My ultimate goal is to make passive income online that can  replace my current Linear Income.Linear income is income you earn working at a traditional job.So what this basically means is that you receive a paycheck based on the time and effort you put in.If you decide to stop working, you would no longer receive any income.I’m so sick of commuting 4 hours a day, working 40 hour weeks, and dealing with all the corporate America B.S.So I’ve been looking at sources of passive online income that will help me to realize this dream.

So what is passive income?

Passive Income, which is also referred to as residual income, is generally defined as regularly received income that is generated
with minimal work from your investments.The keyword here is “minimal”, i.e. very little effort or work required. In other words, passive income is money you earn that doesn’t need much of your time and effort.Most passive income however, requires you to invest some time or money in the beginning. Then you sit back and watch your income grow.

Some examples of passive income are:

• dividends from public company stocks;
• interest earned from bank accounts, CD’s, money
  market accounts or other similar types of investments;
• Rental income;
• royalties from intellectual property such as books, music, or patents.

Passive online income is a little different from traditional passive income.In my opinion, the main difference is that with passive online income, you will have to put up a lot of work up front, but once all the upfront work is completed, it’s just a matter of performing some minimal upkeep to keep the income flowing.

There are many ways to earn a passive income on the internet, and I am definitely focused on multiple streams of passive online income.The more streams the better.

Some of the ways that I am currently earning passive online income are as follows:

Royalties from writing online

There are numerous sites online that will compensate you to write articles.Many of them offer an upfront payment per article submitted, but the way to really make money on these sites is from royalty payments.So far, I have joined 2 of these types of sites: epinions.com and Associated Content.  Epinions and Associated Content pay royalties based on the number of page views the content generates.

The key thing you need to know about these sites is that in order to bring in good online income from royalties, you need to have a lot of content.Simply writing 1, 2 or even 10 articles or reviews will not cut it.I have seen many people bash these programs by saying that they don’t pay much.But this is just not true.To be successful, with these types of programs you need to write at least a few hundred quality articles.If you take a look at their site, you will see that the people who write more articles have generated millions of page views, which in turn amounts to great monthly online income. So the upfront work here would be to create hundreds of articles.The monthly upkeep would be to work on getting inbound links.

Contextual Advertising.

Contextual advertising allows content-based websites and blogs to earn money by featuring targeted advertisements on their sites.Google Adsense is a good example of contextual advertising.I am using Google Adsense on most of my websites and on this blog to generate some passive online income.The upfront work required with this form of monetization is keyword research, building a website or blog and working on SEO to get my sites indexed high in the search engines to generate more clicks.The monthly upkeep or maintenance in this case would be to continue to work on getting backlinks, although I do have a few sites that I have not touched for months that continue to bring in Adsense revenue month after month. Other similar type programs would be Chitika and Kontera.

Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate Marketing simply refers to selling other people’s products and earning a commission for each sale.There are thousands of online companies that offer affiliate programs.The way it works is you sign up with one of these companies, add the referral link that they provide to your site, and earn money when someone buys something after clicking through to their site from your link.One of the largest affiliate programs online is the one run by Amazon.com.

One of the ways that I have implemented this type of marketing into my strategy is by creating content on free platforms such as Squidoo. Squidoo is a platform that allows you to create web pages (called lenses) on any topic you choose. For instance, I just recently created a lens on the High School Musical 3Movie.I like using Squidoo because, it’s extremely easy to use, Squidoo pages tend to get indexed very quickly, and most  importantly, it’s free.Another important thing to note is that Squidoo can be used as a way to obtain backlinks for your other content based websites, which we know is very important for generating more online income.

Blogging??

Some would include blogging as a method for making passive online income, but in my opinion, it’s not really a source of passive income because blogging doesn’t really fit the passive income mold, as you can’t simply set up a blog once and perform minimal maintenance.You have to continually come up with new content and market that new content, reply to comments etc…

So that’s it in a nutshell.What methods are you using to generate passive online income?

A while back, someone mentioned that they were getting some good results using SEO Elite. At the time, I didn’t think much about it and dismissed it as just another internet marketing product. But then I started to hear more about it. I heard that it was a very useful and powerful software program that would save me some time dealing with routine SEO tasks. When it first debuted, it was touted as the best thing ever, that will lead to increased online income. At the time, the price was pretty steep so I added it onto my “things to buy” list. I never got around to buying it, and practically forgot about it.

Well, it just so happens that a few days ago, I was reading one of my favorite make money online blogs and lo and behold the blog owner Grizzly, mentioned that he used SEO Elite to track his stats. I had tried a few other free programs such as the SEO for Firefox plug-in but was never really happy with how they worked. So I again added SEO Elite to my buy list. I had all intentions of buying the software through the link on Griz’s site, since the advice he gives is beneficial and helps me in my quest for more online income, but then a funny thing happened.

I stepped away from my computer for a little while to watch Lost and when I returned, I noticed an email in my inbox with the subject line: “SEO Elite New Version” from Brad Callen Bryxen Software. I thought, wow that’s weird. Here I was just thinking about buying the software, and miraculously out of nowhere, I get an email telling me about the software. I felt as if someone had read my mind or had somehow hacked into my PC or something. Anyway, seeing this as a sign, I immediately clicked through and purchased the software.
(Sorry Griz! It was totally an impulse purchase)

For those of you that don’t know, SEO Elite is a search engine optimization software package. For me, one of the most important features of this software is the competitive analysis tool. This tool will provide you with information on your competitors, and will show you where they rank for certain keywords, and will show you exactly what anchor text they are using for inbound links and help you find their strongest links. This is valuable information which can help you to optimize your own site, move up in the search engines, and as a result, bring in more online income.

