How to Set Up Passive Income
Introduction
Earning passive income is the dream of most Internet Marketers. There is nothing more satisfying than waking up in the morning to find that you have earned money while you were asleep! If you are unable to work for some reason, then your passive income streams will keep providing you with cash.
Passive income is the true Internet lifestyle. You can be anywhere in the world, and all you need is a laptop or other device and a connection to the Internet. There are many different passive income models as you will discover in this post.
Once you have set up your first successful passive income stream, you will want to set up many more.
The top Internet marketers rarely trade their time for money. They rely on solid passive income streams to generate the revenue that they need to live the lifestyle that they want. This report contains a number of secrets that the top Internet marketer’s use to live the passive income lifestyle.
If you do not have any passive income streams at the moment, then you must commit to setting up your first one. This post will show you how…
What Is Passive Income And Why Does It Work?
Let’s describe the concept of passive income by using money as an example. If you are wealthy, then you can invest in term deposits that provide a guaranteed rate of interest. This means that each month or at the end of the deposit term you will make money for doing nothing.
You can say the same about savings accounts in a high street bank. You invest a certain amount, and then after a period of time, you will earn interest on your investment. It is different to investing in stocks or hedge funds because there is a risk associated with doing this.
Now you are probably not rich enough to live off of your investments – few people are. But what you can do is to invest your time (and a little money if necessary) to create something of value that you can sell many times over. This is the passive income concept.
There is Work involved
Some definitions of passive income state that it is income you have not had to work for. Well, that is not true if you are looking to generate passive online income. There is always some work to do upfront. This may be creating a course, setting up a lead funnel and so on.
If you are successful with your passive income strategy, then you will not have to work as hard as someone that relies on active income. Active income is where you trade your time for money. Millions of people do this every day when they go to their jobs.
Overnight Success is very rare
There are always exceptions to everything, but it is rare that a passive income strategy will provide you with a lot of money quickly. One of the main reasons that people give up on the idea of passive income immediately is that they put a lot of effort into creating a product and it doesn’t sell fast enough.
You need to be patient. It could take a long time for your passive income ideas to take off. You will need targeted traffic to your offer and lots of it to make decent money. So the advice is not to give up your day job and wait until your passive income well and indeed overtakes the money that you earn from your job before you think about quitting.
There is a risk with Passive Income
There is the potential to make a lot of money with passive income, but you also risk making nothing and even losing money. If you do the right things then this shouldn’t happen to you, but there is a lot of hype about passive income, and you can end up disappointed if it doesn’t happen for you.
On the positive side of things, creating passive income streams need not cost a lot of money (if anything), so if you do have a few failures along the way, then you can just learn from them and move on.
Why Online Passive Income works
Many people will tell you that passive income doesn’t work and is even a fantasy. But the truth is that many website owners are earning small amounts up to enormous amounts every month.
You need to bear in mind that several passive income models can bring you in additional revenue. Some of these are:
- Creating your own product
- Promote other products as an affiliate
- Google Adsense
- Native Ads
- Selling ad space on your website
And a lot more…
It is very unlikely that if you were to adopt a multi passive income stream approach that you would not make any money. For passive income to work, you will need to drive as much targeted traffic to your website as possible.
The bottom line is that passive income does work. Like any business model, you will need to test and tweak to get the best results. It is not a miracle so be careful about the hype. Treat it as a long-term money-making venture, and you will probably succeed.
The Online Passive Income Myths
Before you get serious about generating a passive income online, you need to understand the myths that surround it. There are some myths that you need to know about and prepare for. We believe in bringing you the truth so that you can make the right plans.
Generating Online Passive Income is Easy
You have no doubt seen some of the claims made by unscrupulous vendors that are trying to sell you the latest dream. “Work 4 hours a week and make six figures”, “set it and forget it passive income” and “the no stress way to an online fortune” are all classic variations on the same theme.
Well, the truth is different from this. To make a reasonable level of passive income online, you will need to put in a lot more than four hours a week and concentrate your efforts entirely on the task at hand.
The easy ways of making passive income have gone. People that made a lot of money writing articles for products and publishing them on ezineartciles.com is a thing of the past. Buying that keyword rich domain name and ending up on the first page of Google for a great keyword is also gone.
Today it is all about providing value and producing quality content. Money talks and if you have a budget for advertising then this will help. But you can’t send your visitors to sales pages and expect them to buy straight away. People are a lot savvier than they used to be.
You need to be prepared to roll your sleeves up and make your effort to invest now and be ready to wait from 6 months to maybe two years to get a good return. If you are not prepared to do that, then passive online income may not be the right strategy for you.
