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Many would think that retirement comes after working hard for some twenty odd years, saving up a pension then living off a half million dollars until you die. But does your retirement have to come at an old age, or can you start developing your own way to retire early?

My plan for the Ultimate Retirement is simple, setup a system that requires the least amount of effort for the most profit.  Ok, so this sounds hard to do, but is it?

Creating a Passive Income

Passive income can be defined as earning an income passively even though you aren’t doing any work.  Consider blogging, even if I don’t write a single post tomorrow I will still over a hundred dollars just from traffic to my old posts.  Each post I write continues to earn me profit well after I’ve written them.

A passive income could come from the stock market from dividends you earn. Song writers earn money each time their song is played, or book writers continue to earn money as their book is sold.

Creating Your Own Job

Like most startups would agree, the object is to: Profit with the least amount of effort possible. Less customers, less offices, less employees, whatever it takes to get more profit.  With a website, sometimes a blog with 5,000 subscribers is better than a blog with 15,000.  If one blog can earn more per person that’s overall going to be better than a blog with more traffic and more subscribers.  Why?  It takes less effort to make more profit.

A few of my blogs, I write a couple of posts a week and earn more than a site such as clickfornick.com.

How This Ties Into Retirement

The goal is to setup a system where it takes so little effort, that you can work literally 4 hours a week and have more than enough money to live on. After starting your own business, you find ways to literally get your business to run yourself.  For me, that would require hiring writers to write all my posts for me.  The only work I would have left is management, make sure things are done.  I could pay someone to do that too.

My Plan for Ultimate Retirement

So how does this tie into my plan for ultimate retirement?   The more income sources I generate i.e. blogs that earn money, the closer I come to earning money with the least amount of effort.  Is that everyone’s goal? Be lazy on the beach and still have money coming in?

Did you ever wonder what the demographics for blogging looks like, particularly for the USA?  If you are a blogger, you most likely a higher than average income for a slightly more than average average.

According to a BIGresearch study:

• 37.6 years old,

• has USD 55,819 average yearly income (which is higher than the real median household income as in 2002 which was $42,409),

• has an above the average education with an average of 14.3 years of education (average of the entire population is 12 years).

The ethnicity of US bloggers: 69.7% white, 20% Hispanic, 12.2% African-American and 3.7% Asian.

Who reads your blogs?

Deloitte & Touche found that the younger the user, the more likely he or she was to read or keep a blog on a weekly basis. 35% of people aged 13-24, 25% of people aged 25-41 and 19% of people above 61 keep a blog. Baby boomers (aged 42-60) have the least time or will to keep a blog: they represent only 7% of the blog owners. (Click on image below to enlarge.)

In today’s industralized country, the things we need for survival are almost a guarantee.  For survival, what do we need beyond food, shelter, and water?  Of course we need health and cleanliness, but all these things are pretty a guarantee.

The role of things

Of course things have the ability to bring us more comfort, make our lives easier.  We don’t need that television set, or that car, or even a computer.  But have said things makes life easier, comfortable, and makes us in many cases more productive in our daily lives.

What’s Your Poverty Threshold?

Your poverty threshold is the minimum amount of discomfort you are willing to deal with.   Often one’s poverty threshold keeps them from pursuing new interests or careers that are more fulfilling. Would you take a large cut in pay to switch career and do something that was perhaps more fulfilling and meaningful to you? Of course it would mean losing some comforts in your life, but does the more meaningful job make up for it?

Questions I Ask Myself Before Buying New Stuff

Most would also call this pre-purchase dissonance.  (More marketing classes at work)

1. Do I really need this?

2. What functional role will this item serve me.

3. Is this an impulse purchase or have I had proper time to think about this?

I received a comment earlier on my blog asking about tax write offs.  Legally I can’t give any advice about write offs, all I can give is an account of what I write off on my blogs.

1. Anything that’s related to my blog.  This year I’m writing off a projector, a digital camera, and the cost of buying domains.  Also I should add that hosting is a definate writeoff.

2. You can’t write off money you don’t earn with your blog.  If you only earn $30 with your blog you can write off $40 worth of stuff.

3. One of the best reasons to go into business for yourself? Write offs.  What’s better than getting stuff “30%” off.  I mean 30% off because you aren’t paying tax on the income used to buy whatever it was for your business.  The key is making it business related.

According to Spark Plugging.com:

“Here are the IRS qualifications of blogging as a business vs. a hobby:

1. You carry on the activity in a business-like manner,
2. The time and effort you put into the activity indicate you intend to make it profitable,
3. You depend on income from the activity for your livelihood,
4. Your losses are due to circumstances beyond your control (or are normal in the start-up phase of your type of business),
5. You change your methods of operation in an attempt to improve profitability,
6. You, or your advisors, have the knowledge needed to carry on the activity as a successful business,
7. You were successful in making a profit in similar activities in the past,
8. The activity makes a profit in some years, and the amount of profit it makes, and
9. You can expect to make a future profit from the appreciation of the assets used in the activity.”

