Have you lost enthusiasm for a job that used to bring you great joy? Or, possibly you enjoy your work but it requires too many hours per week and you’re getting tired. It’s also possible that the cost of living increases mean your salary isn’t keeping pace with financial commitments.
It’s difficult to stay happy when you don’t have time for hobbies, you don’t enjoy your work or you’re feeling daily financial pressures.
When you’re looking for a solution, creating passive income with an Internet business is an excellent avenue to pursue.
What is Passive Income?
Passive income is money that comes in on a monthly basis without the need to do work. Don’t misinterpret the last sentence. There is no such thing as generating income without working for it. However, there are systems you can put into use online that continue to generate revenue month by month.
For example, it’s possible to build a blog that gets traffic from Google every month. Whether you’re physically working on it one month or not, people keep visiting articles you wrote in the past and click to buy products those articles lead them to.
Or, maybe you source a quality product and post it on Amazon. Amazon gets customers visiting their site every single day. Your Amazon account will see sales on days when you might be on vacation or working at your job.
It requires work to set your online business before you’ll benefit from the passive monthly revenue it generates each month. Let’s take a look at three specific types of online businesses that you can set up and generate passive income with.
Let’s establish two definitions so that you understand how you will make money with this method of online marketing.
- Product creator: Someone who creates a product or service for sale.
- Affiliate marketer: Someone who generates sales for the product creator.
As an
affiliate, you don’t need to worry about creating any products or offering any services. Instead, all you need to do is find products and/or services you’d like to recommend to people. When those people buy the product or service, the creator pays you a percentage of the sale amount.
Let’s say that you love personal development. You might recommend products offered by Anthony Robbins, for example. Or, if you enjoy golf, you might recommend training products that help people become better golfers.
Making money as an
affiliate has many benefits. You can get started without needing to do any product market research prior to building a product. This is an expensive and time-intensive process that involves testing sales pages and offers.
Instead, you just get good at online marketing and drive targeted prospects to a proven product offer. Once the product creator’s proven sales process makes the sale, you are paid your commission. The next benefit? You aren’t responsible for any customer service issues. The product creator handles all that.
This means that
affiliate marketing simply requires matching interested prospects with products that solve their problems and it doesn’t require you to do anything after the sale.
How will you find these interested prospects? One of the most effective methods is to create a blog. If you are going to sell golf training products, for example, set up a blog that educates through tips about being a better golfer. This will attract your perfect audience of people who want to learn to improve their golf game.
Your helpful blog posts will get indexed at Google and generate free search engine traffic to your website. All you need to do from there is link your blog visitors to the affiliate product you’re promoting and pick up monthly passive income from the sales of that product.
As you get better, you might use more advanced marketing methods, such as building an email subscriber list (so you can follow-up through email and point them to the product) or paid advertising. Keep it simple at first. Get free traffic first and then start adding more marketing knowledge as your income grows.
Selling on Amazon FBA
Another way to start generating monthly passive income is by selling on Amazon FBA. FBA stands for Fulfilled by Amazon. Amazon does all the work for you and here’s how it works:
The first thing you do is send your products to Amazon so they can store it inside one or more of their many fulfillment warehouses. These are buildings run by both Amazon employees and robots. The warehouse staff sorts and inventories your products. They keep good care of your products. In the event that anything is damaged, Amazon will pay you the full retail price of that ruined product.
Every time a customer buys your product on Amazon, the company handles the entire transaction for you. Everything is automated for you. Your product is taken off the shelf at the fulfillment center, packaged up inside a box and shipped out to your customer.
Amazon even follows up with your customer after the product arrives in order to make sure everything is perfect with the order. If anything is wrong, Amazon steps in and fixes the problem for you and the customer.
You might wonder what the catch is if Amazon does all the work for you. Here are your responsibilities:
You’ll need to select your products. While Amazon handles all the work on the back end, it’s up to you to figure out which products will sell and which ones won’t sell. This means you need to learn a simple process for how to do this type of product research.
It’s your job to keep product inventory. Amazon will notify you whenever inventory is low but you need to stay on top of the process so customers always get their purchases in a timely manner.
Promotion and advertising fall on your shoulders, too. It takes more than just adding a product page on the Amazon site. Promoting products is similar to what was covered in the above affiliate marketing section. You will generate traffic to your Amazon listings via blog posts, email marketing, and paid ads.
Become a Freelancer
Freelancing is another solid way to generate income online. What are you good at? Can you:
- Build a website for clients?
- Do design work?
- Write articles?
- Edit articles?
- Perform bookkeeping services?
- Perform photography at weddings?
- Plan weddings?
- Teach a language?
- Tutor math?
- Become an interpreter?
- Perform legal work?
- Write music?
- Consult for the travel industry?
- Perform accounting services?
As you can see, any skill-set that you possess is easily turned into an online business. On your downtime, such as in the evenings or on weekends, you can start bringing in extra revenue by doing something you enjoy and are good at.
There are many freelancing websites that already get visitors by people who want to hire you for your expertise. All you need to do is list your services there or answer job postings and start working.
If one of the above options has you excited, get started as soon as possible. Start learning how to become an
affiliate, use Amazon, or build your own freelancing business. You'll start experiencing the joys of monthly passive income in no time.