My 4 Hour Workweek

I’m excited today to kick off a personal challenge here, and hopefully some of you will join me.

If you could tell by the tone of my last income report, things weren’t looking all that great.  My income was down for a variety of reasons, and even though April as a whole didn’t turn out too badly, I could tell that a further decline was in store for this month.

As result, I’m launching this personal challenge to see if I can get myself back on the right track.  If everything goes as planned, I’ll have some great things to report at the end of the 31 days.

Let’s get into the details…

Read more…

Now that I finally find myself with some free time again, it’s time for me to get back into productivity mode.

As I previously mentioned, April’s income is probably going to show a very large drop from March’s, thanks to a big loss of traffic from one of my top income sources. With that in mind, I wanted to take this time to revisit some of my 2013 goals and come up with a plan to take my online income to the next level.

This will be more of a public brainstorm post, where I’m just going to write about what’s on my mind with respect to my passive income projects.  I encourage you to do the same, either on your own blog, or in the comments below.

Read more…

This is the post I’ve been referring to for the past couple months, and I’ve finally gotten around to writing it.  If you’ve read my income reports, you know I talk about Lending Club on a monthly basis.  The reason is simple: This is really my only “true” source of passive income online.  I’ve used Lending Club for over 3 years now and am happy to be an affiliate as well.

What is Lending Club?  It’s basically a platform that allows individuals to loan money to other individuals (also known as “peer-to-peer lending”), with Lending Club as the middle man, making sure that your risk is properly identified before you make an investment.  They do everything from running a credit check on the borrower to verifying the borrower’s annual income, to make sure it’s relatively safe for you to loan them the money.

Of course, there is some risk involved, but you’re compensated for that risk by earning a nice interest rate on the loan (investment).  If you read my income reports, you’ll see I currently earn around a 6% annualized rate of return on my investment, and the average rate of all Lending Club investors is around 9%.  There’s a lot more to it, which is why I decided to write this guide and show you my strategy when investing on Lending Club.

Read more…

This is going to be more of a hypothetical post, but it’s something that I really believe will be a reality before long.

No online “empire” has penetrated the average web user’s home like Google, and it only makes sense to look at a online business just as popular to find out who could be the next big player in the ad publishing world – Facebook.

This isn’t all conjecture on my part – there are some real signs that point to Facebook becoming the next big online advertising giant, which I’ll of course explain further…

Read more…

Next up in the Google AdSense Alternatives series is Chitika!  This is actually one advertising network that I’ve been using for awhile, almost as long as AdSense, because I was able to use it on my InfoBarrel articles.

As I go through and review these various alternatives to AdSense, I’m starting to realize that it’s going to be extremely difficult to ever match or beat the performance of AdSense. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to set AdSense as the “standard” because then everything else is going to appear very weak by comparison.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot to like about Chitika, and I’ll go into all the details below.

Read more…

The “Google AdSense Alternatives” series continues! In case you missed it, I previously wrote about Media.net, and today I’m going to discuss Infolinks.

Much like Media.net, Infolinks was one of the alternatives I turned to almost immediately after losing my AdSense account.  I had seen it around on a lot of other sites in the past, but never bothered to try it until now.  My overall feelings are pretty mixed on this one, and I’ll explain why below.

Read more…