Every day we read and hear about people saying they want to escape their stressful 9-to-5 jobs.
We are further inspired by stories of people whose passive income ideas have helped them make it big.
As it turns out, generating passive income is not as easy as investing your money and waiting for it to come streaming back. The good news though is that earning passive income is 100% possible and achievable.
1. Affiliate Commissions
Pat Flynn, famous for earning thousands of dollars per month through passive income alone, lists three major types of affiliate marketing.
Unattached Affiliate Marketing
- basic pay-per-click affiliate marketing
- you don’t need to be involved at all in the niche of the product you’re promoting
- your earn commissions from people who click and buy using your link, but you don’t have to have a direct connection to them
Related Affiliate Marketing
- you need to have some kind of online presence ( a blog, website, podcast, social media page, etc.)
- you don’t have to actually be using the products you promote
Involved Affiliate Marketing
- the most marketable type according to Flynn
- you use the product or service, believe in it and recommend it
- you don’t just put up a link or banner for the ad, you actually talk about the product within your content as part of your success strategy
- the attractiveness of the product come from your direct involvement and experience with it
Flynn warns that you have to be honest when promoting via involved affiliate marketing, especially if you already have a huge following. This is because people will be inclined to use the product or service as per your recommendation.
You’ll be your audience’s living proof that the product/service works. You will most likely be their go-to guy for questions related to the product. You’ll also be accountable to them in case the product or service you promoted doesn’t work as advertised.
It’s a bit risky, which accounts for the need to have experience-fueled faith in the product you are advertising. Done the right way, the income you can generate from this passive income activity can be exponential.
2. Drop shipping
Chances are, you’ll most likely have heard about this and may even already have an idea of how it works.
In fact, a lot of popular social media pages swear by its effectiveness as a passive income stream.
Aside from social media, drop-shipping is also one of the ways that you can use blogging to make passive income.
In a nutshell, drop-shipping is selling products even though you don’t actually have a business. You don’t make or manufacture the products, you don’t pack them. You just sell them.
Drop-shipping involves working with a wholesaler or distributor who offers this kind of service. Since it has been gaining a lot of popularity lately, it’s actually easy to find suppliers you can do business with.
Your responsibilities involve:
- Setting up your online store – you can put up your own website or use your blog. You can also turn your social media page (Facebook, Instagram, etc) into your instant online store.
- Doing social media and email marketing
- Promoting the products by writing about them on your blog
- contacting prospects and customers and promoting the advantages and benefits they can get from the product.
Once the buyer bites, the drop-shipper takes over. You’ll just have to send the orders to your suppliers (via email or an online form or spreadsheet, etc. depending on the distributor). Then you pay the wholesale price for the orders plus handling charges. The distributor will be the one responsible for getting the product to your buyers.
Some of its benefits are:
- not having to spend money buying products wholesale when you’re not even sure if your customers will patronize them. You’ll only pay if someone actually buys.
- not having to personally package and deliver or ship the products you sell
- not having to worry about where to store your goods
One reason why it’s an internationally popular choice for passive income is the minimal amount of risk and effort compared to putting up an actual business or producing your own products.
3. Selling Information products
Now is the perfect time to cash in on all those seminars and webinars you’ve attended, all those online courses and case studies you’ve taken and read, and any other valuable information and experiences you’ve collected over the years.
As mobile devices make it easier for people to take information on the go, there are many reasons why you should start selling eBooks on your blog.
To begin, here’s what you need to do:
- Choose your topic – it should be something related to your niche, preferably something you’ve had experience and success with.
- Create an attention-grabbing title – choose a title that’s guaranteed to pique the interest of your prospective readers
- Design your eBook – decide how your eBook should look like from inside out. It should have a professional-looking cover design. The outline and presentation of your content should both be readable and informative.
- Upload, Promote and Sell Your eBook – you can choose to do it from your blog or website and promote and sell it from there. You also have the option to upload it to eBay, Amazon, Google Books or any other online platform where you want it published.
4. Selling apps
Thanks to app building software like Bubble, Thunkable, Weld, and Caspio, you can now create excellent apps without having extensive coding knowledge.
Now you can work on those business app ideas you’ve been itching to put into reality. It may not immediately make you a millionaire, but technology and your ideas combined can get you a few thousand dollars a month via your app sales.
Sell them on your website or blog or put them up for sale on Google Play, Apple’s App Store or any other app download platform of your choice. It’s a passive income investment that could pay off well in the long run.
5. Selling banner ads
Multi award-winning business and internet blogger Matthew Woodward touts the benefits of Banner Advertising as a lucrative passive income opportunity.
As a blogger, you can generate revenues from banner ads by renting out an ad banner space on your blog to advertisers.
You decide where you want the banners located. You also have the handle on pricing and on how many ads will be in rotation on your ad space.
According to Woodward, when promoting your ad banner space to advertisers, here are what you need to include:
- Audience Interests – highlight your audience’s interests to build credibility and give the advertisers a clear idea regarding your general audience
- Live Traffic Stats – install analytics widgets or plugins that automatically update so advertisers can get a live view of your traffic stats.
- Advertising options – clearly define ad zones on your blog and how many other ads will be in rotation
- Frequently asked questions – answers to questions most commonly asked by potential advertisers
- Links to buy – make sure to put up “Click Here To Advertise” links generously around your page.
That there’s no such thing as passive income is a myth that has been debunked again and again by people who have legitimately earned a lot from such endeavors.
The confusion lies in the idea that passive income means you just work on something once and wait for the cash to flow on for the rest of your life.
Even passive income requires some kind of regular action on your part in order to make it sustainable. That’s why, especially at the start, you first need to balance your active and passive income streams.
And most of the time, passive income streams do not immediately make money fast enough to meet your expectations. It takes time, dedication and a little bit of faith.
Once you accept these as facts, it will be easier for you to put in the work required to start earning from your chosen passive income streams.