How I’ve Made $60,000 On YouTube – With Analytics!

Hey, what’s up. It’s Jerad with Practically Passive, and I wanted to talk today about my number one source of passive income, which is YouTube. Really, that income actually comes from Google AdSense, because Google AdSense is Google’s ad platform for creators. For example, if you’re a company and you have something that you want to market, and you want that to show up in the form of video before a YouTube video plays, then that’s the process you would go through, you would use Google AdSense for that, you would create an ad and it would show during content that was kind of related.

If you came to one of my videos, which was about an iPhone, and you had an iPhone case to sell, you might want your video to play as an ad before, during or after my video is done. So that’s where that revenue comes from with YouTube. I built the State of Tech channel, and also Ditch Auto, which is another YouTube channel up to the point where I’m getting on average around $1,600 to $2,200 a month just from YouTube ads basically.

I started State of Tech a while back. Actually, State of Tech was the second phase from another YouTube channel that I had called Daily App Show. I had really gotten into reviewing apps for smartphones back when the smartphones first came out. I had a lot of traction there, things were going really well for me at that time. It wasn’t so much traffic, or income that was coming from Google AdSense, and from ads, it was active revenue that was coming from other sources such as companies paying me to review their apps.

Daily App Show Website Screenshot from 2010

But when I transitioned towards wanting to come at things from a more educational standpoint, and actually teach people how to use their devices, inform them on how to do specific things on their smartphones, or their tablets, or whatnot, that’s where I really started looking at, “Okay, how do I add the most value? Because this has to be informative. I have to come at this as a good teacher helping people, otherwise, my information isn’t going to be consumed, and it’s not going to become passive income.” As my ad revenue has grown over the months and the years, I’ve really realized there’s a lot of potential in producing content for YouTube.

Revenue-Since-Monetization-SOT YouTube Subscribers State of Tech Watch-Time-Lifetime-SOT

As long as I’m producing enough content, it’s relevant, it’s value-added, then I’m going to end up getting paid over time in a passive way from that content that I’m putting out. I started building on State of Tech because I wanted to be more of an informational source, an educational source in mobile technology. I was trying to differentiate myself from the people who were just doing reviews, who were just doing what I had been doing previously, because the competition had gotten really steep. State of Tech came about and I’ve been kind of slowly building that over time.

Now, I haven’t really focused that well on State of Tech as far as finding a specific topic. I think that if I had gone more niched, and made it just about iPhones, and getting the most out of your iPhone, and being more productive with it, and taking better photos with it, and everything iPhone related, it might’ve been a little easier because that’s a big audience. There’s a lot of people with iPhones, and there’s a lot of people who want to learn how to use their iPhone better.

But I also mixed in iPad stuff, Android phones, Android tablets, Mac computers, Windows computers, drones and all that other stuff into this one channel, which I think created a little bit of a challenge for some people, because maybe they’re not as interested in that wide of a gamut of technology.

I know there are people like me who are interested in all of that, and even though some people may not own all of those things, they’re interested in it, they want to know what technology is, and that’s kind of where State of Tech is, it’s like the state of technology, where is that at, and let’s talk about it. That’s where that whole channel and the name even came from. But I’ve started to realize through watching the behavior of people on the website, or on the YouTube channel, when I get a video that has 100+ thousand views and very few of those turned into actual subscribers. I’m realizing that video performed well, and a lot of people gave it a thumbs up, and there’s great comments, so I know that people are finding that video useful, it’s getting a lot of views, but it’s not resulting in subscribers. So I’ve realized that I think I have gone in too many different directions with that channel, and maybe if I was more specific, I would see better growth there.

I don’t necessarily know if the answer is splitting it off into a whole bunch of different channels or not, that’s something that I definitely need to look at. But I do know typically what is going to produce some views for that channel, and because I’ve been able to create content that’s useful, and it helps answer questions, and it solves problems, I’ve been rewarded in the form of passive income from YouTube add revenue. I’ve tried to do the same thing with Ditch Auto, which is the other YouTube channel that I spend most of my time on, which is in the area of photography.

Revenue-Since-Monetization-DA Subs-DA Watch-Time-Lifetime-DA

With Ditch Auto, I do a lot of camera reviews and set up videos, and here’s tips and techniques, and camera hacks and some different stuff that people can use to become better photographers. So the idea there is that if I’m providing information then I will be rewarded with views and subscribers. That channel’s been a little tricky to grow as well, because I used to shoot with Canon cameras, so a lot of my content was Canon, and then I switched to Sony, so a lot of my content is Sony. Switching to Sony is kind of the popular thing to do right now as a photographer so it’s worked out somewhat.

I just haven’t really found a niche there either to where people could really find a use for every single piece of content that I put out. It’s not relevant to every person every piece of content that I put out, that’s been kind of a challenge for me. But, with all that said, and understanding that there’s a lot of things that I could fine tune and actually make work better, I’m still earning on average $1,800 to $2,200 a month of passive income from those channels alone without even included revenue from links to Amazon products. That’s something that I’ve been able to build up by being persistent, by putting content up as often as I can, even though I’ve had to take some good breaks from that. Especially the last two months, in July and August of 2018, I’ve had to take a lot of breaks from putting up content just because life’s gotten busy, and my actual company has gotten busy, and I lost an employee, so I had a lot of stuff enter my plate. With that, it’s taken away from producing more content for my YouTube channels.

But, with that said also, I am now looking back at that and saying to myself, “Okay, these are great passive income revenue sources that I cannot afford to ignore for too long, how do I make the most of them, how do I produce the content that people want to see and that people will actually subscribe to so that they’ll watch more than one video or they’ll come back as often as I’m putting out new content?” Because that’s where that passive revenue that comes from the YouTube ads is going to grow much faster is if people are coming back. Not every person is new, but I have new people coming in, but I also have people that have been around for a while that are watching content and consuming new content.

With that said, those are the things that I’ve done and kind of the mindset that I have around those YouTube channels, and why they’re working as well as they are. I’ve been feeding into them for quite some time. Now, not only am I being paid with those videos from YouTube, but a lot of them, when they are about a product or something like that, there is an affiliate link down in the description of the video. If I’m talking about, if I did a video on the top five cases for the new iPhone 10, there are five cases and their affiliate links down below.

Amazon-Affiliates-Payout-Since-Beginning

If I do a product review on something, if I do something educational that requires something that people would have to buy, then there’s a link down in the description. Those videos I’m getting paid for for people watching them, but also if somebody decides to go and buy the thing that I recommended, I’ll also get paid there. That’s all passive income.

I wanted to talk about the fact that I have made over $60,000 on YouTube because I wanted to make sure that people understand that it’s not the only source. If I put all of my efforts into just getting paid from YouTube only, and then YouTube decided to change the game with the way that they pay out. So I wanted to talk about this so that I could explain that yes there is one passive income revenue source that does produce a decent amount of revenue for me, it’s not the only place that I’m receiving passive income. Because if YouTube decided to make some major changes to their monetization, or if for some reason something happened to my YouTube channel, or whatever, there’s always things that can happen when you’re playing in the space of other companies such as YouTube.

If something was to happen and I lost that, I wouldn’t lose all of my passive income. Yes, that would be a big chunk of income, and it sure would hurt to lose it, but it wouldn’t be the end of the game. I would just have to look at how I have all these other passive revenue streams, how do I make them the primary or how do I build upon them as well? Having multiple things going on definitely takes the stress out of it all being in one basket.

The same way that I typically was stressed out because all of my income was reliant upon clients, getting new clients and stuff like that. If I didn’t get a new client, then I wasn’t getting paid. If I wasn’t able to get the work done in the time promised, then I wasn’t getting paid either. Now, with passive income, I’m getting paid for work that I’ve already done, and all I need to do is continue to pour into that so that those can continue to grow.

If you have any questions about that, especially with YouTube, I know YouTube monetization is a huge one, especially with earlier this year YouTube deciding to set higher guidelines, or higher limitations that people would have to reach. That’s going to do it for this video, if you have any questions especially around the topic of YouTube monetization, let me know. I have several channels that I monetize with YouTube as well as one that I’ve brought to monetization this year in 2018 after YouTube raised the level of requirements for a channel to be monetizable.

Just to recap that, in order for you to monetize your YouTube channel and get paid by the ads that show up in YouTube videos, you have to have reached 1,000 subscribers on your channel, and you also have to have 4,000 hours of viewed content within a rolling year’s period of time. In that year’s period of time, you have to have 4,000 hours of watched time. I don’t know what happens if you fall below that in the future, if they take away the monetization or what, but I know that you have to at least reach those things in order to monetize. I’ve done that with one channel this year, and my goal is to do that with this channel as well, but it’s going to require you subscribing.

Please, subscribe to the Practically Passive YouTube Channel. Check out some of the other videos that I have here on the channel that you find useful. The more that you watch them, the more that it counts towards that limit that I’m trying to reach. That is definitely a goal of mine that I have that I would love to achieve within the next 30 days. I would appreciate the subscribe, and definitely appreciate you watching some of the other videos all the way through. Until next time, my name is Jerad with Practically Passive, and I hope to see you back here soon.

7 Ways to Find Time to Build Your Passive Income

Hey what’s up, it’s Jerad, with Practically Passive, and in this post I have seven ways to help you find time to build your passive income revenue stream. This is super timely for me because I forgot to put a blog up yesterday. I had announced, not even a full week ago, that I was going to be putting out a blog every day for 30 days and yesterday I straight up forgot to edit a video and get a blog posted.

Now, I started the day early and had meetings in the morning, and then had a couple hours back at the office, tried to knock out editing a video for State of Tech and then had to drive to another town to pick up some stuff for a photo shoot, and then make it back in time to take my kids to Jujitsu practice. Then I had to figure out dinner, I mean, it was just a crazy day, it totally slipped my mind. In looking back, I had forgot to add it to my task list for the day, so it just wasn’t a thing that was on the top of my mind. I had too much going on to really think about it. Then of course there’s today, which at the time that I’m recording this, Apple announced their new iPhones and Apple Watch, so I watched that keynote. I got a new drone in, so I was messing around with that. So there are things for my passive income that I’ve been working on.

Yesterday, I was editing a video on the comparison between the Galaxy S9 Plus and the Note 9 cameras, and so I was editing that video and then I also got my Galaxy Note 9 review video out. So I was working on my passive income revenue streams but I failed at getting a video up for this channel. So here’s seven things that I have identified as things that I need to continuously remind myself of and work at, in order to grow my passive income. I think that they’re things that are going to help you out. So let’s dive right in.

1. Cut Back on Other Activities

The first thing is to cut back on other activities. Now, there are a lot of things that I know that I could cut back on, like TV watching, scrolling Instagram, news and stuff like that. I read … I have to stay up on the industries that I’m in with my passive income, I need to stay up on technology. I need to stay up on what’s coming out with cameras and all of that stuff because I have to constantly be generating ideas for content, and thinking about what’s next and what’s new.

For example, like with the time that I took today, two hours, to watch the Apple keynote, that was two hours that I could’ve been working and doing other things. I tried to multitask but it’s a little hard to take notes and prepare for producing a video while doing other things. So, there’s some times I have to pay attention to that, but when it comes to watching TV shows and scrolling Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, or whatever, those are all things that you can cut back on. I know at times I need to remind myself to cut back on those.

