Making money with passive income

I haven't written in a while, and I haven't managed any of my passive income stuff for just as long. When the market started going sour, I lost motivation to put effort into my projects. If there's one thing I've learned from this period, is that passive income requires work. It might not be continuous work, but you need to put in quite a bit of effort in it to reap the rewards.

I recently reevaluated all my passive income projects. My portfolio income is pretty much crap now. ING Direct has cut interest a lot, but so has every other bank. Propser was in a quiet period while they register with the SEC to offer a secondary market for loans to be bought, sold, and traded. They came out recently, but now they have to register with the individual states. Most states are already done, but as luck would have it, my state is not done yet. So I still have my 6 loans (I had 7, but the one with the A credit defaulted...go figure). They're active, and my return looks pretty good considering my Sharebuilder stinks right now. I just hope Prosper will allow me to reinvest my funds into more loans.

As for Sharebuilder, most of my dividends were cut. Then I made some poor choices. You should know the stories behind Sirius, Freddie Mac, and Fairpoint Communications. I bought knowing they would go up, then I didn't sell when they did go up. And now I'm holding. I vowed that if I did that again, I would sell. Not so! I bought American Apparel a while back. It nearly doubled with an 80% gain after a few weeks of holding. Did I sell? No. I thought they would continue to go up. Then the market had a dip. Consumer spending went lower. Confidence went down. Now I'm holding. To make matters worse, I went to an American Apparel store and didn't like their stuff. I want to sell now, but I want to at least recover my commissions. Oy.

As for my passive income ventures. Adsense for my blogs is doing nothing for me. I'm not as active with my blogs as other successful bloggers are. I'm not as aggressive either with pushing the marketing for my blogs. Then there is Hubpages. I wrote one hub a while back and left it at that. But after reading some stuff about being more active, I wrote four more hubs this past week. I saw my traffic jump a bit, and may have even made $0.10 (I forgot to add the hubs to my Adsense tracker so not sure if that's where they came from). Anyway, seeing some activity has motivated me, so I aim to have 25 - 50 hubs by the end of the year. Epinions still pays occasionally depending on page views on my reviews. I haven't been able to write any new ones; mainly because I haven't bought much stuff lately. And I notice the biggest paying reviews are on electronics and gear. Not a lot of people look up reviews for knives, which I wrote 3 or 4 reviews on. So I'll write more when I get more stuff.

I really need to devote some time every week to improving my passive income situation. Unless you have a really superior blog and/or product, you really need to put in some work to get the benefit. And even then, the earnings eventually taper off and you have to work a bit again. It's almost cyclical.

Well, I'm still brainstorming a lot of ideas, so I hope to be in a better place in ther near future.