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December 2014 Passive Income Report

This month’s passive income totaled $725.01, most of which was dividends. December is traditionally the best month of the year for dividend payouts. I also earned a decent amount for my Ebook How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams ($25); I’d be pretty happy if I kept earning this amount each month. For a detailed look at my passive income report, check out this link. Compared…

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Indecision

I waver back and forth when it comes to moving back to Canada, quite possibly forever and making a life there, or living the expat life which is kind of amazing in a lot of ways. I mean, who wouldn’t be happy working at a university in Korea where you get paid an astounding amount of money for a very little amount of work. I go on exotic vacations a couple times a year, cruise…

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Why I Don’t Like Mutual Funds

I was happy to see that Andrew Hallam in his book, The Global Expatriate’s Guide to Investing: From Millionaire Teacher to Millionaire Expat dislikes mutual funds as much as I do. It actually surprises me that more financial gurus, such as Dave Ramsey (from The Total Money Makeover) don’t jump off the mutual fund bandwagon and onto the index investing or dividend stock investing one. Anyway, mutual funds are a pretty terrible investment choice especially…

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Am I Worried About Losing All My Money in a Stock Market Crash?

I was talking with a friend yesterday and she was asking how much money I can gain or lose in a single day and if I was worried about a stock market crash, or not. Short Answer: I can gain or lose $3000 or $4000 or even more in a single day and I’m not worried about it. Here’s why: the gains or losses in my portfolio are not actually real gains or losses because…

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What I’m Buying: Energy Stocks

I normally like to have around $20 000-40 000 invested on the margin (money borrowed from my broker), which I can get at a really low interest rate (1.62% for the first $100 000 with Interactive Brokers) and then invested in dividend paying stocks that pay 3-5%, which leaves me with a nice profit of around 1-3% (after taxes) on that money. Except lately the markets have been going up and up and I’ve been…

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Ebook Marketing: Guest Posts on other sites

Ebook

Sales of my new Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams are maintaining steady at about 1/day since the initial rush in the first couple days, which I’m pretty happy about. My marketing strategy thus far has consisted of the following things: 1. Using my Amazon Associates account to promote the book on my existing blog, My Life! Teaching in a Korean University, both on…

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How much money do you need to be happy?

I was listening to a recent podcast from The Best of the Left (Capitalism Will Not Set You Free) and they were talking about how the law of diminishing returns can apply to your salary and happiness level. Up to around 75 000 US, people’s happiness increases as their salary does. But, after that level, it kind of has no effect and there are even some examples of happiness decreasing such as when someone wins…

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November 2014 Passive Income Report

November 2014 Passive Income came in at $288.14. For the breakdown and comparison to the previous few months, check out: Passive Income Report The bulk of my income came from dividend paying stocks and Hubpages (formerly Squidoo), as usual but a nice addition was $42.68 in sales from my my new Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams. Compared to previous years: Nov. 2013: 268.98…

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Ebook Marketing…the importance of having a following/reputation

Something that I’ve seen as I’ve ventured into the world of self publishing is the need to already have a positive reputation and a following of people in whatever community you can find your target audience in. While I’m sure it is possible to self-publish a book that is a one-hit wonder, I don’t think it would be that easy unless it somehow went viral. I think followers of my blog (My Life! Teaching in…

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Early Sales of my new Ebook

I published my first book on Amazon Kindle Direct (How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams) on November 11th and early sales have been quite good, especially considering the minimal amount of marketing that I’ve done and the poor timing. Ideally, I would have had it published in early October instead of mid-November. So far, I’ve just posted on a few of the sites that English…

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Ebook into Physical Book: easier than you might think

I originally had the idea to make exclusively an Ebook(How to Get a University Job in South Korea), but that was before I realized how easy it is on Amazon to make your Ebook into a physical book. It takes a couple hours, at most to get everything set up and the price I will earn on commission is about the same as the Ebook, so it seemed like there was really nothing to lose.…

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Passive Income Report October 2014

October 2014 wasn’t a great month for me in terms of passive income with a total of $253.44. Check out my October 2014 passive income report. Iherb and Amazon were pretty disappointing partly due to Iherb not offering any free shipping to South Korea and traditionally dividends are not plentiful in November. Compared to previous Years: 2013: $268 2012: $296 2011: $352 2010: $28 Onwards and upwards! My Ebook should be coming out in the…

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Moving from Squidoo—>Hubpages- Backlinks and Niches

Squidoo shut down their doors a couple of months ago and moved all my content over to Hubpages. After some initial annoyance getting all the details sorted out, it’s actually been pretty painless and it provided me the motivation I needed to get my sites updated because Hubpages seems to have stricter content standards than Squidoo (they’re serious about spammy stuff!). One thing that I didn’t notice until a couple of days ago was the…

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How to Write an Ebook: Facebook Advertising

Ebook Facebook Advertising

These past few days, I’ve been talking about how to write an Ebook as I go through the process myself. My first book should be up on Amazon in a week or two. I’m definitely a beginner in this world of “Ebook” but my hope is that my readers can learn along with me. I’ve already discussed: How to Choose a Topic Editing Formatting Cover Design Marketing via the Email List Today, let’s talk about…

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How to Write an Ebook: Marketing via the “email” list

When I listen to Podcasts related to anything Passive Income and marketing, it’s all about the email list. People use this list to promote new products that they’re selling and to stay in touch with their customers. One of my deep, deep regrets is not keeping track of all the emails I received through my blog: My Life! Teaching in a Korean University. I’ve had that blog for about 7 years and it’s no exaggeration…

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Writing an Ebook: Formatting

When I first started the process of writing an Ebook, the thing that I was most nervous about was formatting it for upload to Amazon. They are very specific about their settings and what you need to do so that it will look professional. I was listening to a Podcast and they mentioned this company, 52 Novels, who you can send your file to and they do all the formatting. It seemed like a good…

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How to Write an Ebook: editing

These past couple weeks, I’ve been working furiously on my first Ebook and I hope to get it out within the next week or two. Yesterday, I posted about how to choose an Ebook topic and today it’ll be talking about the editing process. As someone who has taught academic writing at the university level, I can’t really emphasize enough how important editing is, both self-editing and enlisting the help of another person. Even though…

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How to Write an Ebook: choosing a topic

This past week, I haven’t had classes at my day-job due to midterm exams, so I’ve been busy working on my first Ebook. I’ve wanted to write one for a while because I think diversity is the key in trying to live off passive income. I really have no idea whether affiliate marketing on Amazon or Iherb will be successful in the future, whether Hubpages will shut down, or whether there will a huge crash…

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Moving from Squidoo to Hubpages

A couple of months ago, I got an email from Squidoo saying that they had merged with Hubpages and that Squidoo would be closing down and all the content would be going over to Hubpages. I was initially quite annoyed, but of course that’s the risk when you use a platform that isn’t your own to build websites. I’ve been so busy at the day-job since that announcement that I didn’t really have much time…

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Writing Kindle Books…a thought

While I was out hiking today, I was listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast by Pat Flynn, episode #124, where he interviews Steve Scott, who is making a lot of money by writing Ebooks. It kind of inspired me and got me thinking about what is a topic that people want to know a lot about, but that there just isn’t much information, but which I’m an expert. I have an idea that I…

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