I’ve looked long and hard over the years for passive streams of income ideas I can make from my laptop. It’s not plain sailing and those who make good money from passive income include writers, actors, directors and artists. But what about people who aren’t in those professions? Where are the opportunities for people who don’t work in those fields?
Passive Streams Of Income Ideas – The Internet
The answer is from the internet! There are several ways to generate a passive income from the internet. However, it doesn’t happen overnight. Internet entrepreneurs who make money on autopilot didn’t just land in that circumstance. They worked for it! Passive income from a website for example can replace a regular job. That’s why there are so many people competing on Google for the results. Having a top ranking website is a great way to create a passive income.
#1 Having a Top Ranking Website
So how do you get to have a great ranking website on Google? And how does this make money anyway? Ranking on Google is becoming much more difficult nowadays. There are so many competing websites around that you will need to create an amazing site to compete with top place. Even then, you will need to build traffic to that site and make sales. There are two main ways to make money passively from a website, and both of these assume a certain amount of traffic to it in the first place. Not to be all doom and gloom, but it ain’t easy!
- Google Adsense – Join the Google Adsense program and place some code on your site. This will be turned into clickable adverts which are relevant to your content. When your visitors click on the adverts, you make money. You only make a few pence for each click. However, this is passive income. A few sites generating a few thousands clicks each day and you have made it into easy street!
- Affiliate marketing – Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products and services online. Anyone can set up an affiliate website and start promoting products. There’s no delivery involved or dealing with customers so providing you make sales, they are passive! A nice passive income awaits those who can create many online sales.
Passive Streams Of Income Ideas – Traffic
The internet is a great system to use for passive income. You can create links, pages and emails which all work automatically without you having to be there personally. Ideally all our traffic to our website would come for free from Google. However, this isn’t exactly the case. The people with lots of website traffic coming free from Google have worked hard in building a resource which is useful to visitors. People don’t visit worthless sites which have no inherent value. You can build multiple traffic sources to your blog in order to sell affiliate products or get clicks from Google’s adsense program. The faster way to get traffic to your website however is paid traffic.
Passive Streams Of Income Ideas – Paid Traffic
You might be thinking, hang on, paid traffic isn’t a passive income stream. But it can be. Imagine a scenario where you pay $5 and sell a product which makes you $10. Would you keep just paying that $5 over and over and just settle for your $5 profit each day? No. You would scale up and reach more people with your product. This is the beauty of paid traffic. Once you reach a profitable model you can scale. Particularly if you have products and services which are digital, can be downloaded automatically and can be sold globally.
Affiliate Marketing Business Models
Affiliate marketing is the model of promoting other people’s products. You can show your visitors any product online and if they buy through your website, you earn a commission. That’s the affiliate model. However, there are good models and bad models. Selling a book off Amazon, for example, will only earn you a few pence commission. Selling a membership product can earn you a lifetime of commissions. By choosing the right products and services to sell online, you can earn a nice passive income over time (and having put the work in first).
Selling a low value item on the internet will only earn you a small commission. Selling high ticket products through high ticket affiliate programs allows you make much for for each sale.
Passive Streams Of Income Ideas – Email Marketing
Hang on, sending an email isn’t passive! Yes it can be. Email marketing is the ‘killer app’ of online marketing. An email campaign can be set up to run completely on autopilot, delivering email after email for as long as you like. By also setting up an email capture page you can collect emails and deliver products, services and content all completely on autopilot. But why is email marketing such a great invention?
A website can attract customers and lets them have a look at what you have to offer. However, most people won’t buy a product from someone they don’t know or trust, particularly on the internet. By capturing their email address, instead of having only a few minutes to capture their interest, it lets you build trust and communicate with your visitors over the months, years and decades to come.
This is why email marketing is so powerful. It also lets you send a single email, which can be automated, to thousands of people at once. As you list builds to the thousands and tens of thousands, your ability to make money from that list grows. Even if only a small percentage of your list ever purchases from you, given a growing list of targeted customers, your income will rise as your list grows, and for the same amount of work.
Get your own list and a range of premium products.Â
