Generating a Passive Income - An Experiment

The phone box project and the development of my new telephone network RocketTel has increased the readers to this blog to a level where I where I was recently notified that I qualified for Google's Adsense service.

I have to admit, it did take a little time to set up the accounts and link them to my Blogger account, which is where this blog you're currently reading is hosted with. This actually made the process a little easier with both services, Blogger and Adsense are owned by Google, although the process was still a little clunky and I'm left wondering what it's like to set up an independently hosted blog with Adsense.

As you can see from the side panels, I was able to activate the ads and once this had happened I then set about writing another blog post about my project update.

I fully appreciate that I'm not going to get rich quick, nor is anything going to happen overnight, so I parked the Adsense experiment for a few weeks and set about looking at other ways to generate revenue from the things that I make and produce.

I'm a tutor and occasionally use the resources over on Tes. Over the years I've been more than happy to share my projects and the code as well as the methods I used to make them but this time with the phone hacking I decided to wrap it all up in a couple of educational documents and submit them to Tes, charging a few pounds for both.

Now came the difficult part, knowing how long to leave things running before I assess whether this experiment was successful or not. I decide to leave it for four weeks and when I logged into both the Adsense and TES platforms were greeted with the following amounts.

The £13.75 on the left is the amount generated from the adverts on this blog. I had expected to generate a few pence from this, so this was a nice surprise indeed. The value of £29.90 is the amount from Tes (after they have taken their commission) which again came as a surprise. So collectively, the total amount I have managed to raise by conducting this experiment is £43.65, sadly not enough to retire on but a surprising result non the less.

What's Next?

I would like to explore and learn more about the process surrounding affiliate programs. I have signed up and been approved for both the Amazon Associates and the EBay Partner Network but have done little else - I'm currently too busy deciding what to spend my new found fortune on.