You have to have good Technical skills
A few years ago this was true to a degree. Installing websites, setting up autoresponders and other essentials was quite technical. These days everything is easier for the average person to succeed. There is no need for you to know and understand HTML or any other kind of coding to launch a passive income business online.
Rather than be concerned about your technical knowledge, it is better that you concentrate on developing skills where you can connect with people and build good relationships. Some successful marketers do not have a clue about the technical stuff and are making very good money.
You have to be an Expert to make Passive Income
A lot of people believe that because they are not an expert in a niche that they will never be able to be successful with passive online income. Yes, it is great to be an expert and dominate your niche, but do you think that all of those people making good passive income are experts?
No, they are not. They certainly know their subject, but you can learn all of this. There are many examples of people making money from niches that they know or knew nothing about. You just need to be prepared to research. Knowing more than the average guy is a good place to be.
Selling products to people is a Sleazy act
This is just a state of mind. There indeed are some sleazy sellers out there who peddle dreams and false hopes. But there are also a lot of sellers that provide significant value to people with their products and services.
You need to be one of the latter. You want people to buy your products and then send you glowing testimonials about them. If you don’t fall for the “quick buck” mentality, then you will be on the right track. Always provide value and high-quality products.
Only good writers will succeed
The thought of writing all of those blog posts and offer letters is just too much for some people. They are not confident in their writing ability and do not like the idea of having to create all of that content.
The truth is that you do not need to be a professional writer to make passive income. OK, you need to be able to get your thoughts down on paper, but it doesn’t have to win any literary prizes. The ability to get your point across is all that matters. If you have more money than time you can outsource a lot of your content writing.
Passive Income 101
Here you will learn the essentials of passive income. What it is and what it isn’t, what you will need and how to set realistic expectations. This is all very important if you want to succeed with passive income so make sure that you read this entire article.
The golden rule of passive income is:
You are not trading your time for money
When you have a job, you trade your time for money. Most people hate their jobs and go to them out of necessity. Passive income will help to turn your fortunes around and hopefully help you to quit that day job that you hate.
Selling freelance services is also trading time for money unless you are using arbitrage. If you charge so much an hour for what you do and then you have to do it, this is not passive income. The arbitrage model is different.
Here you will find the customers and then farm the work out to other freelancers so that you can make a profit on their efforts. This is an example of passive income, and it can be a very lucrative model if you do it right.
Setting Realistic Expectations
If you have the wrong expectations about passive income, then you are setting yourself up for a big fail. For some reason, a lot of people think that passive income means that they will not have to do any work or very little work. Software that will make you money online with a few mouse clicks doesn’t exist.
Whenever you see a passive income method advertised that claims there is next to no work involved, run a mile! This is just a marketing gimmick to get you to buy the product. To be successful online, you will have to be prepared to work hard as well as work smart. There are no free lunches.
You will not become a millionaire overnight with passive income while sitting at home in your underwear. Get rich quick schemes do not work. It is advisable not to give up your day job and hope that passive income will replace what you were earning quickly. The chances are that it won’t.
What you certainly can do is make money faster than with conventional business methods. If you were to open a shop, you would have to pay for the stock, advertising, staff and a lot more. You would be lucky to break even in the first year.
With online marketing, there are not likely to be any substantial costs like this. Unless you are selling physical products, you will not require stock. You don’t need a shop as your website is your shop. You may need some full-time staff eventually but not at the start.
It indeed is possible to build a passive income business online. Don’t let anyone else tell you that it isn’t. If you dream of working from home and earning more than you could have ever dreamed of, then you can do it with the right mindset.
Get a Website
You will certainly need a website for your passive income business. If you are promoting your products or other people’s you will need landing pages to do this. Don’t go for a free blog from WordPress.com or Blogger.com. This just makes the wrong statement about who you are.
Have you ever purchased anything from one of these free websites? Or given your email address in exchange for a valuable gift? Probably not, so don’t expect others to do it either. Get your domain name, some web hosting and use the WordPress self-hosted platform for your website.
Decide on a Niche
You have two choices here really. You can choose a niche that you are passionate about or you can choose one that you know will make you money. If your passion is in demand, then you should be on to a winner!
Are there products and services regularly sold in the niche of your choice? Use Google and enter your niche keyword. Are there Adwords ads for the niche? If there are, then this is a good sign.
Create a Passive Income plan
When you have a passive income plan, you are a lot more likely to succeed. There are some things that you need to consider and here are some of the really important things:
- How much time can you dedicate to your passive income business?
- What products or services are you going to create or promote?
- How will you get traffic to your landing pages?
- How will you collect visitor leads?
Passive Income vs. Active Income What Is The Difference?
