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So what’s the big deal about passive income??
The big deal is that it’s something that can help you get your time back and get your life back!
Passive income is work which you are not actively participating in, don’t have to be present to earn it and continue to get paid for long after you have completed the work. Once you have put the work in to create the stream of income, it should require little to no effort to maintain.
For example, your day jobs is not passive because you only get paid for the hours you work and you can only work so many hours in a day. If you work for yourself as a freelancer, you still only get paid for the hours you work. If your job requires physical labor and you get injured, you don’t continue getting paid while you’re at home recovering.
Personally, I don’t believe in a 100% totally passive business – the holy grail of making money without actually doing anything. I just don’t think that’s a lasting, long-term strategy. At some point, if you don’t put any further work into it, the income will eventually die off.
What I do believe is that you should want to put in small amounts of continuous effort to be able to nurture the income stream and keep it healthy and always producing for you. Or even growing that income over time for you.
Warren Buffet said, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”
Time is precious. It’s the most valuable commodity and it’s the one thing that we all have the same. A person can’t have more time than someone else. It’s what we do with that time that separates us and it’s what makes the rich richer.
When you stop thinking in the sense of trading your time for money such as in your 9-5 job or your freelance business or even something like owning your own business running a physical retail store that only opens a few hours of the day, and start thinking about how you can use your time to create income streams that automatically and consistently pay you, you can start to free up your time for use on what’s really important to you.
Passive income streams usually require some upfront work to create, but once you have created it, it can continue to provide you with a source of income potentially for years into the future. It will be one of the most worthwhile investments of your time.
There are some really significant benefits to creating passive income. Life is short. It will give you the freedom of time so that you can focus on doing the things you really want to do with your time.
It will allow you to live and work from anywhere. It allows you to work whenever you want or feel like. If you do get sick and can’t work, you won’t have the stress of where your next paycheck is coming from.
Just as a side note, none of these income streams are “get rich quick” or require minimal effort. You’ll need to put in a lot of effort and consistent effort. The great thing is though that they can all be started with little to no monetary investment. Just your time and hard work.
Now for each of the streams I’m about to talk about I will try to include examples of people who are successful because I find that when people talk about specific ways to make money online, a lot of the response is “yeah well that sounds great but does it actually work? Could I actually do it?”
I will link to the people who I mention so that you can go see what they did, how they did it and all that good stuff.
I like to find other people who are making it work to use it as inspiration for myself so I hope that you can see that it is possible to make money in all these different ways.
So, let’s look as some ways you can create a passive income stream.
CREATE A DIGITAL PRODUCT
Digital products are a great source of passive income because you create the product once and you can sell it multiple times as a downloadable product.
Digital products could be things like educational PDF’s, social media content templates, email funnel templates, logos and printables.
In fact, if you take a look at Etsy and search for the term printable, you’ll see they are hugely popular (showing almost 3 million results!). You basically create a document, save it as a PDF and sell it to people who print it out for themselves. It’s a very simple and easy way to get your feet wet with creating passive income products.
The search results on Etsy show things like invitations, wall art, planners, party game printables, product labels and packaging, wedding stationary and heaps more.
One of the most successful businesses in this niche that I’ve seen is Sarah Titus. Sarah is a single mum who has created a wildly successful printables business. She is very open about her income. If you visit her website she reveals that she has made over $10 million in the last few years just selling printable products.
SARAH TITUS – https://www.shop.sarahtitus.com/
CREATE AN ONLINE COURSE
Everybody knows something about something. I guarantee you know something that other people don’t know. You don’t have to even be an expert. You just need to know more to be able to teach someone else.
Creating an online course can be very lucrative as you can demand substantial fees for access to digital courses. I’ve seen online courses on how to spray paint a car, how to learn piano, how to knit, how to create a millionaire mindset, how to blog and I’ve seen prices range from $99 to $3,000 and even higher.
Digital courses require quite a bit of time and energy to create. They need to be as in depth and packed with as much information that you can provide in order to be able to charge the high prices that you can get for online courses.
Bloggers Create & Go are an amazing example of this. This couple started making money with their blog, so they created a course on how they did this to teach other people how to make money blogging. They report their income every month and in September 2020 they made almost $80,000 from their online courses alone.
They also make an additional $50,000 per month in affiliate income, but we’ll talk about that in a little bit.
CREATE & GO – https://createandgo.com/blog-income-report/
OPEN A PRINT ON DEMAND ONLINE STORE
Maybe you’ve always wanted to have your own clothing store or start your own fashion brand. But this isn’t exactly a passive income business. Far from it.
Something that’s along the same lines is by using a print on demand company. You can create your own designs and have them printed on clothing without having to buy inventory or actually doing the printing yourself.
It’s also combined with a dropshipping service so after they have printed your designs on product, they will also take care of sending the order to the customer as well as returns if you have any.
You might have already heard of print on demand and it’s a really great business, particularly for a beginner that has unlimited potential to earn a lot of money.
And print on demand is not limited to t-shirts or clothing. You can print onto all sorts of things like shoes, hats, towels, car seat covers, bags, pop sockets and aprons just to name a few.
There are so many people I could talk about who are killing it with print on demand but one who is a really great example is Brittany Lewis. She was able to make $90,000 in 6 months selling her print on demand products. Her designs are in a really popular, profitable niche and a little bit of a different style to what you’d usually see with print on demand t-shirts, which I like.
To get started in your print on demand online business, check out my post on how to set up a successful print on demand store.
START A YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Starting a YouTube channel is one of those passive income streams where you need to put in a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of effort to build it to where you want to get it, but once you have you can make a substantial amount of money with little ongoing effort.