As Spark Plugging writes, your blogging activity needs to be profitable.

So I wrote yesterday about some legitimate earnings reports, but what about when the company goes right out and creates a fake ad? Though the amount might be real on this check, it certainly is one of the most obvious photoshop fakes I’ve seen. I mean look at the “Hundert” written on it. Oops!

Of course many companies to decide to go cheap and rather than printing out the big check it’s easier to just photoshop it on later.  It might be better if the check wasn’t magically floating.  Maybe try making his hands actually grasp the check next time?

This one question, how much you earn with adsense, is one of the biggest indicators of your success on the internet.  When you earn a five figure monthly income with adsense, you’ve reached the “elite” status of internet entrepreuners making top dollar with their websites, blogs, and even facebook plugins.

I did Not Earn this with Adsense:

This comes from a German SEO site entitled SEONauten, and if you don’t understand German the site wouldn’t make much sense.  What’s important is the bottom figure, “Gesamt” “einnahmen” or in english, “entire income” which was $32,753.

Now when a blogger posts their adsense income and it’s this high, we’ve all read about problogger and shoemoney pulling this sort of income each month.

We often wonder, is this a photoshop hoax?  Or is this real?  Since we can’t prove this is fake, we go on believing and using this as an inspiration to create our own Adsense empire,

Are these posted Earnings with Adsense an Inspiration?

Reading about monthly incomes this high is one of the reasons I actually started in the first place.  I deducted that if they could make 32 grand with adsense, why couldn’t I make a $1000 a month maybe $3000?  After about 5 months I did reach my first $1000 a month and soon after $3000.  Keep in mind that not everyone can reach these income levels or has the time or expertise to dedicate their time toward website development.

Where to get started?

If you haven’t created a blog and want to start blogging and make some cents on the side, I’d recommend BustaBlog, keep in mind I am the recent founder so the more the merrier.

Though I do get a lot of search engine traffic to my blog from the likes of yahoo and google, it takes more than that to get traffic to my blog.

My daily routine of getting traffic to my blog

1. After I write a post, I use socialposter.com to submit my blog to services such as propeller, digg, and reddit.

2. I bookmark my page on onlywire which bookmarks my article on tons of bookmarking websites.

3. I look on yahoo answers for questions related to my blog topics.  I search for open questions and later vote them as the best.

4. I write comments on other related blogs and leave my website URL in the comment.

Essentially what I’m doing is spreading my blog link across the large world of the internet. The more links the better.  The more possibilities that someone finds a link to your blog, the more chances that someone is going to find your blog.

Where does your cable and internet bill go? Towards building one of the most expensive video screens ever. So what does 22 Million Dollars spent on a screen buy you?

1. the largest four-millimeter LED screen in the world, measuring 83.3ft x 25.4ft

2. 10 million pixels mounted in a seamless flat array - that’s 5 times the resolution of high-definition tv

3. an automated control room, home to 27′000 gigabytes of information, six dx-700 led digitizers, seven encore video processors and three matrixpro routers.

As you’ll see in the video, the screen is quite amazing, though I’m not sure why they decided to construct it where two doors would be in the way…

My latest website venture is a website that allows users to create a blog online using wordpress completely for free.  Sure there are already plenty of blog services online that will let you create a free blog online, but how many let you effectively monetize it?

BustaBlog: Create a Free Wordpress Blog Online
With BustaBlog, users can register, choose from over 100 templates (or even add their own), monetize their blog using services like Chitika and Adsense, and connect to other users on the network.

My Idea
Be better than the rest.  Sure we’ve got blog networks, but I plan to be the most customizable.  Most networks limit just what you can do with your blog.  Of course, I have had to invest money for my own virtual server, getting the server up and running, and lots of ad money to bring users on to the BurstaBlog.

Never Give Up on Your Dreams
I’ve created many blogs, and tried many possibilities, all with 80% of them failing.   But it was worth it to find that 20% that now provides a full time income.  BurstaBlog may or may not work out, but I continue to try idea after idea looking for that next money maker.  We wouldn’t have billiondollar websites like Facebook if the users hadn’t tried, made the small invest and worked hard on their website.

The Spammer Scott Richter’s Company Media Breakaway LLC have been hit with a 6 million dollar lawsuit that is going directly into the pockets of Myspace for spamming it’s users.

“An arbitrator has ruled that Scott Richter and his Web marketing company, Media Breakaway LLC of Westminster, Colo., must pay MySpace $4.8 million in damages and $1.2 million in attorney’s fees for barraging MySpace members with unsolicited advertisements. Media Breakaway and its employees were also banned from the site.”

We all hate spamers and maybe this will put a slight dent into their sides, but it’s not going to step them from invading our privacy on our phones, email, and even our beloved Craigslist.