April 2017 Progress Report – $1,700 Passive Income Milestone

I’m currently writing this back HOME (in the bay area). Crazy, I have completed 1 year of digital nomading. I’ll probably write a recap post soon.

April was a pretty good month for me! I’ve hit a $1,700 passive income milestone…I’m slowly, but surely heading towards the $10,000/month goal.

I spent the month in Taipei, Taiwan. To be honest I mostly worked on music (or just kicked it) rather than attempt my passive income endeavors. It was nice to take it a bit easier this month and have a group of passionate creatives/entrepreneurs to hang out with.

Music video filming in Taipei

Let’s get into the progress for the month!

Travel

Taipei was really great despite the mosquitoes and cockroaches. In certain ways, it felt like home again and I can see myself coming back, but in others ways I don’t think I can be there long term (meaning years at a time). On one hand I got to hang out with one of my closest friends and his Taiwan crew, so I was really grateful to be around chill and sweet people who liked to talk about things I liked to talk about. There wasn’t much Taipei exploration involved. Instead we went to gaming cafes, made music, and just hung out, chatted, and joked every day. It felt like home again.

On the other hand, I think certain Asian countries give off this vibe of placing more importance on superficiality, status, and money. This has been validated by a few of my friends out there, one of whom wants to start nomading to get away from it all. That superficial aspect worries me and I’ve been trying to get away from that atmosphere. Regardless, Taipei was still dope and I could see myself coming back for a few months at a time if I’m working on creating music.

ICRT Radio station interview!

Etsy

I don’t know exactly what happened but Etsy closed down my latest shop without reason. I have decided to refrain from really working on the platform because of it, and am treating the incident as motivation to work on other channels more seriously. I’ve constantly mentioned branching out with different income streams but I would still end up focusing on profiting on Etsy because it is the safe route. I know it works. But now that there have been issues, it’s really time to put my eggs in more than one basket.

If you’d like to open your own Etsy shop, you can use my link here which gives you a free 40 listings (and provides me with 40 free listings as well).

Kindle

After my Kindle outsourcing fail, I outsourced books through the sites that Adrian Ingram recommended (www.ewritersolutions.com or www.hotghostwriter.com). I provided two outlines and received two books back. They weren’t bad, but they definitely still need editing.

I plan to upload the books by end of May, or so I hope.

Amazon Associates/Adsense

I don’t make much through these channels, but it gives a little bit of money.

Blog

I received some inspiration from my friend over at millennialboss.com. She started monetizing her blog later than I did, but she has exponentially increased her earnings each month way faster than I have. It is making me want to study how to do affiliate marketing better and build my blog (I’ve said that so many times…). This entails outsourcing articles, watching courses on Udemy, and more.

Fiverr

I’ve decided to put my Fiverr on vacation mode. The reason being that I forgot to check it at one point and ended up getting a bad rating for a gig I overlooked and didn’t complete. When I double down on passive income I may start sucking at paying attention to active income (Fiverr) which is not a good thing. So I stopped it for now since I’m not putting in that much effort in growing my profile.

Dropshipping!

My new project! I have been wanting to start a dropshipping store through Shopify’s Oberlo plugin. It allows you to integrate with AliExpress and import products through the platform without having to own the products themselves. So items that are sold will be fulfilled by the manufacturers in China themselves.

I have decided to create the store with my friend and see how it goes.

Final Thoughts

For May, the two things I’m really focused on right now is my mental/spiritual health and my dropshipping endeavors with my friend! It will be interesting tracking my progress now that I’m back home. I’d like to see if the change in environment is good or bad for my productivity.