Passive Income

Would You Like Some High PR Backlinks?

Taking a bit of advise from Carrie, I spent a few hours tonight creating backlinks to two of my sniper sites. If you have ever sat down and done some of this, you know how long it can take. Over the course of 3 hours, I managed to get around 50 links created, all to sites with page ranks of 5 or higher. Hopefully over the next few days I will see these sites start to creep up in the SERPs a bit.

After spending a few hours doing this, I found that I kind of enjoyed it. It was relaxing in a weird sort of way and helped get some creative juices flowing. As you know, I plan of buying a ton of domain names over the next few weeks. I wanted to use my eHow money to fund this, however, my earnings have been slowly decreasing ( since I do not have the time needed to constantly create new articles).

As such, I have decided to offer my services to a few of my readers. This should provide a little seed money so that I can go out and grab a few more domain names.

Outsource Your Link Building to Me!

Here is what I am offering for $15:

• backlinks to 10 sites (of my choice), of which all have at least a PR of 5
• for each site, I will create 1 or 2 links to any site you choose (PG-13 or less - I will not do anything shady, unethical, or even slightly questionable)
• A list of where you can find your links as proof they were completed (which you can then use on your other sites yourself or have me create them again for you)

I think this is a pretty decent deal for everyone involved. You get 20 high quality links and I get a few dollars to fund my sniper empire. Each link will be created from an inner, do-follow page, that allows the main domain’s link juice to flow to your site.

If no one elects to give this a try, so be it. No worries either way! Creating these links takes about an hour or two, so to be safe, I am limiting this to 5 people at a time. This ensures that I can get the links done for the purchaser in a reasonable amount of time.

If you are interested, leave me a comment (use the email you want me to respond to when filling out the comment form). I will email you and get all of the information that I will need to create useful backlinks for your sites! To start, I will simply go down the comment list, first come first served, until I have 5 orders (if anyone wants to take me up on this offer). Once I have completed the first 5, I will move on down the list.

Since my main focus is creating passive income, this will be a limited time offer. I may cancel it at any time, so if you are interested, please let me know!

What do you guys think? Am I taking on too much at one time, or not enough?

Popularity: 10% [?]

I spent the past few days on vacation with my family. It was quite possibly the best vacation I have ever had! I truly did not want to come back to reality. I must admit that this tiny vacation really fueled my desire to take charge of my own destiny. What better way than creating my own little passive income empire?

If you will remember from my last passive income challenge update, I added a new site to my growing empire (Sniper Site #3). For whatever reason, it still has not been indexed by Google. I have not added much to it so far, maybe one or two posts, so today I plan on using a few techniques found in One Week Marketing to get it indexed, and to get the traffic started. As a side note, Jennifer sent out another OWM update about an hour ago. This little 50 page bonus gave me some new ideas to jump start a few of my older campaigns. I will probably attack those this weekend.

Since clickbank allows you to track your hops for only 30 days, I went ahead and downloaded my activity for June. Sniper Site #1 is absolutely killing it with respects to hops but has not produced even one sale. I am thinking that perhaps this product has seen the last of its productive days. I am going to give it another 250 hops to produce a sale, or it will be fired. Products that do not convert have no place in my empire. Sniper Site #2 has only received a few hops thus far, so it is way to early to judge its performance.

As a review, my overall passive income mission statement is as follows:

By January 1, 2010, my goal is to earn an additional $400 each month ($500 total). These earnings should be derived primarily from passive sources (i.e., affiliate marketing, revenue sharing websites, etc) in which additional effort may be required up front but require less than 1 hour of maintenance per month to continue.

Passive Income Results: June 2009

Affiliate Sales: $89.12 - While not my best performance ever, I did make a few sales all coming from different niches. My experience continues to prove to me that this whole online income thing is truly a numbers game. Try and get as many little sites working for you and you are bound to make at least some money.

eHow earnings: $68.59  - There is no telling how long it will take for ehow to update June’s final earnings, so I am going to go ahead and provide an estimate. I will update it with final numbers as they are posted. As I earned $82 last month, $68.59 represents a 16% decrease in earnings. As part of my own little ehow experiment, I created no new articles and did not participate at all on ehow during June. I honestly believe that this negatively impacted my results. I am going to resume my article creation efforts in July to see if this has any impact at all.

Amazon: $6.74 - A couple of smallish sales was all I managed from Amazon in June. While the commission percentage is rather small, people trust Amazon, so I like promoting items found there. It will never make me rich, but even $5 a month will help me reach my overall goal.

PCP: $25.45 - I use Yahoo and Google in equal parts. I do not feel comfortable breaking these out individually, so you will see them presented here together. I have toyed with the idea of trying to create 30 new hubs on hubpages, but it is difficult to find the time. If you get the chance, please visit my profile and become a fan.

Swagbucks: $90 - The little search engine that could :). This actually represents two months worth of earnings, but since I did not post my results last month (and i finally cashed them in), I included it here. Typically, I use them to buy Amazon gift cards. I bought myself a new pair of running shoes (since I am trying to get in shape) and the first season of True Blood (which a few colleagues have been raving about). I really like Swagbucks.

Peer Lending: $1.17 - This represents the interest I have been paid on the FREE money I received when I joined. So far, both notes remain current and continue to earn 9.34% annually. I have considered adding some of my own money, but for now I think I will just use the free money and see how it all pans out.

Total: $191.07 (excluding the gift cards earned from Swagbucks). Overall this is not a horrible month. It was not my best by far, but it is a start. I elected not to include the $90 from Swagbucks because I cannot use this money to pay the mortgage. While I can buy myself some cool things, it does not really help me reach my goals.

Speaking of Goals:

In July, I want to accomplish the following tasks:

• write 15 articles on ehow and Infobarrel
• create 10 new Hubs on HubPages
• create 50 links to each of my new sniper sites
• create 20+ posts on Chasingthebull and ExperimentalBlogging
• complete 5 new Sniper Sites
• lose 5 pounds (I actually gained weight on vacation - go figure?)
• earn $250 in passive income - which is an increase of slightly more than 30% (pretty realistic)

What about you? How did your month end up? What are you going to do today that will help you reach your goals tomorrow?
earnings from ehow have been updated

Popularity: 10% [?]

A few months ago, I followed my buddy John’s affiliate link over to Lending Club. If you have never checked out his blog you really should. Passive Family Income is the first site I read in the morning before heading off to work. It is good stuff.

Anyways…Lending Club was having a deal at the time. For every person that signed up, the referrer was SUPPOSED to get $25, while the new member’s account would be credited with $50 to begin their peer lending experience.

From Lending Club’s website:

Rather than spending money on advertising, we’d like to give that money to you, our members, for introducing your friends to Lending Club.

The last time I ask John about this, he still had not receive his income, but I did get receive $50. As such, I immediately set out to lend this money to someone who really needed it. My lending strategy, can be boiled down as follows:

• Credit Score Over 700
• Using Loan to Reduce Debt
• Zero Delinquencies in Past 2 Year

Note #1

Amount: $25
Weighted Average Rate: 9.63%
Principle Received: $5.17
Interest Received: $0.59
Outstanding Principle: $19.83
Status: Current

Note #2

Weighted Average Rate: 9.63%
Principle Received: $1.81
Interest Received: $0.59
Outstanding Principle: $23.19
Status: Current

So far, this little experiment is going rather well. In fact, I was thinking about investing a little more. I would love to hear about your experience with peer-to-peer lending.

If you get a few minutes, go check out Lending Club and let me know what you think.

Have you had good experiences with Peer Lending? What words of caution would you give me or someone else thinking about starting a peer lending portfolio?

Popularity: 12% [?]