I mean, would you rather be editing content or writing content to put out there that’s going to help you build passive income or would you rather make sure that you are up-to-date with whatever TV show episode that’s out, that you’re interested in. The TV show adds value in an entertainment aspect, but it’s not going to add passive income value to you. So you need to look at those ares and how you can cut back. When you go to reach for that remote, to open up Netflix, or whatever it is, you need to just put that remote down and go jump into whatever it is that you’re doing to start building your passive income revenue stream.

2. Wake up Early or Go to Bed Late

Number two is to wake up early or go to bed late. Now, I am not going to trade out time with my family for my passive income. For example, I’m not going to go home after being gone all day working and then ignore my family so that I can work on my projects. My passive income is not more important than my family. My family comes first because if I sacrifice my family in order to build passive income, what good is having the passive income? I just don’t believe in trading extra dollars for time that you could be spending with your family. Especially in the stage that I’m in now, with kids that are elementary school aged. I want to make sure that I’m spending as much time as I can with them and I don’t want to trade to much of it out for work if I don’t have to.

I already feel like I do that. Going to work from 8:00 to 5:00. I’m already gone throughout the day, and even though they’re at school during the day, there’s still a few hours in the afternoon that if I was able to leave a little earlier I could spend time with them. That means, if I want to work on my passive income, I either need to wake up earlier then everybody else. Everybody in my house wakes up around 6:30. So that means I need to wake up maybe an hour earlier then normal to spend some time in the morning on it before everybody wakes up or wait until everybody goes to bed and then spend a little bit of time.

My kids go to bed around 7:30, 8:00. My wife goes to bed usually around 10:00, so maybe that means I stay up until 11:00 or 11:30 working on it. So that’s a way to kind of get some additional work done on your passive income revenue streams without trading out time that you could be spending with a significant other or your kids, or something else important to you. I also wouldn’t trade out time that you spend on yourself, like going to the gym, remaining fit or taking care of yourself, don’t trade that out either. I would rather it take longer to build my passive income revenue streams then sacrifice taking care of my body. Because these are all things that catch up with you, you can’t get time back in those areas and the more that you put those things off the more that you sacrifice the things that’s are important, the more challenging it is to actually make them important again. So, wake up early, go to bed late. That’s number two.

3. Automate Simple Processes

Number three is to automate as much of it as possible. One of the lovely things about the Internet, if you’re going to be doing content on the Internet, like I do, and a lot of what I’m talking about, whether that be blogs or stuff on social media or a course or an eBook or videos like this for YouTube, is that you can sit down and do a whole bunch of them at once. You may have noticed the videos that played before this one, the majority of them I’m wearing the same shirt. I didn’t even bother trying to pretend like I am recording new videos every day. I sat down and recorded three or four videos at a time. A few days later, I sat down and recorded three or four more videos at a time. Now, this one I’m recording today because I wanted to talk about how I forgot yesterdays video but tomorrows video would have been a video that I recorded a couple days ago.

So, you can actually sit down and knock out a bunch of work, and stagger that work to be published because all of these platforms allow you to schedule your content, so you can make a promise like I did, of releasing something every day for 30 days, and get all that work done and then schedule it out and then it doesn’t become something that you have to do every single day. It becomes something that maybe you have to spend a bunch of time on one day. Maybe you spend a couple of hours on a weekend getting that content done, so that you can schedule it out. That’s automating because it’s automatically going to be posted at the time and date that you give it.

If you’re going to be putting out content, depending on the type of content, it’s best to release it in the morning, especially if it’s content that’s more informational, like what I’m putting out. If it’s entertainment content, you may want to schedule that out later in the day because most people are consuming informational content earlier in the day and entertainment content later in the day. But every audience, in every industry, and whatever type of content it is, it’s going to vary. It’s not a solid rule, it’s just my experiences in having produced both types of content.

So, automate as much stuff as possible so that you’re not doing work that could be easily setup and ran automatically. A lot of that comes down to you being able to just sit down and produce a bulk amount of content and scheduling it so that it looks like you have stuff going out every single day. You want to have that activity, it’s extremely important to have that consistent activity happening constantly so that people are exposed to what you’re doing.

4. Hire a Virtual Assistant

Number four is to hire a virtual assistant. If you don’t have that extra time then you can hire a virtual assistant to do the simpler work. This is one of the things that was talked about a lot in, The 4-Hour Workweek. One of these books that is touting the lifestyle of being able to go and do whatever it is that you want and only work for a few hours, automation is discussed a lot in that book and hiring out and allowing other people to do your easier work. Giving the assistant the authority to do certain things so that you can go and explore the world.

For me, it’s looking at the different things that I don’t necessarily need to do, that somebody else could do for me. What are the things that I know somebody could do faster? Now it’s tricky with video, editing video, I would love to outsource that but the files are so large that transferring them would be tough. It’s much easier for me just to shoot a video, do minimal edits to it and upload it myself. When I had an employee I could have the employee handle that stuff and I could get a lot more content out because I could be shooting videos, he could be editing, I could work on other things, he could still be editing, and so I was able to get much more stuff done and get more content out when I had an employee working full-time. But now that it’s just me, it’s a little bit more challenging and if there was a simple way to outsource my video editing I probably would do it, but when it comes to logo design or some other graphical stuff, I will hire out for that, I’ll use Fiverr.com.

When it comes to converting these videos into articles, I don’t do that because it’s going to take me a lot of time. I use Rev.com, get 10% off your order by clicking here. In a video in the near future I’m going to talk about Rev.com because it saves me a ton of time to have these videos transcribed, for a couple of different reasons, I don’t want to get into it too deep, but I have these videos transcribed so that I can convert them to a blog really easily. I can add closed captioning to my videos, which is extremely important to help with these videos being discovered on YouTube.

5. Find a Partner

Number five is to partner with someone. Is there someone that could add value to what it is that you’re doing and with the two of you together you’re actually able to cover twice the amount of ground, in half the amount of time. Maybe you’re married to that person. You have a spouse that’s interested in a similar thing and you both can share the different responsibilities. Partnering with someone can definitely help get you more ground covered. If there’s something that you can offer and there’s something that that other person can offer, you bring both of those parties together and you have a nice team and you’re able to get these passive income revenue streams built faster.

The only problem with this, is that passive income comes from a lot of different sources. So it’s going to be tricky to look at all of that and make sure that each person is getting what it is that they deserve based on their efforts. 50/50 split is probably going to be the easiest, but one person may be contributing more to a certain income stream and another persons work contributing to a different income stream, so that might actually become a little bit challenging to maintain. Its definitely something that you can do. Especially if you enjoy more working together with someone then you do by yourself.

For me, and I think a lot of people reading this, you’re wanting to build passive income revenue streams for yourself, to separate yourself from being reliant upon anybody else or a job. So partnerships aren’t going to be for everyone. I know that they aren’t for me, but I wanted to include it because a lot of people like that aspect of working together, and with the right partnerships you can definitely achieve a lot more then you can on your own.

6. Cut Back On Work Hours

Number six is to cut back on your work hours. This is something I have done, and it made it easy for me to do that because when I had my last employee quit, I was used to paying that persons wage, 40 hours a week. So that was an expense that all of a sudden wasn’t there. There was a certain amount of revenue that I was able to keep and that allowed me to scale back on a little bit of work. Because not having to pay several thousand dollars a month definitely cuts back on the overhead. That means there’s less work that I have to agree to take on and then that gives me a little bit more time and flexibility.

Now I’m still playing catch up with all of the work that we had signed on before he left. There’s a lot that I still have to get done but in things going forward I’ve definitely been much more picky in taking on new work, so I’m definitely taking advantage of this one by cutting back on the amount of work that I’m taking on so that I don’t have to be as tied to active income and I can work more on my passive income streams. It’s just tricky because I don’t have a typical 8:00 to 5:00 job where I clock in, clock out or I’m not getting all of my instruction from the company that I work for. I have multiple clients with different needs and every day I have different requests coming in through email and phone calls. So it can be little tricky to actually find that time.

So a lot of times I have stuff in my task list, for my passive income, that I have to keep moving to the next day, and to the next day, but I leave it in there because if I do have extra time come up I want to make sure it’s top of mind, that it’s on my task list and that I’m able to achieve it.

7. Quit!

The last thing is just to go all in and quit. Now, that’s not likely something that most people can do. You can’t just up and quit your job, you need that income, until you build your passive income revenue stream big enough that you can replace your regular income with that. Now if you are a duel income household, you’re married, you have a husband or a wife that’s also working, you might be able to work something out there where you say, “I’m going to quit my job and I’m going to go full throttle into this passive income for six months. We’re going to have to sacrifice a little bit, maybe not take any vacations or whatever … ” You might have an option there.

If you’re a single income household, like me, then it’s a little bit tricky because you have everything on your plate, as far as the expenses go and you can’t just necessarily say no to everything. There is no guarantee that your passive income is going to continue to grow and that it will get to a point where you can replace your income with it. That could take a lot of time. So it’s very tricky, and kind of scary, to do that. The more responsibilities you have, the more caution I suggest, in making decisions like this, because the job that you currently have is guaranteed, so long as you’re able to keep the job and they’re able to keep paying you.

Passive income is going to vary, it’s going to be different for every single person as to how long it’s going to take to build that up. Your idea may be really good but it may take a lot of execution to pull that off before you’re actually able to start selling it and start making money. If you’re building passive income like me, you’re getting paid small amounts from different things that you’re doing, and it’s going to take even longer because initially you’re not going to get paid much. YouTube has limitations and things that you have to meet before you’re actually even able to get paid by them. So there’s lots of things that you have to start working at before you’re even going to have much of a passive income at all.

So, the whole passive income thing is most likely going to be a side project for you for a while, until you’re able to get it to a point where you have enough income coming in that you can replace at least some of your current income. That’s my goal for this year. It’s what I’ve been talking about, is trying to make sure that I can invest enough time, into my passive income revenue streams, to build them up to the point where they are meeting my needs of my household. If I can get to that point, I’m able to cut back on that active income that requires me to do client work and doesn’t allow me any flexibility and of course that’s the goal for this year for me and I hope a goal that I can help the majority of you reach as well.

Put in your email address to the form here on PracticallyPassive.com so that you could receive updates, whenever I put stuff out. I have some cool stuff that I’m working on in the background here that I haven’t talked about yet. A giveaway that’s going to be really cool and interesting. So definitely make sure you subscribe so that I get notified when all of that stuff comes out. I don’t want you to miss it.

That’s going to do it for now. I hope to see you in the next one.

3 Questions to Ask Before Building Passive Income

Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad with Practically Passive, and today we’re going to talk about three questions to ask yourself before you pursue passive income revenue growth. I think the mindset that you need to be in is a mindset of giving. I’ve always been in a mindset of wanting to share and give and put information out there, and it’s always done me well. Because if I’m not in that mindset of sharing and putting information out there, I’m in a me-mindset, where I want to take. And passive income just doesn’t grow too well in that space. Of course, you can get maybe some quick growths or some quick payments or whatnot that happen, but if you’re not continually adding value, if you’re not putting useful things out there into the world, that tends to dry up pretty quickly.

1. What are your goals and objectives?

The first thing to ask yourself is what your goal and your objective is. Your goal of course, I think, is probably to build a passive income that you can use to replace your existing income. That’s been my goal in this year of 2018, is to replace my income that I make from my businesses with passive income. Not so that I can shut them down, but so that I can have more choice, so I can have more options. There’s a lot of good things that come from a traditional job if you have a decent job, and one of those things is healthcare and another thing is retirement. Those are two things that a lot of jobs provide that passive income isn’t going to naturally provide, you’ll have to set those up for yourself.

