Passive Income

Let’s talk about passive income.

What is passive income?

Passive income includes regular earnings from a source other than a contractor or employer. It can come from rental property or a business in which one does not actively participate, such as stock dividends or being paid royalties.

You might think that passive income is about getting something for nothing, as it has a ‘get-rich-quick’ appeal, but in the end it still involves work. You just give the work upfront.

You might do some or all of the work upfront, but it also involves additional labor along the way too. This could be in the form of keeping you product updated or your rental property well-maintained, in order to keep the money flowing.

Let’s look into some ways that you could start generating multiple income streams that will bring you closer to financial independence!

Create a Course

Selling online courses is one of the best passive income ideas of 2020. There are more and more course creators every day. Instead of being a consumer of these videos, you could be a producer, create your own video course and allow users to purchase it. This is a great option if you have a lot of knowledge in a specific subject matter. You could sell the course on your own website or on a platforms like Udemy and Skillshare.

Sell your photography

You’ve probably have tried to use an image before which has Shutterstock written all over it. If you’re creative enough, you could also make stock images! All you need is a great camera to get started. Once you submit your photos to stock photo sites, you will receive a commission every time someone purchases one of them.

Dropshipping

With e-commerce being one of the most popular ways to make passive income nowadays, it only makes sense to give a shout-out to dropshipping. You can find trending products that you can then sell online to customers all over the world. You can sell products in various niches from home decor to beauty. The most well-known website to use for this is Shopify.

Dividend Stocks

Investing in stocks has been around for a very long time, for a good reason. When you look at the world’s richest people, it’s pretty safe to say that stocks have played a big role in their deep bank accounts. While the act of investing in stocks is pretty passive, the research that goes into it is active. You will have to do plenty of research to find good stocks and invest a significant amount of money to receive large dividend checks. However, if you consistently invest money into dividend stocks you can earn a nice amount of income over time.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing a company’s product. The affiliate simply searches for a product they want to promote and earns a piece of the profit from each sale they make. It is a popular tactic to drive sales and generate significant online revenue. This is a beneficial transaction to both brands and affiliate marketers. This method of generating income works best for those with a bigger following on social media.

Tips for starting affiliate marketing:

1. Only recommend products that you are extremely familiar with: Building trust with your audience is important in affiliate marketing. You don’t want to start promoting a product that does not fit with you audience.

2. Focus on your affiliate traffic sources: Check you google analytics to view things such as bounce rate, time on page, age, gender, time of day, etc., so that you can focus our effort on the highest converting traffic.

3. Test and optimize your conversion rates: Let’s say you have a promotions page where you’re promoting a product via affiliate links. If you currently get 4000 visits/month at a 2% conversion rate, you have 80 referrals. To get 160 referrals, you can either focus on getting 4000 more visitors or simply increasing the conversion rate to 4%. Instead of spending months getting organic traffic, you could focus on landing page optimization, testing your calls-to-action and having a conversion rate optimization strategy.

4. Promote products from many different merchants: Put your eggs in different baskets. If you only promote one company, you are stuck with their commissions, their landing pages and their conversion rates.