
  
  • TLA: $95.87
  
  
  • Kontera: $51.36
  
  
  • Affiliate: $83.85
  
  
  • Prosper Referrals: $100
  
  
  • Direct Ads: $430
  
  
  
  


• Savings Accounts: $138.43
  


• Real Estate Trust Deed: $0


• Direct Oil Drilling Investment: $277


• Dividends from Canroys: $509.11


• Other Dividends: $59.72

I made $100 in referrals fees from Prosper. If you've been thinking of lending or borrowing money on Prosper, now is a good time to do it. They're still offering a $25 incentive to new members.

A majority of the dividend income is from Canroys, and is post-tax income. The Canadian government takes its 15% tax on the dividends from Canroys, so the income is after-tax. You get a tax credit for this amount in the US so there's no double taxation.

I'm also getting affiliate referral income from Linkworth.com. For every person that signs up, they give 5% of the income they earn for life! The $200 that I got in February was actually the income I earned in January. For February, I've actually earned $410.98, of which most of it is referrral income. However, since I won't get paid until March, I'm going to count that next month. Linkworth will probably be the largest income stream next month. Its a great way to boost your site's revenue and I strongly recommend you sign up.

My Kontera income dropped significantly from the prior month. Its down almost 50%. I haven't spent much time analyzing that so I'm not sure what happend. Overall traffic is up so I'd expect the kontera revenue to also increase, but the opposite occurred. I guess it is correlated with the type of posts. I've seen that posts related to gold pay very well for PayPerClick advertising. A lot of clicks are $0.99 and some are even over $1 each. Focusing on investment-related content makes for good income!

As I mentioned last month, my real estate trust deed has defaulted. Luckily, the oil drilling programs have started to kick-in and have almost replaced that income.

Overall, I'm quite pleased with the results. Hopefully, I'll be able to break the $3,000/month barrier pretty soon.

The 17 Year Old Adsense Millionaire!

Here's another depressing story of some 17 year old millionaire who makes $70,000 per month selling myspace templates. Did I say depressing? I meant inspiring!

Ashley Qualls, founder/CEO of Whateverlife.com doesn't actually make money from the templates, but rather from adsense ads! Apparently her first adsense check from Google was for $2800, which is more money than Google EVER sent me. Of course, I haven't filled a need (which she obviously did extremely well) but atleast I'm getting some remuneration (if you consider minimum wage to be any form of remuneration) for voicing my irreverent & often irrelevant opinions.

You can read the entire article online at Fast Company. She's a pretty amazing teenager.

Linkworth's New Referral Program

Linkworth is a site that offers bloggers and website owners the opportunity to monetize their site via paid ads.

Originally they only offered referral commissions for advertisers, but since July they've been tracking publisher referrals and will pay you for those too!

Advertiser Account Referrals
>> $25 payout once the advertiser spends a minimum of $100.00
>>5% payout on all recurring charges for the life of the advertiser account

Partner Account Referrals
>> $25 payout once the partner earns a minimum of $100.00

Combo Account Referrals
>> $25 payout once the advertiser side spends a minimum of $100.00
>> 5% payout on all recurring advertising charges for life of account
>> $25 payout once the partner side earns a minimum of $100.00

I made $144 last month from Linkworth, which is about 1/4th of my monthly online revenue, which I discussed here. If you haven't signed up for it already, you can do so via this link.

How To Make An Easy $25 & Other Blog Monetizing Tips

AuctionAds is running a promotion. Just sign up to display Auction ads on your site and you'll get $25. Not only that, if you refer anyone, you get 5% of their income for the first 6 months too.

It takes less than 5 minutes to sign up and you can modify the code to suite the layout of your site. You can also mention which keywords you'd like to target so that you get relevant ads (Note: this does NOT interfere with Google Ads). Somehow it integrates with Ebay's affiliate program and you earn a referral fee anytime you sign up a new user or someone wins an auction after clicking on your link.

If you sign up a new ebay user, you get $25. If you generate a sale, you get 50% or more of the commission that Ebay makes. Since ebay has increased its fees and commission structure in the past year, this bodes well for publishers like us.