Now I’ve been self-employed since I was 20, so I haven’t paid into 401ks or I don’t have any of those things provided by a job. I have to actually do my own investing and saving for retirement. I have to provide myself with healthcare and all of that stuff, so it’s a little bit different. So there may be good reasons to hang onto a job, but in building passive income revenue streams the goal there is to alleviate that a little bit. If you’re constantly stressed out or in fear over your job, over changes in your industry and stuff like that, maybe you’re going to be laid off, or you have that fear, those aren’t going to be as big a fears if you have some more income coming in.

Like at the end of this year, my goal is to replace my income, that means that I don’t have to be so scared when it comes to the end of the month and I don’t have any new clients that I got during that month, or business has been a bit slow. I’ve definitely had months like that, and it is stressful, and it is a bit scary at times because I’ve got a family. I have a wife and kids and there’s lots of expenses and different things there. Though I know we can exist on a lot less than we do, it’s just still a stress and something that causes anxiety and I want to avoid that as much as I can.

I’ve taken the time to look at my life and say, okay, where are the different things in my life that cause the most stress and anxiety. And because I’m a sole provider to my household, to my family, a lot of it is wrapped up in that because it’s the most responsibility I’ve ever had in my life. As an adult, it can be a lot at times. So that is definitely one of my goals.

Now, your objective needs to be what you’re actually going to do, what you’re going to attempt to do, to get a passive income. Now, I’ve said in other videos and I’ll say it in this one, it’s best to have passive income revenue streams from different locations. If all of your money was coming from one location, if that location … if something dries up there, if they go out of business, if they sell to another company, or decide not to have an affiliate program anymore, then you’re all out of passive income. All of a sudden that’s shut off, and you don’t want that to happen.

So you need to look at how you can spread that out, and those are things that I’m going to be teaching in future videos. How did I build a YouTube channel up to the point where I was earning $1200 to $1500 a month just from that one YouTube channel? How, at the same time, did I build up another YouTube channel that’s making $500 to $600 per month? All the while getting $500 to $1,000 from Amazon Affiliates every month, and all of these other little passive income revenue streams that I have coming in. How did all of those come to be and how did I build those? I want to show you all of that stuff, and I will do that in future videos, so make sure to put in your email address on the website, practicallypassive.com. And of course, subscribe to the YouTube channel because those are going to be the two places I’m delivering the most content and the most value for you.

Think about what your objective is, what are you going to be building, and why.

2. What Value Can I Provide?

Now, like I said in one of the first videos, the revenue is in the value. When you’re building passive income revenue streams, you’re putting information out there, you’re sharing things with people, you’re creating things to be sold or whatnot, there has to be value in those, there has to be something that the other person is getting. If you’re coming at it thinking me, me, me, I’m going to build this, I’m going to get paid, that’s the wrong mindset to have. You need to be thinking about the problems and the challenges that the other person has on the other end of this.

If you’re creating video content like I am, you have to be thinking about what is going on in their head, what’s the problem, what’s the thing that they need to overcome or achieve and how can you produce content around that. If you’re thinking about a product that you could put out, like an informational product, that has to have enough value to solve the problem so that the other person would decide to actually purchase that. In thinking about what you’re going to do, make sure that you are leading with value, that you’re thinking about what is the value that I can provide.

3. Be In It For The Long Haul

And then the third thing, which I think is just as important, if not more important, is to be in it for the long haul. If you’re not in this for the long haul you’re never going to see enough growth to have it really blip the needle, when it comes to your income. Now, everything that I build didn’t happen overnight, it took a lot of time. Some of these channels, these YouTube channels that I have are several years old. I’ve been putting content in them for a long time. It’s just that in the last year here have I really been focusing on it and thinking about it as a thing that drives revenue towards me.

In the past, I’ve always just put up videos when I found them useful and just to share information, to put it out there because I found it fun and interesting. I was adding value but I wasn’t looking at it as a way that I can actually earn income. Then when I did, it was cool if I got $100 here, $100 there, that was great, but now that I’m really wanting to take it serious and make it replace my existing income I have to be in it for the long haul.

I can’t be wishy-washy, I can’t jump in from time to time, I can’t not reply to people’s comments and stuff like that. I have to be active. I have to not only show up and be there, but I have to play in that space as well. I have to be involved in that community, and if I’m not, people are going to go elsewhere and they’re going to find somebody that is. You have to be in it for the long haul, there is no quick rich scheme here. There’s no way to build this overnight, it takes time and it takes effort. And it’s not something that’s going to happen immediately, so you need to have persistence also.

So those are three things that I think are extremely important when considering to get into passive income. Just like you show up for work every single day and do well and are consistent so that you can get a promotion within a year or so, you definitely need to have that same approach when it comes to building passive income revenue streams. You need to show up as often as possible, you need to provide value, you need to do a good job. You can’t give it 50%, you have to give it 100 or 100 plus percent so that it actually starts to build something for you that can turn into something that replaces your existing income.

Like I said before, subscribe to the YouTube channel so that you get updates when new videos come out. It’s the best place to consume the video content. And, of course, head on over to practicallypassive.com and put in your email address so that I can send you news, information and updates whenever I find it extremely useful and relevant. So make sure to do that. Thanks so much and I hope to see you in the next one.

Your First Passive Income Revenue Stream

Hey. It’s Jerad with practically passive, and I wanted to talk about how to find your first passive income revenue stream. Now the reason I titled this video this way is because people are going to be searching for this, but in reality, you’re going to need multiple passive revenue streams because you’re going to want to make sure that you’re diversified and that you don’t have all of your income coming from one source.

Now, right now, you probably have all of your income coming from one source, which is your job. You’ve got to work. You earn an agreed upon wage and you get paid at some agreed upon time, so you know what to expect and you know that you’re going to receive that wage because that’s what you signed on for. It’s what was agreed upon. But with passive income, it’s something that you’re going to be doing a lot of work initially and kind of growing, and you want that income to come from multiple places.

My favorite thing is to have it actually come at different times as well. So, for example, when I get paid from Google Adsense for the views on my YouTube videos, that ads were displayed before and stuff like that, that comes sort of towards the middle, end of the month. My Amazon affiliate payments come at the very end of the month, which is great because a lot of bills are due at the beginning of the month and some of my other affiliate programs, I can actually choose to pay out when they either reach a certain threshold or I can set a custom date, and then they pay out to my PayPal account.

It’s nice because I’m getting paid at different times throughout the month and it’s all different amounts, but it’s something that I’ve grown to be able to rely upon because it’s been consistent enough now. When I wasn’t really putting a lot of focus on my passive income, I was just kind of creating content, and if I got some passive income out of it, that’s great, I couldn’t really rely upon that because may one month I would have a video that did really well. So the next month I’d get paid pretty good on it, and then maybe that video was like super time specific topic, and with it being a time-specific topic, that content just wasn’t very relevant the month after. It kind of died off, and so I didn’t really know kind of what to expect there.

But as I started to build content that was more evergreen, stuff that I knew people would find useful for at least a couple of years, even in and around the subject of technology, I started to see growth in my passive income. So, don’t necessarily be thinking about how to get your first passive income revenue stream. Be thinking about the topics and the content that you’re going to be creating.

Now, in and around that, you want to decide on something that you can add value to. In yesterday’s blog and video, one of the things that I talked about that I learned building passive income revenue streams for myself is that value, the passive income follows the value. If you’re putting value out there, then you’re going to be able to earn passive income from it. If you’re not adding value, then you’re just adding to the noise and it’s not really going to ever result in anything. It’s not going to be very fulfilling for you either.

When you’re thinking about what you should choose as your topic, start by thinking about something that you have an interest in. For example, when I first started my website, it wasn’t necessarily passive income, but it was definitely a side income business, it was when the first iPhone came out. Now I already had some knowledge in that space because I was playing with Palm Pilots and pocket PCs and things like that. I was super into pocketable technology.

Then when the iPhone came out and they talked about allowing third-party apps to be installed on that phone, and that those were going to be available through the iTunes store, I thought to myself, wow. I can’t find good music in the iTunes store. I can’t discover anything there. How do I know what’s good? How am I going to know what’s good in the world of apps when you can’t download a demo or you can’t install a demo and try it first? You either have to buy it or that’s it.

So I started writing reviews. I started producing content around apps. Later on, that turned into creating content around mobile technology. How do you use those new features in the iPhone or the new Samsung phone or whatever it is that you got? How do you make the most out of your iPad. It’s those things that are really interesting to me, and when I was teaching people how to do those things, that’s where the real value was being provided and I was actually getting passive income coming from that.

So when I put out content on YouTube, those videos, if you go and look at the top videos for State of Tech, it’s all basically tutorial videos. There’s a few product reviews in there, but they’re all video tutorials on how to do stuff, and those videos have resulted in decent passive income over the years. It’s been growing and growing. The more that I focus on them, the more that those incomes grow, because I’m adding value.

State of Tech YouTube Popular Videos

If I don’t add value, and I’ve definitely put up some videos where the value is questionable, those videos don’t do well. They don’t end up getting shared. They don’t end up getting liked or commented on or whatever. So the search engines and YouTube’s search engine doesn’t recommend it to other people and so the video doesn’t get a lot of traction. When you’re thinking about what topic you should start tackling, think about something a little more niche that you find interesting, that you have maybe some more information on because maybe you’ve been involved in this space.

For example, if you’re a photographer and you’re thinking about how to grow a passive income revenue stream, be thinking about what you unique aspect of photography you could bring to the table and how you can teach other people about it. If you’re a hairstylist or a makeup artist, there are so many different things that you can do there, especially around the topic of products, because there are so many products out there. Really, what it’s going to come down to is you showing your techniques, teaching people how to use these products and then giving them affiliate links so that they can buy those products because they’re the ones that you’ve recommended. I will have more content on specific ideas for passive income in future blogs and videos.

Just think about what topic it is. Maybe you are more kind of a handy person, handyman around the house, and you just know how to work on things because you’ve always done it or you grew up knowing how to do those things. Maybe that’s an idea for a YouTube channel or for a blog, teaching people how to do stuff that a lot of people just aren’t being taught these days. I know for me, I like getting out and using tools and getting out from behind the computer and the camera and just reconnecting with the earth. So any chance that I get, I want to do that. I tend to consume content from people who are doing that because it’s inspiring to me. If you’re one of those people, you can create content around that.

If you look at what you can provide value by doing, that’s where you’re going to be able to grow your passive revenue stream. It doesn’t matter whether you’re blogging, YouTubing, creating an eBook, doing a course, whatever it is, all the different mechanisms for generating the passive income. Just be thinking about where you can add value. That’s where you’re going to find actual true growth and the ability to earn passive income from whatever different methods there are that are out there, which of course I’m going to talk about all of them and I have talked about some of them in the first video on this YouTube channel and on the blog.

I showed you my main passive income sources for the last year, and you can see all the numbers there. I posted screenshots so you’ll want to make sure to check those out as well. With that said, I think that as long as you go about it, trying to figure out where you can add value, and typically that’s going to come from somewhere that you have some additional knowledge, maybe a little bit more than the average person would have. All of us have that. All of us have something that we have been kind of a nerd in that area around, even if it’s not a nerdy thing. I like the phrase nerding out because there are a lot of things that I’ll nerd out on, even if they’re not typically like technology nerdy type of things.

