Not too long ago, I hit a big milestone.

I officially received my 50,000th dollar in dividend income from my Daily Paycheck portfolio.

I'm not trying to brag. Instead, I want to show you how I did it, and how you could possibly too.

A little less than four years ago, StreetAuthority co-founder Paul Tracy challenged me to build a portfolio of dividend stocks that would pay out more than 30 dividend checks a month -- one for every day of the year. He even gave me $200,000 and a dedicated brokerage account to get started.

I collected the very first dividend from my real-money portfolio on December 24, 2009 -- just a few weeks after launching The Daily Paycheck advisory. It was issued by Invesco Value Municipal Income Fund (NYSE: IIM).

My first dividend was for $18.13, or 7 1/4 cents per share for my initial holding of 250 shares.

It doesn't sound like the most promising start. After all, $18.13 won't get you very far toward retirement -- that is unless you reinvest dividends and have a bit of time. As of today, I've received 46 dividends from IIM for a total of $953.02. My latest dividend was for $23.37 -- 28.9% more than my very first dividend. IIM did raise its monthly dividend to 7 1/2 cents per share back in August 2011. But most of the dividend growth is by way of dividend reinvestment.

You see, I reinvested my very first dividend back into IIM. The following month, I had incrementally more shares generating incrementally more income.