Is there anything better than earning money while you sleep? I mean, wouldn't you like to wake up with an influx of cash into your bank account?
I know this concept sounds crazy, but passive income is more than an impossible dream. Forbes contributor Brianna Wiest calls it an infinite potential revenue stream for a reason. The point, she says, is that "there is always a possibility."
10 passive income strategies to try in 2020
Before I dive into my favorite ways to make money without much work, I want people to know the two reasons why I love this topic so much. First, passive income seems to be incredibly controversial for some reason. Every time I write an article or post YouTube videos about passively making money, people in the comments go crazy.
I am often told that I don't know what passive income means, or that I have no idea what I'm talking about!
The second reason I love passive income so much is the obvious one: It has had such a dramatic impact on my life. Getting passive income has helped my family achieve so many goals. We can give generously and live life on our own terms because of the freedom that passive income provides.
To test what I'm saying here, I want to introduce you to ten passive income strategies that I personally use to earn $ 1,000 a month or more. If you are ready to prepare for life, you will need to pay attention to.
1: Stocks that pay dividends and other investments
The first passive income idea on this list requires some initial money, but it absolutely helps me earn more than $ 1,000 per month. Dividend-paying stocks, ETFs, and other investments like Fundraise and Lending Club are helping me make money all day, all without work on my part. Although the amounts I have invested in these accounts vary, they all pay me more than $ 1,000 per month.
Investing in dividends, in particular, has been a profitable effort for me and for many other investors. According to Forbes taxpayer Brett Owens, forward-looking dividend investors have the potential to earn annual returns of 15%, 20%, or even 25%, if they only choose the right stocks that pay dividends and stay on track.
Obviously, it takes time and constant investment to build your portfolio where you earn $ 1,000 per month. But you have to start somewhere, right?
2: affiliate marketing
Where investing is a wealth-building strategy that has been around forever, the second passive income option on this list is fairly new. Affiliate marketing is an income idea that requires you to have a website or platform that you can use to promote other companies or "affiliates". When someone uses your affiliate link to buy a product or subscribe to a service, they get paid.
My main website, GoodFinancialCents.com, generates all kinds of affiliate income through our relationships with investment firms, insurance companies, online banks, and more. But you don't have to do things like I did; You could start almost any type of website and find affiliates that work in your niche.
And remember, you don't necessarily have to start a blog per se. I know people who are crushing it with affiliates who use YouTube, podcasts, and other avenues. You can even build an affiliate business using social media!
3: display ads
Another way to passively earn more than $ 1,000 per month is through the use of graphic ads. Again, this is returning to the blog. The beauty of owning property online is the fact that you can monetize it in many ways.
Graphic ads work like billboards you see on the side of the road, only displayed on your website. The point is that advertisers are paying to promote their products; your ads are on your website.
Most graphic ads are set up by ad networks that function as intermediaries between you and the advertisers who want to pay you. The best part about graphic ads is that they are completely passive. You can be paid a ridiculous amount of money based on your traffic, even while you sleep!
4: CPC Ads (cost per click)
With affiliate advertising, you are only paid when someone clicks on your link and signs up for something or buys something. Graphic ads, on the other hand, pay based on the amount of traffic and eyeballs you get on their ads.
With CPC ads, also known as "cost per click" ads, on the other hand, you get paid when someone clicks on an ad no matter what they do after that. I don't have to wait and pray for them to buy something or sign up for nothing. Each click puts money into my bank account.
Does that mean I can go to my own website and click on ads all day? I suppose I could, but eventually, that company would find out what I'm doing and interrupt me! With that in mind, clicking on your own ads shouldn't be part of your strategy here. Instead, try to increase traffic so that your ads are seen by more and more people every day.
5: Selling leads
After launching Good Financial Cents, I launched a niche insurance site called Life Insurance by Jeff. Believe it or not, but I was able to generate 100,000 income in just nine months from the launch of this website.
While website creation was not passive at all, we made many changes to the website over time to make it much more passive. Eventually, I even decided that selling the leads my website generated was much better than earning commissions when making a purchase.
While selling leads is much less lucrative than earning life insurance commissions, I realized over time that selling life insurance was too much work. If he was going to keep things going, he would need to hire people, manage a team, and spend hours. I wasn't really interested in doing any of that, so I opted to start selling leads. Now that I do, I earn passive income with little effort on my part.
6: Selling courses
As of right now, the only course I'm selling is an online marketing course for financial advisors. Although I hardly promote it, I still get a lot of sales. The course is not cheap either: there are 2,500!