If there’s something that you nerd out on, something that just really gets you excited and you have some additional knowledge in that area, that is a perfect example of something that would make for a good, passive revenue stream, if you can start creating content in that area. Make sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel because I’m talking about how to do this, how to do that, how to grow these things and how to come up with ideas, but I’m also going to be teaching how to create this content. How do you start blogging? How do you start creating videos? How do you do these things? That’s all part of the process and it’s all part of learning how to create passive income revenue streams.

Put in your email address so you can be notified when I put out new content. Because all of this stuff is going to help you get to the point where you are growing passive income revenue streams, having more control over your income and having to be less reliant, or maybe even completely free of the income that you’ve been just traditionally accustomed to, which is probably your job. With that said, thanks so much for checking out this video. Let me know what you think down in the comments section below and I’ll see you in the next one.

5 Things I Learned Building Passive Income Revenue Streams

Hey, it’s Jerad with Practically Passive, and here are five things that I learned building a passive income revenue stream. Now, over the last couple of years I’ve been working at building passive income revenue streams for myself, because having that extra income just was really nice. I had things that I already enjoy doing, and I took that and went online with it. Whether it be mobile technology or photography, there are things that I liked to mess with, or learn about or teach. I took that and put it online, and I’ve been growing passive income revenue streams ever since with those. And of course, I’ve been trying really hard this year, as my goal in 2018, is to completely replace my income with passive income revenue streams.

Now I am more than halfway through the year and though I am not necessarily on track right now to completely replace my income, I am on track to exceed the median household income in the United States. The median household income in the United States is $62,000. That’s the average household income if you average out everybody in the United States. Of course, there’s a lot that are lower and there’s a lot that are higher, but that’s the median or the medium amount of income that a household will receive.

For the first six months of this year from January to the end of June, my passive income was just over $32,000. With that milestone having been made, I want to just hit the ground running even harder for the second half of this year, to try and make sure that I achieved my goal. Of course, what I’m doing here with Practically Passive, is sharing all of that process with you. Now, originally I was going to wait until this year was over before I shared anything, but as I’ve said with many things, there’s no better time to start than now.

Five things that I’ve learned while building passive income revenue streams

1. Passive isn’t really Passive:

I’ve known this because I’ve been doing it for a while. But there are a lot of people out there saying, build a passive revenue stream, so that you can go and lounge all the time and not have to do any work, or whatever. Maybe you read the Four Hour Work Week, and though there is definitely work talked about in that book, you focused more on the idea of traveling the world and doing all the fun things. So passive income definitely takes work.

The reason that it’s called passive income isn’t that it’s completely passive. There’s really no such thing in the world that’s completely passive. Everything takes some sort of action. And I’ve definitely learned that through this process of building passive income revenue streams, it takes time and it takes work, there’s effort involved and it takes dedication. And without those things, you’re unable to build a passive revenue stream. And, of course, you want to get to the point where you can step away from time to time and utilize that income, it takes time to build it to that. I, at times, have thought that it should be easier than it is, but it’s really not. It is challenging.

It takes time and effort, and there are way more people making next to nothing off of passive income. Or maybe they had a successful week or two, or something like that. But to say that they’re still making income off of something that they did a year ago, a year later, there aren’t a whole lot of people that can say that. To have a consistent passive income that is on par with the median household income of the United States, is definitely something that not many people achieve. I’ve learned that passive income revenue streams are not truly passive, because nothing in this world is truly passive. Even the decision to be passive is a decision that takes action. So with that said, passive isn’t passive.

2. Persistence Wins

Whenever I have been persistent and consistent, I am winning. I am producing content, I’m staying on top of things. I’m staying plugged into the industries that I’ve chosen to play in, and produce content for. When I am being persistent and staying on top of all of that stuff, my income increases. Sometimes when I step away or I’m not so persistent, it kind of decreases a little bit, but there’s still passive income that keeps me going all the way through. There might be that month where I don’t have any time to work on anything. For example, in July of this year, I lost an employee that really handled editing most of my videos and a lot of my stuff that went out, that had to do with my passive income revenue streams.

And so, in July and pretty much all of August, I really haven’t had a whole lot of time to work on that stuff, because I’ve had to pick up the slack with other work for my business. When I get those deposits throughout the month for the different passive income revenue streams that I have, it’s like, okay, I didn’t really do anything this month. I’m getting paid for work that I did a while ago. Why am I not putting all of my effort into that, so that those numbers can continue to increase? Because doing the work that I had to do during July and August to pick up the extra slack, was work that was active income. Where I get paid only for the work that’s being done, and then the job’s done and I have to move onto the next one. So persistence definitely wins, and it’s easy to get sidetracked. Because life happens, and everything else around us definitely is pulling at us at all times.

3. Choose Niche Topics

I have had a struggle trying to keep things niche for a while. I end up going down the path of talking about a large variety of things. There are all kind topics within the same industry. Maybe they’re all photography related things, but they’re not niche within photography. For example, with different brands of cameras. I use mostly Sony cameras right now, and so I ended up talking a lot more about Sony cameras than I used to with Canon cameras back in the day when I was shooting Canon. So that changes my audience. My audience consists of people that are mostly interested in Sony cameras now. So I have to really decide if I should niche down and focus only on Sony cameras, which is going to alienate all the other people out there that might want photography related news and information and education, that are not Sony shooters.

State of Tech is mostly about mobile technology. And I’ve talked a lot about iPhones, Android, Tablets, Windows computers, and Apple Computers, so I’ve kind of bounced all around in there. There’s been a little bit of something for everybody, but there hasn’t been a lot of something for a niche audience. So I need to figure that out. What I’ve found out is that, when I do focus more on a specific niche in that industry, I tend to get better traction. Because people sign on to stick around for more information as long as it remains relevant to them.

Otherwise, I’m just creating information that is informative and it’s consumed, but then they don’t subscribe, or they don’t sign up for more. They don’t stick around to watch more. Because they came for a video on some android phone topic, and then the next video after that was an iPhone, and they don’t have an iPhone. So they leave, they go somewhere else. You have to keep that path of their interest, and it has to be niche topics. Because most people are not carrying around an android phone, and an iPhone, and a windows pc and a Mac laptop. I mean, it’s just too disjointed there. So, whenever I niched down and focus on more of a specific topic, I’ve seen a lot more action there and growth in my passive income.

4. The Revenue is in the Value

You could put out content until you’re blue in the face. If there’s no value, you’re not going to have any passive revenue growth from it. The reason that my videos do as well, considering I don’t have a huge subscriber base on my youtube channels … so for example on my youtube channels, I make a pretty decent amount on State of Tech and Ditch Auto, considering the fact that both channels barely have more than 30,000 subscribers. Most channels that have 30,000 subscribers are making maybe a couple hundred dollars a month if they’re lucky. But I’m making thousands of dollars a month, because my video views are high. And the links that are in the description of those videos, for things that add value to whatever it is that’s being talked about in that video get clicked.

State of Tech YouTube Popular Videos

So, there’s a lot of value that I’m adding in my videos there, and that’s why I’m able to earn as much as I am based on having smaller followings. So the revenue is in the value. If you’re not providing any value, nobody is going to stick around for more content. Nobody is going to click on any links. Without that kind of action happening on your content, Google, YouTube, whatever platform it is, is not going to recommend it. And people aren’t going to recommend it to each other either. So make sure that you’re adding value. If you’re not adding value, you’re wasting your own time. You’re also wasting other people’s time. But you’re really wasting your time as well, because we should only be putting out what we find we can add value to. That’s why I’ve waited as long as I have, to start this blog and this youtube channel around passive income.

I didn’t want to start it until I knew that I could really add value. Over the years I’ve felt that I’ve kind of tuned in my added value BS sensor, I guess you could call it. Like, if I’m not adding value, I can sniff that out pretty quick. It’s why I’ve had such a struggle with doing podcasting and stuff like that is that, unless I’m adding value with that podcast or that blog, I’m not going to do it. I might be able to get away with it for like a week or two, but just that filter kicks in and it says, don’t. There’s no value there, or there isn’t enough value there, so don’t do it. You’re just going to be more noise, and I don’t want to be noise. I want to be value.

5. Income from Passive Income Revenue Streams Feels Better

I mean it does feel good when I get a check from a client after completing work. It’s like, “Ah, okay, I got that work done, I got the check.” But it’s a means to an end. And that means that that job ended, and I have to find another one. I have to find another client to do work for, and it’s a constant chase. But when I get those deposits throughout the month, every month from YouTube/AdSense, from Amazon, from the different affiliate programs that I have going, that just feels good. Because that was work that I did a while back, and I’m still paid for it, so it feels good. It feels like I’m getting appreciated for my work, because there’s ongoing pay there. It’s lasting longer, its legacy money. I really like that, and it feels better.

So if I just can continue to remind myself of that, because it’s easier to do a job for a client and get paid, because you get probably a bigger payment. Or when you go to work at the end of the two weeks or whatever, you get that paycheck. You know that, that’s coming. You know what to expect, because what you signed on for when you started the work, is what you get paid for at the end of the work. But with passive income, it’s building something and it’s a little more volatile at first. You’re not 100% sure how long it’s going to take in order for you to reach some sort of level of passive income, that can change your life. And for me, it has taken a little bit of time. I haven’t focused on it really that hard, compared to how hard I could focus on it. But it’s taken a few years to get it to that point.

Now if I really put my head down and focused, I feel that I could build something that would replace my income in six months. But I have to run a business at the same time. Most of us are going to have to work. We have responsibilities, we have families, bills and all of that stuff that we have to take care of. We can’t just shut everything down and go work on our passive income revenue streams, we have responsibilities. So, when I get those deposits throughout the month from my different passive income revenue streams, it just feels good to receive those. It feels good, because that’s income from work that I did that’s continuing to pay me. It’s not one time and done. It’s continued passive income. It’s not active, it’s passive, and I like that and it feels good.

It’s Time For You To Get Started!

So those are the five things that I’ve learned over the years of building passive income revenue streams. If I could just commit to remembering those things daily, it definitely will alter my priorities for the day, and put them more towards working on my passive revenue streams. So let me know what you think down in the comment section below. If you’re watching this on YouTube, click that subscribe button so that you can be notified when I put out new videos. Make sure to put your email address in the subscribe box here so you can be notified when new content goes up, whether it’d be blogs or videos. I want to make sure that you’re getting notified. Because I’m putting out stuff every day during this month, and I want to make sure that you’re notified so that you can chime in, and share your thoughts. Be a part of this movement along with me, to gain more freedom in our income.

Thanks so much and I hope to see you back in the next one.

30-Day Passive Income Video/Blog Challenge

Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad with Practically Passive, and I wanted to talk to you today about my 30-day challenge to create content every single day for the next 30 days. Now, I uploaded my first video to the new YouTube channel and to my new blog and also posted it in a couple of other places online.

Now, why would I want to do that? First of all, this is a brand new property. Practicallypassive.com is a brand new domain name, a new YouTube channel, new social media, so part of the challenge is wanting to see if I could build something from nothing and what it would take to get it to a decent place within 30 days. What kind of work is that going to take?

I’ve been working at building my passive income revenue streams for a few years now and really been taking it more seriously over the last year, but what if you were to start from nothing with a new property? I don’t really have a plan to try and earn passive income from this passive income blog that I’m creating and from this content. My goal here is to give as much away as I can for free without having to charge. If not, potentially being able to give all of it away for free because I believe that all of us deserve some additional control in our life, especially when it comes to our income because our income does really control the majority of our lives if we allow it to.

