Passive income, sometimes referred to as residual income, is the latest hot button topic for those interested in building wealth. Passive income is the income that is generated from an investment. The investment can be a stock portfolio or sales of goods and services that generate income after the sale is complete.
Practitioners can earn passive income as well. First, it’s important to understand what is required and the best way to do it.
Time and Money
As a service provider you earn income from the services you provide. You exchange your time and expertise, for money. Theoretically if you increase your time, you will increase your income as well, as the more hours you work the more income you will receive.
Unfortunately, there are limits to our human capabilities. There are only so many hours in a day that we can work effectively. There is another way to generate more income that does not require more working hours and that is through earning residuals or passive income.
The belief has existed for a very long time that the more education you have and the harder you work, the higher your income will be. Unfortunately, it does not always work that way and is far from being written in stone. Too often in this economy and society, income very often results from other things. A steady salaried position can be just the thing for you. Perhaps you enjoy knowing a paycheck awaits you at the end of the week. But a problem arises when you are not able to earn what you are really worth in this type of position. As a result you begin searching through the variety of websites that will generate potential income for their members. You look at any opportunity that invites you to package your knowledge and expertise into multiple marketable products. EBooks that can be sold from a website are a good example.
Generating a significant amount of residual income from the internet is doable, but it requires a considerable amount of time and money. It takes more than just creating a product and putting it on a website. The availability of inexpensive ways to create an attractive web site has made it very easy for everyone to do so. There are templates and services that provide everything you need to get started. The difficulty arises when you attempt to generate income from the web site. The first thing you must do is determine if the information products you have created or plan to create for distribution on your website will actually sell.
As a service provider, your information is your product but you do not know if it will have the value needed to actually sell as an eBook on your website. Many people do not realize that creating an information product and placing it on an attractive website doesn’t guarantee sales. There are millions of similar products being made available every day, not to mention the abundance of free information that is also available online. Generating sales of your information product from your website requires some very smart marketing. It can be done and you can generate a successful passive revenue stream doing so.
A Strategy for Developing Passive Income
Given that you have a website and a potential target market, what is it that you actually need to sell your information product?
The following are a few helpful steps to get you started down the road to generating passive income. It will be anything but passive in the beginning as it does require an initial commitment of time and money to get things up and running. But once in place, you will begin to create passive income.
• Begin with a proposal for selling your product and then test market a variety of target markets and a variety of keywords or titles. See what generates a response.
• A Google AdWords campaign can generate a significant amount of market analysis for less than $500.
• As you study the market and try test products, keep track of what works. Make small changes until you obtain the results you are looking for, and then you can automate the campaign.
When it comes to internet sales, it’s the best marketer that gets results, not the best product. Therapists and practitioners are generally not very good at marketing. You can be successful at creating passive income by putting time and effort into marketing your information products.