So what are you waiting for? If you haven't already signed up, claim your free $25 right now!

AuctionAds is actually a sub-division of Text Link Ads, which also offers bloggers an opportunity to make money by selling ads on their site. If you haven't signed up for Text Link Ads, I suggest that you do that as well. [continued below ad]





You might be wondering if its worth putting up all these ads? After all, your site might not be attracting a lot of traffic and you may not feel the income is worth the effort.

I actually do not get a lot of traffic (less than 10,000 hits per month), especially compared to entertainment-related blogs or blogs about getting out of debt, but the traffic that I do get is highly targeted and results in high dollar-value conversions. As a result I'm still currently pulling in between $400-500 per month.

I'm making money from various different sources so that if the guidelines change for one, it doesn't completely stop the income. Also, over 50% of my traffic is organic in nature, coming mostly from Google.com searches.

Here are the various programs (in no particular order)

• Google Adsense

Not only do you make money when people click on the sites, but you also get $5 per publisher who signs up. If they earn $100 in the first 6 months, you get an bonus $250! If you're lucky enough to sign up 25 such publishers in a year, you get an extra $2,000!





• Linkworth

Linkworth enables you to get sponsors who pay a flat fee to host ads on your ads. They have 2 programs, one with a 50-50 split and another with a 70-30 split. I'd recommend going with the 70-30 split. Get your own sponsors here.


• Text Link Ads

Similar to Linkworth, they also let you sell ad space. The also allow a post-level sponsorship, but this is difficult to incorporate into Blogger.com. If however, you're using wordpress then you're in luck and this might be a better option for you. For advertisers, they're running a promotion where you get $100 in FREE Links.


• Amazon's Affiliate Program

This is a pretty good program since a lot of people use it anyway. I make enough to buy myself a few books every month myself! So this effectively subsidizes my voracious reading habit. And by setting up an my online bookstore, I don't have to repeatedly send people a list of my favorite books, plus I get a referral if they actually buy any of my recommendations.


• Prosper.com

This is a new and somewhat temporary referral program. If a new lender signs up, you both get $25. If a new borrower joins, you get $125! I've made nearly $200 bucks from this referral program (which I haven't included in my total, since its a temporary program).



• Direct Sponsors

I'm often contacted directly by sponsors wanting to put up ads. Many bloggers don't make it easy for sponsors to contact them by not having comments enabled and not having any email address or website-ownership info visible. They're missing out on potential revenue. I've had internet marketing companies as far away as the UK and Israel send me money via paypal for text ads. If you're interested, you can send me an email at emptyspacesinc@gmail.com

While $500 isn't enough to live on (atleast not in the US), its one of several income streams that I'm trying to develop. I'll try to post a monthly update on the passive income growth in future.

Buying Canadian Income Funds For Passive Income (and Financial Freedom)

Yesterday, I bought some more Canadian Income Funds, also called Royalty Trusts or Canroys. As I mentioned before, I recently refinanced a property and I managed to pull some money out (totally tax-free!).

Rather than spend the money on an SUV or a big-screen TV, I opted to divide the money into 3 parts. The first 1/3rd went towards replenishing my emergency fund which was drawn down by vacancies in my rental properties. The second 1/3rd went towards future investments in summer just in case there's a pullback in the stock market and the last 1/3rd went to building up my passive cash-flow.


Long time readers will realize that I haven't made any effort display my net worth or any goals of net worth. That's because I feel its a meaningless number. If I had a $1 million dollar net worth and it only generated $25,000 a year in income (like Cd's did a few years ago) that's pretty sad. On the other hand, if I owned a $1,000,000 car-wash that generated $125,000 that's pretty significant.

My goal is to generate passive income. Its your passive income that provides financial independence, not your net worth. If you have $3,000/month through various passive income streams, you've got your basic food and shelter taken care of and you won't starve if you lose your job. That is my short term goal. My longer term goal is generate $10,000/month in passive income so I can travel the world without worrying (or working).

