5 Ways To Make Passive Income
There are so many ways to make money passively that it is mind-boggling and, in the beginning, confusing. Some methods are easier to set up than others and are great if you want to set up a quick income stream. Others take more time but can generate more income. So, let’s look at a few of the more popular ways to make passive money:
• Creating and selling your own products on your website
• Selling other people’s products on your website (known as affiliate marketing)
• Writing and selling an ebook or print-on-demand (POD) book
• Building and selling an app, plugin or software
• Sell images as micro-stock
Creating and selling your own products
With this model, you generally must create the content for the products (but there are other ways to get content as we will discuss later on), write the sales page and set up the delivery method for each product; once it is done, it runs on autopilot. The only upfront and recurring costs involved if selling from your own website is buying a domain name, hosting and possibly a subscription to an autoresponder, if you are going to use it to deliver your product.
Another way to sell products is through affiliate marketing where you allow other marketers to sell your product for a commission from each sale. If you get a large stable of people selling for you, it can boost your income substantially. The way to make this passive is to buy an ecommerce software that has a built-in affiliate module so that it can handle sales, commissions, etc.
Selling other people’s products (also known as affiliate marketing)
In the previous income stream we talked about you letting other people sell your products but you can also sell other people’s products too as an additional stream of income. With this form of affiliate marketing, you are given permission (in the form of a website link) to sell products that other people have created. For each one you sell, you get a commission. Most of the time, you choose products that complement yours, so they will pertain to your audience too.
While the profit potential is not as great as with selling your own products, it is faster to set up because the products, sales page and delivery process are already set up by the producer of the product.
In the next lesson, we continue discussing the types of passive income streams, so you are not going to want to miss that lesson.
Writing and selling an ebook or print-on-demand (POD) book
Writing an ebook or POD book is no more difficult than writing your own product except that an ebook might be longer and require a little more work up front in the beginning. But once you have it done and listed on Amazon for Kindle, CreateSpace as POD, or uploaded on any number of other book seller sites, your job is usually done as they do the marketing, delivery and paying you royalties for the books sold.
A great tactic is to write a POD book and then also upload an electronic version to Amazon. That way you have two income streams with very little extra work. And because both audiences are different in the format they want, there is very little overlap in buyers.
Building and selling an app, plugin or software
Another lucrative passive income stream is creating an app, plugin or other type of software if you are handy with coding. Apps and plugins many times are a one-time payment, whereas for software, many are SAAS (Software As A Service) meaning the software is based on a recurring charge of either monthly or annually. Many of the big software companies like Microsoft Office Suite now use an SAAS-type model.
Sell images as micro-stock
If you are a photographer and have many, many images, you can sell them over and over either off your own website or through several micro-stock agencies. All you do is upload them once and you are done.
