These are my five top ways to create passive or “residual” income businesses and make money from at home. Passive income businesses are where you set the business up and leave it to run on autopilot. Of course, there is work on the front-end and you may face a steep learning curve in creating your first online business, but you do the work once and then enjoy automatic profits from your money making site for years to come.
If it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t. But don’t underestimate the work needed to set up your first site. There are a number of shortcuts you can employ if you don’t have the time or inclination to learn all the components of creating an online business and are willing to pay others to do the work for you. You can use “Done For You” web building services, repurpose private label rights content instead of creating your own products from scratch, and you can outsource just about every aspect of building your business.
Personally I like to learn as many skills as possible before I outsource so I fully understand the process but there is nothing to stop you paying others to help you out.
So, let’s look at five passive income online businesses you can start today.
Consider an online shop e.g. an eBay or Amazon shop, a private label ecommerce shop (using PLR or resale rights to create an instantly available stock of products) or sell products through Pinterest or shopify. I started a fab and funky shop using Shopify (which provides the shopfront facility for a small monthly fee) and sourcing unique hand made products from Etsy, which is an amazing resource.Start a professional site offering services you offer or can help a local business with. Such as tax assessment advice, catering or cosmetic dentistry. You may not feel you are enough of an SEO or social media expert to get paid to help others but if you have basic online business skills you’ll be far ahead of you local businesses who desperately need help in finding new customers. The key to local marketing is to combine online and offline strategies and to create mini-sites with posts rich with keywords relevant to the services you’re promoting. Use the Google external keyword tool to find 5-10 keywords relevant to your niche that are getting a lot of monthly searches (at least 1,000 a month is my minimum). Then create a mini-site with core or “pillar” articles relevant to these 5-10 keywords. This will “rank” your keywords high in the search engines and generate natural traffic to your mini-site. Once you’ve achieved this your business is really running on autopilot and you can generate passive income.
Create a membership site where you offer a monthly subscription in return for membership services. Process payments using PayPal or ClickBank and offer an incentive to sign-up, for example offer a $1 trial, plus a bonus report or video.
Advertising site. Find a profitable niche where there are proven buyers (using Amazon or ClickBank) and create a keyword targeted mini-site providing a solution to your target audience’s problem. Offer free content with revenue generated through Adsense. This is where Google pays you to place relevant advertising on your site and you get paid every time someone clicks on an ad. Use the Google keyword tool to find profitable keywords and focus your mini site around one keyword to get lots of traffic and therefore more clicks, and more income.
Directory site e.g. dating or professional site. Get paid for listing companies or singles looking for love. Consider a directory of local family-friend events or days-out, or local businesses. The beauty of directory sites is that you don’t have to create content as your members will do that, you just need to facilitate bringing them together in a central resource.
There is an added benefit of being able to offer advertising to related businesses, online and offline. For example, with a small business directory you may get advertising or sponsorship from local suppliers. Charge them for advertising in your newsletter or sponsoring your website. The opportunities are endless.