The bacons back on the grill baby!

After a short hiatus due to ‘real life’, my experiments in passive and residual income will continue.

I am going to re-vamp the the about section to re-align the goals of this website. Also look soon for a quarterly review.

I am currently working on a new article that should be out later today.

Cheers!

This means that I won’t be able to give this blog the love I intended for a few weeks. :\

I will be back soon.

-Residual Bacon

Residual Income Earnings : Dec 2009

• GraphicRiver.net earnings : $8.00
• Adsense Web Traffic Earnings : $5.62
• eHow Article earnings : $0.44
• Total Earnings for DEC : $14.06

So this is good. I know its not hundreds of dollars, but it is a start. I am still learning and after a year of following my goals I am hoping we will be well into the hundreds each month.

Looking at the Past

My blog has only been rolling for about a month now and those of you who know me I have been making residual income for a little over a year now. My best month from just GraphicRiver was $53.20 way back in February. Lets take a look at the total amount of residual income earned in 2009:

• 2009 GraphicRiver Earnings : $193.80
• 2009 eHow Earnings (1 article for 3 weeks) : $0.44
• 2009 Adsense Earnings (only for December 2009) $5.62
• Total 2009 Residual Income Earnings : $199.86

Now you be thinking. $200.00 in 1 year is not what I am looking for. I want the BIG BUCKS! Well you have to realize that I made this money by doing a little work and never touching it again, and I am still making money on this. If you haven’t read how I ALMOST made $10,000 a year I would suggest reading it. Basically I did about 2 hours of work towards making this 200 dollars, since most of it is from that one file I put on graphic river.

Thinking of the Future

So I made 200 dollars with about 2 hours of work. We are going to be taking it to the next level this upcoming year with continuous work, I am planning on working 1 hour, each day of the week, on my passive and residual income. It may be working on eHow articles, posting a blog, making some micro-stock, whatever. So If I can get the same return for my time (in theory) I will work for 360 hours of work over the next year. Using last years summary of about 2 hours of work for $200.00 this means I am making aprox $100.00 for 1 hour. So in 2010 I should make around $36,000.00 if I get that same return. Lets make it happen!

This week I have added a few more article posting sites and a handful more of the Envato Network sites. The list grows:

• Bukisa.com | Props : Reed
• AudioJungle.net
• ThemeForest.net
• Activeden.net
• Infobarrel.com

So this brings the total of the residual income list to ten total ways of making passive and residual income. Lets keep adding to the list and please if you know of something not on this list let me know and I will add it and in return you get a link to your site. Cheers!

It was a usual day of being a freelance hero. I was sitting at my desk reading some blogs much like you are doing right now, when I went to the old trusty browser and loaded up my email. ‘You have been invited to beta test our network’ the email read. Apparently I was chosen to be a part of the GraphicRiver.net pre-release. I was allowed to setup an account and get a jump-start before the site went public. This would allow me to build a portfolio and setup shop so when the curtains dropped I would be able to start making some money.

Fill your tank with the right gas.

I did some browsing of the site, and I saw one fatal mistake that 90% of the users were making. They were all uploading every little graphic they have ever made, nothing that could universally used throughout the design world. I went with the opposite, I sat down and created a Web 2.0 Background Designer, a simple, customizable web background maker. You could easily adjust the colors and pump out different backgrounds you would need. Out of the gate it was an instant success. People with 200 items weren’t getting sales, I had 1 dinky item and made 60+ sales the first month.

I had the right idea, that is where I was successful. I had an original file that could be used time and again, so naturally other designers wanted it.

Step on the gas!

So i thought I was going to begin my life on easy street. I thought to myself, make 3 files like my background maker a month and let the cash start pouring in. I mean one dinky file sold over 60 times resulting in $60+. If I could make an average of $54 dollars a month per file, and add 3 files a month I thought to myself:

• 1 file x 54.00 = $54
• 3 file x 54.00 = $162
• 6 file x 54.00 = $324
• 9 file x 54.00 = $486
• 12 file x 54.00 = $648
• 15 file x 54.00 = $810
• 18 file x 54.00 = $972
• 21 file x 54.00 = $1,134
• 24 file x 54.00 = $1,296
• 27 file x 54.00 = $1,308
• 30 file x 54.00 = $1,620
• 33 file x 54.00 = $1,782
• 1 year = $10,594.00

All of this is great in theory, and I knew all things wouldn’t sale so well, but maybe some would be an even bigger hit. Lets not get ahead of ourselves though, for there is one more part of the equation, for this isn’t how I made $10,000 in one year, its how i DID NOT!

Total Engine Failure!