I'm currently not even at 50% of my $3,000/month goal so at least 1/3rd of all future investments must take me towards that goal. That's why I bought some Canroys yesterday. I bought Harvest Energy (HTE) and Canetic Resources(CNE). They generate revenue from oil and gas production and refining. The noteworthy part is that they payout around 12% dividend per year. Since the selling of oil and gas leads to a depletion of reserves, its important that they keep some of their revenue for future acquisition of new properties and for drilling new wells. Both of them have a payout ratio of under 80% which isn't bad considering they have proven and probable reserve lifespans of 9.5 years.

There are Canroys with lifespans of 6-7 years and payout ratios of 95% that yield 15% but I'm suspicious of their longterm viability. These two seem like pretty safe bets. If oil prices rise there's a chance of increased payout and also capital appreciation. If not, I'm still getting my 12% yield.

The only issue I have is that the Canadian Government takes its 15% tax straight out of my account. But even considering for that, my yield is still just over 10%. Besides, I get a US tax credit for that amount, so its not a total loss.

I also bought some units in Prism Income Fund(QSR.UN) which owns and operates nearly 500 fast-food franchises in Canada (Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver and Pizza Hut). Their stock has been pretty stable compared to other Canroys following the whole Taxation issue. Its also currently yielding 12% and while I don't expect much capital appreciation, I don't expect it to drop in value or its dividend to fluctuate with the price of oil and gas.

So now I'm one step closer to my goal of $3,000 in passive income. This brings my total passive income from Canroys to $300 per month. I'm also getting $300 from a loan to a developer at 2% per month. And I average around $300/month from my various online ventures. (Even though my online ventures aren't passive, I enjoy pursuing them and I have geographic independence. Thats why I'm counting it).I'm also making around $150/month from my direct oil and gas drilling investments, so I'm almost 1/3rd of the way to my goal!

When I get the money back from the developer, it'll be redeployed at a much lower rate. But I expect the cash flow from the direct oil drilling program to increase enough to cover this short-fall.

Opened a Roth IRA in 10 Minutes

I've been trying to open a Roth IRA for my wife for 2006 contributions at Zecco for a few weeks now.

Initially I couldn't open their stupid .fdf file. Finally I gave in and updated my adobe acrobat to the latest version in order to open it, filled out the paperwork, printed it all out and asked the wife for a copy of her drivers license.

She didn't have. She's lost it and isn't going to waste time at the DMV until after tax season is over. Bummer, without it Zecco will not open an account. Unfortunately tax season ends on 17th April this year, which is the last date I can make a 2006 contribution.

Total time wasted in this activity has been about 4-5 hours. This involved filling out the online application 3 times, calling customer support and being placed on hold for 30-45 minutes (and then giving up), emailing them, printing out the forms and then shredding them.

Instead I decided to go with TDAmeritrade. I currently have all my accounts with them and they have excellent customer service. They also sent me a free 2 GB Ipod when I asked them!

I went online and in about 10 minutes, the account was setup and funded via ACH.

Zecco may have free stock trades and ETF trades but it has significant drawbacks.
1. There is no customer support.
2. There is no technical support.
3. Too much paperwork to signup.
4. They charge you commissions for Mutual Funds.
TDAmeritrade has a TON of mutual funds that are no commission and no load. They also waive the minimum purchase amounts for most of them too.

I think Zecco is definitely over-rated. Besides that, TDAmeritrade gave me free trades for 45 days and a free copy of Money!

Also check out this post about Ben Stein's Rule of Retirement Investing.

Earning Money Online

I read a really interesting post today on Earner$ blog aboutmaking $200 every day.

The first half of the post is just a reference to 'earn money online' which links to his site. This is a just a blatant (but clever) way to fool the search engines to rank his site higher for the search 'earn money online'. The reason many bloggers (John Chow Dot Com included) convet this phrase is because a lot of people search for this term and if you're ranked highly on a search engine for it you get a lot of 'organic' traffic which results in a lot of ad revenue.

However, later in the post he comes to the real meat. Basically you sign up for an affiliate program that pays upto $300 per signup and then find off-line ways to promote it. One way he suggests is buying an ebook package with reseller rights, adding your affiliate link to each ebook and selling it for next to nothing. It will spread virally and eventually you'll have people signing up using your affiliate ID at $300 a pop!!

Sheer genius!