The SEO Elite Software package also includes a:

1. Link building tool to assist you with getting get high PR links from a variety of highly relevant pages.
2. Ranking monitor, which identifies where your sites rank in the search engines.
3. An article submitter that allows you to submit articles which contain a backlink to your site to a lot of popular article directories.

The software package also comes with training videos that will help you get started using the program. So far, I have gone through all of the videos and am just now starting to actively use the software. I will post my observations on how the program is working for me in future posts and will let you all know if it’s helped to bring in more online income.

Recently, as part of my quest for more online income, I’ve been using a new and easy strategy to acquire more inbound links for my web sites.

First and foremost, allow me to explain what an inbound link is.  Inbound links are also referred to as backlinks. This is what the super popular web encyclopedia Wikipedia says about backlinks:

So basically, inbound links or backlinks are links from another website to your site.  For instance, the URL of this blog is http://www.onlineincomediary.com.  If I decide to leave a comment on somebody else’s blog, I’d also leave this blog’s URL when I comment so that other readers of that blog would be able to click through and visit my blog. That URL that I left would be considered to be an inbound link or back link.

Why are inbound links important?

They’re important because (1) they can increase your traffic; (2) they help your link to be crawled by the search engines; and (3) the search engines such as Yahoo and Google consider the number and quality of sites that link back to your sites as part of their algorithms.  Basically, Google, Yahoo and other search engines will see your website as important because other websites have linked back to yours. This is all very important if you want to earn more online income like I do.

But you also have to remember that the number of inbound links alone doesn’t justify higher rankings.  The search engines also look at the quality of the inbound links.  So it’s very important to try to get links from sites with similar relevant and high quality content.   A web page that has acquired more backlinks than another one that has similar content will always rank higher than the other web page, simply because it appears to be more popular with visitors and other sites.

Want to find out how many backlinks your site has in Google?  Simply do a search of your site or blog URL in Google as follows:  link: www.YourUrl.com

The Strategy

If you’re looking to score some more inbound links for your blog or web site, and at the same time earn more online income, this simple strategy can help.

What I have been doing lately is setting up Google alerts for the keywords that I am targeting.  Google Alerts then sends emails which contain search results which include the keyword that I am targeting.  I then simply click through to the blogs and sites listed in the search results and see if comments are enabled on that particular site or blog.  If it is, I leave a relevant comment along with a link back to my site.  I tend to focus more on leaving blog comments because blogs are indexed by search engines more frequently than regular websites and are updated more frequently which search engines like Google love.  Simple eh?

Although this is not the only strategy I use for getting inbound links, In my opinion, I think this is one of the easiest strategies you can implement to build quality inbound links.   Make sure that the comments you post are relevant and helpful.   Do not comment just for the sake of building your inbound links. A comment that adds nothing to the conversation and is only self serving will tend to be seen as spam and will most likely hurt you more than it will help.

To set up an alert, go to www.google.com/alerts.  You will then be presented with the following:

Fill in the keyword you’re targeting in the search box and sleet how often you want to be notified, along with your email address.

I set it up for daily alerts, because in order for me to get anything done, I need to set up daily to do lists.  Having it set to daily helps me to meet my daily goal of trying to acquire a certain number of inbound links every day.

Do you use this strategy or a similar strategy for building inbound links?  If so, do you have any additional tips that you can share?  How is your strategy affecting your online income goals.

When I ventured onto the internet about 9 years ago, one of the goals in the back of my mind was to earn some online income.  That’s when, I stumbled upon eBay.  It looked like an interesting concept and looked like there was some income potential there, so I decided that I would try to make money on eBay.  First, I went through my closets and found all the stuff that I had bought and never worn and stuff that I just didn’t need, or no longer wanted and set them aside.  Then I purchased a digital camera, and started taking pictures of the stuff.  I listed the items on eBay, and wound up selling most of them.  From then on, I was hooked!  I knew I could earn some good online income with ebay.

Fast forward to 2009, and I can happily say that I still sell stuff on eBay.  I introduced my husband to eBay after we got married in 2004, and he wound up leaving his job in 2007 to pursue selling on eBay full time.  We are now eBay Powersellers, and our online income has risen dramatically with sales of over $1000 every month.

There is definitely money to be made on eBay, but it is definitely not a get rich quick scheme.  There is a lot of work involved in selling on eBay.  First, you have to identify and purchase products that are in demand that can be purchased at a deep discount and resold for a profit.  Next you have to take photographs of each item you intend to sell.  Then you have to create an ad listing for it on eBay.  Finally, when the item sells, you have to pack it up and mail it out to the buyer. You also have to be detailed oriented as you will have to keep track of: your inventory, payments, and shipping log.

It’s not for the faint of heart, but I would definitely recommend eBay as a great way to make money online.  I always advise people to start slow, just like I did, by finding stuff around the house that you no longer need and take it from there.  Once you learn the ropes, it’s all up to you to take it to the next level, so if you haven’t already, sign up for eBay today!

I plan on providing lots of tips and tricks on selling on eBay to improve your online income cashflow, so please stay tuned!  And let me know if you have any specific questions on selling on eBay.

Thank you for stopping by my online income diary.  Over the years I have found and continue to look for various ways to make money online.  Throughout this journey, I have found that there is a lot of money to be made online. The purpose of this diary is to document what I have learned so far, and to continue learning along the way.  I plan to provide specific examples and tutorials so that you can reap the benefits and increase your own online income goals as well!

-Diane-