Residual Income

I think this is important in general, but I see a good use for CoAlpha as well. One of my desires is to create residual income and maintain and increase it gradually. Most people trade their time for money, and while this nets better profits based on time exchanged alone, one must always trade their time if they wish to keep making money. Not a good strategy for security and freedom, at least not by itself. I've been at my current job for almost a year and my initial plan was to find success by saving money. And although I have a small nestegg now, I realize it will shrink in value every year. Before the gold standard was abolished and inherently worthless fiat currency was instated, saving made much more sense. But now I realize I need more strategies than mere saving. Inflation will kill value over time. And residual income is one of the best ways to find success in this precarious world I think.

With my current nestegg, about $12,000, I plan to buy gold and silver with some of it, in order to preserve value, and with some of the rest, I plan to invest into some things that will help my residual income work. The rest of it will be a general fund for spending on things like trips outside the femisphere and such and small day to day expenses. I don't have any plans to invest via the stock market. Or at least not anything much. The best idea I could come up with is to invest a small amount into a startup company, and then it's no big loss if it goes under.

For the ways to may residual income though, I've focused on the creative things because I don't own land or a house to rent out, etc.

I've got five ways and I've started working on some.

1. Blogging - any free blog can be monetized with google adsense. I currently am keeping up a blogger.com blog, www.darkageofmisandry.blogspot.com. This was not my first blog, but is my most successful yet. It's made no money yet, although I've found the power of keywords and niche. The first blogs I started got maybe 30 or so views. This one I have managed to get to about 350 views in the last 3 or 4 weeks. These are key for blogging. Find a niche, an audience, and use relevant words and terms that people will search for. Then it's a matter of keeping up your blog and increasing traffic. I plan to create more blogs, looking for good niches, and also to use wordpress.org (seems higher quality although it is also free) for some future blogs. If I can find some success and revenue from free blogs, the plan at that point would be to buy a domain name and continue blogging that way.

2. Article Writing - Sites such as hubpages.com and squidoo.com contain advice, how to, or other helpful articles. Users create the content and their pages and articles are monetized with adsense and such. I think I may be better suited to this than blogging. Links to one's site(s) can be included, so if you have a website, you can also use these kinds of sites to increase traffic.

3. Freelance Writing - Another one I think is suited to me. Sites such as guru.com allow people to sign up as freelancers and get writing projects for which they will be payed little for. The idea is to build reputation and one's earnings over time, and get better, well payed projects.

4. Video Content - For those who don't like writing instead. Youtube has a partner program which can make revenue for content makers. It's not my kind of thing. It's low on my list. Writing is my strength.

5. Books and Ebooks - With the internet, publishing and selling written works is easier than ever. I love writing, and although this is probably the hardest one to do on this list, for me it would be the most rewarding because I write for fun. Making money from it makes it that much more appealing! One can partner with a site like Amazon.com to have a well known marketplace to sell books, or one can sell ebooks off of one's website. A mere 5 pages a day can result in two or more books a year. And finding lots of success is difficult, and time consuming. But this is a dream of mine, to write books. I've already started writing my first book. I've nicknamed it my "CoAlpha Novel" because of some CoAlpha themes which will be in it.

Since making residual income can free a person, this is ideal for a tangible existence for CoAlpha someday. If we members can help each other, gradually make residual income, the geography wouldn't be a big problem, and resources would not either. Which could have implications like a CoAlpha group in another country, or El Paso, or where ever. Being able to make income from anywhere is a key for the future.