Passive income from blogging?

When i started my Singapore IPOs Blog on 7 July 2007, I wonder if it is possible to receive some passive income from blogging. The idea behind was to combine my passion for investing with my desire to share that knowledge through blogging and then trying to earn some coffee money out of it. I will share with you my experiences here and you can decide for yourself if you want to take this path.

It took me exactly one year before i receive my first pay check from Google for reaching the minimum payout milestone of US$100. I thank the support of all my readers who "faithfully" check this blog whenever there is a new listing in Singapore. However, the number of visitors will fluctuate widely like the IPO market. There is seasonality and i will go "hungry" whenever there is a famine in the IPO scene. ^_^ The good thing about blogging about IPO companies is that i do receive a lot of ad-hoc visitors through Google who search for the upcoming companies seeking listing. 

Just to share, the most reliable advertising partner for bloggers like me is still google adsense. But as i shared before, having integrity is important in your life and this apply to blogging as well so it will be wise not to be funny in trying to increase traffic or clicks to your blog through the wrong way. At the end of the day, i agree with Derek from Financesg that it is the content which drives readers to your blog. In any case, if you are wondering how much i have made through blogging, i can let you know that after five years, i still can't buy a daily cup of local coffee from the hawker centre. hahaha

I too have my fair share of 'bad advertisers' who refuse to honor their obligation such as Advertlets below. As you can see, i am lucky enough to get the first payout of RM100 in May 2009 and after which they decided not to pay or answer to my emails anymore. Anyway, i am pretty sure i wasn't the only one whom they had defaulted on but this is not the right way to run a legitimate business and it is only a matter of time before they....

I have since switched to Nuffnang exclusively. While i am eligible for payout, i decided to accumulate to $100 before clicking the payout button. I will update you again if something untoward happens. hahaha but going by the comments from some of our bloggers, that doesn't seem to be an issue and i hope Nuffnang can continue to do well given they started out here in Singapore.

 

I made a decision to blog more actively in Aug this year and the responses have been fairly positive. I guess this is probably due to the goodwill generated by the IPO blog over the years. So the lesson to share is "don't give up" and it is frankly quite pleasing to see more "likes" on my facebook page than on some of the local stocks and shares website. hahaha. I started to reach out to other bloggers to exchange links and that has also helped to increase the traffic. FinanceSG and SGbloggers have been particularly helpful in helping boost some of the traffic although i have to say that Finance SG is more 'atas' in terms of website design and they do screen through the posts to ensure that the postings are relevant and have proper labeling.  The only downside is that the articles will not be as 'fresh and timely' as it should be. If you want to exchange links with whichever blogs i run, just feel free to add a link to them. I do check where the traffic comes from regularly and i will add you to the 'sidebar' whenever i see traffic coming in nicely from your end.

In September this year, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a request from Unruly media to help them run the Heineken video. Perhaps my efforts to step up blogging helps and blogging can be a way to earn a living? After all, you can see some famous bloggers doing endorsements on their blogs. The only issue about blogging for me is that i don't want to be famous. hahaha. Not at this juncture. I just want to hide someway and drink my local coffee in peace without having people staring at me. :)

I will update you again next time to tell you if i managed to upgrade from a local kopi to a gourmet Latte. 

I hope this post is useful in your decision whether to take up blogging seriously but it will take time, patience and passion to build up your "fans'.

Happy blogging!