Recent set of events shook me rite from my grounds. A lot of things changed the way it shouldn’t have. I had not anticipated or accounted for any of this losses. Losses were significant, nevertheless. Losses did highlight one major thing : Keeping your passive income passive requires a constant ‘Active’ effort.

Ok, So here is the story. In last 3 months three of my sites got hit by Google’s panda update.  Initial 2 hits could be justified but the last hit which happened 2 days a go pissed the living shit out of me. As a consequence of the panda hit, the daily traffic count dropped substantially. Traffic dropped, revenue dropped. These were sites that made me decent income with little or no effort. Decent Income ? It made me 1 grand AED a month.  Can I fight the Panda back ? Yes, I can. But the first two sites were just not worth the whole effort. The third site is well worth the fight and I’ll take this freaking panda head on.

The basic thing you can notice is that my business is dependent on one basic resource called the ‘Google’. If  ‘Google’ gets cranky, I am f*cked in the ass.  Just FYI, getting f*cked in the ass pains. There are very few things I can do on internet without getting ‘Google’ involved in it. Lets think of it this way, Its more like a transportation business. You business is directly related to the petrol prices and petrol prices are volatile. It is difficult to control something that is not really under your control.

Now let me go around blaming my self. Once my sites get established and the money starts pouring in, I tend to get a little lazy. I tend to focus on other things. I don’t update my site often and don’t do things which I need to do on a regular basis. My five sites got hacked yesterday just because I never got around to update the software I was using. Luckily, there was a back up. Remember, I don’t update my sites often ? So that allowed me to use some really old back up without much trouble.

Cribbing about a problem doesn’t really help you in anyway. So WTF am I gonna do ? I’ll be working on this sites regularly to get the sites where they were initially. Is it the worth the trouble ? I don’t know. I wanna see how far I can push my self.  Plus, I ll be completing other projects which I am lagging behind on and taking backups every 30 days. In short, I’ll be working on a far more regular basis. I’ll try blogging daily or every other day. Easy money, is not really that easy and passive money is not really that passive.