You want to know what that last part of the equation was? It was me. I never did another god damn thing to help build my portfolio on graphic river. Hell I barely even logged into the site for a few months. Call it procrastination, call it being dumb, call it what you want, but needless to say my sales dropped off. At the start since I was getting so many buys and portfolio views that my item was constantly at the top of the list. When you sorted by sales alone I was second to the top, but I neglected my shining star, and the result:

Sales dropped dramatically. So as you can see this adds no where close to $10,000. In fact it adds up to a couple hundred dollars, but the potential was there.

Lesson: Know When to Capitalize

In retrospect it could have been so simple. Have a goal, make a goal-plan, follow that goal-plan, check the effectiveness of the goal plan and tweak it as necessary. All the puzzle pieces were in the right place but I failed to capitalize on the moment. I just had dreams in my head and never put them into action. That is half of the reason I started this blog, to give me an external source of motivation. To have a place to mark my accomplishments. So please, learn from my mistakes and take this advice:

• Keep eyes open for oppurtunity, it is out there you just have to see it.
• When oppurtunity is spotted do your homework and give it your best shot.
• Make a goal and goal plan to achieve success.
• When you see results, CAPITALIZE on them.

Like my story? Have a similar story? Maybe some advice so others do not make the same mistakes? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

*note – this blog post was written for a challenge from SimplyZesty, but is a very true story.

The items added on the list today are mainly the most well known. I am still constantly searching and have more to put up but was hoping to review them first. The items that made this list this growth spurt are:

• E-Junkie
• Google Adsense
• ClickBank
• eHow

I also have a new idea to add. If you know of a source of residual and passive income not on The List by all means please support the RB and share the information. I will give you props in both an update post to list growth, as well as add a Submitted By (your name & website) to ‘The List’ itself. Giving you some nice link-backs as a thank you for helping me.

There are plenty of ways to earn passive incomes out there, and different people find success in certain areas. Lets help everyone out by making this list nice and large. Once the list grows enough I will break it down into sub-categories, like Micro-Stock Sites, Article Posting Sites, Advertising Sites, etc.

Hope these new list items help new comers and old comers alike. Cheers & Happy Holidays to everyone from the RB!

Good, Great, GOAL!

It is not hard to just come up with a goal. It is quite easy as a matter of fact. You can come up with them all day long, but lets pick one apart, in fact, lets pick my goal apart. “I wan’t to make $1,000 dollars of residual income each month.” So we have our goal, but is it realistic? Is it measurable? Here are a handful of key terms that come to mind when goal setting:

• Written
• Challenging
• believable
• specific
• Measurable
• & Have a Specific Deadline

I think these terms sum up a goal rather well, but you do not necasarilly need all of them to make a goal a good goal. Some of the terms like believable and challenging are relative terms that may differ to person to person. While I think all goals must be measureable in some aspect otherwise you will never know if you are making progress. Specific deadlines depend strongly on the goal, it may be a lifestyle enhacement goal that really has no end. A good way to look at goals is think if they have a good plan involved. One that if follwed offers a reasonably high probability of sucess.

Lets break down my goal of “Making $1,000 a month of residual income” and see it attacked by these definitions and see if we can carve a better goal plan for it:

• Written: I have written my goal down here, as well as made a new page on the blog to remind myself what I shoot for by the end of 2010, so I have passed the first term with ease.
• Believable: I do personally believe the goal is acheivable, I read other posts and blogs that have earned and surpassed $1,000 dollars a month of residual income. The key here is the goal setter must believe, and in this case I do!
• Challenging:this will definitly be a challange for me. I have no long record of earning passive income and I am exploring new ways of doing so.
• Measurable:My goal is measurable as I will be breaking down the amount of money made each month and reporting it on this blog. Money can always be measured
• Specific:Now my goal could probably use a little love here. Clearly its specific in the long term, but could probably be a little more specific.
• Deadline: My goal does have a deadline, but in reality if I don’t meet my goal’s deadline I won’t just stop trying, as well as if I meet it earlier then the deadline I won’t keep trying to improve it.

So after looking over my goal I think I can challange myself with taking this goal on, but I am going to need to make a good goal plan that I can follow. This is what tests the true integrity of a goal, for if your goal doesn’t have a plan for sucess then its just a pipe dream.

Create a Goal Plan!