While it took a lot of work to create this course three years ago, really all I have done since then is sit back and collect money from the occasional sale. Now I easily earn over $ 1,000 a month with the course, and that's in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars I earned when I actively promoted it every week.
With this in mind, making money from selling courses is not as easy as flipping a switch! You must first create the course, which may take weeks or months of your time. However, once you are done with the work required to create your product, income can become passive.
Holly Johnson, a freelance professional writer who makes over $ 200,000 a year creating content online, is another successful entrepreneur who is doing well with course sales. Johnson launched her freelance writing course Earn More Writing in 2017 and has sold over 700 courses for $ 199 each since then. In January 2019, she also released a "Pro" version of her course that sells for $ 349. She sold 40 the first day.
"Selling 700 courses doesn't seem like much," says Johnson. "But when the price of a course is one hundred dollars or more, you don't have to sell thousands to earn considerable income."
That's a good point, and it's one to consider if you have teaching skills that people will pay $ 100 or more to learn. If you can get enough people to buy, or if their price is high enough, the courses can generate a lot of cash flow over time.
7: Create a digital product
While courses are digital products that you can sell over and over again, there are other types of digital products that you can dive into. I'm talking about e-books, online how-to guides, and basically anything else you can market and sell online.
My latest digital product is an online challenge that helps people earn $ 1,000 online. Actually, I offered this challenge for free but gave the option to pay $ 7 for an updated package with PDF and instruction worksheets.
This update is only $ 7, but even small amounts can quickly accumulate when you sell a couple of hundred per month.
If you think digital products can't work, consider a Forbes interview I did in 2016 with Christian rock star Chris Greenwood. While Greenwood has made considerable sums of money online now, his first product was a self-published book.
Greenwood launched the book idea on Kickstarter and raised $ 20,000! This only shows how a small idea can translate into big profits with the right plan.
The bottom line: think of an online product you can create that solves a problem or provides a service. Once you create it, you can sell it over and over again and earn passive income while sleeping.
8: YouTube Ads
While YouTube ads aren't as "passive" as some income-generating strategies on this list, they still fit in with the rest of this post. Anyway, I'm making YouTube videos, so why not run ads that generate additional revenue? The passive part comes in because I make the video once and earn income over and over as more and more people watch it.
For example, I took a lot of free time with my children during the holidays since they were out of school. I don't think I shot any video during that time, fine, maybe one, but passive income continued to come in as many people logged into YouTube to watch my show.
And it's surprising how much content YouTube viewers consume. Some people make a living from videos on extremely random topics. Take for example the "Queen of the slime", Karina García, who has more than 10 million followers on social networks who tune in to see her play with the slime. According to Forbes, she's only 24, but she's making money!
If you love being on video and want to earn a passive income while you sleep, YouTube ads are where they are.
9: My financial planning practice
Although I live with my family near Nashville, Tennessee, until recently I owned a financial planning practice in Illinois. He hadn't stepped on that business forever but still kept generating a fair amount of profit.
How much? My financial planning process has generated more than $ 400,000 in revenue each year for the past several years, and with almost no work on my part.
But, it took me a while to get to that point. Where I once worked in my financial planning office most days, I started testing things with a few days a month out of the office at first. From there, I started working remotely 2-3 days a week, then 4-5 days a week, and so on. Finally, I was able to manage my business remotely without having to show up for work.
You may be wondering how passive this is since I obviously built this business many years ago. The reality is that creating this business from scratch was a lot of work.
The point is that I have been slowly disconnected every year as I have hired competent people to carry out daily operations. The end result is a business that has always provided passive income while I sleep.
10: sell a business
While I loved being a financial advisor and running a financial planning practice from afar, I finally decided it was over. In late 2018, I decided that my financial practice was a distraction and sold it! Yes, you read it well; I sold my financial planning practice.
Selling a business can sometimes generate initial income that is earned immediately; Other times, you will receive payments for several years.
My situation falls into the last category, as I am paid for my practice in monthly payments. This means that for the foreseeable future, I will receive a fully passive income in my bank account every month.
Just like owning a business and running it from a distance, selling a business requires a lot of work upfront. You must first build the business and get it to start generating income. Only then will you have a business that someone will pay for.
However, once you get to that point, you can achieve the holy grail of passive income - a huge sum of money that is pouring into your bank account every month.
The bottom line
If you are reading this and think "there is no such thing as passive income", it is a shame. You've already decided that this article's premise is false, so you will never begin the journey to build passive wealth that increases over time.
I hope you love your 9-5 job because you are going to be there for a while. If you need me, I'll be building more sources of passive income here that work 24 hours, even when I don't feel like it.
