Passive Income for Musicians - My Top Music Affiliate Programs, Positive Cashflow Returns You Can Expect From Property Investment And More.

Passive Income for Musicians - My Top Music Affiliate Programs

Recently, there was a discussion on the MusicThoughts list regarding how to develop passive income as a musician. Of course, there are many types of passive income open to musicians , but this discussion in particular involved using affiliate programs to earn money.

For the newbie, affiliate programs are program online that allow you to earn money by selling products or services that you do not own. Companies like Commission Junction , LinkShare , ClickBank offer a variety of a affiliate programs on every subject . While companies like Amazon.com (books, music, and more), MP3DownloadHQ (free music downloads) offer more specific products or services.

Building a successful affiliate income is NOT easy. And as internet companies come and go, they are also not a hugely reliable source of income for the long-term. I prefer to focus on offering products and services for my active websites, but most of my websites were created with affiliates in mind. Consequently, I've learned the affiliate game quite well.

Most people don't like sharing how much they earn from passive income . So finding those stats Will be difficult. But frankly, I prefer helping folks with facts.

So, here's a couple notes on the various passive internet income sources I earn or have earned in the past:

1. Google Adsense .
Google CAN be great, but a lot of it depends on what keywords your site is focused on. Head over to PixelFast offers a great Overture Keywords and Bid Amounts Tool and you can find out how much people bid on certain types of keywords through overture.

Having done testing which got me banned from Google I learned a few things when I was using Google Adsense. I found on the average, I made about pittance on each of my random websites. Some however, did MUCH better. Namely the 'free music downloads' websites.

You'll note at PixelFast that companies bid heavily for those keywords with clickthrus averaging at about 45c per click. Seventy percent of the income I earned on Google was from one free music download website that somehow made it high on the search results. I'm not allowed to say how much I made, but you can do the math when a site gets approximately 500 unique visits a day and has a 5-10% clickthru rate.

The point is if you create and promote webpages with high impact keywords, you will do fairly well.

2. Affiliate Programs.
Since I'm no longer with Google, I've sense learned to find other alternatives using Google style ads. You can those on my Directory of Free Music Downloads as an example. >> Search for more related passive income info <<

Positive Cashflow Returns You Can Expect From Property Investment

By Aug 16, 2005, 12:02

Financial Independence and Passive Income

Financial independence is an investing outcome that is becoming increasingly more popular as disgruntled employees look for a better quality of life.

Financial independence means the freedom or release from the need to have to work.

It can occur in varying degrees from partial independence (when you get to take a few hours off work a week) to complete financial freedom (where you no longer need to work at all).

The way to attain financial independence is through acquiring passive income .

passive income is something that flows to you and is largely independent of the number of hours worked in a job.

It needs to be pointed out that there is really no such thing as completely passive income because every dollar of passive income must flow from some kind of work or effort in the first place.

For example, while rental income might seem to be passive income , the task of finding and investing in property, together with managing the tenant, filling in tax returns etc. is anything but passive !

A good example of passive income is royalty payments paid to musicians . They write a song once and are potentially paid a royalty each time the song is played. The initial act of writing and recording the song wasn't passive , but the ongoing payments when it is included on music CDs (sometimes many years later) is. Just think of the Beatles!

The word 'passive' really means avoiding being paid by the hour.

Instead you seek to do some work today and leverage off it tomorrow. This leverage is in the form of receiving multiple payments without the need to work again.

For example, if you invest in a positive cashflow property then you hope that the work involved in finding and acquiring the property will create a positive income stream that will last until you sell the property. One days work now for a lifetime of return later.

It's like an extended form of delayed gratification. Click here and view the website, If you want to know more about passive income for musicians info ......

Poignant Perspective

By Melanie Light, Director, Fotovision :

The Photojournalism Festival at Perpignan was exciting, intense, disturbing and fun. 3,000 professionals converged on this lovely town in southern France for a week. 45 agencies had booths, throngs of photographers were showing their work and important deals were being cut. There were symposia and press conferences. 30 photographers had shows in venues about town and every night there was a slide show of even more work by yet more photographers. They were held outdoors on giant screens. Numerous prizes were awarded to photographers.

Much of the work involved crisis photography and so, despite the idyllic setting of this town, the subject matter was very intense and very disturbing, at times. A certain portion of the stories would never be printed because the subject matter is much too grisely. It seemed that the quality of the images were somewhat affected by pressure to shoot the sensational shots. When I compared a lot of the contemporary work to that of the two retrospective shows of work by Willy Ronis and Charles Harbutt, it seemed that a certain lyrical, or simply earthy quality has been lost in favor of a dramatic aesthetic.

The industry, as judged by this festival, is under stress. In the same way that the music industry has become monopolized, so has the media. Consequently, there has been a big squeeze on the photographers and the agencies. There is a ton of great talent out there and competition to get printed is fierce, with most work done by freelancers. Even the most heralded and highly skilled photographers have a hard time getting their long-term projects funded and published. They do a lot of assignments they don't necessarily want to do in order to shoot their "real" projects on the side. I also noticed a trend for many photographers to live in Asia because it is so much cheaper than living in Europe or the U.S.

After a week of immersion in this environment, I realized the two best skills a photographer can have are to be able to edit his/her own work really well and to get a grip on the business side of the industry. So many of the young photographers I met had spent a lot of time and energy getting to Perpignan, but really were not prepared to negotiate and operate like a professional. One of the least popular symposia was probably the most important one for this group. It was a lecture by an international copyright lawyer who works for Corbis. There were a handful of middle-aged, mid-career people who were there because they had had first hand experience with the many pitfalls of copyright infringement. A photographer's pictures are all he or she has. That creative body of work must accrue over time and will become a source of passive income and a retirement plan, if protected. Most young photographers are desperately trying to get their foot in the door, but it just doesn't make sense to sell oneself out for a tear sheet. << Click for more passive income info >>