Passive Income Streams:
Are There Truly Lazy Ways to Online Income?
(continued)
featuring high-quality memberships or programs that have recurring fees,
such as web hosting, dating services, insurance, etc., so that every time
your visitor gets charged for another month or year, you earn an additional
commission.
2. Adsense sites If you understand how to identify in-demand
keywords, you can purchase domains, set up sites with timeless content on
them and then enroll in Google’s Adsense advertising program for publishers.
This automatically populates your site with ads related to your content and
pays you a commission every time a visitor clicks on one of those little
ads on your site.
An information marketing veteran I know told me he earns $1000 a month from
such Adsense ads, with expenses totaling $70 a year and no work on his part
after he set up the sites. Others claim to earn far more than that in passive
income from Adsense.
3. Kindle ebooks Like to write? Research relatively specific
topics that are in demand but not oversaturated, then write a series of
substantive 30-page ebooks that you publish for Amazon’s Kindle store, Barnes
& Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBookstore. Because those online retailers
attract the customers, you can get away with little or no marketing after
posting the ebooks for sale there.
I recommend the ebooks be related to one another in some way so that someone
who buys one and likes it is likely to buy another one. I’m a couple of months
into this strategy and see that it is going to add up to passive income of
thousands of dollars a year for me.
4. PDF ebooks Whereas ebooks for Kindle, Nook and the iBookstore
generally get priced from $.99 to $9.99 and you’re hoping to cash in with
regular volume, there’s still a market for specialized, short, practical
information reports in PDF format in the range of $19.95 to $99.00.
Choose problem-oriented topics whose solutions won’t go out of date quickly
for these. Write a long, persuasive sales letter and either recruit affiliates
through a network like Clickbank or buy pay-per-click traffic to your sales
letter page.
You may need a period of trial and error until you see decent conversion
rates, but beyond that point it’s possible to receive sales like clockwork
month after month after month.
5. Software When you belong to an industry and share its day-to-day
routines, you often observe an unmet need for automation of a specialized,
yet not that complicated task. Commission web-based software to perform that
task and then sell it for a low monthly fee.
This can cost as little as a few hundred dollars through various programmer
marketplaces like Scriptlance, and you don’t need to understand programming
yourself to set this up. Once buyers get accustomed to using your service,
they tend to stick with you for quite a long time, and this becomes a mounting
stream of passive income for you.
6. Stock stuff This was mentioned at one of the places I inquired
for ideas online, and it involves creating saleable images, video clips,
sound effects, ringtones or other such small pieces of intellectual property
that can be sold repeatedly and over the long run through online marketplaces
for each of those items.
To avoid having your creations go out of date quickly, choose subject matter
that doesn’t involve quickly changing fashions for example, landscapes
instead of people shots, where hair styles become telltale signs of when
the work was created.
• These six ideas barely begin to exhaust your options, of course, and perhaps
they’ll inspire you to create possibilities of your own for online income
that you can set up once and sit back and collect income from, year after
year after year.
About the author: The author of 15 books and nine multimedia home
study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information in one form or
another since 1981. She has developed and sold more than a dozen multimedia
home-study courses on publicity, writing, web site structure and personal
branding. Download a free recording of her answers to the most commonly asked
questions about information marketing by entering your information into the
privacy-assured request box at
http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm