Posted: 10:25 am by tom in
Blog,
Making Money,
Online Projects
Summer has finally begun! Time to make blog posts. Time to work on web stuff. Time to get rich (I hope!). I’ll be blogging about my many summer projects here over the next few months.
First up…
DiscoverUnsigned.com has had delays in development and album launch but should relaunch within a week and see the debut album go live.
PSDFan.com is about to be started on in Photoshop by moi - I’ll try and get some opinions on the design right here before launching it officially.
Other sites include:
A Wordpress themes shop
A VERY useful resource for bloggers
A coding tutorials site (really a sister site to psdfan.com)
And that’s just to start things off. Of course I don’t want to give myself too much to start with - so the priorities right now are my design clients, discoverunsigned and psdfan. After that will come the coding tutorials site, and then hopefully the theme shop and blogging resource. Then I have a few more site ideas up my sleeve.
My plan is to be making $2000 per month from advertising alone, as well as cash from designing for clients. On top of this will come the profit from selling albums via DiscoverUnsigned.
More updates soon when these projects get off the ground!
Posted: 12:30 am by tom in
Blog,
Blogging,
Making Money
We all know how difficult it can be to earn a living from blogging, and even great bloggers get the occasional financial dry patch. Whilst income that directly results from your blog is one of the best sources of motivation, streams of passive income can help to support your blogging efforts.
But just what is passive income? Wikipedia defines passive income as:
“An income stream where money is received usually on a regular basis, without continuing effort. This does not mean no effort at all; most passive income streams require great effort to start with.”
The key is finding sources of passive income that relate somehow to your blog. As the above definition states, most types of passive income will involve a lot of initial effort, but the beauty is that you can then just enjoy the profits. It is important to note that not all types of passive income work this way, some will take you just 2 minutes to set up, and then you can forget all about them.
Some of my favorite techniques include:
Write an EBook - This is a great way to earn from writing about what you love. If you spend the time writing a quality EBook on a subject that you’re interested in you’ll essentially be earning from doing what you’re doing blogging - that is, teaching your readers. Perhaps offer the EBook at a discount to your loyal blog readers and then sell it elsewhere at the full price. All the effort is in the writing, once the book is complete you can just sit back and earn from it. Of course the more you promote it the more you’ll earn, but it can be a great source of passive income driven largely by viral marketing (if your product is good, people will recommend it).
Sell Templates - This is a source of passive income that I’m very interested in pursuing. If you are a web designer and blogger, why not come up with a cool blog template for others to use? This can be especially effective if you add a link to your blog in the template’s footer for exponential self-promotion. You can also earn well from affiliate sales of your design if it becomes popular. If you don’t have the skills required to design a template just pay someone else to do it.
Donations - This is one of the easiest ways to earn passively from your blog. Just stick on a widget such as the Buy Me a Beer Widget and then forget about it. Of course donations will rely on you posting quality content and having a loyal readership, but you should be striving for these things anyway.
Affiliate Links - This subject is really too vast to delve into in this post. However, affiliate links are clearly a great source of passive income. By selling others products/services you can provide useful resources for your readership and earn revenue. Check out my friend Alan’s wonderful blog Affiliate Confession for more on the subject.
Adsense & PPC Advertising - Again, this subject is too broad to discuss within this post, but Adsense is a fantastic way to earn from your blogs. I have a small niche blog that uses Adsense and often forget all about it until I receive a cheque in the mail. There are many other alternatives to Adsense, but I’ve so far had the best experience with this service. This method of producing income will often not be regarded as passive as people will often have to work to create great content in order to earn from Adsense. However, I view Adsense as highly passive if you already own a blog, as you are just profiting from your ongoing hard work.
I hope that these tips were helpful. Obviously some of them are very well known, but I’m trying to share with you what I think works best and what is easiest. Good luck with your money making schemes!
