The Residualist

I’m really frustrated right now because I really want to put more time and energy into this blog and the research behind it, but at the moment I have no choice but to focus on my day job.  There’s simply too much going on and it would be foolish of me to divert too much of my attention.

The only good news is that I’ve been able to spend a little of my time between working on “real” projects on a side project, currently simply called “ladder”.  The idea is you can create “ladders” of images and then people vote on which images are better and they move  up and down the ladder.  I haven’t done much with it yet, but the idea is to apply some internet marketing muscle to it and see if I can start generating some passive income through AdSense and/or other internet marketing style monetization mechanisms.

If I’m at all successful (and to some degree, even if I’m not) it will actually serve as a case study for this project.  So, hey, at least in a small way I’m moving forward with this project.

Anyway, if you’re bored, check out the ladder site and let me know what you think.

I’ve just finished moving this last week, so I’ve been a bit too busy to spend any time on this project, but just to try to provide a little value, here are some more quick links I’ve come across since my last post that may be of interest.

• 40+ Ways to Make Money on the Internet at DumbLittleMan.
• 10 Reasons You Aren’t Rich by Jeffrey Strain at TheStreet.com and J.D.’s annotated version at GetRichSlowly.org (with a bonus 11th item).
• Dane Carlson’s Business Opportunities blog.
• A great post with a great title at Feld Thoughts: ‘Fear is the Mindkiller‘.
• Brian Lee’s Passive Income Report at geniustypes.com.
• Don’t Tell Me What You’re Gonna Do (also at geniustypes.com).

Edited to add:

I forgot a great one: Self Made Minds, a blog  started by two entrepreneurs chronicling the day-to-day life of running their own website businesses.

GetRichSlowly has a great introduction to financial statements, highlighting three of the most common, the balance sheet, the income statement and the cashflow statement.  This is something that almost anyone concerned with generating passive income should be familiar with and understand at least at the level that it’s described in this post.

Here are some posts from around the blogosphere that I have read in the past week or so that relate to one or more items that I have mentioned or will be mentioning, or might otherwise be relevant to the audience of this blog.

• ‘Moving a Savings Account to an Online Bank‘ by Jay White on his dumblittleman blog.
• Jay also has a post pointing to a piece entitled ‘10 Internet Businesses You can Start with as Little as $100‘ by Kineda on her blog….
• …and another entitled ‘The Myths of Starting a Business‘, which references a post called ‘Six Self-Employment Myths You Need to Know Before Striking Out On Your Own‘ by Amy L. Fontinelle at Personal Finance Advice.  These posts are close to my heart, because as I’ve mentioned before, one of the things that motivated me to start on this project is all the bad info on how easy/hard it is to start your own business (vis-a-vis creating passive income).
• One of the specific ideas that I intend to investigate is note writing/note purchase, and in case you haven’t heard of it, Prosper.com is a site that allows you do invest in micro-loans.  There is an interesting post on pfblog by mm called ‘Prosper: From Bad to Worse‘ which talks about his disappointing experience using the site.
• mm has some other posts which relate to savings accounts, one entitled ‘An Inflection Point of Savings Account Yield‘ and another, ‘New Comer to High Yield Savings Account: 5.5% at ELoan.com‘.
• mm also points us at a post at The Motley Fool on dividend paying stocks, enticingly titled ‘Free Money‘.
• J.D. at Get Rich Slowly posted a piece entitled ‘Which Online High-Yield Savings Account is the Best’.

Introduction to Criteria for Valuing a Passive Income Opportunity

Every passive income opportunity is different. They all have their own unique character. It is probably not possible to say that one opportunity is better than another, at least not usually. Different opportunities are better/worse for different people at different times. However, since my goal is to decide what opportunities I should spend my time persuing, I need to compare and contrast all each of the different opportunities I analyze on an equal footing. In order to do that, I am going to need a consistent set of criteria for evaluating them.

This post is a first shot at putting together that list of criteria. I am sure that as I do more research and analysis I will uncover other factors that need to be added to the list, and I will probably find better ways to organize or think about these initial factors… but, you have to start somewhere. I am not sure exactly how to measure each of these factors, but that can be resolved over time. In the meantime, here is my initial list of the criteria:

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Matt Coddington has posted an entry entitled “My Little E-Book Rant” on NetBusinessBlog.com, in response to a post entitled “The Ebook Crusade” by Jon on his Super Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Since I plan on exploring the business of E-Books as part of my research, I thought I should log these posts as a data point.  By and large I agree with Matt’s view point.  I think it’s pretty obvious that not all e-books are scams, but any time I see one of those pitch pages promising great riches with no work, it makes me angry.