Earning passive income is an ideal scenario. It means that you will be making money when you are not working. You may also see passive income described as “residual income”; it means the same thing.
The opposite of passive income is active income. With active income, you are always working for your money. If you think about a conventional job, you have to show up and do the work that the employer asks you to do, or you will not make any money.
The same is true of freelance services businesses. Let’s say that you are a freelance writer. If you do not have people providing you with orders for your services, then you will not make any money. This is true with any service that you offer.
Passive Income does involve some Work
To be successful with a passive income strategy, you will need to do some work upfront and possibly some ongoing maintenance work. It may take time for your passive income stream to kick in and generate the income that you desire.
Passive income is not a miracle. It is not an overnight “get rich quick” scheme, and it will require you to put in some effort. But if you do it right then your efforts will reward you over and over again. There are people earning money today from passive income streams that they set up years ago.
It is not a Lump Sum
We are not talking about receiving lump sum payments here. You are not selling an asset or gaining an inheritance. It is a regular source of income that will continue for a period. The period will vary. If what you are promoting is “evergreen”, then there is no reason why you cannot generate income for years.
It is not Totally Secure
It is not wise to entirely rely on passive income as you can never be sure how much you will generate in any given month. It is also tough to predict when it will end, so you need to be smart here.
Everybody needs money to survive so if you have a job or run a freelance business then you should continue to do this while you are creating passive income streams. If you do an excellent job with your passive income work, then it will probably overtake what you can earn actively, and this is when you can decide to focus your full attention on it.
There is often a need for Maintenance
If you are deriving your passive income from the Internet, then you will need a constant supply of visitors (traffic) to your offers so that you can earn money. Even if you are relying on traffic from search engines which should be pretty constant, it is always wise to have other traffic strategies that you can use such as ads.
You may need to run solo ads or find new solo ad sellers if you are not getting the results that you want. It could be that you need to create some Facebook ads to generate further interest. Or you may have to embark on a PPC advertising campaign. These are all maintenance activities that require effort (not much though!).
Multiple Passive Income Streams
Because there is a level of uncertainty with the passive income, you need to develop several streams of passive income. This takes a fair amount of effort and testing to get it right, and you should consider this to be an investment.
Some people are earning hundreds of thousands in passive income each month. They did not achieve this in a few days or weeks but steadily over time. There is no reason why you cannot do this too.
Recurring Income
This is a great passive income model. You get the customer to sign up to something one time, and then they have to pay a monthly fee each month to keep it going. An excellent example of this is Web Hosting.
If you can earn a commission from several recurring income streams, then you are in business. There are many opportunities for you online – it is all about traffic and conversions. Develop your passive income strategy today.
Don’t Make These 5 Online Passive Income Mistakes
Online passive income is an excellent opportunity for everyone, but so many people fail to achieve their residual income goals. You do not want to do this, so be sure that you avoid these passive income mistakes.
The first thing to say is that not everything you do is going to work. You need to accept this and know when to move on. Moving on can mean scrapping the idea altogether or tweaking it to make it work. The latter is preferable especially if you have invested time and money into this passive income stream.
So whatever you do, be sure that you avoid these 5 passive income mistakes:
1. Expecting Revenues too Quickly
This is one of the most common mistakes and is probably the reason why most people give up on the idea of passive income. It will take time to make passive income, and you must allow for this. You will need to get targeted traffic to your passive income streams, and depending on your traffic strategy, this can take a while.
A lot of people still firmly believe in search engine optimization (SEO) as a significant traffic strategy. There is nothing wrong with this as SEO is now easier than it used to be if you know what you are doing.
If you are promoting your products and services or being an affiliate for other people’s, then remember that it takes on average 7 contacts to make a sale. The chances that a visitor will buy your product the first time that they see it are pretty low.
So you will want to present your offers as many times as you can to the same people to convert them. One of the best ways of doing this is to capture their email address in exchange for an incentive. You can then send them emails regularly by providing value and reminding them about your offer.
2. Underestimating how much Work is required for Passive Income streams
OK, some passive income streams are relatively simple to implement, but most of the good long-term ones are not. Whatever you are promoting, you should use a funnel approach so that you capture leads as well as make sales.
You will need an autoresponder and an initial email sequence that goes out to all new subscribers. You will need to be prepared to write further emails regularly to keep in touch with your subscribers.
If you are creating your products, then this will always take longer than you think. You do not want to be a perfectionist and redo everything, or you will never get your product out there. Things will always go wrong when you are creating your product so be prepared for this.
3. You are Focusing on too many things
This is another classic mistake. You have several unfinished passive income projects on your computer because you found yet another way to make a passive income that is more interesting than your original method.
