My 4 Hour Workweek

The other day, I was thinking about the success (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) of my online passive income projects over the past year or so.  I started this blog early in 2010 (although didn’t really start working on passive income projects until mid-2010) and decided it would be interesting to look at some overall trends and see if I could learn anything from them.

Rather than do this and keep it to myself, I figured I might as well make it public and see if you have any thoughts as well.

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This is one thing internet marketers don’t seem to ever shut up about, mainly because there’s some truth behind it.  The thing that always bothered me about the phrase “the money’s in the list” is that it implies some kind of instant value:  subscribers to your newsletter = money in your pocket.

The problem I have with this equation is that it’s like saying “the money’s in a high traffic, well-monetized website.” Obviously.  Honestly, I think half the reason many internet marketers preach “the money’s in the list” is so they can use their affiliate link to Aweber or another subscription mailing service.  I’m purposely leaving out my affiliate link here.

Really, the money is in how you use your list.  Having a list is a lot like running a niche affiliate site – you can’t just focus on getting traffic – you must also focus on converting that traffic.  Keep reading, and I’ll keep ranting…

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I’ve written before about 142+ ways to make money online, but there was no formal ranking involved.  Sometimes when you only have time to do one or two things, you want to “work closest to the money” – in other words, you want to do whatever is going to maximize your earnings (considering both short and long term potential).

With that in mind, I’ve decided to rank various sources of passive income in broad terms, however I will give some examples for each category.  Keep in mind, these rankings are based on my own opinion and experience – feel free to disagree with them in the comments.

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As you may be aware, last week I decided to experiment with laser focus on one project, cutting out all distractions (to the best of my ability).  It was difficult to stay away from reading e-mail and @ messages on Twitter, but there were a lot of distractions I successfully avoided.  This project, as I’ve mentioned in the past, will be an authority website that’s going to allow me to share the knowledge and wisdom I’ve accumulated throughout my career, and hopefully help people by addressing real problems, issues, and concerns that I know are prevalent in most people’s lives.

Although I’m not ready to share the very specific details and the exact site URL with you yet (this is more for my own protection), I want to talk about what I’ve done and the plans I’ve come up with over the past couple of weeks.

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Recently, I wrote a post titled “Getting Screwed Out of Hostgator Affiliate Commissions?” where I discussed my frustration as a Hostgator affiliate, because it seemed as though all of my affiliate sales were being labeled “invalid” for one reason or another, causing them to never be paid out.  As it turns out (based on the comments the post received), many of you had a similar issue.

Well, to my surprise today, someone from Hostgator just responded to these concerns in the comments of that post.  I figured this affects enough of you that it warrants its own post here, especially because many of you won’t go and look back at the comments from that post.  Here’s what he said…

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I love list posts, especially ones that can be bookmarked and revisited as a resource.  I’ve always wanted to create something like that, which is what led me to this article.  I’ve been working on this article for a couple months now, adding to it little by little.  I’m proud to be able to finally share it with you today.

The contents of this article are not in any way revolutionary.  Given enough time (this actually took much longer than I expected), you could easily compile a similar list. The concept of making money online is so broad, however, that I wanted a resource that captures most aspects of it.  Take from it whatever you’d like, or simply bookmark it for future reference.

Here’s some food for thought: If you could find a way to make just $1 per day utilizing each of the following sources, you would earn over $52,000 per year!

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We’re all pretty familiar with website hosting services and the affiliate programs that go along with them.  After all, if you’re going to make money online, you probably need to buy a hosting account.  Their affiliate commissions are usually pretty lucrative ($50+ per sale!), which is why you’ll see affiliate links and banners for hosting services on most blogs.  Hostgator and BlueHost are two of the more common ones.

I don’t heavily promote hosting at all – I have a couple links on my resources page, but beyond that, I’m not really working hard for hosting affiliate commissions.  Because I suspect many of you promote hosting either actively or passively (through banners, etc.), I thought I’d bring this finding to your attention, specifically if you promote Hostgator.

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With my January income report coming up later this week, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about something I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly discussed here before: reinvesting.  You often hear about “reinvesting” as it applies to large corporations.  For example, XYZ Manufacturing Inc. had a profit of $4 million in 2010 – instead of paying it out to its owners, the company reinvested the money by putting it toward additional research and development, to hopefully bring greater earnings in the future.

The same concept applies to us too – we can take our earnings, however large or small, and put it toward things that can help us expand our income potential.

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