Real Passive Income Ideas

If you were knocking around on the Internet back in the early 1990s you could have snapped up domains like business.com for next to nothing (actually they were completely free prior to 1995!).

But these days it seems as though every single decent domain is registered.

But it’s not true, when you expand the definition of ‘decent’ to be any domain that contains strong keywords.

Two quick things I will say before going any further…

Google did start penalizing exact match domains, but this is only the case if you create a low quality low content site with that domain and Google can thus see it is a shitty little Google adwords or other type of site (ie people are still looking to buy keyword rich domains to help their SEO efforts).

Also by ‘strong’ keywords I mean any keyword getting 800+ unique monthly searches globally.

So what domain names are you looking for?

Anything where you can imagine an entrepreneur might come along in a years time and want to start a business with it, and would be willing to pay $500-$2,000.

Notice how I’m keeping expectations low here, ie you’re not going to snap up a domain today that you can sell for $10,000+ in the future, because there simply aren’t enough free domains left.

Also, although you could try and enter the new wild west of alternate top level domains like .tv or .info or .me etc, the 80-20 market remains .com (for now).

So once you register your domains, eg hotpinksheets.com or dinsoaurbedsheets.com or whatever, then just hook it up to Godaddy auctions, set a reserve price and wait.  The majority of these domains will never sell. 

But the 10-20% that do, will make the holding periods of all the domains worth it…well, at least that’s the game plan.

PS if you don’t want to sell for $500, you could always just rent the domain (eg setup a redirect to a company that sells that product and charge an annual fee or do it as PPC).

PPS If you stick to a niche you really understand, you can quickly come up with keyword rich domains that would rock and park the sheeeet out of them in no time.

PPPS parking commonish personal names can also work, as people are often willing to pay a big premium to own their name.

Why the feck did I include this?

Well, because I am OCDing all over the joint and want to make this list uber complete.

This passive income strategy may not be the finest.

Unless you have a super popular blog or a blog that speaks to the heart of reader’s identity, eg a blog on Buddhism by a guru, eg political satire blog, eg an irreverent blog on old vintage cars etc, your readers are pretty much never going to say “Hey I want to walk around with your blog’s name plastered on my back”.

With all that said, there are other things you can put on merchandise apart from your name/logo; eg quotes your niche would find inspiring or hilarious, graphic designs to do with your niche etc.

And hey, it ain’t too hard to whack up a design or two on Café Press, and just add that to your blog.

Why not?!

At least I’ll quit shooting this idea down then.

PS I’ve had a think about this idea more over lunch, and I think I may have failed to realize how many blogs fall into the “speaks to the heart” category.  I remember reading Corbett Barr of Think Traffic for example, saying how they made a couple hundred dollars from selling posters of their Expert Enough manifesto.  So I guess the circle is quite wide.

Heck even someone like Arseblog (a guy who writes about the English soccer team, Arsenal), makes a fair decent amount of passive income selling his humorously designed Arsenal t-shirts.  Go for it!!

Kind of like Mixergy, but for any niche! 

You give away a ton of the content for free, and then charge for the premium stuff or for the latest stuff.

Either charge per download or offer unlimited access for a monthly recurring charge.

Once again, I’m including this…just.

It’s pretty active after all, if you plan to keep adding to it and expanding your customer base.  But hey, 80% of the content is being created for you via your guests, so smile a little, this idea has some legs!

This is going to make millions for those that get it right, but to be honest it’s not entirely passive.

The example that springs to mind with this idea, so I can really explain what I’m talking about here, is Corbett Barr’s Fizzle.

It’s an online member’s only site where there’s a library of content (video and resources), monthly webinars, daily Q&A, forums / mastermind group etc etc.

ie it goes beyond a simple online course and replicates the learning experience of going to university where you have course books, lectures and tutorial classes.

It accordingly isn’t a cheap product, and instead demands a monthly ‘tuition’ fee if you like, of $30+.

