Lost the Fire, But I Feel Better Now

For those of you who follow this blog, you may have noticed my absence for essentially the entire month of July. Well, the fact is that I was burned out. I wasn't necessarily burned out with my online income venture, but was undergoing lots of stress at work and was physically and mentally exhausted. I just didn't have anything to give and was simply surviving.

Well, I know that I feel a lot better now and am starting to get motivated to write again. About a week ago, I went to bed early at 8:30 and slept for just over 12 hours. Boy, did that make a huge difference. I had another long night of sleep this week (about ten hours). Even though my back is sore this morning from working out Thursday and playing golf yesterday, I still feel pretty good.

I began to question why I was putting so much effort into developing passive income and lost all motivation to continue so I took the month of July off. Between the last post on this blog about earnings and this post, I did nothing at all. And despite doing nothing, the income kept coming in! Granted, it isn't great but it was a little better than last month.

So, I have some motivation back, and I am going to bust my tail to develop links for the articles that I already have written. I want to work on the eHow articles and have all of those completed by the end of August. It will take a lot of work, but I actually feel up for it now. I may not end up writing a lot of new content, but will definitely do more writing than I did in July.

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know that I took a little unplanned vacation from developing passive income, but that it was well worth the break. What do you do when you get burned out? I would especially like to hear from those who are doing this for a living since it would be tough to take a month off.

Earnings for Second Quarter of 2010

First, I would like to apologize for not posting for the past week. I was out of town and had very limited internet access (not to mention time) so was unable to post anything. I still haven't gotten to the point where I schedule blog posts in advance. I simply write on the spot and off the cuff. Maybe someday, I will be so organized.

As a result of the time off, I feel like I am way behind in my regular life. I still have a week's worth of mail to go through and bills to pay. I plan on catching up this evening after I am done at work. In the meantime, I have a few minutes to post my earnings numbers for the second quarter of 2010.

I am encouraged by these numbers since the June earnings were slightly better than I earned in May. Hopefully the downtrend will be broken, and I can start to see some gradual improvement. Of course the earnings are much better compared to last June since that was my first full month ever online. I am really hoping that the numbers are looking better in the fall and winter months since last year seemed to be pretty good considering I was still early in this venture.

So here is what I earned for the past 3 months:

April 2010: AdSense = $22.86, eHow = $22.94, Total = $45.80

May 2010: AdSense = $22.49, eHow = $11.34, Total = $35.88

June 2010: AdSense = $24.51, eHow = $13.78, Total = $41.88

It looks like maybe I have found the bottom. Of course, one month does not define a trend, and I will have to see what this month brings. So far, the start of July seems to be promising. I need to get to work building more links and will be doing that for the next several months to be sure.

I hope to get back into the swing of things over this next week. It is always tough for me to come back from time off. It seems like I spend a lot of time trying to get things done before leaving and time catching up when returning compressing 3 weeks of work into 2. Anyway, it will be good to get back into a rhythm again. I will try to do a little each day and keep plugging away at building that passive income.