In fact, that is actually one of the reasons I started this project and this blog.  I am in love with the idea of creating passive income, but I am sickened by the huge pile of BS you have to wade through if you are searching for legitimate information on passive income online.  When friends asked me about my motivation, I gave two specific examples of the type of horrible stuff you run into when searching for information about passive income online.

One was the proliferation of lines similar to “just quit your job and start a business to create passive income” (the reasons this type of statement bothers me should be obvious, but I’ll go into that in a later post) and the second was exactly what Matt eludes to in his post — ebooks that claim to tell you how to get rich, in which their contents consist of an explanation of how to make an ebook about how to get rich, and sell it to other people looking to get rich.  This kind of stuff is just ridiculous.

I was initially planning to have this post about the different high-level approaches to passive income be one of the first on my blog, but I haven’t had the time to edit it until this weekend and I got a bit ahead of myself with some of the other posts that have come before. In any case, without further ado, here is it is:

There are innumerable specific ways to generate passive income — but to make them easier to work with, I am going to attempt to break them out into one of several major categories. There are undoubtedly different specific techniques that will span categories or won’t quite fit into one perfectly, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, here is the current breakout of major categories that I have come up with along with some examples for each category…

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I’ve just spent a bit more time reading some of the older articles on the GeniusTypes.com site. The more I read, the more impressed I am. Here are a couple of great posts that I really enjoyed, and I think would be beneficial to anyone reading this blog…

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Two major categories of passive income generators that I intended to research are Internet Marketing and Network Marketing (aka Multi-Level Marketing, MLM, etc). AGLOCO is an example of an opportunity that spans both of these categories. The short version is that you sign up and install a piece of software called the “viewbar” into your browser. The viewbar then provides a search mechanism, displays ads, and tracks your usage. You get paid for various activities (searching, viewing/clicking ads, buying stuff through them, downloading stuff through them, etc as well as just surfing with the view bar installed) . In addition to directly compensating you for activities you engage in, you can sign up people under your referral ID and you get a cut of the revenue generated by the network of people you build. You also earn shares in the company itself.

I have avoided signing up for AGLOCO until now, mainly because it does have a bit of a pyramid scheme feel to it, and I’m not one to try to market this type of thing to my friends, family or colleagues. MI also do web development for my day job so I already have a ton of plugins and whatnot installed in my browser, so I don’t want another one and will probably never install the viewbar. However, it seems like with the launch of this blog, it couldn’t hurt to sign up now. I suspect because I will not initially be doing anything to promote my AGLOCO network outside of this post, I will probably get very few (if any) signups in my network. But, it only takes a couple of minutes and it doesn’t cost me anything but the time, so I figured why not. If I get lucky and get some people signing up under me and start generating some revenue I will post about the results here for educational purposes. And, now that I’m signed up, if I find another opportunity to encourage people to join my network, then I will be able to capitalize on it immediately. Time will tell, I guess.

In the meantime, John Chow has a whole category devoted to AGLOCO on his blog with many posts, including this specific one that do a good job of explaining AGLOCO in more detail. This also gives me an excuse to link to JohnChow.com, which I think is a great blog for people interesting in Internet Marketing and making money in general. For what it’s worth, I signed up for AGLOCO using John Chow’s affiliate link.

If you are interested, join my AGLOCO network.

The first post on the Techquila Shots blog introduces it thusly:

The mission of this blog is to spark ideas and business creativity in my readers. I have started this blog to express my web strategy/marketing creativity by differentiating from all of the other great “web tech” blogs out there — whether it be news (TechCrunch, Mashable!, GigaOM, etc) or opinion/insight from the many blogs by VCs/Entrepreneurs/etc.

I have just stumbled across the blog, and since this first post on January 17th (almost exactly 2 months ago), Steve Poland has made over 70 more posts outlining and discussing 42 separate business ideas.

I think this is a fantastic idea for a blog and a commend Steve on his effort and hope he keeps it up.