The Game: Earn a Million Dollars
Renewable Wealth Update, and More On Leverage
I’ve added a bunch of content to Renewable Wealth over the past few days. I had been neglecting it for a while because I was busy with other things, but even the small amount of content that was there brought in a trickle of passive income the entire time, so my stake continued growing behind the scenes.
It was never my intent for Renewable Wealth to be a static “fire-and-forget” site, though, so now that I have some time to come up for air I am adding more content. (Static sites are a great way to earn passive income online , though - we’ll be discussing them more down the line.)
There are Opportunities for Leverage Everywhere
This is a good time to mention the concept of leverage again. You see, green investing is a great interest of mine, and I have been spending a lot of time trying to shift my investment portfolio to being as close to completely green as possible without sacrificing performance.
So here I am doing all this investment research for my own portfolio, which hopefully will produce a nice return for my retirement account as well as my soul. But all of that work can be leveraged to benefit me further if I write about it and share it with others. So, that is exactly what I am doing. I am simply writing about the stocks I have chosen for my own green investment portfolio, with a brief discussion of why I chose them.
The time spent is negligible compared to the total time I have spent on this research, but it allows me to profit further from my own work in several ways: 1) More traffic to my site; 2) When having to make my case for these investments to others, I am more apt to make doubly sure my logic is sound; 3) I can get feedback form my readers which might point out flaws in my thinking; 4) I can get others involved in Green Investing, which is one more tiny contribution to the future of the planet; 5) I can connect with others in the Green Investing community. Not bad for an extra few minutes to write up research I am doing already. Now ask yourself: is there anything you spend a lot of time on that could be leveraged in this way?
Leverage Your Passions
If you have a personal passion that takes up a good chunk of your time, there’s a good chance that other people share it. Consider how you might leverage the time you spend on what you love to help you progress toward financial independence. Put up a site and share your knowledge and experiences. You’ll enjoy it, and chances are you’ll profit as well.
Progress Updates
Now that I’ve switched to online methods for growing my stake, I will be providing a bit more information to those of you who are following along. As you may recall, when I first started The Million-Dollar Dime, I promised to document every transaction here. Of course that will get complicated as my stake grows in size, so I will know be publishing periodic Earnings Reports, where you can see a day-by-day of the earnings of my online projects. You can check out my first earnings report here. As you can see, my sites have earned some more money since my last update on my personal progress toward a million dollars. I’m up to $44.12, now!
The Million-Dollar Dime Game Distilled
As you know, I write a number of general articles on wealth building, the economy, politics, and other related topics. For those who just want to track my personal progress toward a million dollars, though, there’s a new “Track Sean’s Progress” link on the top menu-bar, which will be limited to progress updates for the game itself.
I hope these new additions will help build your motivation to try the game yourself.
The Ten-Cent Media Empire
So my stake has grown to a healthy $37.89, which is just itching to be reinvested. What next? As you surely have surmised by now, I’m a fan of passive income . It’s time to create more.
We’re Buying Ourselves Out
As you may have noticed, this site has ads on it. However, I didn’t count any earnings toward my stake before now, because I paid for the domain out of my personal funds. That’s all about to change, though. Now that my stake has grown large enough, I’m going to pay myself back the purchase price of this domain out of my stake. Henceforth, any ad revenues from this site will go straight into the stake to keep it growing.
This will also serve as motivation to give the design of this site a much-needed overhaul. At present, the layout is not at all conducive to producing revenue, and is very poor in terms of search engine optimization. I’ve learned a lot in recent months about both topics, and will be putting these lessons into action here. Once the changes are made, I’ll write about what I did and why.
When Time is the Bottleneck
While running a little niche site is a great way to earn a little extra cash, the fact is that there is only so much I can write myself before I run out of time. If your income is limited by the amount of time you personally spend on your business, you don’t have a real business, you have a job. No one gets rich working at a job. If I am to reach my goal, I need a way to get past this limitation.
Be the One Who Writes the Check, Not the One Who Cashes It
It’s well known that employees don’t get rich, employers do. It’s time to bring in some outside help. Of course, $37.89 won’t pay for too many man-hours, so a different approach is needed. I’ve therefore chosen to look for partners, rather than employees.
The Plan
Here’s the notion: I’ll put up a network of niche content sites and blogs. I’ll work with writers who will produce the content. I will handle all the technical details, pay for domains and any other expenses out of my stake, and help market the sites and build traffic. I’ll split revenues with the writers 50/50.
The remainder of my stake should serve to pay the startup costs for two or three new sites. All I need to do is find writers. I’ve put up an ad on Craig’s List, and gotten a lot of interest, so it looks like it won’t be long before I can put the plan in action.
