After climbing out of the 9-5 job grind a month ago, I’m glad to say I’m still surviving.

Online money is not as much as I’d hoped but with my work done as bulletin boy combined with my online revenues, I’ve just managed to match my former full time salary for last month.

The challenge now of course is to make my online money match my full time salary. Things are looking good because I’ve done okay despite taking 2 full weeks off from making money online.

Pay Per Post is still my biggest money earner and some of my new websites have aged enough (90 days) to be added into PPP which means more potential to make money. Currently I only have 2 blogs registered with PPP. I’m holding back on submitting these new sites because they are still PR0 because Google has not updated it’s PageRank database yet. Maybe I should not wait and just submit?

I know I should not depend too much on PPP and ‘diversify’. I’m planning to concentrate on websites that are in the category of:

  • information/news
  • free online tools
  • education

This is to capitalise on passive income channels such as Kontera, Google Adsense and Text Link Ads.


Sites
My other new websites that are starting to show promise is:

Website Description
ChessPublisher.com Free tools for chess publisher to show games on their sites (brand new so PR 0)
MalaysiaOpen.net news report on the biggest Malaysian Chess tournament but only active once a year (now PR 3 after 2 years)
Gacc-chess.com inter-varsity chess competition site that is international (PR 2 after a year)

Plans
One thing I’d like to do is move away from chess related sites (I have at least 10 chess related sites!) and go into new topics such as travel, programming and tech news.

One thing I’m concerned is that my programming skills is getting rusty because I don’t flex my programming muscles much now that the bulk of my time is spent setting up sites and blogging. My plan is to set up more tutorial and educational-based sites to teach programming and challenge myself by writing from scratch my own dynamic websites or at least plugins instead of relying on open-source software such as XOOPS, Joomla, Wordpress etc.

Everyday is a Sunday
Since my everyday routine centres around home, everyday seems like a Sunday. Weekends is no different from weekdays. The danger is of course becoming lazy. I do feel that my productivity has dropped compared to being at work. I guess there are some advantages of 9-5 work pressure as it pushes you to complete tasks to meet deadlines. At home, there no such pressure. That can be a good as well as a bad thing.

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