How Much Will It Cost?

I just bought a nice domain name for $14. I was doing keyword searches with Google Keyword Tool and stumbled into something that had nice amount of searches, but the domain matching the search was still free. There was not much competition either. I am not at the point in my passive income project where I should be buying domains, but I just could not resist.

That made me think how much it costs to create a passive income stream. I have planned a rough budget of 1000€ (about 1250 US Dollars) for this project. I will put up a counter so you'll be able to see how much of that I end up spending and where it went. I surely hope I don't have to invest the whole 1000€, but that is what I am prepared to spend if necessary. To me it looks like that creating a passive income stream does not HAVE to cost much, but the temptation to spend is there. Having to confess my budget slips here hopefully helps with that!


How Will I Invest My Money?

To get a trustworthy looking site one has to have an own domain. I bought mine from GoDaddy, but lots of people seem to prefer BlueHost. I have been using GoDaddy for couple of years now and I've been happy with them, but I am buying just domains and hosting my stuff elsewhere.

I think I probably need virtual machines from a cloud service to run my future applications. So I have allocated some money for that in my budget. Most of you don't need that, but then you might have some other needs that I don't have.

Some money is earmarked for photos and graphics. The picture in my profile is several years old and I might need some simple graphics for my products too.

I have also allocated money for skill building, that is - books and courses. I estimate those will probably eat up most of my budget.

I'm planning to buy some books on technical subjects for learning purposes. But there is a possibility that I end up trying affiliate marketing and in that case I want to buy the products I'm marketing.

There is only one course I have earmarked money this far and it is SBI! (Site-Build-It). I might take other courses too if I find good ones. But this far the only courses that I have considered for real are SBI! and Amy's 30x500 (which is unavailable now). I will take the SBI! after my summer vacation so I really have time for it and of course I'll report to you how it works for me.

I ended up considering SBI! since Steve and several other people living on passive income highly praise it and SBI! site has plenty of real life success stories. They even show you the sites they are doing money with. But I got the final push yesterday, when I added EndersAdventures to my link list of people who are taking part in Steve Pavlina's Passive Income Series. Ender's passive income goal is $2,800+ per month by Nov 1st, 2012. That is highest I have seen this far. I was interested in how he is planning to do that so I browsed his site a bit. And guess what? Yes, he is already using SBI!.

When I first browsed SBI! site couple of months ago I was a bit turned back by the blocky look of the web pages that were generated with their web site builder tool. But I went through a several success story sites and my final thoughts were that SBI! is something else than just a web site builder. I mean, I looked at all those blocky web sites and rolled around the thought that all those pages are collecting the bucks home. I came into conclusion that they must be effectively search engine optimized and that SBI! must teach some really effective ways to drive massive traffic to one's sites. Also, I've seen SBI reports used to find out which ideas are worth investing. And those things are just what I need to learn now.

EDIT: When I went to their site today I noticed that SBI! has a new site builder. So no more clumsy web pages. Also, all their pages seem to have this brand new look. That makes me wonder if Steve is going to make purchasing SBI! a suggested part of his passive income series....

I'd love to hear your ideas on the subject! What are you planning to invest and why? Did I miss something obvious in my budget planning?