Money Tips Network

A complementary “mini-game” for your main game (main goal) can help you to stay on track.

My primary goal through August 2024 is to earn $100 through the Medium Partner Program in a single month. To complement this, I'm also working toward monetizing my YouTube channel.

(This YouTube channel is focused on currency collecting, and is an offshoot of my Facebook Group.)

My work over there gives me material to bring here, which works directly toward my primary goal.

This will be a short-ish series, once a week, through the end of July.

Two videos uploaded since 6/23/2024

Over the past seven days, I've added one regular video and one short.

The regular video talks about a bill that's both awesome and sad. Awesome because the serial number is very rare, and sad because the bill is torn in two:

Keeping score on my side quest

Having a mini-game for your main goals helps to keep focus.

Though my primary goal for the next couple of months is to earn $100 through the Medium Partner Program in a single month, I'm also building up my YouTube channel.

(This YouTube channel is focused on currency collecting, and is an offshoot of my Facebook Group.)

As I work over there, it provides material to bring here, to work toward my primary goal.

This will be a short-ish series, once a week, through the end of July.

Four videos uploaded since 6/16/2024

Over the past eight days, I've uploaded two regular videos and two shorts.

One of the regular videos has me testing out combining a bill hunt (going through dollar bills looking for cool serial numbers) with me talking briefly about a single question. I have another one scripted for the coming week.

Also drive traffic to your other online assets

I no longer am convinced that a website is the key to online riches.

In fact, it's pretty much the hard way now.

What worked in 2005 was to

• register a domain
• set up WordPress,
• join some affiliate programs
• write blog posts with some of those affiliate links
• do a modicum of networking
• profit

That's far harder to pull off in 2024.

This month my Medium income will outstrip the AdSense and affiliate income from my nearly 20-year-old blog.

A ground-floor affiliate opportunity with Benable

If Medium is the new version of the blog community, then Benable may be the new version of Commission Junction meets Amazon Store. No website needed!

An uptick overall but my Medium income was scary …

This year I'm publishing side income reports each month for accountability.

Public accountability keeps things moving forward by keeping it real. Reporting on the good / bad / ugly allows for reflection on lessons learned.

Which sources I'm reporting and which I'm not

Since I'm not posting anonymously, my primary and part-time jobs and my main investments won't be reported here.

Everything else is fair game. Some income will be reported when I cash out, and others when I earn it.

Also, I'm reporting income, not profit. I'm in the red overall and still will be for a while.

With that, let's get a move-on!

Google AdSense income: $18.70 (-$2.79)

This past month showed a modest downtick in my Google AdSense income.

GPT stands for Get Paid To.

Get paid to watch videos.

Get paid to fill out surveys.

Get paid to search the web.

What GPT really means

In the end, GPT means “possibly get paid a very tiny amount of money to do something that takes no special skill but makes someone else slightly more money for having gone through it.”

Here's an example. I'm making the numbers up.

A marketing company is asked to conduct a study for a potential advertising campaign. They approach a site like Pollfish to create an online survey and pay them $2 per valid response for 10,000 representative responses.

Pollfish then farms this study out to sites like Swagbucks and offer Swagbucks $1.50 per valid response from their users.

A decent portion of my income from my online adventures over the past nearly 20 years has been from referral income.

Referral income, as the name implies, happens from people you refer to a service. There could be a one-time bounty, a recurring commission based on their activity with they service, or both.

A referral income structure is a legitimate and often sustainable strategy for growing a business. It encourages existing members to find, and sign up, new members. The referral rewards are built into the system, and should involve no additional cost to the people signing up.

Work now, earn later

The process for gaining referral income works like this:

Currency hunting is a fun, low-cost hobby with very little downside.

I liken it to playing a lottery where you always at least break even. If you look a dollar bill over and there's nothing special about it, you still have a dollar bill that you can spend! It's a no-lose situation.

My Cool Serial Facebook Group just crossed 22,000 members so I recorded another pricing video for a special kind of trinary serial number. More about that below.

Trinary serial numbers are not super easy to find

Trinary serial numbers have three distinct digits. An example of this is 13441433.

About six bills out of a thousand are trinary bills. If you had $100-$200 in ones and looked through all of them, you might find one trinary.

I used to play Zynga Poker on Facebook and loved it. There was essentially no way to make real money from it but the mechanics of the game fascinated me.

After playing that enough, I investigated how to play online for real money. It was a very different experience having actual cash on the line with each pot. It's something you just don't experience until you start doing it.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm reliably pulling out more than $50/month playing a few games a week.

It's not life-changing money, but it goes directly into my savings account each time, and I enjoy doing it!

Here are the five essential pieces I've worked out over time for turning this enjoyable game into cash with very little risk.

1. I learned how to play in very small stakes

Below is a graph of my profit over the entire time I've played sit-and-go (knockout) tournaments:

Last month I published the first side income report I had done, ever.

Public accountability can be a driver and a motivator to keep things moving forward. I'm committed to put these out once a month for a while, reporting on the good / bad / ugly.

Which sources I'm reporting and which I'm not

Since I'm not posting anonymously, income from my primary and part-time jobs and my main investments won't be reported here.

Everything else, though, is fair game. Some income will be reported when I cash out, and others when I earn it.

Also, I'm reporting income, not profit. I'll be in the red for a while.

With that, here we go!

Google AdSense income: $18.79 (+$7.79)

This past month showed an uptick in my Google AdSense income. (And I passed the $100 threshold at the end of January which gave me a payout of $108.64 near the end of February.)