New Goal, 300 words

 

It’s time to take things up a notch!  I’m setting a new goal for myself to produce content with at least 300 words.  This will help push me to articulate my thoughts and expand on my hypotheses and decision stories more fully.  The goal of 300 words also maintains a relatively compact reading experience, which I hypothesize would be desired by my audience (leave a comment to let me know your preference).  I also feel that these shorter bursts of engagement are more authentic for me to write because I’m not filling the space with fluff.  😊  I also feel that the realistic goal of 300 words will be a natural transition and inspire greater frequency of writing, rather than feel like a homework assignment that gets continuously procrastinated and never completed if the word count goal was much bigger.

Okay, so here I’m already at 140 words (almost halfway to goal!).  I want to switch gears slightly and talk about what led to my 300-word goal. 

As you know, I’m working on several personal projects and experiments with the goal of having fun and building my FIRE – Financial Independence, Retire Early.  One of my strategies for building FIRE is to start creating additional revenue streams and passive income through various sources.  By “additional,” I mean in addition to my 8-to-4 regular job.  I’m going to differentiate additional income and passive income as, additional income as the result of active contribution / engagement and additional income I receive without doing any extra work, respectively.

Some of the ideas I’m working on include:

Investing (active income) – many folks already partake in investing through 401k and/or company stock contributions, as I am doing as well.  My addition here is to push even more income into the market, make calculated investments, and benefit from short-term gains and long-term growth.

Dividend Income (passive income) – Strategically invest in stocks with strong dividend yield and with growth opportunity.  Dividend stocks are a long-term investment, meaning once you purchase them, you hold them long-term.  Dividend stocks pay their dividend on a quarterly basis (typically).  Some stocks will pay their dividend monthly.

Blog (active and passive income) – The blog is fun for me to journal my thoughts and activities, and I hope that sharing this with you may inspire or inform your own ideas for FIRE, or just for fun.  Writing of the blog is the active work of this stream.  In the future, I plan to incorporate AdSense to provide passive income, or possibly engage with Affiliate Linking.

Amazon Merch (active, then passive income) – I’m super excited about this idea, because it incorporates a lot of creativity and results in a purchasable product!  Amazon Merch is mostly focused on T-shirts currently and a few phone accessories.  The best part is that I don’t have to purchase or maintain an inventory!  The active part of this stream is the creation and upload of designs.  Once created and uploaded, the rest is mostly passive income.  Remember, there’s no upfront costs because there’s no inventory.  Items are print-on-demand and managed / shipped by Amazon.  As a Merch seller, I receive a royalty for each sale.  Now, honestly, to be successful this isn’t completely passive, as you would want to monitor your sales to cycle out non-performing designs and trade in for better designs.

Book Publishing and Game Publishing (active, then passive) – these are two more ideas that I’m working on together with my husband and family.  I would say these are the least mature as of today but are actively in the making.

Back to the driving force of my 300-word goal.  To monetize my Blog, collaborators need to see that I’m producing compelling content.  Setting a 300-word goal ensures that I produce enough content, not just a fleeting thought, and that I more fully articulate my thoughts and / or include more rich content such as pictures and links to other great content.  My initial application for Google AdSense was recently denied, for reasons undisclosed – I have to read the Policies and figure it out on my own.  I’m not afraid of self-reflection, and after not finding any blatant “misalignment” with the Policies, I can only assume my content needs to be more “compelling”.  So it’s time to step up my game!

For this round, it’s a big WIN with over 713 words!  In closing, here’s a picture (wink, wink) and a link to one of my favorite new collaborations - https://ko-fi.com/7zerofire.

 

Word Count ~ 742 words

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