Usually things that require the most amount of time and effort to start thing bring the biggest rewards and that’s no exception with YouTube.
YouTube could also be the hardest of businesses to start because let’s face it, 99% of the population fears being on camera and putting it out there for the world to see and judge.
And you are probably thinking “what could I possibly start a YouTube channel about?”. But in a similar fashion to online courses, you know something about something that everyone else doesn’t know and would love to learn.
You don’t even have to teach anything. There are thousands of YouTube channels about people’s daily lives. Those channels probably thought their life was boring too but started a channel anyway and eventually they were able to make money off it.
In fact, one of the highest paid YouTube channels is run by 9 year old Ryan Kaji, whose channel is aimed at kids. He originally filmed himself opening and reviewing toys and now makes educational type videos. He makes a killing. As in a $29 million in 2019 kind of killing.
Actually, kids channels make up a large percentage of the highest paid YouTube channels with all of them making multi-millions per year.
Once you have uploaded a video and it’s able to have ads running on it, it will continuously earn you passive income. The more videos you upload, the more opportunity to make passive income you have.
Just hop onto YouTube and search for “YouTube income reports” and you’ll get an idea of who much people are making with their different YouTube channels.
BUILD AFFILIATE INCOME
Affiliate income is probably one of the most talked about ways of making money online and is always pushed as the best way for a beginner to start making money online.
Affiliate income is simply promoting other people’s products and services in exchange for a commission when someone you refer purchases that product or service.
So, for example you decide to promote a workout supplement. The owner of the supplement says they will give you $10 every time someone you send buys their product. You send 10 people in one day who make a purchase. You make $100.
Simple. Well yes and no. Like everything we are talking about in this video, it’s not a get rich quick type of deal. Time and effort is required in the short term, to make big gains in the long run.
There are thousands of affiliate products and services available for you to promote and there are so many different ways that you can promote them. Finding the right product in the right niche for the right audience is what will make you successful here.
Again, there are so many affiliate marketers I could show you who are making money with promoting affiliate offers but the one that comes to mind right away is Pat Flynn. I started following Pat many years ago at the beginning of his online journey and his growth has been amazing. He has stopped publishing his income but the last time he did was December 2017 and his affiliate income was over $100,000 for that month, so you can only imagine what it is now, 2 years later, right?
PAT FLYNN – https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/category/income-reports/
BECOME A SELF-PUBLISHER
Here it is, my favorite passive income stream! Self-publishing. There are so many different things you can do with self-publishing and you don’t even need to write a book if you don’t want to.
Once you have a book and you have uploaded it, it’s there for people to continuously purchase and make you a passive income. The more books you create, the more chances you have of building passive income.
There are people who write fiction and non-fiction books and sell them on Amazon and whilst authors are quite private, you’ll find it hard to find publicly available income reports from them, I am part of a private group for authors who do share their results and there are people making up to $50,000 per month and more from self-publishing.
If big numbers like that put you off because they seem unreachable for you, don’t worry there are lots of people making part and fulltime incomes too.
If writing isn’t your thing, that’s fine too. If you have a budget to start with you could hire a ghostwriter to write your book.
Dane McBeth made over $100,000 in his first year self-publishing books and he outsources his content, so check him out if this interests you and you’d like to learn more about his methods.
If you don’t have a budget to spend on outsourcing the content of your book, don’t worry there’s something for you too!
Low content or no content books are also a great way to get into self-publishing. These are things like notebooks, journals, logbooks and planners and the like. You don’t have to actually “write a book”. You simply design a cover and an interior which may be something as simple as lined pages and away you go.
If you search for “KDP income reports” on YouTube you’ll find a few people who do talk about their income but one person who is doing particularly well is Shashwat Ashiya. He talks about his income reports on his YouTube channel and his September income was over $15,000 for the month.
SELL YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEOS & MUSIC
Did you know you can sell your photos, video’s and music on stock websites? Have you ever purchased from a stock photography website? The footage has to come from somewhere, right?
It comes from individuals who upload their work and if someone downloads their photo, video or music track, they get paid a royalty from the stock website.
I’m talking about sites like istockphoto, shutterstock, getty images, pond5 and there is so many more out there, who give you that platform to sell your work. They may offer you a percentage or a flat fee for each photo, video or track that is sold.
Once you have uploaded all your photos, video’s or music you now have the potential to make residual, passive income.
CREATE A MEMBERSHIP SITE
In full disclosure a membership site is probably one of the least passive types of online businesses you can have. Some might even say they aren’t passive at all but it can become semi-passive once you have built up a good amount of resources within the membership area.
So, for example, you would spend time building up the membership area with a good amount of content so that when you open it to members, there’s something substantial for them to have access to.
This will encourage members to continue paying for their membership after that first month. Then from here you can add to the memberships’ resources once a month. So, you could spend a day or two each month adding something new into the membership area.
The reason why you don’t want your membership site to be completely passive is because if new resources are not being added, your members will cancel when they see they aren’t getting anything new for their monthly subscription fee.
The great thing about membership sites is the recurring income, so you want to make sure you’re doing what you can to retain your members.
Pinch of Yum is a popular recipe/food blog and in addition to making over $35,000 per month from their blog, they also created a membership site called Food Blogger Pro to teach other people how to have a successful food blog.
According to their website they have 2,545 members paying $35 per month in subscription fees which means they are also making almost $90,000 per month from their subscription site.
FOOD BLOGGER PRO – https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/
So, there you have it. 8 ways that you can start creating a passive income for yourself without needing to invest much or any money at all. I hope you are already getting some ideas about what you know that you could potentially package up and sell as an online course or within a membership site or put up on a YouTube channel.