It happens all of the time. In Internet marketing circles this is known as the “shiny object syndrome,” and it is where people are tempted by new “successful” passive income methods. What you end up doing here is focusing on nothing and giving up as a result.
4. Failure to spot what isn’t working
At the end of the day making money online is a pretty simple concept. You provide a product or service where there is a need to interested people. So you create an irresistible offer and then drive targeted traffic to it.
The main reason that you will not be making as many sales as you want is the offer itself. Maybe your copy is not strong enough, or you have priced your product too high. Look out for these things and be prepared to tweak your copy and your pricing until you get it right.
5. Not Updating your Products / Services
Things are always changing especially online. If you have a product or service that is out of date, then nobody will want to buy it. This certainly applies to the make money online niche as things change all of the time there.
Even with evergreen niches such as personal development and weight loss you can always add something to make your offer more exciting. An additional chapter with new methods can be appealing for example.
Why You Need To Capture Leads Rather Than Just Make Sales
The idea of making lots of sales to build your passive income is attractive, but there is a better way to do it. You may find it hard to believe but capturing leads is a better long-term strategy for passive income.
What is a lead? Well in the online marketing world this will be a visitor’s email address. When people come to your website or watch your videos, they will have an interest in your niche. You want to capture their email address so that you can communicate with them regularly.
A Single Sale and then gone Forever
Unless your website or video is really memorable, the chances of people coming back to it are slim. This is not a direct reflection on your site. The problem is that there is so much choice these days that people forget.
In a single Internet session, people can go to dozens of websites. OK, they might bookmark yours if it is particularly interesting to them, but it doesn’t mean that they will come back anytime soon (if at all). How many bookmarks do you have that you have never used again?
A person comes to your website and buys your product. That’s great but don’t just leave it at that. Ask them for their email address so that you can contact them in the future when you have something of value to share with them.
Get Leads and use Automation
It is straightforward to create a form on your website to capture someone’s email address in exchange for something of value. This can be a gift or access to a part of your website that is private.
You can then use an autoresponder service to send regular emails to your subscribers. Tell them when you have published a new post and provide a link to it in the email. Tell them when you have a new product that you want them to check out and give a link to the sales page.
It is a lot Easier selling to Leads than Cold Visitors
Even if you had the greatest product in the world, it would be difficult to sell it to cold online visitors. By cold, we mean that the visitor has never heard of you or your website before. They discovered your site via the search engine results or through some form of advertising.
With this kind of traffic, if you get a 1% conversion, you will be doing reasonably well. This means that for every hundred cold visitors you will make one sale. Is there a way that you can increase this conversion percentage?
Sure there is – get to know your visitors and build up trust and likability with them. When they subscribe to your email list give them a lot of value with every email that you send. Give them lots of free stuff as well as making offers to them.
After a while, you can point them towards your products. If they have been reading your emails and downloading your gifts, then they will be a lot warmer to what you are offering them. Give them a special discount, and they will be even hotter!
Think Long Term
The best passive income businesses are the long-term ones. Can you imagine having an email list of thousands of subscribers who love what you send to them? If you create a new product or discover someone else’s product that is good, you can send an email to your whole list and a percentage will buy from you.
Are the conversion rates better than cold traffic? You had better believe that they are! And of course, you still have that subscriber to promote to again in the future. So concentrate on leads rather than just sales in your passive income business.
3 Ways to Boost Your Bottom Line With Passive Income
If you are already in an active income business (e.g., selling freelance services) where you trade your time for money, then there are some passive income strategies that you can use to boost your bottom line.
Wouldn’t it be great to make an additional $1,000 a month from passive income on top of your active income? Of course it would, so learn what you can do to generate passive income on top of your active income.
We are going to use the example of a freelance service provider here. Someone that writes content provides SEO services, social media services and so on. These freelancers have a lot of knowledge, and they can use this to build passive income.
3 passive income strategies to add to your bottom line:
1. Create once sell many times
You can create your products and sell them to your customers. If you are in the content writing business, you could produce a guide on successful content marketing. You will show your customers what they must do to get the word out and increase the numbers of leads and sales that they make.
They will come to you for their content anyway so this is a win-win. This can be a course delivered in PDF document format or even a short video series where you explain everything and provide some “over the shoulder” training.
If you are an SEO services provider, then you can create guides about optimizing blog posts and videos properly and share other secrets about SEO such as how to assess Google top 10 competition, the right way to do keyword research and so on. Again this can be a PDF or videos or a combination of the two.
As a social media service provider, you can explain how to create a winning social media strategy. How your customers can maximize their social media efforts to increase their audience and provide engagement.
