Alternative Income And Blog Report 2021 – First Quarter ($16,429)

P.S. That’s right – five freaking grand a month. Keep reading until the end. It gets better, I promise.

Welcome to another edition of my quarterly alternative income report – the place where I do a stock-take of all the income that I was able to generate which was outside of my regular 9-6 job.

After a month (April) without any of my monthly reports on either CPF, alternative income and KrisFlyer miles, this month’s update on alternative income is going to be an interesting read!

Before we continue, the previous edition of my alternative income report can be found here. Catch up before reading!

The boring SEO stuff

Quick mention regarding search engine optimizations. Google Core Web Vitals is going to wreak havoc on millions of blogs worldwide. I always believe in playing nice when it comes to Google’s requirements and this time, it is no different.

If you are a blogger or an aspiring one, check out Google PageSpeed Insights for more information. I won’t deny that a faster blog means happier readers.

Yep, there are probably a lot more (especially Mobile) that I can optimize for but I’m not going to sweat the small stuff as long as I’m not failing too badly. When it comes to SEO, I tend to think of Google’s guidance as best practices and recommendations.

At the end of the day, content is still king – right?

Building passive income like a millionaire

Since last year, I have been focusing my efforts on building passive income streams. That’s right at the height of the Covid pandemic.

Jobs, much like our lives, are fragile and can be taken away from us easily. It is up to us to create our own safety nets.

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Ancient Chinese Philosophao Tzu

Building up net worth and wealth is no longer enough for me. The next step is to craft and maintain both passive and semi-passive income streams that are able to sustain our lifestyle.

What are my alternative income streams?

To summarize, my alternative income streams consists of –

1. Cash (or equivalent) – Interest

2. Investment – Dividends

3. Blog – Ad revenue

4. Affiliate Marketing – Sales revenue

5. Crypto income – Lending / staking / farming

6. Others

To spare you the ordeal of reading the same things over and over again, you can check out this blog post which I felt was rather detailed and 90% of what it covered is gonna be the same.

Monthly income growth vs alternative income growth

I think I have been fairly transparent on my blog when it comes to numbers.

Plus, it helps that I’m a pseudo-anonymous nobody with nothing to hide.

Indeed, I’m neither exceptionally smart nor super capable, which explains the rather underwhelming income growth that I have enjoyed over the years.

Interestingly, I was spending 80% of my time on full-time work but it wasn’t amounting to 80% of my net worth growth. The other 20% of my time spent on side-hustling? That part was seeing crazy, exponential growth.

Pretty amazing what we can see beyond the fog by simply stopping to think, isn’t it?

That was why for the first quarter of 2021, a lot of my attention was focused on two income streams in particular – affiliate marketing and crypto income – because the returns would be able to far exceed my efforts expended.

Free Spotify and Netflix since 2019

Taking one step back, I don’t consider myself a super early adopter of crypto but I’ll admit I had a couple of years’ worth of head start.

You know what? Small things quickly added up to bigger things over the years. That definitely escalated very quickly.

Based on my YNAB records, I have been getting free Spotify Family since August 2019 and free Netflix Premium since December 2019 simply by holding on to a Crypto.com (Indigo tier) Visa card.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ll simply use the purchase rebate limit of US$13 for Spotify (21 months) and US$14 for Netflix (17 months). In total, they add up to a whopping USD$511! Terms and conditions have changed over the years but at this point, this is the card that keeps on giving.

I like to think of it as an SGD$36 monthly dividend, and I haven’t even included the weekly staking rewards of its CRO tokens which nets me around SGD$20 each month.

Until the benefits get taken away, I guess?

The bigger stuff

Opportunities like the one I have mentioned above are everywhere in the crypto space. As we get comfortable with the low-hanging fruits, we can then move on to the higher-value items.

To me, crypto isn’t about getting in and out with huge gains. Crypto isn’t a one-off affair. Crypto is here to stay.

The important thing is learning to take profits and knowing how to utilize assets to produce resilient income streams.

Affiliate marketing has always been around and it is only a matter of how much we are able to scale our income streams with respect to how much time we’re spending on itThe right conditions for the perfect storm gathered, and it just happened that the two income streams I have been focusing my efforts on returned exceptional results in the first quarter of this year.

Combining the results of affiliate marketing and crypto income, March 2021 was a blockbuster month that blew every single expectations I had out of the water.

Total earnings for 2021 – first quarter (S$16,429)

The first quarter of 2021 generated a grand total of $16,429 or $5,476 per month.

Yes, I recognize that this is a life-changing amount money, if sustainable. This meant that my 2021 Q1 alternative income has exceeded the monthly gross salary I was drawing, prior to 2019.

• January 2021 – S$2,357

• February 2021 – S$2,982

• March 2021 – S$11,089

As I have mentioned previously, this is not passive income. This is alternative income that is generated by expending my time and efforts which are valuable resources.

Moving forward, it will continue to be important for me to continue focusing on the generation of alternative income.

Whether or not my numbers will continue to reach greater heights remains to be seen.

Oh? Glad that you stayed around for the surprise that I mentioned at the start of the blog post. Yes, my Twitter account has a lot more interesting updates!

This article is dropping on Seedly ahead of my regular blog posts schedule since this is my first time posting here!