The Cheap Bastid» passive income

My Passive Earnings Revealed

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 23:24:54 +0000

I actually had a person email me and accuse me of pumping the numbers here in order to get sales.

I’m not really sure what I’m selling but it isn’t working, nope, not one bit.

To be honest the email kind’ve shocked me, I think I’ve always been upfront about everything here. I’m also ‘giving away’ what lots of people sell in an eBook, so I’m not really sure what hidden agenda this person thinks I have.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of my eHow earning screen.

Impressive isn't it..

Now here’s my Amazon sales screen from November 2008 (when I started) until today.

Not much, but it all adds up

And finally, some of you may have noticed I updated the SEO/Click friendly article box on the right, there is now an Amazon sale listed. Here it is below..

This guy bought a nice PSU!

Actually this sale occurred at the end of last month, I only noticed it when I took the Amazon screenshot above. Thank you Mr. Earnings doubter!

So there you have it, all my major earning screens laid out for your approval. Now if you’re satisfied please click on whatever I’m selling and buy two of each.

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A Record Setting Earnings Day

admin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:53:09 +0000

I probably shouldn’t say anything so as not to anger the Gods of Passive Income, but Between eHow and Amazon I pulled in over $13 yesterday.

A truly great day, it only inspires me to publish more articles!

Good thing too, I’m already behind on publishing if I want to get 75 articles out this month.

Earnings have been up for the last 2 – 3 weeks, anyone else having above average earnings?

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Setting Up your Computer for Article Writing

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:05:49 +0000

First I’m going to show you how to setup your computer for article writing. This is important. If you’re like me and work all day you need to have your system setup for high speed, hassle free article writing.

Don’t worry, there’s no expensive software to install. In fact, if you don’t own some of the recommended programs i’ll provide a link to a free alternative.

When you write articles you need to have four things.

Keywords
Photos
Information
Storage and Organization

First off we’re going to setup your keyword links, I’m not going to talk about what they do, but by all means click around and discover what they do. We’ll come back to them later

Open up your favorite browser, open favorites and create a folder called Keyword Tools

Go to the following sites, bookmark them and move the bookmark into the keyword tools folder (Links open in a new window)

These are the keyword tools you will use, know them and love them because they will make you lots of cash.

Next up are Photos.

Once again, in your browser create a new favorites folder called (oddly enough) Free Photos

Same drill, go to each of the following sites, bookmark them and move the bookmark into the free photos folder.

You’ll be using these sites to get photos for your articles. They are all free so you should use them since articles with photos earn more.

Next are informational links

Create a folder called Information, then go to the following sites and bookmark them. Make sure to move the bookmark into the information folder.

Amazon (you’ll see why in a later post)

The information folder is where you’ll store links to sites that you can used to get, you guessed it, information. As an example if you’re doing an article about camping a great site to get information is Cabellas (an outdoor related store)

I can’t tell you what links to put into this folder besides Amazon. You will know the types of articles you’ll be writing and will eventually get a feel for what sites provide the best information. The trick is to add a bookmark and move it into this folder, you may need it for another article in the future. As you complete more articles and find more sites you can eventually make sub-folders; camping, cooking, clothes, recipes etc…

Next go to Windows Explorer and create a new folder on your hard drive called Articles. This is where you’ll be storing all of your articles, eventually there will be sub-folders but we’ll get to that later.

Next make sure you have a spreadsheet program and a word processor. Microsoft Word and Excel are the obvious ones.

You’ll be using Excel to track your article views and earnings. You’ll actually be writing your articles in word and saving them locally before you upload them to the article sites.

If you don’t own either or both programs download and install OpenOffice. This is a highly rated, free program that does everything Microsoft Office does at a better price, free.

Now, you need to install Mozilla Firefox and the Firefox Pagerank Plugin. These are two VERY IMPORTANT things you must have!!

The last thing to do is create a text file on your desktop called Ideas. This is simply a quick access location where you can quickly jot down keyword or article ideas when they come to you.

For you Windows Vista users there is an awesome sidebar program called Notes that you can install for free, I use it instead of a text file to jot down ideas. Right click on your sidebar, go to ‘Add Gadgets’ it should be right there on page 1, called Notes.

So now your computer is setup for high speed, low hassle article writing. The goal with all this is to have everything at your fingertips so you can finish your articles quickly and make some cash.

If anyone has additional things to add or any suggestions feel free to let me know.

Next we’ll talk about finding topics for articles.

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Writing Articles for Profit – A General Outline

admin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:05:32 +0000

I’m going to outline the general steps in creating articles to publish online. Articles are also known as ‘content’, and as you’ll hear from me and other article sources, content is key.

The article process is as follows, and I’ll say upfront that this is geared towards eHow, but is still absolutely useful for other sites.

Come up with a topic: this is simple enough, it just means decide on what you want to write an article about. This is also where the dreaded ‘writers block’ pops up. I’ll discuss ways to overcome this.
Research keywords: This step is vitally important and if you don’t master it you will not realize maximum earnings. As you research keywords you may come to realize that your topic simply doesn’t pay well, in that case just come up with a new topic.
Write the article: Now it’s time to write the article, make sure you use the keywords that you researched earlier.
Adjust keywords for SEO: After you write the article take a look at it and read it, does it flow naturally? Adjust your keyword density if necessary and never overuse keywords.
Publish the article: If it looks good then publish it. We’ll cover that process later.
Adjust the article for ad targeting: A lot of new writers don’t do this step. Just look at your published article and make sure the ads are appropriate to the content. If you write an article about ‘chocolate addiction’ make sure the ads aren’t about drug addiction. If the ads are wrong, edit the article and adjust your keyword density.
Promote the Article: We’ll talk about some free social networking and other sites to get traffic to your article. More traffic, more money.
Monitor the article: Another often overlooked step. The more traffic your article gets the more money you will make, it’s as simple as that. If you’re article isn’t getting traffic there are ways to improve it, which I’ll discuss in a later post.
Adjust to optimize profit: This is an optional step but it’s sometimes a good idea to revisit an article a few months later and update it if necessary. This is especially true if there are Amazon product links.

So there you have it. I just briefly touched upon the process but I’ll expand on all of them in coming posts.

Writing articles is NOT difficult and certainly not time consuming, just learn SEO and you’ll do very well. Once you get the hang of it you should easily be able to publish an article from scratch within 30 minutes.

The general consensus among eHow users is that articles should average between 1.50 and 3.00 dollars per month. If you publish just one article a day at the end of the year you should have about 350 articles and a permanent, passive income of from 500-1000 dollars a month,

My next post will be on setting up your PC to make this entire process easier and quicker. I spent the last two months hunting down software and informational links to give me the tools to excel at this.

Set up your computer for article writing to make the most money as fast as possible.

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A New Direction For Me

admin — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:49:45 +0000

Hi there, and welcome to the Cheap Bastid. As some of you may notice this blog has a new look, and a new direction.

Yesterday I hit my two month anniversary of (trying) to make money online.

I’ve tried all the popular routes; surveys, pay per click, InboxDollars, ChaCha and so on.

My total income in two months in all those endeavors was exactly $31.16 Considering the number of hours I put in this is about .25 cents an hour, which, as i’m sure you’ll agree, is pathetic and not worth the time.

There was one shining star out there though, eHow, which is a site where you write articles, and make money off the ad revenue that those articles generate. In two months I wrote a total of 77 articles and my total earnings from eHow was an amazing $75, the great part about eHow is the income is passive and permanent.

Simply put this means that those articles are out there earning me money till the end of time, or the eHow site shuts down (whichever comes first). If I stop writing today I will continue earning money from eHow from those 77 articles.

Starting today I will no longer waste my time doing any surveys or whatever, I will write articles and get paid to do it.

At the beginning of January I had 50 articles published and had made $33.05 in the month of December. I had set my goal for January to have 75 articles published and an income of $100. I made my article publishing goal quite quickly, and considering where my earnings are so far for the month I think I have a good chance of making my income goal as well.

There are many ‘power users’ on eHow making over $500 a month, there’s even a handful making over $1500 a month. Income like this would honestly change my life as I would pay off my debt quickly and finally start saving money.

My goal for this year is get my monthly income to $1000 on eHow and my other means, which i’ll explain in greater detail in coming posts.

I’ll update my earnings window in the sidebar daily so you can track my progress.

I’ll also post up tips and guides so you too can join in on this and make some serious cash online writing articles.

If you have any tips of suggestions I would love to hear them!

P.S. If anyone knows of a WordPress widget that allows formatted text let me know. I tried adding my eHow income into a text widget and it looks terrible..

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The last few weeks…

admin — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 02:42:48 +0000

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth… A few weeks ago the unthinkable happened, a coworker got laid off in our department. I was almost 100% certain the IT dept was immune to layoffs due to the large number of high profile projects we have going on right now. I was wrong..

Back in the ’90s I was laid off, and completely unprepared for it. End result, I was unemployed for over a year, and with no savings, ended up in absolute financial ruin. I vowed I would never let myself get into that situation again.

Well, fast forward to 2008 and I find myself without savings and heavily in debt, a layoff now would be absolutely catastrophic for me.

So, I had to take drastic steps these last few weeks to at least prepare as best I can in case I get laid off. I spent the last few weeks pumping out article after article on ehow, which is, in my opinion, the absolute best way to earn money now, and build a passive income stream for the future.

I managed to push out almost 30 articles the last few weeks, and my daily income went from about 15 cents to almost $3 a day. I’ll get a payout next month of about $30 bucks, and I expect to end next month in the $100 dollar range.

By my estimate, I need to get my article income to about $400 a month to be able to pay my bills (earnings + unemployment), I figure, with maximum effort I should be able to hit that mark by March.

So, to sum up, my immediate goal is to get my article earnings into the $400 dollar range, then, I can concentrate on other income streams.

Needless to say there is no budget for December, I am trying to spend an absolute minimum on everything without exception, i’ll do the same for January and February in an attempt to get some credit cards paid off.

Once, the dust settles so to speak I can continue forward with my ultimate goal, which is to be debt free ASAP while building many passive income streams.

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