February 2007 Income Update

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I guess it’s about time that I deliver my report to you all on my streams of income. The format for these reports is very flexible at the moment, as I go on with these reports, I hope to standardize the information more. However, I’ll present the information for February in the same way as January.

Well first, I have to restate January’s results by an additional $7.99. I missed an $8 payout for a posting from Payperpost. And I ditched Adbrite permanently. I had hoped that they would provide an additional source of income and alternative to Adsense, but after nearly four weeks of total inaccessibility (except through a proxy server) and no ads on my website, I finally mailed them to find out what was going on. They tweaked their ‘settings’ (whatever that means), and I ‘tweaked’ mine. Now Adbrite is history, I took a 1c bath on that!

February 2007.
Payperpost $149.00
Google $5.65
ReviewME $0.00
Other Blogs $15.00
Adlinks $10.63
Stockbroker $57.35
Hosting $107.69
Bank Interest $14.74
Journal $37.64
Business $307.69

The total for this month was in fact much higher: $705.39 altogether. I guess there were several new items:
a Chinese New Year bonus from my business (small, though welcome!), I finally sold a copy of my journal (a subscription, no less), and a customer from my hosting service renewed his hosting with me for another 12 months. Other changes included selling less text links on the top left ( perhaps a result of my blog dropping one PR placing from 5 to 4), I didn’t have any new clients for February at all (March is different!) on that count. Also, income from Investments dropped this month, as end of year capital gains distributions and bonuses were not included in February. On the bank interest front, I’m now making more as my CDs are renewing at higher and higher interest rates, currently approaching 2% (local rates here).

How is March shaping up? Well, I already sold two links for the year which will produce a nice bump. Interest income will increase somewhat as will dividend income. I’m increasing holdings in both areas from cash holding and cash in low interest bearing accounts.

A general overview will look at the range of income and the range of types of income. I’m not looking to only create an income from online activities, but also from ‘real’ world activities. In fact, there are 10 types of income in the statement. However, the general arrangement is below (for six months average)

Blog $168.36 46.07%
Stocks $66.37 18.16%
Hosting $32.12 8.79%
Bank $10.70 2.93%
Business $87.91 24.05%

General notes: Interest rates in Taiwan are different from U.S or U.K rates. All of these figures given are Gross Results – not including any taxes.

Anyway, the averages are much more favorable and suggest that I’ve reached about 30.4% of my target over the last 6 months, but February, it was nearly 2x that, at about 58.8%!

There are still two challenges ahead, though. #1 how to increase the total income to the minimum of $1200 per month and #2 how to stabilize the income over a longer period!

This is the Year of the Golden Pig (Boar)! I wonder if that will bode well or not for InvestorBlogger!

Copyright: does a blogger’s blog have copyright?

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After a real incident in a workplace, I was inspired to think about the issue of copyright.
I was wondering about the issue of copyright after someone in my workplace tried to claim my work as theirs. I was annoyed as anyone would be. However, it started me thinking about the issue of copyright. How is copyright claimed? How is it asserted? How is it protected? What are the limits on copyright claims?

Now I’m not a lawyer, but I do believe that copyright does affect bloggers like you and me. Once your blog becomes popular enough, scrapers may steal your content, unscrupulous bloggers may copy and paste your entries, and fakers may even in some extreme cases replicate your entire website.

If your blog is important enough to you, financially or otherwise, it might be a good idea to seek out legal counsel in your jurisdiction about how to protect your investment.

In the meantime, I’ll be creating a copyright notice for the bottom of this page. And I’ll be reading Brad Templeton’s notes on copyright, too.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has experience on this matter, just post your story on the comments or register and submit an article via email!

ReviewME starts their Affiliate Program

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For those of you interested in or using ReviewME, they have just announced details of a new affiliate program.

We are very excited to announce our new affiliate program and the ability for you to set your own review price!

Details on the new affiliate program can be found on our blog or if you want to log right in to get your cool affiliate badge you can go here.

So if you are interested in this program, join up and check out the benefits. You’ll need to install a button with some code on your website. In return, you’ll earn $25.00 for each and every new advertiser you refer. The only pre-condition is that the reviewer must purchase a review and get it completed. Here is my button to show you what it looks like! Click away!