Passive Income Streams: Are There Truly Lazy Ways to Online Income?
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Passive Income Streams: Are There Truly Lazy Ways to Online Income?
by Marcia Yudkin
Someone asked me what kinds of online businesses I'd recommend for someone who wanted to do any necessary work up front, then sit back and enjoy passive income for a number of years. I thought about what I'd heard about and seen and asked for additional input from Internet marketers. Six realistic options cropped up.
1. Affiliate programs. If you know how to get traffic to a web site through either pay-per-click advertising or search engine optimized content, then you can match that traffic with products and services that earn you commissions when your visitors buy. You're best off featuring high-quality memberships or programs that have recurring fees, such as web hosting, dating services, insurance, etc., so that every time your visitor gets charged for another month or year, you earn an additional commission.
2. Adsense sites. If you understand how to identify in-demand keywords, you can purchase domains, set up sites with timeless content on them and then enroll in Google's Adsense advertising program for publishers. This automatically populates your site with ads related to your content and pays you a commission every time a visitor clicks on one of those little ads on your site. An information marketing veteran I know told me he earns $1000 a month from such Adsense ads, with expenses totaling $70 a year and no work on his part after he set up the sites. Others claim to earn far more than that in passive income from Adsense.
3. Kindle ebooks. Like to write? Research relatively specific topics that are in demand but not oversaturated, then write a series of substantive 30-page ebooks that you publish for Amazon's Kindle store, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Apple's iBookstore. Because those online retailers attract the customers, you can get away with little or no marketing after posting the ebooks for sale there. I recommend the ebooks be related to one another in some way so that someone who buys one and likes it is likely to buy another one. I'm a couple of months into this strategy and see that it is going to add up to passive income of thousands of dollars a year for me.
4. PDF ebooks. Whereas ebooks for Kindle, Nook and the iBookstore generally get priced from $.99 to $9.99 and you're hoping to cash in with regular volume, there's still a market for specialized, short, practical information reports in PDF format in the range of $19.95 to $99.00. Choose problem-oriented topics whose solutions won't go out of date quickly for these. Write a long, persuasive sales letter and either recruit affiliates through a network like Clickbank or buy pay-per-click traffic to your sales letter page. You may need a period of trial and error until you see decent conversion rates, but beyond that point it's possible to receive sales like clockwork month after month after month.
5. Software. When you belong to an industry and share its day-to-day routines, you often observe an unmet need for automation of a specialized, yet not that complicated task. Commission web-based software to perform that task and then sell it for a low monthly fee. This can cost as little as a few hundred dollars through various programmer marketplaces like Scriptlance, and you don't need to understand programming yourself to set this up. Once buyers get accustomed to using your service, they tend to stick with you for quite a long time, and this becomes a mounting stream of passive income for you.
6. Stock stuff. This was mentioned at one of the places I inquired for ideas online, and it involves creating saleable images, video clips, sound effects, ringtones or other such small pieces of intellectual property that can be sold repeatedly and over the long run through online marketplaces for each of those items. To avoid having your creations go out of date quickly, choose subject matter that doesn't involve quickly changing fashions - for example, landscapes instead of people shots, where hair styles become telltale signs of when the work was created.
These six ideas barely begin to exhaust your options, of course, and perhaps they'll inspire you to create possibilities of your own for online income that you can set up once and sit back and collect income from, year after year after year.
The author of 15 books and nine multimedia home study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information in one form or another since 1981. She has developed and sold more than a dozen multimedia home-study courses on publicity, writing, web site structure and personal branding. Download a free recording of her answers to the most commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information into the privacy-assured request box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm .
by Marcia Yudkin
Someone asked me what kinds of online businesses I'd recommend for someone who wanted to do any necessary work up front, then sit back and enjoy passive income for a number of years. I thought about what I'd heard about and seen and asked for additional input from Internet marketers. Six realistic options cropped up.
1. Affiliate programs. If you know how to get traffic to a web site through either pay-per-click advertising or search engine optimized content, then you can match that traffic with products and services that earn you commissions when your visitors buy. You're best off featuring high-quality memberships or programs that have recurring fees, such as web hosting, dating services, insurance, etc., so that every time your visitor gets charged for another month or year, you earn an additional commission.
2. Adsense sites. If you understand how to identify in-demand keywords, you can purchase domains, set up sites with timeless content on them and then enroll in Google's Adsense advertising program for publishers. This automatically populates your site with ads related to your content and pays you a commission every time a visitor clicks on one of those little ads on your site. An information marketing veteran I know told me he earns $1000 a month from such Adsense ads, with expenses totaling $70 a year and no work on his part after he set up the sites. Others claim to earn far more than that in passive income from Adsense.
3. Kindle ebooks. Like to write? Research relatively specific topics that are in demand but not oversaturated, then write a series of substantive 30-page ebooks that you publish for Amazon's Kindle store, Barnes & Noble's Nook and Apple's iBookstore. Because those online retailers attract the customers, you can get away with little or no marketing after posting the ebooks for sale there. I recommend the ebooks be related to one another in some way so that someone who buys one and likes it is likely to buy another one. I'm a couple of months into this strategy and see that it is going to add up to passive income of thousands of dollars a year for me.
4. PDF ebooks. Whereas ebooks for Kindle, Nook and the iBookstore generally get priced from $.99 to $9.99 and you're hoping to cash in with regular volume, there's still a market for specialized, short, practical information reports in PDF format in the range of $19.95 to $99.00. Choose problem-oriented topics whose solutions won't go out of date quickly for these. Write a long, persuasive sales letter and either recruit affiliates through a network like Clickbank or buy pay-per-click traffic to your sales letter page. You may need a period of trial and error until you see decent conversion rates, but beyond that point it's possible to receive sales like clockwork month after month after month.
5. Software. When you belong to an industry and share its day-to-day routines, you often observe an unmet need for automation of a specialized, yet not that complicated task. Commission web-based software to perform that task and then sell it for a low monthly fee. This can cost as little as a few hundred dollars through various programmer marketplaces like Scriptlance, and you don't need to understand programming yourself to set this up. Once buyers get accustomed to using your service, they tend to stick with you for quite a long time, and this becomes a mounting stream of passive income for you.
6. Stock stuff. This was mentioned at one of the places I inquired for ideas online, and it involves creating saleable images, video clips, sound effects, ringtones or other such small pieces of intellectual property that can be sold repeatedly and over the long run through online marketplaces for each of those items. To avoid having your creations go out of date quickly, choose subject matter that doesn't involve quickly changing fashions - for example, landscapes instead of people shots, where hair styles become telltale signs of when the work was created.
These six ideas barely begin to exhaust your options, of course, and perhaps they'll inspire you to create possibilities of your own for online income that you can set up once and sit back and collect income from, year after year after year.
The author of 15 books and nine multimedia home study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information in one form or another since 1981. She has developed and sold more than a dozen multimedia home-study courses on publicity, writing, web site structure and personal branding. Download a free recording of her answers to the most commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information into the privacy-assured request box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm .