For years now, I have been putting spare time and effort into a variety of passive income revenue streams that have grown to be a substantial part of my income.
In my 5 Step Guide To Building Passive Income Revenue Streams article, I talked about why I decided to stop trading my time for money. If you are reading this article, you have probably already made this decision.
It’s easy to get caught up in active income methods because they typically pay out faster. The problem is that active income only pays you as long as you are working. Passive income work continues to pay you even long after you have completed the work. If you continue to feed your passive income revenue streams, the growth continues. It compounds like the interest you earn on
There are a lot of Passive Income Revenue models that require an upfront investment of money. I don’t believe in selling opportunity that isn’t proven. I would rather you start something with no investment at all other than your time. As you grow, you can find a way to invest in it in other ways.
I have a lot of resources I link to throughout this post so make sure to read it and click on the links that will provide value to you.
I am also going to skip the Passive Income methods that assume you already have a huge following. I will discuss each method and how to grow it into a revenue stream from Day One! Let’s jump into it!
#1 Blogging
It has never been easier to start a
Go to WordPress.Com and set up a free blog. There are free themes to choose from so you can give it a professional style that is appealing to you and premium themes that are pretty cheap as well. You can buy a domain name website address for your blog but I don’t believe you need to start with a domain. You can always purchase that later.
Start blogging on a specific topic. Starting a niche blog is the best way to get going because the search engines have a hard time determining what to rank a lower traffic website for. Until your website is receiving a lot of organic traffic from the search engines, it will be hard for you to be more generalized in your content approach.
You can start blogging about a hobby or an area of expertise you have. Your experience and unique approach will help others learn about the topics you are sharing. I shared a great example of this in my previous article and plan to share more, so make sure you subscribe to my blog for updates.
Don’t get caught up on making your blog fancy. Focus on the content. If you need content ideas, use sites such as Quora to look for questions being asked that are related to your blog’s topics.
My wife wrote a blog in 2012 titled “How To Make A Wood Sign With Stickers” which has received over 1 Million views since she wrote it. It ended up getting Pinned multiple times on Pinterest early on when Pinterest was first gaining popularity. She wasn’t even trying to write a viral piece of content, but it happened. Just focus on creating something useful and the views will come.
#2 Online Courses
We carry a high quality digital video recorder in our pocket. You can use it to film an online course to sell to the world. If you have an area of expertise, you can teach others about it. That doesn’t mean you have to be the world’s leading professional on the topic. You just have to know enough about the subject to teach others.
I am a professional photographer, but I am not the leading professional photographer out there. I created a course because I was continually getting asked how I get such amazing photos out of a camera anyone could buy off of the shelf. What is that one thing people keep asking you about? Have you considered turning that into a course?
You can upload and sell your course on sites like Udemy.Com for free. It’s a great place to start because they already have a large user base that is looking for online courses. Use their platform until you have grown your audience to the point where you can host your course on your own website using a platform like Teachable.
#3 EBooks & Information Products
You can easily create an ebook using something as small as your smartphone. There are so many powerful tools available to us these days. You can design and create a nice looking downloadable book using an app like Pages that comes with your iPhone, iPad, or Mac computer.
Ebooks and downloadable information products such as PDFs can be simple or very graphical. I recommend that you focus more on your informational product containing great information and only add flare where it makes sense. Don’t take away from the content, you simply don’t need to.
There are many tutorials on YouTube that can teach you how to make an Ebook in Pages. If you are not on a Mac or an iOS device, there are alternatives for Windows and Android, just do a Google search for Pages Alternatives for Android or Pages for Mac Alternatives for Windows.
#4 YouTube
Some of the most subscribed to YouTube channels started out filming videos on a smartphone or a cheap video camera. The popular YouTuber Casey Neistat often refers back to the cameras he was using when he first got started. You don’t need high-end video equipment to make YouTube videos. The quality of your content is more important.
There are YouTube channels focused on just about everything. I really get into watching “build” videos where someone creates something out of wood or metal. I really enjoy wood and metal working but don’t have the time or the space to do it myself, so I enjoy watching others create which keeps me inspired to create something on my own one day.
You can make videos showcasing a hobby such as many people in the craft space do. Rather than focusing on creating craft products to sell you can teach others how to create items of their own. If you are still learning make that part of the process as well. I shared about the YouTube channel “Seth’s Bike Hacks” in my previous article and how he has grown as a
#5 Affiliate Marketing
Companies need exposure for their products. One of the methods used to get exposure are affiliate programs. A company starts an affiliate program to incentivize others to promote their products in exchange for a flat fee or a commission on the sale.
Depending on the month, around 40% of my passive income revenue comes from affiliate marketing I have done for various brands. Currently, the most comes from Amazon.Com. In videos I publish to YouTube, I discuss the use of specific products as part of my videos. I link to those products in the description of the video and people click on those links to view the products. When they purchase a product, I get a small commission. One sale won’t result in much, but 100’s of sales do. Look to see what products you use and how you can incorporate them into your content.
Making passive income from affiliate marketing requires building up a lot of content over time. It will start out small but overtime it will grow into something you can count on each month as part of your overall income.
You can look for affiliate marketing opportunities on popular Affiliate Marketing Networks such as ShareaSale, Clickbank, and Rakuten Marketing. Sometimes companies have their own affiliate program and usually provide a link to it in the footer of their website.
#6 Automated Services
Just about everything can be automated in one way or another. I used to manually manage the business listing information of my clients online. That was a tedious process until I found a company that helps automate that process. Now I simply make sure the information is correct and let the tool I pay for continually check to make sure the information stays current. I log in once or twice a month to check on my clients business information and submit an update if needed.
You can easily find a service that most people do manually and automate it. We live in a world where automation has never been easier. Whether it be finding a tool that automates a process like I did or hiring people on a website like Fiverr to do the work for you, the time invested on your behalf will be significantly less which means you can more easily scale it into a passive income revenue stream.
It is often that automation services start out as something you offer manually. In order to invest in a tool that automates the process, you must first have customers willing to pay you for that service.
You can even use Fiverr to get examples of services you want to offer automation for. Chances are if it is being offered there, people are willing to pay to keep from having to do it themselves.
#7 Stock Photography
There are a lot of websites selling stock photography, so how can you create stock photography that will sell? Simple, create a specific type of stock photography and offer it to people in that industry. Let me give you an example:
An auto repair facility might want to use social media to reach new customers. They probably are not social media savvy so they need photography they can use in their posts and will pay for a collection of images they can use. You can package your photos together with a calendar of social media posts they can publish throughout the month. Heck, you could even automate the process for them using a social media scheduling tool and be their social media manager.
Find a niche that seems to be underserved with interesting photos on stock photography websites and create photos for that niche. The photos don’t have to be professional quality, they just have to be interesting and easy to look at. Keep your images simple and clear of distraction.
To get opportunities to shoot photos of these underserved niche markets, go into a local business that specializes in that niche and trade photos for them allowing you to photograph their facility. They need good photos as well. Just make sure you get permission from them to sell the photos online and have anybody that is in the photos to sign a photo release.
Start Making Passive Income
As you can see, it is pretty easy to start making passive income online. It doesn’t mean you get to avoid work as building passive income revenue streams means doing the upfront work. You are simply choosing to do work that continues to pay you rather than trading dollars for time.
If you want more articles from me on passive income and lifestyle design, subscribe to my blog here. Let me know down in the comments section below if you have any questions or if there is any way I can help encourage you to get started today!