All of these ideas will take work. You will need to find the time to write the material, produce the videos and so on. But once you have your product created you can sell it over and over again for great passive income. As soon as your product is ready, send an email to your customers explaining the benefits. You can even offer an early bird discount.
2. Organize Webinars
If you have a large customer base, then you will be able to find vendors who sell high ticket business tools that you can sell using a webinar. You will need to agree on a split of the revenues with the vendor, and then you will provide the audience.
Your customers already know and like you so they will probably be interested in spending an hour in your company on a webinar finding out about this new tool that you want to show them. You will do the warm-up and the introduction and then let the vendor explain the product or service.
3. Affiliate Marketing
Think about your customer base and what would really help them succeed. There are thousands of affiliate products out there that your customers will not be aware of that could assist them to achieve their business goals.
You need to find these products and services and then recommend them to your customers. Find out as much as you can about the product (it is better if you purchase it or ask the vendor for access) and then tell them how it helped you in your business.
Use a pre-sell approach that is gentle here. Don’t go over the top with your emails and website promotion. Just say that the product helped you and are convinced it will help them and they should check it out.
Use These Blogging Strategies To Earn A Passive Income
Some of the top blogs are earning thousands and even hundreds of thousands each month with passive income. The owners are monetizing their blogs in a number of ways, and that is what we will be discussing here.
What you need to start a Successful Blog
You will need the following:
- The ability to write well (or find someone else that can write well for you)
- A domain name
- Web hosting
- The WordPress blogging platform (free)
You will also need to be in a niche that is popular and where you can make a difference. The more related products and services to this niche the better as you can become an affiliate and make money from them.
How to Generate Passive Income from your Blog
You have a lot of options here. Here are some of the most popular blog monetization strategies for passive income:
Google Adsense
By signing up to the Google Adsense program and placing some code on your blog, you will be able to display Google advertisements and share in the spoils when the ads are clicked on. This is easy to set up, and as long as you abide by the terms of conditions, this can make you passive income for years.
The problem is that the money that you will make per ad click will be meager. You will only make a few cents in a lot of cases. If you have a lot of traffic to your blog, then these clicks can mount up, and some blog owners are making thousands each month from Adsense.
Adsense works best if your blog posts are keyword rich (which they need to be to rank in the search engines). It will display ads that it considers are relevant to your content, and that will increase the likelihood that your readers will click on the ads.
Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, you will be recommending other people’s products on your blog and then earn commissions when people buy products from your link. You can earn excellent money with affiliate marketing if you do it right. Some blog owners make thousands a month from doing this.
It is all about relevance. If your blog is about making money online, then you can promote related products and services as an affiliate. For example, you can write a review about how you used XYZ product and the results that you achieved. Or how the latest ABC software tool helped you to get more traffic.
You need to be persuasive in your writing so that people will check out the products and services that you are recommending. Don’t use a lot of hype and pushy sales words but gently persuade them that the product can really solve their problems.
Selling your Product
Why not create and sell your products on your blog? This idea is good because you have a captive audience that knows you, trusts you and likes you and you get to keep all of the profit when you make a sale!
When you have a successful blog, you will have an email list of lots of subscribers (this is a must). They look forward to receiving your content, and they will be very interested in any products that you create. So create your products!
Selling Advertising Space
When you have a high traffic website, you will get attention from a lot of places. Some of this attention will be in the form of people looking to advertise on your site. There are always people that are looking for opportunities like this, and you can negotiate your own terms here.
Usually, a banner ad of some description is required on your website. Alternatively, the advertiser may want to make a guest post and link back to their site/product at the end of the post. Either way, you can charge for this.
You can try and sell banner ad space proactively on your website, but you will need very high traffic to make this pay. If you are generating around 10,000 visitors a month, then don’t expect to make more than $100 a month from this.Is Amazon Kindle The Ultimate Passive Income Opportunity?
Is Amazon Kindle The Ultimate Passive Income Opportunity?
If you didn’t already know it, Amazon is the world’s largest marketplace. People are searching for all kinds of things every day and one of the most popular searches is for books. There are so many people now with Amazon Kindle devices and of course smartphones where you can download and read books that this has become a golden opportunity.
You can have a book published on Amazon Kindle and then sell it to those that are interested in what your book is about. It can be a fiction or a nonfiction book. If you publish a fiction book that is popular, then you can be on the road to the big time.
Nonfiction does not sell as well but is certainly in demand. Having a few good books on Kindle can certainly bring you in an excellent passive income. And the best thing about it is that it is free to publish your books.
Don’t you need to be a good Writer?
No, you don’t. We are not condoning that you publish a lousy grammar book on Kindle with lots of typos and spelling mistakes. What we are saying is that you can have your Kindle book written by someone else!
