5 Passive Income Ideas That You Can Action Now.

Are you fed up of spending every waking hour working hard each day to make other people rich? Working 9–5, living pay slip to pay slip and never having enough money to actually save or have enough time to spend on the things you actually enjoy doing.

Well, the answer to this problem is passive income. You have a finite time to live on this planet, and the majority of that time is traded for a little bit of money. Wealthy people know this and change the equation and spend their time building their revenue streams to give them a passive income.

So to help you understand what things can help build a passive income revenue stream, and build one yourself, we have put together a list of 5 waysto earn a passive income.

Every idea on this list can be actioned and completed within a month or two and can earn passive income for years to come. So start now by spending some of your valuable time (when you’re not using it to make someone else richer) on one or more of these ideas and completely change your life for the better.

Idea 1: Write an ebook

Ebooks might not seem as profitable as other online revenue streams, but in my experience, they can be a great product to source a longterm passive income. An ebook can be something that you can put together within a month which could generate a passive income for years to come.

The reasons I love ebooks are;

They are relatively quick to put together and there is no real ongoing work once it has been completed (depending on your topic that is). You may need to update them from time to time, but generally speaking, it should look after its self.

Ebooks can earn you a passive income for years! Other streams of passive income sources can die out really quickly if you don’t keep them up to date. In my experience, an ebook that is based on an evergreen topic will keep generating an income for years.

You don’t have to be an amazing writer or even an expert to generate an income from an ebook. Many people will not write one as they are too scared, as they believe they don’t know enough about the topic and they think that they are not very good at writing. You just need to be brave, pick a topic that you know something about, and have an interest in and start. Write what you know about the topic and if you’re not already an expert then don’t pretend to be.

You can write your ebook from the perspective of a beginner, which might actually help your audience relate to you.

So how do you get started?

The best thing to do is just start. Think of a topic that you’re passionate in, and set up your Word Doc. Most eBooks are 50,000 words, but if you can write about 30,000 words then you’ll probably be fine. Once you’re done get a friend to proofread it, this will help fix typos or grammar issues.

Once you’re happy with your ebook, the next step is to get it published. smashwords.com is a great site that can help you with this. You can upload your Word document and they will convert it into the correct file type ready for distribution. They are able to get your ebook onto major distribution channels, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other major e-book sites.

If you have a website, Youtube channel or social media following then you can use these to market your ebook as well.

It’s best to keep plugin your ebook to your market audience to increase the numbers seeing your published ebook.

Time to earn: 1 month
Potential earning longevity: 10 years
Earning potential for 30 days work: £100 — £1000 per month, but this depends on how you market it.
Ongoing work: Almost none (depending on your choice of topic).

Idea 2: Build a passive income website

Here is the basic idea of building a passive income website. Take the same type of content that you would create an ebook and put it on your own website. If you target the right keywords (SEO) then with about 30 posts you can get enough traffic to earn a good income.

There are 3 ways you can earn income from your posts;

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 — Once you start to get some traffic, you can place ads from premium ad networks (like Google Adsense).

Information products — You can take some of your content and organise it into a premium content package. It can be in the format of a written guide, audio guide, or video course. You can then start selling this on your own site to those who want the premium content.

One key thing to building a passive income website is to make sure that you’re consistent. The biggest mistake that most people make is that they quit too soon. They write 30 + articles that don’t generate any money for 3 months they then give up and delete the site. Remember it is quite normal for a site to take 3–6months for its content to start bringing in any substantial amount of traffic.

It can be really easy to be overwhelmed when building a website from scratch, there is really a lot to think about, and a lot of things that need to be right on your site for it to get traction. If you’re not technically minded or don’t have the time to put together your site, then you can purchase a ready-made site with all of the technical bits and pieces in place. Click here for more info

Time to earn: 3–6 months
Potential earning longevity: 2 to 15 years depending on the topic
Earning potential for 30 days work: £500 to £5,000 per month
Ongoing work required: Monthly updates, tweaks too content and weekly to fortnightly content writing.

Idea 3: Start a YouTube channel

Youtube is a huge opportunity for anyone looking to earn a passive income. Youtube can work just like a website. You pick a topic you can share information about and then start recording videos. The best way to do this is to keep them simple to start with, you can use your phone and YouTube video editor to give your self a starting point.

Once your channel starts to get views, you can start making money with ads. But that not even the best part. You can also recommend affiliate products and even sell your own information products from your channel.

The best way to start would be to spend a month making 30 or so videos. Upload them to your YouTube channel and schedule them to post once a week for 30 weeks. If it starts to pick up and you get positive view count and subscribers then you can decide to make more videos to keep promoting your affiliate products and your own products.

Time to earn: 5 -10 months
Potential earning longevity: 1 to 5 years
Earning potential for 30 days of work: £500 per month
Ongoing work required: Adding more video content on a regular basis will dramatically grow your earnings.

Idea 4: Record a podcast

A podcast works in a similar way to a Youtube channel, it’s just through a different medium. You will need to record your podcast a bit like a TV show by adding seasons. Spend the next month recording 30 episodes on any topic that you’re interested in and schedule them to go out one a week. Podcasts work best if they are informative and entertaining. Think about how it is going to be listened to, most people will be listening to your podcast whilst driving or at the gym, don’t give them too much to do whilst they are listening.

Time to earn: 1 month
Potential earning longevity: less than 2 years
Earning potential for 30 days of work: £50 to £500
Ongoing working required: Just like a Youtube channel, the more content you create on a regular basis, the more your earnings will grow.

Idea 5: Start investing

Investing is the most important source of passive income over the course of your life. If you’re not putting money aside into some kind of investment then you’re missing out on more money.

The difference in how much wealth you can accumulate if you start investing is astounding. Every wealthy person on the planet understands how to make their money work for them and not the other way round.

There are a few ways that you can get started with investing. You can invest in commodities such as gold & silver, stocks or buying assets, like buy-to-let housing, that generate cash flow. Set aside a little bit of money every month, and build up a bit of a surplus. The idea is to create a bit of a buffer with money that you can afford to lose if everything goes south in your investment portfolio. You can decide where to put this money but the idea is to convert it into an asset that generates more money. Make your money work for you rather than you working for money.

If you don’t know anything about investing I would suggest that you spend some time learning as much as you can about it. A great place to start would be Rich dad poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki does a very good job in explaining how investing works in a simple way and will give you a solid base to start from.

Time to earn: immediately
Potential earning longevity: Forever
Earning potential for 30 days of work: infinite
Ongoing work required: check in occasionally, learn as you grow, invest more.

Conclusion

All of the above ideas are a great way to start building your finances so that you can begin to have a bit more freedom within your life. Although each of the ideas will take a bit of work, to begin with, once the foundations have been built it they will pretty much look after themselves. The biggest hurdle to all of this is getting started. So free up some of your valuable time, and put it to good use, something that you will benefit from in the long term.

Originally Posted on Entrepreneurs Blog.