Now we need to make a goal plan that we can follow to achieve our goal. We can do this by breaking down our goal into stepping stones that lead us to our big goal. It is important to make these smaller goals to help us achieve a feeling of accomplishment while we are working on our larger goals. In this goalplan we are going to identify :

• Your Goal
• Starting Date of Goal
• Ending Date of Goal (if there is one)
• Obstacle: People, events, cirumstances & anything that may hinder your progress on obtaining your goal.
• Task: Mini-goals that hurdle obstances as well as other items that help pursuit your goal.
• Obstacle 2
• Task 2

The idea here is simple. Create a formula that you can follow that will keep you on track to your goals. Identify the things that prevent your goal from happening and the taks that will hurdle the obstacles and keep you going. These little goals will help you keep motivation if your goal takes more time then expected. Here is a sample of goalplan for my goal:

• Earn $1,000 of Residual Income
• January 1 2010
• December 31 2010
• Obstacle: Making money with eHow.
• Task: Write 3 eHow articles. (monthly)
• Obstacle: Affiliate Marketing Income.
• Each month research and use one product an create sale page on blog, research keywords and setup adwords campaign(monthly)
• Obstacle: Generate income through GraphicRiver.
• Task: Create 3 items for my GraphicRiver portfolio (monthly).
• Obstacle: Generate More Reader for Blogs
• Task: Create 3 quality content posts. (weekly)
• Obstacle: Monthly Income review
• Task: End of each month review what has been working, what has not been working, make necassary adjustements.

Now I will be following the above formula to help obtain my goals for the 2010 year, but there might be soem hiccups and that is ok, just keep trucking and working on your goals. Remember that it is ok to make changes to your goal and goal plan, review it and fix it and go back after it!

Go make your goals and lets work hard this upcoming year to achieve our goals!

]]> http://residualbacon.com/blog/set-your-2010-goals/feed/ 14 http://residualbacon.com/blog/5-blog-starting-interviews-you-should-read/ http://residualbacon.com/blog/5-blog-starting-interviews-you-should-read/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:22:32 +0000 residubalbacon.com http://residualbacon.com/?p=40 So I did some homework the past few days and I have been reading up on other bloggers who have had much success in the world of blogging. This may not be geared specifically towards residual income but for those who blog and use your sites to make money off of ads and some affiliate marketing you really need a solid blog to get a heavy following that you can then monetize and build income from. So here is a nice little list of interviews from some very successful bloggers that you can read and use the knowledge they give to help your own blog get rolling. Read the interviews and use the knowledge they give on your own blog.

Jacob Cass interview on IncomeDiary.com

Jacob Cass is one of the authority figures in the Logo & Branding world. He began his blog in 2007 which is Just Creative Design and uses his blog as a guide to help him obtain design work. With currently over 21,000 subscribers and counting Jacob has become quite the internet celebrity in the design world. His interview focuses on advice to new bloggers and how to get the ball rolling for your niche site. He explains not to give up:

What advice would you give to people just starting out with an online business?

Don’t give up. The first 3-4 months are the hardest but stick with it, it does pay off in the end. Remember the snowball effect (1 tells another, that person tells another, etc).

If you could go back in a time machine to the time when you were just getting started, what advice would you give yourself regarding making money online?

Do your research, learn more before going straight in, it will save you a lot of time. I recommend Problogger for blogging tips.

Check out the Jacob Cass Interview

Alborz Fallah – A Million Dollar Blogger

This next interview comes in PDF form or MP3. Alborz Fallah created an automobile blog called CarAdvice.com.auand with adsense alone was making over $5,000 a month and then got some corporate ads which boosted his income to $20,000 a month. Its a rather lengthy interview (totaling 18 pages) but is a wealth of information on what he did to become a million dollar blogger. He talks about different keys to success and explains how his niche blog was able to make big money online:

Yaro: What’s that translating to in terms of revenue at the moment?

Alborz: It’s a bit of a different model. We started, obviously, with Adsense. It was always the best to start with and we got up to around $5000 a month U.S. dollars, but it wasn’t sufficient to pay for what we do. We have dedicated server hosting now, we have four full-time staff and two part-time staff. We managed to get ourselves signed up to an advertising agency which pretty much pays us 10 cents per unique browse that we deliver.

On an average day, we get about 16,000 unique browses. You can put that into dollars, I suppose. It’s not too bad. It generates a fair bit of income every month. It would average out about $20 grand a month, but that’s just for the advertising. We get other sponsors and things and other stuff like that. Google is still running on the site which gives us another couple of grand a month, but we are always improving advertising. The more visitors we do, the more money we get. That’s how it works.

Download & listen to the Alborz Fallah interview

Mr. Rajaie Alkorani new blogger interview

Rajaie Alkorani is a young (under 20) blogger who has a top blog in making money online niche. In his interview he talks about SEO work and a few effective and not so effective strategies of online blogging :

What tools can be used to select a profitable niche to blog about?

