Many of us spend the majority of our waking hours daily working hard to make other people rich. It’s hard to get ahead when each time you get a paycheck, the previous paycheck is already spent!
The solution is passive income. You only have so much time in life, and trading so much of that time for a little bit of salary isn’t a very good deal for you. That’s why all wealthy people I’ve ever encountered earn a passive income. So hear are some ideas I listed for you to earn a passive income.
Start Investing
This is my top pick and in my opinion the easiest to do. It’s what I started with many years before I even heard about passive income.
For most people, Investing will be by far the most important source of passive income over the course of your lifetime. If you’re not putting money aside into an investment of some kind from a young age, you’re missing out on more money than you realize. It is the number one way wealthy individuals generate a passive income.
Age makes a huge difference in your investment results
The best advice anyone can give you is Start Young. The difference in how much wealth you will accumulate if you start investing at 20 vs 40 is mind-boggling. Just check out some examples with compound interest calculators and you will see what I mean. Here is one example.
How to start Investing
Look online for a good investment broker. If you’re in the United States, TD Ameritrade or Fidelity are two good options that will let you open an account without having to work with a financial adviser who wants to make a commission.
Many investment accounts require a minimum of $500 or $1,000 to open a new account. So gather that initial amount and start as soon as possible. If you are new to investing and just starting to learn, just start by investing in an S&P500 index fund. It’s a good mix of a bunch of stocks so it’s about as safe as an investment in the stock market can be.
My recommendation is to use the strategy of paying yourself first meaning that you setup an automated way of investing a set amount of money every month when you receive your paycheck. So then it will be easy to keep investing every month without it taking any effort from you. Once you have started it will also be a lot more interesting to start learning about mutual funds and investing. The more you know, the better you can invest.
Just to reiterate the most important point. This really is the most important source of passive income and will for sure make me the most money. I have had really good results with this approach.
Time to Start Earning: Immediate
How Long will the Earnings keep flowing: Forever
Work Required: Check your progress twice a year and keep investing!
Build a Passive Income Website
This is actually something I’m doing with a couple of websites currently like the one your reading this from now. I have read and learned that a website is a great way to earn a passive income. I’m doing it as a side thing and am still working towards a mayor income but I truly believe it’s possible if you put the effort into it. If you build honest helpful content google will give you traffic which you can monetize.
The basic idea is that you create really helpful content that people would even pay to read or see and post it for free. If you target the right keywords then with about 30 posts you can get enough traffic to earn a great income.
There are many guides and a lot of content in blogs and YouTube about building passive income websites or niche sites. The one I have found most useful and honest is Income School. You can find them at incomeschool.com. They also have a paid class called Project 24 were they teach how to build a passive income website in 24 months. I haven’t enrolled in that class but I have found the Income School YouTube channel really helpful.
How to monetize your website
In Income School they teach you how to monetize your website. There are 3 ways and I have tried the two first ones that are really easy to setup.
- Affiliate products—you link to products that other people are selling (on Amazon or various other sites) and you earn a commission for every sale.
- Advertising—You can start with google ad’s and once you start to get more traffic, you can place ads from premium ad networks on your sites.
- Information products—Convert some of your content into a premium content package. It could be a written guide, audio guide, or video course. You can start selling this on your site to those who want the premium information.
How much can you make with a website
There is really no limit on how much money you can make with this approach, but just to give some idea on how much you can easily make just starting out, lets look at a few examples.
In the below example on YouTube Income School shares a story where someone has after 6 months of writing blog posts 45 000 page views per month and a $2800 monthly income. However he has written 76 articles averaging 2200 words per article. So he has put in a lot of effort although this was not his primary job. I would be happy if I can reach that kind of income after 24 months and 30 blog posts.
Possible mistakes when starting a web site
A lot of people get demotivated because of the long period of time one spends writing content without any visible results. So the biggest mistake people make is that they quit too soon. They might write a few or even 30 articles and when they don’t earn money in a few weeks or months and they quit and delete their site! It’s absolutely normal for a new site to take 3-6 months for its content to start to bring in any substantial amount of organic traffic. It just takes time for google to rank your content since it’s an entirely new website.
In Project 24 Income School will help you build up your online income so that it can replace your full-time income in about 24 months. I must say that their website and YouTube channel alone is so helpful that you can follow their instructions without purchasing the program. At least I have and I’m up and running with a couple of websites. Although I have the advantage of being familiar with some of the IT stuff like installing WordPress but I had to read and learn about hosting and all the other things.
Time to Start Earning: 3 months
How Long will the Earnings keep flowing: 2 to multiple years depending on the topic
Work Required: Check in a once a month to install updates etc. After the initial 30 posts you could just sit on the site and watch the earnings come in, but you will get better results if you keep on producing content.