There are many ghostwriters and professional writers that can help you with this. It will not be that cheap so prepare to budget around $250 – 500 for your book. But if you hate writing or just suck at it, then this is a good option.
What will my books be about?
There is an old saying – “give the people what they want”. Have a look at the books that are selling well on Kindle now. What are they about? Let’s discount fiction for the moment and concentrate on nonfiction.
You will find many popular subjects. Recipes are always a good one. Diets and weight loss are good too. Making money is becoming more popular and how to do stuff such as build a website and use social media are gaining traction.
You need to research your subjects carefully and find out what problems people are having. Your book needs to address these questions and then answer them in full. You are looking for niches that have a considerable demand where there are a number of problems to solve.
Take a look at the “Dummies” collection of books. They rarely publish anything that is not in demand (there will be a few exceptions). A lot of this is just common sense. You know what the popular niches are already, so try looking at:
Weight loss and diets
Recipes and food
Making money
Wealth building
Relationships
Marketing
Business
Self-help
Travel
Home improvement
How do you price your books on Kindle?
Don’t price too low and don’t price too high. Most successful Kindle nonfiction books are priced between $2.99 and $9.99. There is a good reason for this as Amazon will only take 30% of the face price and leave you with 70%. If you price your book higher than $9.99, then they will take 70%.
What length of Kindle book is right?
There is no right answer to this. There are books of 2000-3000 words selling pretty well on Kindle. The answer has to be the minimum amount of words to answer all of the reader’s questions.
When people are shopping on Kindle they are not looking for general reference tomes. Quite the opposite in fact. They have a problem and they are looking for a fast solution and you are there to provide it. So don’t get caught up with the number of words.
Will you have to market your book?
Yes you certainly will. You can have the best book in the world but if you don’t get reviews for it then nobody will buy it. Take every opportunity that you can to get your book out there. If you can throw some money at it then do that too.
Service Arbitrage For Passive Income
Certain services are in great demand these days. With Google’s shift to quality content there is now a need more than there ever was before for high quality writing. It was never a good idea to post those $5 articles on your blog but if you do that now you will not get good results – in fact quite the opposite.
What is Services Arbitrage?
Services arbitrage is a simple concept where you buy a service at a low price and sell it at a higher price. As an example, you may find a good writer that charges $20 an hour. Or they might offer you a word rate of 2.5 cents per word.
When you know this you can then sell their content services at a higher price. A lot of businesses will not think twice about paying $50 for a good blog post so if you can source this at $25 you have made a very good profit.
You ask the customer to pay up front and then you pay the writer. What could be better?
Why the Services Arbitrage opportunity exists
The reason that there is an opportunity in the first place is because freelance service providers are usually very good at what they do but poor at marketing themselves. Then there are the customers who are just looking for a hassle free solution. They don’t want to spend time on freelancing websites finding the right people even if they know about the sites in the first place which a lot won’t.
So here you are the person in the middle that can solve your customer’s problem easily. You know the freelancers (or where to find them) and all you have to do is to capture the job requirements and get the work done. What could be easier?
What are the Opportunities in Services Arbitrage?
There are many opportunities for services arbitrage. We have already mentioned content writing which is a big one. The demand is huge for high quality content as everybody needs it.
Then there is copywriting. This is a real skill that very few people have. The customer wants to have a sales page that will be very persuasive and convert well. You can find good copywriters and do a deal with them and add your margin on top.
Web design is another opportunity. There are many websites out there that need a makeover. There are also lots of new businesses that need a web site designed for them. Finding good web designers is not that difficult and you can easily add your margin.
Graphic design is another in demand service. Companies want new logos or headers for their websites or Facebook pages. There are many good graphic designers out there that will do an excellent job and make you a profit. Some other ideas are:
- SEO services
- Keyword research
- Installing and setting up WordPress
- Fixing WordPress problems
- Special web coding assignments
- Website Security
- Video creation
- Voiceover tasks
Where do you find these Freelancers?
There are lots of websites where you can find good freelancers. One of the most used sites is Fiverr.com because you can find good people cheaply and easily here. You need to be careful though as not everybody on Fiverr is going to be great.
Then there are forums such as the Warrior Forum. In the “Warriors For Hire” section you can find writers, copywriters, SEO experts, graphic designers and lots more. These people will have a reputation that you can easily check by reading the reviews on their service threads.
Then there are the classic freelancing sites such as Upwork and Freelancer. There are thousands of freelancers on these sites with a variety of skills. You should be able to find anyone that can do anything here.
Where do you find the Customers?
This is where you have to be a little creative and consistent. If you have contacts already then let them know that you are operating a digital services agency and tell them what you can do for them.
