Are There Any Real Passive Income Streams?
Passive income streams are the dream of any business owner or entrepreneur. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could find a way to make money while you sleep, or had a business that you could tend to once or twice a week, and forget about the rest of the time? In an ideal world your business would take care of itself, generating income for you even if you were sick, or if you were away on holiday.
There are many companies that promise people a passive income, but most passive income streams are not genuine. A lot of the systems marketed as offering a passive income are just multi-level marketing scams. Instead of offering true earning potential they simply charge you money to get you to sign up for a “training package” which essentially shows you how to sign up other people to sell on that same idea.
If you don’t want to irritate your family and friends by selling to them constantly, then you will not make money from this sort of thing, and even if you were willing to engage in aggressive promotion, you are unlikely to make a lot of money in the long term – eventually the downline will stop growing because there won’t be anyone left to recruit.
Generating a Real Passive Income
The only real way to generate a passive income is to find something to promote or sell that has an ongoing demand. Subscription services are a good option, as are consumable items. You will need to invest some time into tending the business – maintaining your servers or writing content for your website, for example. If you sell items you will need to post them out.
However, these are things that you can do in just a few minutes each day. You can also outsource your packing and fulfilment, freeing yourself up to focus on other things.
There is no such thing as completely passive income streams; at least not one that you can really make a living from. Instead of pursuing the goal of getting money from nowhere, why not try to find ways to work smarter and grow your income by building a scalable, healthy and sustainable business – something that could one day offer an income stream for not just you but other people in your family or your circle of friends as well?
How To Create Passive Income Streams Online
Creating passive income streams is the way to go, if you want a life that allows you to enjoy many happy moments together with your beloved ones. Regular jobs, even when they are well-paid, are a way of trading your time for money. The moment you stop giving time, the income stream stops flowing. Passive income streams, on the other hand, require effort only when you set them up.
If you are successful, they will bring you revenues for many years to come, even when you sleep. There are two broad types of passive income sources: online and off-line. Off-line sources refer to things like investing in real estate properties which you then rent out. Online sources include, but aren’t limited to, eBooks, courses, membership programs, affiliate websites or consulting services.
This article is going to detail a few ideas of generating passive income online. You are welcome to explore them and choose the ones you may find suitable for you. A little bit of extra money can never be a bad thing, can it?
Creating eBooks and selling them online
If you are an expert in your field of activity, chances are you can write a book or two on some specific topics. Producing and publishing an ebook is very easy today, with the help of modern technologies. You can sell your ebook online on Amazon, as a Kindle book or you can offer it in Clickbank, where you can also setup an affiliate program for it.
You allow Clickbank affiliates to promote your book in exchange for a percentage of the earnings they generate for you. Another way of selling your ebook online is to build and maintain an associated website on the same topic, where you give free information for everybody who is interested. Those people are the perfect customers for your ebook. If they see it promoted on your website, they will most probably buy it.
Creating a membership site or an online course
If you don’t fell like writing ebooks and supporting them by maintaining a free website, you can simply turn your website into a paid membership one and give access to information only to paying readers. This can be considered a passive income stream, but you have to keep in mind that people will cancel their membership if you don’t add valuable content on regular basis.
There is another variant for this idea: creating an online course. The advantage for you is that you write it once, then you use an email marketing program to schedule sending the lessons to new students. The biggest volume of work will be in the beginning, when you create the course in itself and when you setup and schedule all the lessons. You can get people to join your course by putting together a compelling sales page, then use search engine marketing to draw traffic to it.
Creating affiliate websites
Affiliate marketing is a very powerful tool for creating passive income streams online. The mechanism of affiliate marketing consists of promoting various products or services and earning a commission for each sale made to one of the leads you sent to the merchant’s website. The easiest way to start with affiliate marketing is to join some affiliate networks, choose a few offers and build a website where to review those products or services. The biggest challenge will be to get traffic to your website, but if you have an advertising budget to start with, you can buy visitors from search engines.
It has been statistically proven that a certain percentage of your visitors will buy something, so you can predict how much money you can earn from your marketing efforts. This is where you need to pay attention, because you need to make more money than you spend, in order to have a profit. Buying search engine traffic is based on bidding for your spot in the SERPs. The more you bid, the higher you get displayed. You have to find that balance where you still show up in a good position, but the cost of getting the customers is lower than the profit you make from them.
These are only three ideas to get you started. Possibilities of making money online are endless, but you have to be aware that setting up successful passive income streams does require hard work and perhaps a little bit of luck. When you get started, it’s best to try and establish more than a single income stream, because in case something happens with any of your streams and it disappears, you’ll still have the others.
Anyway, the good news is that you don’t have to throw away everything you know and start something totally new. You can use your skills and expertise and create products and services that will help beginners to instruct themselves and become experts at their turn.