There are thousands of ways you might choose to begin making money with your new blog (online business). This is an overview of some of my favorite ways to make income, some passive, some not. Read through these and see which sounds like it might be FOR YOU. There are links to ways to make money at the bottom of this article which you can implement and begin today. Check those out, and when you’re ready, choose one and get going on this. Time is passing by…
1. SELL A PHYSICAL PRODUCT – If you have a product, an idea, know where you can find ample supply, you might start a website to sell a tangible product. I’ve done this numerous times over the past 16 years. I started with this sort of website, and I say unfortunately – I have one now.
I say it that way because it is not strictly passive income. Sure we make money while we’re sleeping, while we’re out eating at one of our favorite restaurants here in Southern Thailand, but eventually some of my TIME is required and I have to physically or mentally “DO SOMETHING” to fulfill my part of the deal and collect that payment.
Email, packing boxes with products sold, and driving to the post office. It takes me two to three hours per week to earn money with our e-commerce business. It brings in anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000 per month after expenses.
That’s decent, but as I said, it’s not ideal. My current goal – my only goal – is to ramp up one of my other projects – a passive income project – and make $30,000 per month. It’s why I’m writing this article now. It’s why I got up this morning.
Online business selling physical products is great. It’s AMAZING, don’t get me wrong. We still get a little giddy when we’re eating dinner and check the phone to see we received an email notifying us of a sale of a few hundred dollars. It’s easy to think “IT DOESN’T GET ANY EASIER THAN THIS!”
Guess what though? IT DOES GET EASIER.
Focus on passive income when you can. Sell a physical product to get started, and then start thinking about some strictly PASSIVE income project you can get started on.
2. SELL A PHYSICAL SERVICE – Like a physical product, you or someone else must be there using TIME to fulfill your part of the deal. Trading TIME for money is not ideal in any situation. Look at your time as the most important variable you own. It surely is. Remember, the less manually intensive your physical service, the easier time you’ll have to scale it. Scaling physical product and services sales can be difficult in many situations. Many times it is just impossible.
When possible – choose one of the next options.
3. SELL A DIGITAL PRODUCT – Digital products are, in my own opinion, the best thing to sell ever. Once they’re created, you can sell them in your sleep. You may do nothing else. You might not even have any email setup to answer questions. The entire digital sales and fulfillment process can run on its own without your intervention. That’s ideal, isn’t it?
This has been my favorite form of making money online for years. Besides the e-commerce site I mentioned earlier, I haven’t started anything BUT digital product businesses online for years.
Two of my favorite are – ebooks, and training videos. Selling media to help people learn about something foreign to them is a great way to make a living. I wrote 34 books for Amazon over the last few years. That has been a completely hands-off passive income stream for about six years now. And these books were not just at Amazon, I put them at Barnes & Noble, Sony, Google, Apple, Smashwords, and many other ebook outlets. All it takes once the books are finished is to format them in the required way, upload the information, and setup a payment form so you can collect your cash. It’s a sweet, SWEET system that I’m so glad to have been able to enjoy. It has helped to free me up from trading time at a job for a paycheck.
4. SELL A DIGITAL SERVICE – Like a digital product, you might create a service you can do online. Converting ebooks from DOC to EPUB for instance. Charge a small fee or create a membership site for people that need the service often. Digital services can be a website which serves people somehow. You can write the software into the website so it works whenever visitors want to use it. Web apps are a great way to make money online – and it’s purely passive once it’s developed.
5. CREATE A MOBILE APP – Mobile apps, computer apps, tablet apps, the opportunity for creating new software that people can use on their phones and other devices is WIDE OPEN. Sure you have to create it, but guess what? Fees for outsourcing the complete development of your app are finally REASONABLE!
It has become easy and commonplace to outsource apps to India or the Philippines to developers there who have experience and who are more than happy to trade their time for money. Some people have made boatloads of money creating entire businesses based on this model. You can too, you just need the idea and $1,000 or so cash to get started.
Once you create a working prototype of your app, throw it up on IndieGogo or KickStarter and see if you can’t get others to support your vision. Some apps receive OUTRAGEOUS SUPPORT in crowdfunding projects and you might just start making bank before you even know what hit you. It shouldn’t be that easy, and I’m not saying it is. It CAN happen. It HAS happened to some people. Why couldn’t it happen to you?
6. YOUTUBE – If you would have told me seven years ago that today I would have over 500 videos on Youtube, sometimes acting the complete ass, I’d have said you were out of your mind. Seven years later, here I am. 26+ Million views. 16,000+ Subscribers. Income on Youtube has ranged from zero to over $1,000 each month during the last 84 months. Last month’s check was $560 something.
I LOVE YouTube as a passive income opportunity, and I hate it. I love it because I have made a lot of money there. I hate it because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to go to the next level and make $30,000 per month there shooting videos.
I’d do it if I could figure it out. I’ve tried all sorts of videos, and I never can nail it. Videos I think will do well, die a slow or very fast death. Others that I am sure won’t go anywhere at all, BLOW UP and I make all kinds of money on them. It’s a mystery to me. I’m clueless. I wish I was making $30,000 per month TODAY so I could just go full-time into YouTube and figure it out. I’d much rather be shooting videos every day or so than anything else!
Training videos give you more possibilities. Teach viewers to do something and you can create whole courses for Udemy.com and other similar sites. You can have your own membership site filled with training videos. You can sell your videos from Vimeo – an awesome high-level platform where some of the pros sell from.
That’s it. That’s all. Are there another 60,000 ways to make money online? Yep, there are. These are the ones I suggest you focus on. Choose something from this short list and start hammering it.
WHY CHOOSE ONE OF THE ABOVE?
1. SPEED. You can have something that makes you money in an hour if you have an idea (YouTube). None of the ideas above will take you a year to get going. In most cases you can be producing something within weeks or just a couple of months. Speed is essential because TIME is the most important resource. Never forget that!
2. EASE OF IMPLEMENTATION. Even if you’re going to sell a physical product or service, you can be selling it online in days once you know what it is. Even if you don’t have it yet, pretend you have it and test the market – buy Facebook traffic to send to a landing page to see if anyone pre-orders what you plan on selling.
3. I CAN HELP YOU WITH THESE. As I said, I haven’t done it all. I’ve done the above over and over, and I know a lot about each of these options. If you have a question about getting started on one of them, shoot me an email and I’ll point you in the right direction.