LinkedIn is a great social platform for business networking and you can use this to promote your services in a number of ways. Be careful not to overdo it on LinkedIn and provide value first.
Creating A Sales Funnel For Passive Income
These days you will not have a lot of success generating a passive income if you just send your visitors directly to a sales page for your product. What you need to do is take them through a process to gently warm them up to make a purchase.
You need to provide value first. Give something away for free that your visitors will really appreciate and then keep adding value. You want your audience to like and trust you as much as possible before you hit them with the offer pitch.
The Elements of a Sales Funnel
You need to plan out your sales funnel in advance. You will want to have all of your content prepared so that you can start driving targeted traffic to your starting point. This starting point will be a “squeeze page” where you will offer your visitor a free gift of value in return for their email address.
The Lead Magnet
This is your free gift of value. It needs to be enticing and your squeeze page copy needs to be compelling. It needs to solve a problem that the visitor is having and you can present this as a “little known secret” which they cannot afford to miss.
There are a number of options for lead magnets. You can create a mini guide in PDF format that the visitor will be able to download once they have provided their email address. You could create a video that shows you doing something to solve their problem. Or it can be an audio that explains a particular concept.
It is not difficult to create a squeeze page and there are many tools out there to help you do this. You need to make your squeeze page look really great so use the best graphics. Get a graphic designer to create a cool eBook cover or product box to display on your page.
You will need an Autoresponder
In order to capture email addresses and automatically send out follow up emails you will need a good autoresponder. There are many good services out there that you can pay monthly for. I like Mailerlite because it’s free to use until you get your first 1000 subscribers. It also offers a ton of awesome features to help you run your email list smoothly and efficiently.
Your autoresponder service will generate the code that you need to insert into your squeeze page so that you can build your email list. You can also create a sequence of emails and add these to your autoresponder so that the new subscriber to your email list will receive these at certain intervals.
All autoresponders also have a “broadcast” facility where you can send out an email to all of your list or part of it immediately. You should use the best autoresponder services as their delivery rates are usually the best.
What to put in your Emails
Begin by providing more value to your email subscribers. Tell them things that are not widely known and be prepared to share secrets with them without giving too much away. Do this often and your subscribers will really grow to like you and trust you. Don’t make any offers to them for a few days.
Payment Processor, Your Sales page and Thank You page
You will also have to create a sales page for your product. There needs to be a buy button on this page so you will need a way to collect money from your customers. It is best to use one of the popular payment processors such as PayPal or 2Checkout. They will provide you with the code that you need to insert in your sales page.
You will also need a “thank you” page where your customers can access your product once you have collected their payment. These days it is a popular trend to create a membership site and provide the customer with a login and password. You do not have to do this but don’t just call your page “thank-you” as you do not want it appearing in the public search engines.
One Time Offers
You can create related products and sell these as one time offers to your customers. They will only see the offer once and if they pass up on the deal they will not be able to get the product again.
The thinking is that the customer already has their credit card ready so using it again will be easy for them. There are good and bad points about a onetime offer. Some customers hate them (especially in the Internet marketing niche) and others swear by them. It is your choice in the end.
The Best Ad Strategy For Achieving Passive Income
For a lot of people, using an ad strategy to generate passive income is preferable over waiting a long time for organic traffic to materialize. Let’s face it, free traffic is great but it can really take a long while to kick in.
Using ads is a great way to generate traffic. It is quick and it can be reasonably cheap. You have to be careful though as even those cheap Facebook ads can run you up an advertising bill that you weren’t expecting.
So in this article we will share with you the best ad strategy for achieving passive income. Pay attention and follow the advice below and you should do really well and not overspend on your advertising budget.
Make it Targeted
You may think that this is obvious but there are always lots of ads out there that have their targeting all wrong. Unless you are promoting something that the whole world needs (very unlikely) you will need to pay attention to this point.
Your ads should be targeted to the types of people that you have identified are your customers. This implies that you really need to know your audience which of course you do. When you know your audience you can use demographics that are not so obvious and end up paying less for your Facebook ads.
It is better to reach out to fewer people that are more targeted than send out to the masses who couldn’t care less about what you are promoting. You may think this is obvious but this mistake happens over and over again. Don’t worry about the audience size – focus on the targeting.
Another important point is that your ads must match up with your landing page. Don’t use one message for your ads and then a contradictory one for your landing page. Make sure that your landing page provides what your target audience is looking for.
Start with a Small Campaign and Closely Monitor Everything
Even if you have a ton of money to spend on your online passive income business always start off in a small way. Do your homework and find the right keywords for your campaign. Test everything thoroughly and note what works.