I don’t have much experience in this area, but from what I’ve read, keyword research is probably one of the most important steps you should keep in mind when starting a niche site. SEOBook.com have a lot of awesome search engine optimization tools that will definitely help anyone starting out make a good choice. I would also recommend reading sites that give valuable information regarding keyword research, one of the most notable being the Keyword Academy.

Any specific advice for New-web-business.com and our readers?

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo Da Vinci,Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

Check out the Rajaie Alkorani Interview

Expert Advice: Creating A Successful Blog

The 4th and final interview (wait you said 5!) is an interview that went down over at GraphicDesignTwist and they did an interview with 5 top blog owners: Collis Ta’eed of FreelanceSwitch, Walter Apai of Web Designer Deopt, Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks, Brian Hoff of Design Cubicle and Christ Spooner of Spoon Graphics. So total your getting 9 interviews including the 4 above! On this set of interviews Graphic Design Twist picks the brains of these top blog owners of how they got their blogs to the top levels of the blogging world:

Question #2 – How long did it take to start making a profit from advertising?

Chris Spooner – A good income wasn’t received until I decided to place direct advertising in the form of 125px ad spots in the sidebar of Blog.SpoonGraphics. Beforehand I received the odd few dollars from Google Adsense and a couple of affiliates programs. Now the advertising income has reached a level where it’s higher than my wage from my previous job, which has allowed me to spend more time crafting blog posts and work on developing the blog on a daily basis.

Chris Coyier – Maybe 9 months? I think in the really really early days I tried AdSense but I have come to despise AdSense (in a nutshell, it’s ugly, it doesn’t give enough control, and it doesn’t pay well enough). After I got rid of that, I just did nothing until eventually advertisers approached me. I sold it manually for a while, which was alright but became too much work. Now I sell through BuySellAds.

Walter – It took about a month or so.

Collis – Profitability took a long time, close to a year in fact. This was in large part however because we were constantly pushing new projects. In the first year we ran a survey of 3000 freelancers, subsites for calculating your rates, earning passive income and applying the 80/20 rule, launched a podcast and pursued a number of other ideas, some of which never made it out. All this was a bit expensive to do and was a constant drain on the finances. By early in 2008 we’d eased back and were focusing on just posting and the site hit profitability.

Brian – Although there is a few ads and sponsors throughout the Design Cubicle, the money gained through Google Adsense and my sponsors goes right back into TDC and my readers. With TDC being under 4 months old, I have only recently started accepting sponsorship and advertising on my site within the past month.

Check out the Expert Advice Interview

That is it for our list of interviews, be sure to read these if you are planning on starting a new blog to help make some residual income, these interviews will definitely start you off on the right foot!

]]> http://residualbacon.com/blog/5-blog-starting-interviews-you-should-read/feed/ 0 http://residualbacon.com/blog/hello-world/ http://residualbacon.com/blog/hello-world/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:47:29 +0000 residubalbacon.com http:/?p=1 You have stumbled across Residual Bacon. A new blog that is dedicated to everything residual revenue.

Lets face it. We all don’t want to work for a living. There has to be a better way to make money in this world rather then finding some guy who hires us on a whim and then we spend our next 30 years working our asses off. And for what? Just to hope to get raises that may never come, profit sharing if the company does well, and benefits so when the job stresses me to the brink of suicide the insurance can cover my happy pills. No way Jose. That life is not for me! That is the reason I have created this site. Welcome Residual Bacon!

This blog is dedicated to people that are interested in learning the go-to ways of earning residual income. Now its not always going to be easy. Let us be honest here when we know that hard work pays off, but our goal here is our hard work keeps paying off again, again and again! I already have a rather small revenue coming in each month from a website called Graphic River. This is a ’stock site’ that lets me create a profile and sell digital imagery of different sorts on their site. They bring in the people and I make the product. This is just one of many ways that I will be talking about to earn your passive income. I will be creating “THE BIG LIST” which will hold different sites for different ways of making passive income, as well as reviews on such sites. I encourage you to help me create this list as well as bring your experience and knowledge of creating lines of passive income to the Residual Bacon, you can do this by commenting on articles and subscribing to our feed.

I will also be sharing my revenue goals and report my earnings each month. This will do two things. It will help create a visual outline of what works and what does not work in our world of passive income, as well as help keep my goals in sight while trying such a feet. My goal as of now is to make $1,000 dollars a month in residual income in 1 year. We can talk more about this once the site really gets up and running.

I encourage all to SUBSCRIBE to this blog as well as leave comments! Lets start making some money!

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