3 Passive Income Secrets for Dividend Investors

When you're building an income stream with dividend stocks, not all that glitters is gold. Some companies might appear to offer far more juicy payouts to investors than they actually do on a regular basis thanks to special dividends or intermittent ones, and others might be disbursing unsustainably high amounts of cash.

If you want your passive income to be as close to fully passive as possible, you'll need to figure out how to sift out the companies that can actually continue to keep paying you quarter after quarter. So without further ado, here are three secrets that'll help your passive-income investments to be as lucrative and long-lived as possible.

The most important thing that every passive income investor should know is that dividend yield isn't a metric you need to obsess over. Take Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) for example; its forward dividend yield is just over 1.8%, and it's a member of the high-flying crew of companies known as Dividend Kings that have increased their dividend payments annually for 50 years and running. Look at this chart:

Source Fool.com