By the Way
If you like writing and are interested in partnering with me on a project, feel free to contact me at 
. It can be a great way to build a starting stake for the game, as you can start literally from zero. You don’t even have to find a dime in the street! Further, since you’ll be a co-owner of the business, you won’t be violating Rule 8.
Until next time!
The Magic of Passive Income
Hi all,
First and foremost, thanks for the emails and comments from those wondering about my absence. I know it’s been a very long time since my last post. Various family emergencies have kept me away from projects like this one for much of this year. I won’t go into the details, but in brief, two very close family members have suffered life threatening illnesses in the past few months. One had cancer, and the other a heart attack. The good news is both survived and have recovered.
I’ve also taken a lot of time to rethink my priorities in life. As you might imagine, these sorts of events can bring on the need for such reflection. I’ve made a lot of changes, hopefully for the better. More details on that to come.
The Game is Still Afoot
As for the game, no, I most certainly have NOT given up. In fact, it has progressed quite nicely behind the scenes, with hardly any input from me at all. How is this possible?
Recall my last transaction was to put up a Web site called Renewable Wealth. I added a few more pages of content to the site before setting it all aside in January. I’ve hardly touched it since. However, it has generated a steady trickle of traffic.
Passive Income
I checked the adsense logs, and discovered that the site has earned a tiny but steady stream of income. Total earnings since creation: $35.84! That’s a return of over 700% on my initial investment of $4, in just 4 months.
With no input from me over the past few months, I have made money in my sleep, and grown my stake by several hundred percent. This is the magic of passive income, of owning an income-producing asset.
Adding in the $2.05 left over from my previous transaction, I have grown my stake to $37.89, from absolutely nothing. The return I’ve earned on my initial dime is over 37000%, and I’ve moved up to step 8 of 24. Believe it or not, taken in terms of doubling, I’m a third of the way to a million dollars.
As you can see, passive income is immensely powerful.
Now what?
Obviously It’s time to reinvest, but I have a problem - the site is doing well, but it was time consuming to build, and time is precious now as always. How can I replicate this technique without burning through all my free time?
That’s the subject of the next post. Stay tuned. (And I assure you the wait will not be anywhere near as long this time 
)
Renewable Wealth - First Revenue!
I checked my Google Adsense logs today, and saw that RenewableWealth.com got two clicks, earning me 71¢. Frankly this surprised me - the site has almost no content, and other than my posting here, I have done nothing at all to promote it. Yet already I’ve earned back almost 20% of my investment.
It appears that it won’t take long at all for me to double my stake with this method, and this tiny little trickle of revenue should continue indefinitely.
Then What?
And what will I do with the tiny sum of money it generates? Reinvest it, of course. 71¢ in a day isn’t much on its own. But imagine if I put up 100 more sites like this. Say they each averaged 71¢ a day. (A rather pessimistic estimate, actually.) That would produce $71 a day. Not enough to buy a yacht, perhaps, but that is $26,000 a year in purely passive income . Who couldn’t use that?
If You Can Do it Once…
Seeing as it only took a couple of days to put this site up, I could have 100 sites up in a few months. And if I can do 100, why not 500? Assuming they all average the same, that would produce $355 a day, or $129,575 a year on autopilot. It might take a couple of years to do this, but so what? $129,000 in passive income is enough to free you to do just about anything you want. You could take big risks without having to worry about going broke. That kind of passive income would give you the freedom to shoot for millions, or pursue your dreams, or do nothing at all, if that’s your thing.
Slay Your Inner Nay-Sayer
This method may not last forever. Heck, it probably won’t. But if you’re smart, and save, and diversify, it won’t have to.
The Inspiration
So how did I learn about this technique? There’s a little-known membership service called Super Apprentice, which is dedicated to this idea. It is run by Dave Moore, one of the very few straight-arrow, honest, real heroes of the Internet Marketing business. The service takes the concept a lot farther than I have covered in my brief discussion here, and provides a bunch of tools which automate much of the process, allowing you to publish revenue earning sites rapidly and efficiently. You should check it out if this concept appeals to you.
The service is not free, so I built RenewableWealth manually, in order to stick to the rules. It would have gone a lot faster had I been able to use the tools the Super Apprentice service provides, but c’est la vie. When I build my stake up enough to cover my membership, I’ll start using Super Apprentice to bump things up a notch. In the mean time, I’ll stick to Rule 6 and keep plugging away with what I have.
Can You Feel It?
Do you get the feeling things are starting to get exciting? I have now parlayed my dime into an actual revenue producing business. It’s on a very small scale, of course, but it can be replicated indefinitely, without a single additional dime being added. It is now self-sustaining, and it is quite literally only a matter of time before I have a million dollars. All that is required now is to work to shorten the time needed.
More importantly, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same.