Frugal Pinoy

First of all, thank you to those who participated in the poll for future Frugal Pinoy topics.  Your votes will help me decide on what personal finance topics to blog about.  You can still vote in case you haven’t.  I’ll probably keep it running for the entire month of July.  If you want to vote, click here.

So far, there have been some votes for passive income and making money online.  Instead of a textbook discussion of these things, I’ll give real-life examples from what my partner and I do to make money online.  If you want a more detailed explanation on these income sources, simply ask me a question via the comment box.

Affiliate programs. Basically, with affiliate programs, you’re trying to sell other people’s products and you get a commission for each sale you make.  The way this usually works is that you place a link on your website to the product you’re selling, and when you make a sale through that link, you get a commission.

There are some networks for affiliate programs such as Commission Junction and E-junkie, which collect several programs for you, and you just select from their database. Here are the affiliate programs I make some money on:

• Zazzle.com.  Basically, you create designs for shirts, mugs, and other items and make money from each sale you make.  Three people have bought the shirts I designed.  Alternatively, you can also sell other people’s designs, but the commission you get will be less (since the creator gets a bigger percentage).  What I like about Zazzle is that they pay you via PayPal.  You can receive payments monthly (if you earn more than $25) or yearly (if you earn less than $25).
• E-Junkie.com.  The payout rate for E-junkie tends to be higher, and I usually select affiliate programs with at least 40% commission.  Like Zazzle, they also pay via PayPal.

Since we’re not yet that serious about affiliate marketing, we only make a few dollars here and there for various affiliate programs.  But if you add up these few dollars, they’re enough to pay for some yearly domain renewals.

Advertising networks.  If you have a website, you can have some space where you’ll put advertisements and you can get paid per click or based on time (per week or per month).  The pay per click ads are usually from networks like Google Adsense or Linkworth.  The ads based on time are often private advertisers who contact you and say something like “I’d like to place an ad on your website for one month”.

We get a nice amount from Adsense each month, especially after we’ve used it on a wide variety of websites.

Contract work.  The bulk of my income comes from contract work, where I do various online jobs for companies abroad and I get paid for them.  It takes more time than the above methods, but only roughly 9 to 15 hours per week.  Mainly, my partner and I are online writers, but we also get some design work.  Here are the blogs I write for:

• Pimp Your Work.  This is my main blog.  The payment structure is that I get a base pay each month, with a traffic bonus of $1.65 per 1,000 page views.  My traffic bonus is roughly just as much as my base pay.  The topic for this blog is workday efficiency.
• The AppGap.  This is another blog which pays me per post.  It’s about Web 2.0 and the future of the workplace.
• Web Worker Daily. This is a blog aimed at web workers like me, like The AppGap, it pays per post.

Among these online moneymaking opportunities, the affiliate programs and advertising networks tend to be more passive.   However, the set-up will take up some time and money.

I’m going to talk more about these online income opportunities through Frugal Pinoy. So if you want to know more, just stay tuned

Have you tried making money online?  How’s it been so far?  If you haven’t tried it yet, is it something you’re interested in?  Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Earning, Online Income. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.