The goal is to get as much of this content out for free if not all of it without having to charge for anything. But we’ll see. I’m going to be completely transparent along the way with everybody, talking and showcasing as much as I can about what I’m doing so that way you know what it takes to actually become profitable to build a passive income revenue stream. Those are the things that I want to teach and get across in all of this content that I’m putting out. Unlike most people in this space, I have passive income revenue streams already, so I don’t have to rely on selling things to you to make money.

The 30-day challenge is to give it a good kickstart, a good jumpstart to building that content, to having a good library of information that’s there. I have a lot of stuff that I’ve been doing and learning about over the last several years, and I feel that I have 30 days worth of content that I could put out there, and with that 30 days of content, it will, of course, help grow this new website and hopefully help you get started as well. I want to see how hard it is to actually rank in Google page one for a couple of these blogs. I know it’s going to be really hard for me to rank for “passive income” as a search term, but perhaps maybe some of the blogs that I end up publishing, some of the content I might end up being able to rank on page one.

This is a challenge for me. I want to see if I can achieve that in 30 days because if I can achieve it while doing all of the other things that I’m doing, then I know all of you can as well. All of this is in the name of learning, it’s in the name of sharing and putting out content so that we can all grow and learn from each other. This is a learning experience for me as well because even when I’m sharing and offering something to other people, I want to be learning at the same time. If I’m not learning in the process, then it doesn’t make sense to me. It doesn’t add value to anybody if there isn’t learning going on that goes both directions.

At the end of the 30 days, I’ll be measuring the traffic that the websites received, email signups for people that want to be notified when I put out new content, YouTube video views, and subscriptions. I’ll probably try and do a little bit of stuff on social media, but I don’t know how much time I’m going to have to put into that because social media definitely can take a lot more time, than doing what I’m already doing.

I’m definitely going to attempt to try and rank on page one for a couple of things. I don’t know if that’s going to be possible. I know it’s very challenging. Based on my SEO experience I know that some of the things that matter to Google search are how long a website has been around. It also is inbound links coming from other websites. There’s authority, there’s a lot of different things that are important for the search engines to rank. I’m going to do everything that I possibly can because if I can attempt and achieve ranking, relatively decent ranking in Google search for something like passive income, not passive income itself, but some aspects of passive income, then that’s another thing that I’m able to help all of you as you go and try to build your own passive revenue streams is how to rank in Google search because people are searching for problems that they need answers to, and we need our websites to show up.

You’re going to be solving problems, answering questions, reviewing, doing all these different things, and you need the Google to show the people. That’s where ranking comes into play.

I’m not selling anything here, as I said. This is all free content. I’m going to do my best to make everything that I put out here free. I don’t want to charge for anything if I dot have to. I’m building my passive income streams through my other channels, which I am showing all of you as examples here. My goal is to give as much away of this as I can for free.

Only when I feel like I have something groundbreaking that is just not available anywhere else, something that is foolproof and proven to work, then I might put together a course or something like that, but there’s a lot of people out there shouting, “How to make $4,000 this month,” “How to do this,” “How to do that,” and they make it sound like it’s something that you can achieve over night, and it really isn’t. That’s why I want to put out as much as I can for free so that you can see that I’m willing to put in the work just as you will need to put in the work to build passive income streams as well.

This challenge is just as much of a challenge for myself because I have a lot of things that I want to achieve here, but also a challenge to give back because, as I’ve said many times on the Internet through blogs and other videos and stuff is that I learned everything that I have learned, or every bit of information that’ve put to work has been learned through experience. That experience has either come by trial and error, trying something for the first time by myself without any additional information, or from consuming information online and learning how to do it, and then going and doing it myself.

There’s a lot of information that I’ve consumed out there, and I’m constantly wanting to be putting information back to fill the gaps and to add to what I’ve already taken because that’s what the Internet is. It’s a place where we give and we receive, and if I can keep giving, I’m going to keep giving as long as possible.

I hope that you find this interesting. If you do and you want to follow along, make sure to go over to put in your email address in the subscribe box. I will be sending out updates and letting you know the progress along the way. You’ll get my blogs that I’m putting out, the videos that I’m putting out. That way, you don’t have to come back and check all the time and see what’s new. You can just get notified and see if what I’m posting is interesting, and then you can check it out. Definitely go and do that!

On YouTube, make sure to click that Subscribe button because subscribing to the channel here on YouTube will get you notified when I put out new videos. There are also some goals that I have for YouTube, which are going to require subscriptions and watch time. Those are two metrics that I want to achieve within the first 30 days is a thousand subscribers to the YouTube channel and 4,000 watch hours.

Those are two requirements to monetize your YouTube channel with ads. YouTube’s going to show ads regardless on a video, and I want to be compensated for those, like my other channels on YouTube have monetization and an ad will play unless you have YouTube Premium, which then an ad won’t play. But I want to get to that level and be able to showcase the fact that I was able to attain that within 30 days because most people when YouTube announced those new rules at the beginning of 2018 were like, “It’s going to be impossible monetize. We’re never going to be able to create and get paid on YouTube,” because a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watch hours is an impossible amount to reach.

It takes a lot of time, and so my goal is to try and reach that within 30 days. I’m going to need your help by clicking that Subscribe button and making sure to watch through the videos all the way so all those minutes count towards the 4,000 hours of watch time that I need by the end of the month.

It sounds like a tall order, but they’re goals that I’m setting, and I’m dead set to achieve them within the next 30 days. I’ll be sure to make a video on the 30th day showcasing what’s happened, whether I’m at that goal or didn’t, what I could’ve done better, and how I can improve moving forward. Thanks so much for checking out this blog.

June 2018 Passive Income Report

Welcome to my Passive Income report for June 2018.

June and July are turning out to be a testament to why passive income revenue streams are so important to continue to pour into. Most of my passive income comes from online content I produce on YouTube. If it was not for the YouTube videos, I would not be earning ad revenue from Google and nobody would be clicking on Amazon Affiliate links to products I showcase. I was not able to get much content out during the month of June. My company Hill Media Group had an influx of new business and closing out of business that came in during the prior months. I just didn’t have the time to pour much into it. I did keep responding to comments and communicating with those who were interacting with my content.

During June, Instagram announced IGTV, which is their competitor with YouTube. I started creating some content for that platform, but there is no built-in monetization offered for creators on Instagram or IGTV so I am working on ideas while trying to put out a steady stream of content to yet another platform.

Diversifying is important when it comes to growing Passive Income revenue streams. Though sales were down with Amazon Affiliates a few of the affiliate programs I set up with other companies started to show some movement.

June was pretty steady compared to last month, which is good. Being that I did not put in a lot of effort in June, it shows that passive income can continue to provide an income even when you have to take your foot off the throttle for a while. July is going to be just like that as well.

Summer was slow the last few years with my other ventures which led me to believe this year would be the same. It has not been the same. People are powering right through summer and that has been good for Hill Media Group but not so good for my availability to work on my passive income growth.

Now that June has come to a close I will be doing a six-month wrap up to look back over the last six months to discuss what has worked and what has not. It has been an interesting journey so far and I look forward to sharing more of that with you.

Later this year I will bottle up everything I learned growing my Passive Income (Side Income) from a few hundred dollars to what it is now in under a years time. People ask me about these monthly Passive Income Reports all of the time. I know there is a huge need for education on building passive income streams from someone who actually has proof they are doing it.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

June 2018 Side Income Total – $4,766.99 (+1.45%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $1,650.50 (+19.75%) Subscribers: 33,026 (+4.62%) Watch Time: 1,599,428 Minutes (+6.07%)
    With not much new in technology during June, I decided to film a few videos on how tech has aged over the last 6 months and a couple of “Reasons” videos which seemed to perform well. With 1.5 million minutes consumed each month, we should be growing at a subscriber rate greater than 5%. I have a few campaigns I want to run to help with subscriber growth but I need time to commit to them.
  • Ditch Auto – $554.80 (+6.1%) Subscribers: 28,565 (+4.59%) Watch Time: 898,475 Minutes (-0.65%)
    I didn’t get any new videos live in June on this channel. I have a lot planned, and filmed two, but was unable to get them ready to post. There has been growth in the affiliate program I brought on. I am going to try to bring on a few more affiliate programs for products I believe in.
  • Jerad Hill – $46.97 (-18.51%) Subscribers: 5,320 (+0.34%) Watch Time: 35,819 Minutes (-10.46%)
    I really don’t know what to do here. No wonder what I do here, YouTube holds the videos back. I am starting to believe that this channel is a lost cause. There is no way to know if YouTube has a problem with it. I produced a video on how to edit video for IGTV, which was a hot-button topic. The blog on the same topic is ranking on the first page of Google, the video on YouTube is dead in the water.
  • AltCast – I will be removing AltCast from my report until I decide what I am going to do with this channel. Though I am only 120 watch hours away from monetization, I have not uploaded any videos to this channel in months. I have considered discussing Cryptocurrency news, but there are so many others covering this topic. The original idea of discussing alternative investment methods still excites me, but I am not as focused on my investing as I am on my Passive Income journey right now. Perhaps this channel will make a comeback in the future.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $424.59 (-47.24%)
    With summer in full swing, people are using their purchases from last month which led to a dip this month. Seeing a boost in certain tutorial style videos rather than review style videos confirms that people are wanting to learn how to use what they purchased rather than research their next purchase. This income category typically slows during the summer and will pick back up around back to school time. I have some ideas in the mix for back to school that I hope to be able to pull off.
    Want to show me some love on Amazon? Use this link the next time you go to purchase something on Amazon.

Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense links/display – $43.55 (+3.44%)
    As I mentioned last month, I have been publishing more content on the two sites I monetize with Adsense. This shows up in the numbers. Though it is only $43, that also represents continued growth in traffic to these websites. In order for Adsense revenue to increase, traffic to the sites had to increase as well. I am glad to see some forward momentum after how the last several months have been.
    Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.NetDitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

  • Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $49.00 (-0%)
    The Mining Rig Course is definitely not producing like it did for the first three months of this year. On this site alone, that course produced just over $3,400 in income. Not too bad, but I was hoping for more. I should have more aggressively marketed that course while the interest in mining was still high.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $49.58 (-69.61%)
    Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has bottomed out here on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,400 on Udemy.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1,948.00 (+15.88%)
    Over the last few months, I have started to build content for a few small affiliate programs that will eventually become their own category in this income report. My videos on Peak Design Camera Bags have been driving a lot of sales and that has boosted growth in this category. The affiliate programs are for products I have reviewed or produced other content for. In the next few months, I will break apart this category a bit to further explain what it is made up of.

Investments

I didn’t get to touch my investments this month. My stock holdings in the Robinhood app grew a bit but my cryptocurrency holdings decreased a bit after last months rebound. Nobody knows where Crypto is going. I know it is not going away, but it’s hard to tell where it will go in regards to value over the following months. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

  • Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $10,625.82 (+2.14%)
    Continuing to see good growth here. I did not put any money in this month so the improvement here is all market growth. Hopefully next month I can throw in an extra $500-$1,000 to purchase more stock. There were a few more stocks that bottomed out in early June that I wish I had the extra money to buy as they saw a solid rebound in June. I need to make sure I have money set aside for opportunities I see like this.
  • Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $5,151.71 (-14.61%)
    In May I was happy to see things rebound a bit, but June showed a decent loss. I did sell off some of the GPUs from one of my Ethereum Mining Rigs and stopped mining ZCash altogether. I am continuing to mine with 375mh/s of power going to Ethereum.
    If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

June was a good month. All of these revenue streams continue to grow organically, which is great. Things are changing in my other businesses as well which will be interesting. Creating video content takes a lot of work and I just don’t have as many hours as I would like to work on content. July will be an interesting month as we see how the lack of new content production affects my passive income bottom line.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

June 2018 Passive Income Report June 2018 Passive Income Report

How to Film & Edit Video for IGTV

IGTV is the latest long-form video platform to come out. IGTV or Instagram TV allows users to upload 15 seconds to 10 minute long videos, in Portrait Crop. That means that video is vertical rather than landscape which has been the standard for video. Instagrammers are complaining about having to film extra video just to make content for IGTV but I am here to say that it’s not really that hard.