Advertising is not a lottery but it is often the case that what you think will work really well turns out to be a loser. There can be many reasons for this and you need to be prepared to test everything and make changes until you achieve that winning formula.
If you are using pay per click (PPC) ads then go with single keyword ad groups. If you are using Facebook ads then go for single audiences first. Be sure to test your images, keywords and copy all of the time.
Don’t diversify while you are doing this. Work on one advertising channel until you get it right. If you start hopping all over the place then your ROI will tank and you will end up losing money. When you find the right combination keep rinsing and repeating.
Use Paid Advertising to build relationships rather than sell
If you were at a party and saw this really hot person that you found out was available would you go up to them and ask them to marry you? It might work with a few people but most would think that you were out of your mind!
So why do advertisers insist on sending their targets directly to sales pages and expect them to make a purchase on their first visit? They are still a cold prospect and they know next to nothing about you or your product.
The best strategy is to send them to a landing page where you will offer them value first. In order to receive this value from you all they have to do is provide their email address. Once they are on your subscriber list you can keep sending them value and then present your offer to them when they know you better.
Test and Test Again
Have we mentioned testing in this article? Oh yes we did. And here it is again because it is so important to the success of your ad campaigns. If you experience some failures (this is almost certain) then use the data that you have to work out why. Tweak it and test it again until you get the conversions that you are looking for.
How To Keep Your Passive Income Growing Without Burning The Midnight Oil
When you make your first few dollars and cents from passive income it will become like an addiction. Think about it – you created something to promote a product (or maybe you created your own product) and people are now buying and you are earning money.
Why wouldn’t you want to repeat this and make even more money? Of course you would and you certainly should. Let’s say that you wrote a great Amazon Kindle book about losing weight and it has really been successful. You want to grow your passive income so what do you do?
Get More Traffic
The first thing that you can do is to get more traffic to your book page. There is free traffic and paid traffic so you need to work out how much money you are going to budget for the paid traffic route.
One of the benefits of paid traffic is that it is fast and usually takes very little effort to set up. Once you have something that works just keep feeding the machine. You can test different Facebook ads to see which ones provide the best response and then keep using those ads to drive new traffic.
With free traffic there is normally a lot of work involved. There are all kinds of free traffic methods such as social media, writing guest posts, SEO and so on. The problem is that all of these methods take time and you could find yourself burning the midnight oil if you take on too many of them.
A good strategy here is to outsource the work. If you know that what you have is good and gets you conversions then invest in your business by having someone else build those links, write those posts and send out those social media messages.
Create More Passive Income Streams
The next thing that you can do is to create more streams of passive income. If your first Amazon Kindle book was a success then write another one. If you created a great review video that converts make some more for different products and services.
Your ultimate aim is to have a number of passive income streams that all have good visitor traffic and convert well. OK it is going to take you a while to write that second book and you really don’t have the time at the moment. So outsource the writing of your next book.
There are a number of good writers out there that will provide a quality ghostwritten book for you. All you need to do is to provide them with your precise instructions and provide a table of contents (this really helps).
When you are looking for freelance writers that can create Kindle books for you don’t just go for the cheapest offer. Get samples from everyone that you contact and go with the best. Guess what – the best writers charge the most in general. Again you need to think of this as an investment in your future passive income business.
Here is something that you really must avoid. If you are not good at creating graphics then don’t spend days and weeks learning Photoshop and trying to create your own book covers. Unless this skill will help you in other areas it is just not worth the time and effort. Just spend $10 or so on Fiverr.com and get a great result.
What about that review video that you created that makes you great passive income? Well obviously you will want to create more and you can outsource most of this as well. If you have used your own voice on the video then you should carry on doing this. You can have the rest of the video made for you.
Tell your outsourcer what you require in each slide and whether you want “over the shoulder” action using Cam Studio. You may have to provide log in details to them if it is special software that you are presenting.
Don’t try and do it all Yourself
By doing everything yourself you can make a nice bit of passive income. By treating this as a business and using other people’s efforts you can create multiple passive income streams that will pay you handsomely.
Conclusion
We have provided you with the inside track on passive income generation in this report. You now know what you need to do and the mistakes that you must avoid. It is all about taking action now and setting up your first passive income stream.
The passive income ideas in this report really work so the only reason that you will fail is if you don’t make a start and follow through on these ideas. Imagine how great you will feel in a few months time when your passive income streams are providing you with money on a daily basis.
So if you want to live the Internet dream then choose passive income as the way to do it. You can always get help by outsourcing some of the tasks. Keep investing your initial revenues to create more passive income streams and before you know it you will be generating thousands without having to do anything. There are not many things that feel better than that!
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