The passivity in this product is probably about 70%.  ie you create the curriculum up front, and then add bits to it over time, often with the help of guest ‘lecturers’, but you still have to do a lot of work with your students / community.

It gets more passive for you personally if you take on some people to run the program day-to-day week-to-week, or you limit your interaction with the members / community.

But I’m going to be straight up here; if you plan to really kill it with this idea (ie $100k + a year), then like any authority site, this is going to require your full time attention.

This is different to the ‘fake store’ idea above, because here it’s not an online store we’re building, but rather a content-rich site with tons of product-focused articles and videos etc.

ie one idea is for an online shop and the other for a blog/affiliate site of sorts.

So before we get into this, I want to say this is classic Chris Guthrie, the guy behind Make Money Online.

Chris is the guy who earns $100k+ a year with Amazon affiliate fees…oh I’m talking $100k profit, not turnover!

The important points per Guthrie are that you pick a physical product niche, then talk about specific products, so that people who arrive on your site are pre-qualified – ie they’re doing research on a specific product and ready to buy if they get some confirmation that it’s a good idea.

All you want to do is get people to click your Amazon affiliate link.

That’s it.

Once they get to Amazon they may buy the product and/or other things (you get paid for them too – although your Amazon affiliate cookie expires within 24 hours of the person clicking), since Amazon is sooooo good at converting people per their web page layouts, prices, suggested products and what not.

So scatter a ton of text based affiliate links throughout your article.

Your article can sum up all different products for a particular use, review them or whatever.

Just make sure it’s 100% unique writing and not copy-pasted product reviews/specs etc.

Some other points with this idea…

We don’t care about keeping people on our site, actually we want them to get going to Amazon, so make everything clickable, including affiliate coded product images, buy buttons etc.

The better quality your review, the higher chance the reader is ready to click – if you do hands on video reviews for example, you’re killing it!

Also, Guthrie says since it’s a product niche, you should try to build an email list by offering free buyers guides in exchange for sign up (you can email the list every time you do a new review for example).

One more cool tip, affiliate both high cost and low cost items, because by pumping up your volume (through low cost sales), you get the chance of earning higher payout ratios on the high end stuff later in the month!

PS use different Amazon tracking IDs for different sites, so you can see which site is leading to the highest payouts.

PPS show how products differ, publish best selling posts once a month and for more info checkout ‘Make Money On The Internet’ by Chris Guthrie himself.

The average blog is like the average wardrobe…a complete fecking mess; with gold nuggets of wisdom spread throughout 100s of articles.

How much more useful would it be – to your reader – if you created a unified guide?

ie collected all the best bits of your blog, ordered them and edited them down into a succinct punchy broth?!

If you can do this with blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, interviews or whatever, you can end up with an entirely new product to sell.

Since this idea could end up as an ebook, online course, video, or whatever, I thought it worth putting as a separate passive income stream idea.  PS think about how many people buy ebooks that are simply ordered and succinct versions of existing blog posts!

This is the craziest kind of passive income I can think of, because it basically involves executing Michael Gerber’s e-Myth idea 110%…ie so much so, that you are no longer involved in the daily running of the business.

But it isn’t that hard.

In fact, this is what your real entrepreneur does best; starts something up and then gets management in to run it.

But the twist I’m putting on this idea (so you can make the most money possible), is to think of a service business where the majority of the work can be done overseas.

Without this aspect, you can end up eroding your profits to a slightly sad 3-8% (hello your average small business!).

But what businesses fit within this realm?

A lot more than you think.

Anything that is done on elance for example fits perfectly; meaning programming (web design, SEO, etc), design (graphic, logos, branding etc), writing (copywriting, editing, web content etc), marketing (PPC, business plans etc), admin (data entry, research, transcription etc), consulting (accounting, financial planning, budgeting etc), legal (contracts, incorporation, wills etc), engineering (CAD, product design etc).  Crazy right?!

