passive income

An Income Conveyor Belt: How to Build Passive Income

Passive income is everyone’s ultimate dream, right? Having passive income is like having an income conveyor belt that allows you to make money for your business while you do absolutely nothing. However, achieving the reality is far from easy.

Being able to rely on a passive income requires hard work upfront. There is no magic switch you can install on your business’s website. You’ll have to be willing to do the work in the beginning and keep things running with routine maintenance after that. That’s because if there’s a chink in the chain, that chain isn’t moving at optimum speed. And speed is essential to keep your business’s passive income running along. Here are a few methods to help you get started.

 

1. Start a Blog

Blogs are one of the most popular way to earn income passively. This is because the content you create for your blog remains there, often for years after you created it. When a business has a blog that’s vibrant and informative, that business is generally seen as an authority figure in the industry. If you don’t know where to start, there are some courses on Udemy that will teach you how to set a blog up in under a week.

If your content contains affiliate links, ads and sponsors and continually gets high traffic, then you can sit back and watch the passive income roll in.

However, blogging is a huge industry, and there are a lot of players. What’s more, these people are not resting on their laurels. No, they’re doing everything they can to make sure they get the most clicks and traffic.

Your main source of income from blogs depends on your industry connections. For instance, you could link to affiliates on your blog site. This means that other people pay you to advertise their relevant services on your site. Whenever someone visits your blog then clicks on a link there and uses those services, you receive a commission fee.

 

RELATED ARTICLE: 6 TIPS TO GET THE MOST VALUE FROM YOUR QUALITY WEBSITE

 

2. Build a Membership Community

In time, your audience will respect you as an authority figure in your niche. Once this happens, you’ll have little trouble getting members to join a membership community.

Think of a membership community as being like one of those loyalty cards that shops and stores hand out to their frequent customers. It’s like a secret club that only your best customers can belong to. For example, a lot of online businesses encourage people to subscribe to their free newsletter. However, those same businesses often have more valuable information and more thorough services for which they charge a higher fee.

Keep in mind, though, that the information or the products and services you offer in your special access package must be of premium quality. Those customers are paying more than the average person, and therefore they deserve services and products that the average person can’t get.

 

3. Sell Yourself

Everyone on Earth is unique, and we each have our own natural talents. You can market those talents of yours, even if you’re running your business in your spare time. An example of someone who has been successful in this vein is the creator of the YouTube channel Valuetainment, who has a net worth of $10 million.

 

Selling yourself, or info-marketing goes like this:

  • Identify your skill. This needs to be whatever it is you do best, something that comes as easily to you as breathing.
  • Outline in easy-to-follow steps how to perform that skill.
  • Record and document those steps, showing other people how to perform that skill.
  • Market those recordings and sell them to your target audience.

Easy, right?

Not so much. I’ve been producing successful info-products for 2 years and spend a large chunk of my time and energy creating them. Know, though, that once the basic leg work is done, it’s pretty much smooth sailing, depending on your list and customer base. That’s because the hard part is done. Now all you have to do is market the thing!

However, once you have a dedicated list of subscribers and customers, many of them will be willing to buy additional products and services from you. And that truly is passive income if those products are online only.

 

4. Invest

One of the most time-consuming but rewarding options for earning passive income is investing in dividend-bearing stocks. These stocks let you collect dividends on a monthly or quarterly basis. Additionally, many companies offer dividend reinvestment programs that automatically use those dividends to purchase extra shares of company stock. This automatic system is the basis of earning passive income.

However, investing requires a long-term commitment, somewhere between 10-20 years. To achieve true diversification and ensure all your eggs are in enough baskets, you’ll need to invest in roughly 10-15 stocks.

Stock investment is not necessarily easy money. However, during those 10-20 years of waiting, those reinvested dividends accumulate more shares, which collect more dividends, and so on. You can learn the basics of how dividend-bearing stock investing works in a weekend or so.

 

5. Network like a Son of a Gun

Businesses thrive on customers. We all know that. What we tend to forget, though, is that a hefty number of customers come to us through referrals. When customers need something one store doesn’t have, that business often refers customers to another business. If you’re on bad terms with other players in your industry, they’re not going to refer to you.

The larger your network, the more opportunities you’ll get for inside deals and hidden insights for expanding your business. Often in ways you couldn’t (or wouldn’t) do alone. Everybody you meet knows someone who knows someone who could bring value to you.

 

6. Advertise

In this day and age, good content is determined by a few factors, which legendary marketing king Neil Patel talks extensively about. However, good content can be boiled down to one question: Is it helpful?

Content that does not benefit someone, answer a question, solve a problem, or show someone how to do something new isn’t going to generate a lot of traffic. That’s a given.

Advertisers naturally want to do business with sites that promote a huge amount of traffic on a routine basis. The more your traffic grows, the more likely it will be that people will click the ads that are not intrusive and promise genuine help.

Few people look forward to seeing an ad. A lot of people hate ads and consider them a real nuisance. Ads are often the biggest reason why people stay away from sites in droves. Therefore, advertisements on your site that are actually useful and non-intrusive will endear you to your customer base and random visitors.

Further, once you have a good number of advertisements on your site that offer meaningful solutions to your audience’s problems, you’ll enjoy a generous amount of passive income.

 

Conclusion

Making your business a receptor for passive income requires tenacity and dedication. It also requires investments of money and time. However, a passive income system, once it’s operational, will give your business a reliable income conveyor belt.