The Writers Coin

I’ve been posting my alternative income for every month lately and while it’s nice to chart how well I do from one month to the next, I started to wonder how much alternative income I’ve made total since I started to monetize my blog and keep track of this stuff. So I decided to count it all up and see where I stand. Here are all the things I’ve counted into the figure in order of how much they’ve made me:

• Freelancing: Writing, editing and translating.
• ING Interest: As passive as it gets, I just keep my savings in there and they pay me 3% interest.
• Other: Referral programs like Money Exchange and links I’ve sold through the blog.
• ING Referrals: When someone opens an account with my promotional link, I get $10 and they get $25.
• Blogging: Ads on my site.
• Amazon: Links to books on Amazon where people actually end up buying a book.

Since November of 2007, I’ve made $690.

My first month I made $45 and on my best month I made $136. The best part? It’s gone right back into my ING account to continually grow how much interest I get. The bad part? I feed my Roth IRA via that account, so every few months it experiences a drop when I invest.

It sounds great, but keep in mind there are people out there making more than this in a month, so in the blogging world this is chump change. For me, however, it’s a nice way to see how I can grow my income. Even if it’s just a little.

Well, it’s the end of the month and that means taking a look at how the blog has done. One major thing that happened is I quit my one freelance gig. I had been having issues with it for a while now (I absolutely hated it) and it was taking up more and more of my time, so I dropped it. It was paying me $70/month but was increasingly taking up more and more of my time.

So this will be my last check for that particular client. But the good news is I got a monthly client paying $25 for mentioning them in a blog post, so that’s good news. It’s funny, the day I ended it with the freelance client this thing came a knocking, so that was funny. Anyway, we’re showing an increase from last month again, which is good. That’s mostly due to higher ING interest gains because of the money M and I got from out wedding, despite Bank of America’s best efforts to thwart me.

Here’s what my situation looks like for April compared to March:

The increase data tells you I boosted my alternative income by $56 compared to yesterday, which is pretty good (a 70% increase over last month’s 36% increase), but there are some things to clarify before getting too giddy.

I didn’t get any ING referrals this month and I didn’t get any Amazon revenue either. The interest I gained from my ING account went up a bit and Adsense went way down. Not sure why that happened since I had more traffic this month, but I won’t try to dissect that too much.

The saving grace was closing out a Brainmass account I had no idea was active and had money in it ($23) and getting some revenue by referring people to Revolution Money Exchange for a free $25. Without those two streams I would’ve been down as compared to last month.

So I crossed the $100 barrier for the first time!

The cool thing is I added one new income stream that I hope will contribute as I move forward, so that’s good.

It seems like eons ago, but back in the day (when I was in grad school, not working, and had a ton of time on my hands) I thought I wanted to be a teacher. Maybe not to that extent, but I knew I wanted to at least try teaching. OK maybe that’s off the mark too—I wanted to make some money and I figured tutoring would be able to bring in some money for me. Knowing Spanish, I figured being a Spanish tutor would be a sure-fire way of making a little money on the side (even though I had no job, so it wouldn’t really be on the “side” of anything).

The site is still up and running for those interested in making some money by tutoring. I just can’t vouch for the quality of help students are seeking now. For me, the whole idea of the site was to help kids with learning, not doing work for them—that’s why I had to quit it.

Has anyone out there quit a source of income due to moral issues?

But I’m just not the type of person to put up a flier in a public place explaining that I will “Tutor You Good!” It’s just not who I am, so when I found a site called Brainmass I was thrilled. How it works: you sign up and prove that you have some sort of advanced degree or knowledge in any particular area (anything from math to Spanish—I signed up as a Writing and Spanish tutor). Once that’s been proven (I sent a transcript of my grad degree), you are officially accepted as a tutor. Then HS and college kids from all over the country write in with questions or help. It gets posted and registered tutors with expertise in that area get an email. You click on it and whoever gets to the “job” first, keeps it.

It’s a basic tutoring system, but it’s all online. They key back then was to have your computer handy and click in as soon as possible to scoop up the jobs before other tutors got to them. If you did well, your ratings went up. If students weren’t happy with you, it went down. You got paid depending on how big the job was. Since I had no job, I sat at the student center clicking refresh and going through jobs. It was rewarding to help kids and to make some coin while I was at it. And being in the student center all by myself was just icing on the cake.

The pay was in Canadian Dollars, but I didn’t really care because, at that point, getting paid was still getting paid. The 15th of every month I would get a Paypal transfer into my account and that would be that.

“But that’s not passive income”

True, but there’s more. There was also a feature that allowed you to upload certain “solutions” to common problems. These formed a library that students could virtually “check out” whenever they wanted and each time they did, you got paid. This truly was passive income because you could post hundreds of solutions, sit back, and rake in the dough each time kids accessed it (I say “rake in” but I don’t think I ever made more than a few hundred dollars total).

Every time a student needed help with something I would get an email from Brainmass—sometimes I would get 15–20 emails a day. Which is good when you can make money off them, but then things went a little off track. Kids began to simply post the assignments their teachers gave them with “explanations” that basically said “I need this done by tomorrow.” All they wanted was the work to be done for them and they were willing to pay up for it.

I alerted the site and never “worked” on those posts. To me, the whole spirit of the site was to help, not to do the work for them. I hate cheaters so I was very adamant about this, but it became more and more common until it got to the point that every posting was of this nature. So my relationship to Brainmass became one of just deleting emails. That lasted for a couple of years until I finally got around to closing my account.

Well, it turns out I had accumulated CAN$25 of money from solutions students had checked out while I was deleting emails (so I guess technically it wasn’t really passive). That was found money and the best part was that by having it sit there I managed to increase its value because the dollar lost a lot of value over that time.

Brainmass is still up and running, just not without me. For me, the site was all about helping students learn, not doing work for them. Although I liked the basic premise and I still think it’s a great source of passive income—it’s just not for me anymore. I refuse to be a homework machine for these kids.

Has anyone else out there given up some income due to morality issues?