If you can create a website, then market it via Google SEO – think content like articles and videos – and push all leads to an in-country part-time project manager, who then liaises with your outsource workers, boom, you’ve successfully executed!!

So why isn’t everyone doing this?

Well, it’s a helluva lot of work up front and you can make a lot of mistakes.

I know it took us about 6-9 months to successfully execute this ourselves and it requires a good eye for talent, systems and well, trust!

Most small business owners unfortunately can’t work themselves out of the business and delegate like this.

But anyways, let me finish this idea by saying it kicks ass, and for those of you who already have service oriented small businesses, then you may already have your passive income idea at your fingertips.  Time to transform that puppy from painfully active to 90% passive!

To give you an idea of what I’ve done; well, I’ve applied it to a service business (web design) to great effect, along with my business partner, and let me just say I do max 1 hour work a day on this business thanks to systematization, automation and outsourcing.  Pretty cool right?!

The big thing about this stream idea is that you have a real business, ie it generates $100k plus a year, and your ‘take home’ margins remain in the 50-70% range.

We’re no longer talking about selling $3k of ebooks a year. 

And yet, we’re only needing to do a few hours a week of overview work; checking the numbers, skim reading emails, making a few phone calls and well, that’s about it.

I will say the big thing we’ve learnt with this idea is that if you really want to make it passive (ie no more than 10 hours a week of work), you really need to pay well above the standard rate for your outsourced personnel.  It really is that simple.

Be generous and you’ll say goodbye to headaches forever.

This is a popular passive income stream for lots of WordPress developers, especially of plugins, and is also quite popular amongst bloggers who pump out lots of useful content for free (eg Steve Pavlina) – not to mention a great lead generator for future premium product sales.

The idea rests on your product adding a ton of value to users lives and you systematically and nicely / in a fun way, asking for donations.

The way you frame ‘the ask’ is crucial and the payment system behind it also needs to be dead simple…2 clicks and I’m done.

I would never rely on donations as an income stream, unless you plan on building a bid audience, of which 0.01% might want to donate you a few dollars to buy a beer.

Even a huuuugely popular WordPress plugin like Contact Form 7 appears to desperately be in need of donations just to maintain developer support.

This ain’t going to be easy!  But once again, think niches here.

The upfront work can involve a fair bit of programming, even if you do use a lot of template and existing off-the-shelf programs.

But it could lead to a sizable stream of passive income going forward, assuming you build the site so that employers can easily upload positions and job hunters can easily find the site through Google searches (and then easily search through the job listings).

It’s an interesting idea for all the hard working hustlers out there with a bit of time and money to risk.

PS You can always go super low budget and create something rough and ready using an existing plugin on WordPress – that could be setup in a day or two.

But the real work comes in solving the chicken and the egg problem, ie how do you attract employers when there are no visitors yet, and how do you attract visitors if there aren’t many jobs being advertised?

My advice; first create a site that visitors would want to come to regardless (think helpful site for job searchers in that niche including sample resumes specific to those types of jobs, interviews with employers in that niche etc), then show employers the visitors you’re getting, and put the jobs up.

That’s how you solve le problem senori!

Think nichey here.

The idea is to get a bunch of people involved, creating content through forums and posts, and then sell them all kinds of products and services related to their interests.

Whether you sell products you make or others make or users make, it can be a big success.

Best of all, it is uber passive income, because the work up front is limited to website and marketing work, as opposed to also content creation – your users after all are creating all the content for you.

Obviously the problem with this idea is that you either reach critical mass or you die.

An example; the niche of knitting has the site Ravelry as the main community site and it is killing it by having a marketplace where community members can sell their patterns (designs) to each other and Ravelry takes a cut off everything.

Perfect, passive income in the truest sense of the word.

That said, there is really only one Ravelry in the knitting community (it got critical mass) and the people behind the site actually work quite hard because they don’t outsource any work, and well, once you have built up a community site it can become quite technically complex, so it may not turn out as passive as you hoped.