90% of current jobs currently out there require you to go to the physical place of work, clock in, actively work your butt off, and then clock out to earn a paycheck. There’s that old saying that the rich make money while they sleep – they plant a seed, water it over time, and then collect the fruits of the labor once some time has passed.
This talks about the difference between active income and passive income. Active income is any income in which you work directly and translates into money earned, and you don’t make any profit if you aren’t “at work.” Passive income is income that’s being made indirectly through setting up something that makes you money, no matter where you are or what you happen to be doing. Owning a vending machine, for instance, can be considered a form of passive income as long as you always have someone restocking it. But then, that’s the physical world. The online world is the real home of passive income. Let’s get into it.
Online Sources of Passive Income
There are a lot of ways to generate passive income online. While the money you make after you’ve established your passive income can be considered the money you made while not working, it’s really only a technicality. It takes a lot of work and thoughtful planning to set up some form of online income that will pay dividends, but it translates into each hour of work you put in becoming more valuable over time. Here are some ways people make a name for themselves online.
YouTube or Content Creation
If you make content on YouTube or a similar video-sharing service, you’ll end up being able to monetize your content based on views. Every time someone watches your video, you’ll be making extra money. Most people think you need to break into a highly competitive market like video game streams to get thousands of viewers, but you can record yourself doing nearly anything and make money off of it, as long as you can draw in viewers. This can be anything from simply opening up products you’ve purchased (eventually, companies will send you products for free if you start to see success), talking about your day, or merely taking publicly available information and making an easy to digest video about it that people like to watch.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs, like Amazon, deal with physical products, while others, like ClickBank, deal with digital goods like guides, as explained by bwccu. When you set up an affiliate site, you’re setting up something publicly accessible with a link to either a physical product or digital good that someone would like to buy. If anyone clicks through to your link and makes a purchase, you’ll get a percentage of the sale. Getting started is where most people fail in this endeavor, as it usually takes months to set up a website that gets traffic and converts that traffic into sales. However, once the site is set up and the content is there, you don’t really need to touch it again to keep seeing affiliate payments roll in.
Parting Words
The Internet is allowing people all across the world to make money hand over fist, as long as they know what to do and how to leverage web traffic to their advantage. The human attention span has been monetized essentially. Just figure out who’s willing to pay for any chunk of what you manage to wrangle.