I have a simple way to edit your videos for IGTV that DOES NOT require you to shoot two versions of your footage. Check out my tutorial on how to film and edit video for IGTV using Adobe Premiere Pro CC and make sure to head over to Instagram and follow me to see more IGTV content.

Gear I Used to Make This Video:
My Vlog Camera – http://amzn.to/2FEchU5
Main Camera – http://amzn.to/2GELnNb
Main Cam Lens – http://amzn.to/2EucObH
Vlog Cam Lens – http://amzn.to/2E8fAFW
4K Digital Recorder – http://amzn.to/2DX5gNS
Mic – http://amzn.to/2GBAgoa
Camera Backpack – http://amzn.to/2EAoUQQ
Action Camera – http://amzn.to/2EyWA18

Video Transcription:

Hey, what’s up? It’s Jerad, and I wanted to talk today about how to shoot and edit video for IGTV. That’s Instagram’s new, longer form video platform that allows most of us to upload between 15 second and 10 or 15-minute videos, depending on who you ask, and whose account you’re looking at. And then for those with more popular accounts, they can get up to 60 minute long videos.

So a lot of people have been talking about how to shoot for that, or whatnot. But for me, I do a lot of stuff on YouTube, and I wanna do a lot of stuff on Instagram TV, and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to go and shoot two whole versions of a video. I’ve definitely tried that, and it makes for a lot longer editing process. Sometimes videos need to be longer than 10 minutes or 15 minutes. If I had one of those accounts that was accepting up to 60-minute videos, that might be cool, because then I wouldn’t have to worry about shooting different versions. But I think what’s important is that on IGTV, we’re used to … Well, on Instagram in general, we’re used to moving a little bit faster through content, and so maybe shorter form content that is 10 to 15 minutes or less is good, because of the attention span, and how fast we wanna move through Instagram. Do you really picture yourself watching an hour long video on Instagram? I think it would have to be from somebody who was a more popular influencer or at least, maybe a celebrity or something like that to make you wanna watch through that long a video.

So I wanted to talk, anyways, about how to shoot and edit video for that platform. Now, I’ve been kinda playin’ around with different camera setups. This is a Sony a7 III here, and I have it kind of set up for vertical shooting. This isn’t the best handle for it. I just kinda did this temporarily. I’ve messed around with the a6500. I’m kinda showing you a couple of photos here of some vertical video formats that I’ve kinda been messing with. But I’ve decided I don’t necessarily think it’s the best option to shoot vertically like this, to shoot everything vertical. IGTV, the quality of the video that they’re wanting you to upload is not 4K, it’s actually pretty close to HD. And so, considering the actual size of the image that they’re wanting you to upload, you might as well shoot 4K and then just crop in and get tighter in on your shot.

That’s essentially what I’ve been doing so far. I’m filming this in the standard format, 4K. Camera isn’t flipped or anything like that. So I’ve got all this extra room out here on the sides and so the only thing I have to focus on is just making sure that either the main action stays centered, or that I’m find with doing a little bit of post-production editing. So now, when I’m deciding whether or not I wanna shoot something and then put it up on YouTube, and then maybe put some of it over on IGTV or maybe a version of both, I’m essentially going to shoot like I’m gonna be shooting for YouTube. I’m just going to try to keep the action centered in the frame so that way, I can crop.

So to get the action in the center of the screen, you can also do some key framing and kinda move the video around within the constraints of the portrait view. And I did that in the first video that I uploaded to my personal IGTV. I did kind of this Father’s Day weekend recap, because we did a bunch of stuff on Father’s Day, and I had a couple of proud dad moments that weekend.

The first video that I uploaded, there has some shots from an obstacle course run that my kids did, and I had to kinda key frame a little bit and move that video around. You almost can’t even tell that I did it, because there was so much camera movement to begin with. So that’s essentially what I did there to get the action centered into that smaller, just that portrait. Because essentially, if any action was happening on the outer sides of the screen, you wouldn’t be able to see it. So just like I’m doing here, I’m filming, I’m in the center of the screen. I’m looking directly into the camera, which is what I would be doing if I was wanting to do a IGTV video. I typically would be talking to the person that is holding their phone. And so in that instance, it’s gonna be easy for me to edit that down.

So when I’m shooting B roll, any shots that I’m gonna shoot to kind of add to this video to make it more interesting that I’m gonna edit into the shot, I might consider keeping that action in one side of the camera frame. So whether I center that, which means I’m not gonna have to do anything other than just drop the video in, or if I keep it over maybe on the right third or the left third, then all I have to do is slide the video over, and I’m gonna show you exactly how I do that in post production. And you can film in 4K. This camera, most of the cameras, actually all the cameras that I use film in 4K and I’ll make sure to list those down in the description below on YouTube and if you’re watching this on IGTV, there’s a short link down below that you can go to to see my list of stuff. This is the equipment that I use, and I haven’t had to change a thing. I’ve just had to change my mindset in how I actually film, keeping in mind that now I’m not just trying to make it look good in a standard kind of landscape wider view, I also have to think about how that’s gonna look in portrait view, when somebody’s watching it on IGTV.

So let’s jump over to Premiere Pro. I’m gonna show you how my I have my video set up. We’re actually gonna be editing this video that we’re talking about. So the first half of the video you’re gonna get to see how I edited that and Premiere Pro so that I can have my YouTube version and my IGTV version, and that means doing all the edits only once. I’m not creating two separate timelines. Essentially, I am, but I’m not editing everything into two separate timelines. I’m only having to do any titles or any text onto screen once. I just have it all set up so that we only have to do the work once, yet we’re getting a landscape version of the video and a portrait version of the video. So let’s head over to Premiere Pro and take a look at how that’s done.

All right, so we have our project here, and I’ve basically gotten as much done as I can editing for YouTube. So you can see here, we’ve got our video. I’ve got some images that I’ve kinda put in here. I’ve got a couple of titles that I’ve put in. And so the video’s pretty much done. This section here in the middle is where we’re gonna put what you’re watching right now. And it’s gonna require a little bit of trickery to get all of the footage that you’re looking at now to actually look good on IGTV, but the main thing here is to show you how this footage that you’re looking at now can be cropped in easily.

So we have our sequence that you’re looking at right now. We’re gonna go head and create a second sequence by just going to sequence, and you can see I already have a preset here, called Portrait 4K UHD, but I can go into settings and show you exactly what I’m going to need to create. We’re gonna wanna choose custom. We’re going to want our vertical to be 2160. So this is if you’re shooting 4K, of course. If you’re not shooting 4K, you’re gonna need to figure out how to get to whatever your resolution is, just crop down. So I’m gonna type in 1215, and you can see that instead of having 16 by 9, I now have 9 by 16 footage. So essentially, this is the same. It’s gonna be the same height as the 4K footage originally was, it’s just gonna be a lot narrower, of course. We wanna make sure we choose square pixels. If you don’t have square pixels chosen, your ratio here isn’t gonna look right. And then everything else, you can just kinda leave default. And like I said at the beginning, saving it as a preset’s gonna save you a little bit of time. So I’ll go ahead and title this How to Film Edit for IGTV Portrait. Hit OK, and you can see here, now we have this portrait mode, black sequence ready to go.

Now the beautiful thing about this editor, is I can simply drag the sequence … This is the other sequence that we’ve already edited. I’ll just drag it and drop it right here onto the timeline. I’m gonna go ahead and keep existing settings. I don’t wanna change them. And so now I have basically a whole video ready to go. The only thing is you can see a few things are a little wider than they need to be, as far as the text goes. That’s something that I can adjust later. And then, let’s scroll to … Oh, here’s where we have the images. Those images, because of how I dropped them in, those images look perfect. Remember here, I basically cropped them center and then put a blurry version, so the images stacked. So let me show you exactly what this looks like. I’ll turn this off. So you can see, this is just a blurry version of the image maxed out at 250% exactly. And then on top of that, I put another version of the image. And you could even get creative here and actually edit this in Photoshop and drag it in if you wanted to. There’s a lot of cool ways that you can make that look even better. I just did it pretty quick, just so that we can see those images in there quickly. Obviously this is something I’m gonna have to resize, but …

And doing it this way, let’s go to this link. That’s a prime example. Let’s go to that link that I wanted to display there. So here’s that link. Obviously, this is too wide. It’s cut off, nobody’s gonna be able to see that link. I can resize this. So let’s just go ahead and let’s take that down to say, 80%, and then we’ll go and view it here. Look, it automatically adjusted it here. So the reason that that happened is because this timeline here, essentially was just put right here. So that’s great. That timeline is right there, and I have the ability to edit it in one place, and have it automatically update in the other location. So when I go and resize the titles at the beginning … So this title obviously is a little too wide for the IGTV version, or the portrait version, as we can see here, it’s a little bit cut off. This one’s gonna be a little wide, as well. I can just resize those and make them fit. Now, that’s gonna make the text a little small, maybe for the YouTube crop, or the landscape crop, but that’s okay. We’re just focusing here on making this as simple as possible.

Another thing that you can do is, we’ll just go ahead and create another version of the sequence that we already had. So I’m gonna go ahead and make that 2160 by 1215. Make sure that’s 9 by 16. Hit OK. So we have that new sequence. I can also just copy and paste everything, so I’m gonna hit command or control A, and then command or control C to copy it to my clipboard. And then I can come over here and paste it all in and everything is right in, and I have a duplicate of my timeline. So the only problem here … And see, it even actually resized it. So maybe this is a better option. The only problem is that this is not dynamically linked, so if I need to go back and make some changes to my original version, I’m now gonna have to go back and make those same changes here.

So this is just another way of doing it. You can either do it the dynamically linked way, and then maybe change your assets, the additional assets that need to be sized appropriately. Or, you can just copy and paste it into a whole nother … And you see the images look good, actually. This source URL is gonna be really tiny, so we’re gonna need to go back to that and increase its size to fit. So definitely, there’s pros and cons to both ways. But I wanted to show you that that’s a pretty simple way to do this. And then when you go to render out …

So this is another thing you gotta pay attention to. When you go to render out your IGTV version, so I’m gonna make sure that my timeline is selected. I’m gonna hit command or control M, depending on whether you’re on Mac or PC. You’re not gonna wanna go and change the render out settings to any of these presets, because it’s gonna override your portrait settings. Notice that if I go and choose YouTube 4K, it’s gonna mess things up. It’s gonna basically put my portrait video in the middle. You wouldn’t be able to upload this to Instagram, their IGTV without having issues. So you’re gonna wanna make sure and just leave it on match source high bit rate. I’ve got a 660 MB file here. I can then export this, and this’ll be ready to go. I can upload it directly to IGTV through the app, or through the web interface.

Alright, so I hope this video helped with figuring out what the best way is for you to create an edit content for both YouTube and Instagram TV, or IGTV. It is cool to build fun setups like this with cameras that are in portrait mode, and displays that are in portrait mode and all that stuff, it’s definitely impressive. But I’ve tried filming this way, and it’s very challenging, especially if you’re gonna be vlogging or something like that, to hold the camera when you don’t have that extra real estate for camera sway to film that way. So I highly recommend taking advantage of the fact that 4K video is more than enough footage, as far as the resolution goes for IGTV. So shoot all of your stuff in landscape, and then just crop for portrait. That’s the best advice I could give you.

So I’d appreciate a follow on IGTV or a subscribe on YouTube. You can check out some of my other content. My goal here is to help us all grow and get better at creating our content, at running our businesses, at optimizing our lives, and that’s kind of the variety of content that I’m putting up here on this channel. So make sure to follow along if you’d like. I look forward to seeing you in the next video, and take care.

How to Clear Your Mind of Negative Thoughts – 7 Tips!

Without constant monitoring, I end up with negative thoughts that slow me down. These negative thoughts can be tied to a variety of things, but if unchecked, they lead to procrastination, depression, anxiety, and generally ineffective behavior.

To keep motivated, I have had to come up with a variety of methods to keep moving. I recognize that I must deal with the negative thoughts, but when I need to be effective, I put some of these things into practice.

I originally recorded this as a video but transcribed and edited it into an article.

Hey what’s up, it’s Jerad. Today I wanted to start out the week by talking to you about negative thoughts and how to get rid of them. I’ve got seven tips on how to get rid of negative thoughts. Now, I suffer from probably various forms of depression and anxiety, I think I’ve battled with that for a long time and I’ve found ways naturally to cope with it and deal with it. Then, I’ve also found myself deep in the trenches and not necessarily understanding or knowing why I’m there.

For a lot of years, I think I’ve dealt with fears. One of my biggest fears going in through my twenties and leading into my thirties was the fact that I didn’t get a college education. Now I’d been working for myself for a long time, I’d been doing things for a long time on my own and had various forms of success but I still felt like that college education was that fall back that I knew that companies hired people just because they had a Bachelor’s. It didn’t even matter if I had half a cell working in their brain, they would hire them because they’d managed to get through college, so I had feared there and I dealt with those for a long time.

Anxieties and different things had just come up over the years. I think these days we have a lot to measure up to. We’ve got more than just magazines on the rack like it was when I was a kid. We have social media and more television shows, more things than ever that are basically telling us this is what life looks like, this is what being happy looks like, and if we can’t measure up to those then it’s just a bummer and it’s kind of depressing.

Negative thoughts can definitely creep in and they can mess with you and so I found that I could really get into a funk easily and that can last an entire day. Then, it ruins my day and that just leads into another day and before you know it I’ve had a week that isn’t as productive as it could have been and I’m not as effective as a husband to my wife, I’m not as effective as a dad to my kids, a friend, and anything else so getting rid of thoughts is the key to it.

Here are seven things that I’ve figured out and as long as I can remember these things and implement them on a day-to-day I tend to have a great day.

1. Change Your Posture

Recognize and change my posture. I notice that a lot of times I’m sitting, I’m working, I’m on the computer or whatnot and my posture just starts to get really horrible. That’s kind of a telltale sign that I just have negativity going on.

Now, I can definitely relax and you can slouch and just kind of chill, there’s nothing wrong with that but what often happens is that I will be just slouching. Maybe I have to write an email I didn’t want to write or respond to something that put out a fire or something like that and I just find myself just getting into this funky position in my chair and before you know it it’s affected me in more than one way.

I have to remind myself just to sit up straight and fix my posture, keep my back straight, not get too comfortable in the chair to the point where I’m slouching or whatnot. I want to be comfortable but I don’t want to get myself into a position where my body just feels achy because it’s been sitting and contorted in some way for so long in the chair so changing my posture is definitely huge.

2. Be More Mindful

Starting my day being mindful from the beginning. I think that if we start our days attached to whatever tasks and things, we have to achieve an email, we focus more on other things rather than ourselves, we’re starting the day off the wrong way. We need to start our day off mindful and that means making a list. I use Evernote and I make a list every single day of these different things including tasks and things that I have on my schedule for the day.

These things include gratitude, affirmation, what would make today great, and I set goals. I write all these things down every single day and on the days that I don’t do that or if I let too many days go by that I don’t do that then it starts to affect me. Some might say, “Oh, it’s kind of weird to write down affirmations about me every single day, it seems kind of weird,” maybe a little … It’s just odd to write down, “I am blah-blah-blah,” every day but those are things that I need to do because I need to remind myself.

Even if it’s something as simple as reminding myself that I’m a good dad or reminding myself that I’m good at a specific task or something that I’m good at, that’s just starting off with one additional positive thing for the day so write those things down.

3. Be More Creative

We don’t get creative enough and we don’t create in different ways. For example, I’m not much of an artist with a pen. I see people drawing and creating art and I’m just in awe. One of my cousins, his kid, his daughter is amazing, I didn’t even know this about her because I hadn’t seen her in forever. She’s just sitting there drawing and just is amazing at it and I thought, “Wow, it’s creative outlet is something that I don’t have.

Getting creating, having that outlet, and not necessarily having to be amazing at it but just having some sort of an outlet that creativity just flows out of us when we let it and it definitely takes negativity with it. Whether you can write, draw, reorganize things, whatever it is you can get creative in so many different ways. I’m not the best writer but I do like to write sometimes. I definitely am not any good at drawing and that’s something that I probably need to try and get better at because even if I’m not drawing anything too good it’s still just a good creative outlet.

4. Be More Active

This one used to be huge for me and I’ve been horrible at it since having kids. That’s going and working out, going and running, riding my bike, just being more active. I’ve found that my body just, and maybe it’s because I’m just a bigger guy, I don’t know, but my body just closes in on itself and if I don’t work out and stay active … I don’t know, I just feel like my body just wants to pull itself together into a little knot and then that’s it. Being active is a must for me, I have to be active. When I’m not I could feel it physically, and when I could feel it physically I could feel it mentally and emotionally as well.

5. Create a workflow.

Now, this one’s been huge for me and this is probably a whole video in and of itself but I’m going to briefly explain what a workflow is. Now in my line of work, a workflow is a process that I take from start to finish completing a task. I’ve found that when I’m further into a negative thought or I’ve found that maybe an hour has gone by and I’ve just been in this negative thought I need to initiate a workflow.

Here’s an example of one. It’s getting up, stretching, walking around, taking a drink of water, closing my eyes for around 60 seconds, and then sitting back down. Initiating that workflow interrupts whatever was going on and allows me to change things for a few minutes. Then I can go and sit back down and get back to work or relax or be there for my wife or my kids or whatever the situation is around me. Usually, it has something to do with being at work so workflows are great because I can just initiate them, do whatever it is for a minute or two, sit back down, and then be good.

6. Take a Timeout

Sometimes as adults we need a timeout. I was talking with one of my other cousins about this, this weekend, about parenting. Sometimes we have to give ourselves a timeout. Sometimes our kids need a timeout to correct behavior or to calm down or something like that. A timeout definitely is something that as adults we don’t give ourselves that often. We might feel like we give ourselves timeouts because maybe we binge watch Netflix for a few hours or something like that or have a glass of wine and just sit and read but we really, truly need timeouts. Timeout just to chill and initiate one of those workflows or be creative.

7. Leave

Sometimes you just flat out need to leave. If you can’t shake the issue, whatever it is, sometimes for me it’s shame, things that you’ve done in the past, things that have happened in the past that were out of your control, that you didn’t get to correct or fix. Sometimes you just need to get up and leave and change the atmosphere altogether. Now at work that might be a little tougher so that’s why I wanted to give you six things that you could actually do before seven, which is to get up and leave, but sometimes you just have to get up and leave and change things.

Conclusion

In closing, not all negative thoughts are bad. We have to be introspective from time to time just to remain normal and healthy so when you have those feelings of guilt, anxiety, shame, jealousy, temptation, fear, those are things that you do need to deal with eventually. You can’t just push them away forever or something is going to happen. I do recommend that you find somebody to help you with your thoughts, especially if it’s an ongoing issue for you if it’s something that you think is chronic you definitely want to get that dealt with.

That’s going to do it, thanks so much for reading. I know it was kind of fast, I went through a lot of things quickly. I may break these things down a little bit more but I’d love for you to chime in in the comment section below. Let me know your thoughts, let me know what works for you and let’s just do life together and help each other get through some of those times that definitely keep us away from achieving the things that we want to achieve. That’s going to do it for today, we’ll see you next time.

May 2018 Passive Income Report

Welcome to my Passive Income report for May 2018. I am excited to report growth in May and am looking forward to June. May was a busy month personally, so I didn’t get to spend as much time on growing passive income streams as I would like, but it is nice to see that growth can still happen if I continue to produce more content that has value.

I am realizing that I need to increase the production value of my YouTube videos. The content is great, but the production value is just lazy. Other creators are stepping up their production quite a bit. People are expecting more out of the videos they watch. I need to focus more on producing an all around great video rather than just trying to get something out in a timely manner.

Traffic to my websites saw a boost in May, but I need to be more consistent with creating content there as well. Having videos transcribed has helped quite a bit with search engine ranking but a direct transcription of a video is not providing the best experience for those who land on this written content. I need to take my videos and turn them into a well-organized article with quality photography when necessary.

It’s hard to do all things well. That is why most people focus on only doing one or two things to the best of their ability. I have never been that way. I want to do all things and do them to the best of my ability, but I know that to be near impossible. I give myself eight hours each day to work and I don’t work weekends. I either need more manpower or I need to scale back in a few areas. I guess I have some thinking to do over the next few weeks.

Going into June, I have a lot on my calendar in regards to family time. We have something scheduled each weekend through the end of summer with family events and other short trips scattered throughout June and July. It is going to be hard to focus on Passive Income Growth so I will take time when I can find it to create. Summer is a prime example of why I am doing this. I will have extra income in June and July because I have done this work. Passive Income is providing more freedom for me this year than I had last year, and that was the goal. I am getting closer to replacing my families income needs and feel 100% confident that I will be able to pull that off well before the end of this year.

Later this year I will bottle up everything I learned growing my Passive Income (Side Income) from a few hundred dollars to what it is now in under a years time. People ask me about these monthly Passive Income Reports all of the time. I know there is a huge need for education on building passive income streams from someone who actually has proof they are doing it.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

May 2018 Side Income Total – $4,698.92 (+17.33%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $1,378.28 (+39.55%) Subscribers: 31,567 (+5.57%) Watch Time: 1,507,912 Minutes (+28.93%)
    We have released a lot of videos over the last few months and the numbers are reflecting that. We broke through the 30,000 subscriber mark as well. This is a huge milestone and has given me a fierce desire to grow this channel. I still feel that I need to narrow down the topics a bit to appeal more to a specific audience. With over 1.5 million minutes consumed each month, we should be growing at a subscriber rate greater than 5%.
  • Ditch Auto – $522.90 (+24.78%) Subscribers: 27,311 (+5.30%) Watch Time: 904,417 Minutes (+11.14%)
    I was able to get a few new videos live this month. I am looking more into affiliate programs in the photography space to grow revenues and seek out new opportunities. A video I did for a Peak Designs Camera Bag brought in over $175 in affiliate commission. Over the next few months, I am going to try to bring on a few more affiliate programs for products I believe in.
  • Jerad Hill – $57.64 (+27.72%) Subscribers: 5302 (+0.34%) Watch Time: 40,005 Minutes (+7.53%)
    I didn’t upload as much in May to this channel as I have in the previous few months, but the transcriptions of the videos I have been posting have been helping grow traffic to my blog, which has these videos embedded. My income reports have also been getting talked about a bit which has resulted in more views and subscribers. Looking forward to growing this channel as I would love to catch up to State of Tech and Ditch Auto.
  • AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1,718 (+3.99%) Watch Time: 34,106 Minutes (+4.51%)
    AltCast is a new channel started in January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. I am not sure what I want to do with this channel. I have not been doing much with Cryptocurrency Mining over the last few months other than just making sure my mining rigs continue to run. I sold off some of the hardware so I only have two rigs left. I think I am going to need to pivot and come up with another topic for this channel in order to keep moving forward with it.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $804.83 (-4.28%)
    This last month I have been publishing a lot of informational content rather than product reviews which is where most of my Amazon revenue comes from. I need to start doing a better job representing products in my videos without the video having to be a review for an exact product.
    Want to show me some love on Amazon? Use this link the next time you go to purchase something on Amazon.

Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense links/display – $42.10 (+42.9%)
    As I mentioned last month, I have been publishing more content on the two sites I monetize with Adsense. This shows up in the numbers. Though it is only $42, that also represents a huge bump in traffic to these websites. In order for adsense revenue to almost double, traffic to the site had to almost double. I am glad to see some forward momentum after how the last several months have been.
    Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.NetDitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

  • Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $49.00 (-50%)
    The Mining Rig Course is definitely not producing like it did for the first three months of this year. On this site alone, that course produced just over $3,300 in income. Not too bad, but I was hoping for more. I should have more aggressively marketed that course while the interest in mining was still high.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $163.17 (+32.97%)
    Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has bottomed out here on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,300 on Udemy.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1,681.00 (+14.98%)
    Over the last few months, I have started to build content for a few small affiliate programs that will eventually become their own category in this income report. The affiliate programs are for products I have reviewed or produced other content for. In the next few months, I will break apart this category a bit to further explain what it is made up of.

Investments

I didn’t touch my investments this month. My stock holdings in the Robinhood app grew at a decent rate but my cryptocurrency holdings decreased a bit after last months rebound. Nobody knows where Crypto is going. I know it is not going away, but it’s hard to tell where it will go in regards to value over the following months. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

  • Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $10,402.92 (+13.24%)
    Continuing to see good growth here. I did not put any money in this month so the improvement here is all market growth. Hopefully next month I can throw in an extra $500-$1,000 to purchase more stock. There were a few stocks that bottomed out in early May that I wish I had the extra money to buy as they saw a solid rebound in May. I need to make sure I have money set aside for opportunities I see like this.
  • Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $6,033.52 (-9.92%)
    Last month I was happy to see things rebound a bit. There was not a lot of excitement here in May. I did sell off some of the GPUs from one of my Ethereum Mining Rigs and stopped mining ZCash altogether. I am continuing to mine with 375mh/s of power going to Ethereum.
    If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

May was a pretty good month. All of these revenue streams continue to grow organically. I have not partnered with anyone or attempted to collaborate with other creators yet. I feel that this is one of the next areas of growth for me. There are opportunities for growth in these partnerships. I have used my location as an excuse and I need to stop there. There are creators near me, I just need to find them and partner with the ones who make sense.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

 

May 2018 Passive Income Report Jerad Hill May 2018 Passive Income Report Jerad Hill

Parenting In A World Of Technology

I originally made a video on this topic for a couple of reasons. The first of course was prompted by another video that I saw on the subject of flat-out forbidding your kids from experiencing certain things in this world without giving them valid reasoning.

The second reason is that this is long overdue. For years I have wanted to film some videos and perhaps even to a podcast on the subject of parenting and Technology. My kids are still relatively young but they are getting to that age where kids at school are introducing them to things. The big eye-opener for me was when my son and I started having a conversation about the game Fortnite. I thought I was being the cool dad by talking to him about this game that I’m sure he had heard of only to find out that he had already played it at a friend’s house. As parents, I think that we all eventually have one of those awakening moments when we realize that we should have talked to our kids about certain things earlier. It’s never going to be easy but if I don’t do the hard work I’ve trying to understand my kids and the things that they are interested in, I am failing them.

The video is no longer on my YouTube channel as I have made some changes to that channel, but I talked about how I feel about certain Technologies and how I plan to introduce them to my kids. I don’t plan to expose my kids to everything. I want to be remembered by them as a person in their life that took the time to explain things to them whether they were allowed to experience them or not.

I plan to revisit this topic now that I have relaunched my Youtube channel again, but let me know what you think in the comments section below about this topic. I am also interested in knowing about topics that you would like to know more about in regards to technology in parenting. As in life, parenting is a Non-Stop learning experience which at times is like drinking from a firehose.

Subscribe to my YouTube Channel, it’s Free!!

April 2018 Passive Income Report

Welcome to my Passive Income report for April 2018. April was a month of reflection as I looked back over everything I have been doing over the past five months since I really started getting serious about replacing my regular income with passive income. Looking into how I have been spending my time revealed to me a few things which I will discuss here and explain how I plan to fix them.

The big elephant in the room is the topic of cryptocurrency. There were some huge opportunities for me in the crypto space which I took advantage of, but they were short-lived, kind-of. Though my cryptocurrency holdings are recovering well (see below), mining with the current equipment I have is getting more challenging. Though crypto pricing is back up to around where it was in early December of last year, the difficulty to mine has increased quite a bit. With that said, I am still able to turn a profit due to having paid off my mining rigs so quickly. With my current set up, I can still mine $1,500 US worth of crypto in a month. My electricity costs are about $400/mo so that puts me at a profit of $1,100 per month.

The mining rigs do not take much to keep up but with summer approaching, I have some big decisions to make with where they are currently running from. I need a proper cooling system to keep the rigs and the room temperature down. I estimate that increasing my electricity costs substantially right away. Last summer in Modesto, CA we had over three months of 95+ degree temperatures. It was 84 degrees out the other day and the room temperature near the rigs was 112 degrees. So in regards to cryptocurrency mining, I need to look at my options. I will explain more in my next Mining Update video on the State of Tech AltCast YouTube channel. What I really need is a solar solution.

Another source of income over the past few months has been my How to build a Mining Rig Course. With the crypto pricing correction and the crazy prices of mining hardware, the interest in mining has gone way down as well.

I have been putting out a lot of videos but this is the time of year where most will see a slight dip in their average view counts anyway. YouTube has been making a lot of changes to their suggestion algorithm which has helped some of my videos while at the same time hurting others. This is an ever-changing process toward growth.

This is why I am doing all of this on the side while keeping my core focus on Hill Media Group. I have learned a lot over the past six months, especially in the cryptocurrency world. I would not trade that new knowledge for anything. I’m still making money.

Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along as I continue to explore new ways to grow my personal income.

April 2018 Side Income Total – $4,004.92 (-18.2%)

YouTube

  • StateOfTech – $987.69 (-11.76%) Subscribers: 29,902 (+0.44%) Watch Time: 1,116,955 Minutes (-4.53%)
    This YouTube channel is part mobile technology review videos and part tech tutorial videos. After a huge month of new content last month, April slowed a bit which brought me back to normal. Each month I am getting better at determining what content this audience wants.
  • Ditch Auto – $419.07 (-4.93%) Subscribers: 25,935 (+4.64) Watch Time: 813,763 Minutes (-1.67%)
    Ditch Auto is a YouTube channel around the topic of Photography. I added a few videos in April but have not had much time to do more than review a few products. The product review videos do not do as well for YouTube growth as educational videos.
  • Jerad Hill – $45.13 (+5.27%) Subscribers: 5214 (+0.12%) Watch Time: 37,249 Minutes (+10.65%)
    This is my personal channel. I started uploading more content this month but am having trouble with it being found. This channel is so old and has been unused so many times. I am starting to see very slow growth here. Trying to figure out my voice and what topics are best for me to focus on.
  • AltCast – $0 (0%) Subscribers: 1562 (+8%) Watch Time: 32,634 Minutes (-49.59%)
    AltCast is a new channel started in January 2018 with a focus on Cryptocurrency Mining. Growth is slow here due to the decrease in interest in mining Cryptocurrency. I still need to reach 250,000 watch minutes in order to monetize this channel. I am currently at around 185,000. I feel like I will need to pivot here in order to regain growth and bring this channel to monetization.

Amazon Affiliate

  • Amazon Product Links – $840.86 (-13.52%)
    Nothing really new to report here except that I am playing around with my own redirect links to Amazon so I could more easily fix links when a product on Amazon goes out of stock. Want to show me some love on Amazon? Use this link the next time you go to purchase something on Amazon.

Google Adsense

  • Google Adsense links/display – $29.46 (+6.7%)
    I may finally have seen the bottom of the drop from Google’s Algorithm change earlier this year. I have been posting some of my videos on my websites with short articles which could also be helping. Next months report should show some additional growth here as well because I have been having some of my videos transcribed and that should help with SEO. Will be interesting to see if there was any value in doing that work.
    Sites with Adsense Integration: StateOfTech.NetDitchAuto.Com

Jerad’s Courses

  • Paid courses on Jerad.Courses – $98.00 (-84.61%)
    The Mining Rig Course is definitely not producing like it did for the first three months of this year. On this site alone, that course produced just over $3,200 in income. Not too bad, but I was hoping for more. I should have more aggressively marketed that course while the interest in mining was still high.

Udemy.Com

  • Paid courses on Udemy – $122.71 (-63.43%)
    Just like with my personal course site, the revenue has dropped a bit on Udemy. To date, the Mining course has brought in just over $2,200 on Udemy.

Other Income

  • Other monthly revenue streams from side work – $1462.00 (+10.62%)
    I am almost back to where things were before in this category. I am not selling mining hardware anymore. This category consists of passive income that comes in from various other past projects and content that I no longer work on growing.

Investments

I was right about last month being the bottom. Things have started to recover as you can see in my holdings below. I put an additional $500.00 into stocks with Robinhood but the rest of the growth was due to stocks recovering value. Crypto has recovered nicely with almost a 100% recovery over last month. I have not put any additional money into cryptocurrency but I have continued to mine crypto through the entire month of April. My plan with Crypto was to hold on to what I had (HODL) and wait for it to recover. My investment strategy is a long game here.

  • Stocks (Robinhood) – Holdings: $9,186.30 (+23.21%)
    As I mentioned above, I put $500 into stocks this month and saw some recovery on some other stocks I had that dropped last month. This month I am up and it looks like that will continue into May.
  • Cryptocurrency – Holdings: $6,698.15 (+92.36%)
    I was right about March being the bottom. As you can see, my crypto holdings are recovering at a nice pace. I am continuing to mine with 720mh/s of power going to Ethereum and 3,200 sols/s going to ZCash.
    If you want to get started investing in Cryptocurrency, I suggest joining Coinbase. You can buy and sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin currently.

April was a mixed bag. I still need to figure out a good flow for content release so my audiences know what to expect from me. I need to work on a path that I hope to guide them through. I really need to get serious about updating some of my older courses and producing some premium content for my students as well.

I am considering doing more than just reporting monthly on my progress. I have received a lot of questions from people who want to know more about what I am doing. In a perfect world, I would be producing videos a couple of times each week on this, but that just isn’t sustainable at this time. Maybe a thought for the future.

Thanks for coming along. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments section below.

April 2018 Passive Income Report