It feels good waking up after a good sleep, reaching for your phone to shut off the alarm, and excited to start the day. Your excitement comes from knowing that overnight income was generated. 

“If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”  Warren Buffet

There are 3 general ways of making money online.

• Offering your services
• Selling a product
• Attention from content

Why Offering Your Services Cannot Be A Source Of Passive Income?

When you are a skilled professional, people will pay you money for your services. But there is only a limited amount of time you can offer your services for – 40hours a week or stretched to 80 hours is overkill.

You are basically trading time for money. This method cannot be scaled thus cannot be a source of passive income.

What Is Passive Income?

Passive income is money earned from a business or asset without actively participating in the process. 

Passive income has a get rich quick tone to it, but don’t be fooled. There is a lot of upfront work that needs to be invested.

This is what having passive income is all about. Income that goes beyond trading your time for money. It’s how you detach your ability to earn from the limited time that you have in a day.

How Do I Start?

As with everything, you need to start small and you need to be consistent- always keeping the end goal in mind. When your passive income exceeds your expenses, then financial freedom is attained.

Evaluate yourself with this these basic questions

1. What do you want?
2. Is there something that there is a need or a demand for that you’ve identified?
3. What skills are you willing to learn? Will you enjoy learning it?

What Products Can I Start Building?

Before thinking of what product to build, ask yourself what value the product adds in general. Why would people want to buy your product and what purpose does it serve.

The below example covers digital products that are not tied to any inventory and doesn’t require shipping or logistics. Making the barrier of building product entry low.

• Information Products
  • Write an ebook and sell them on Amazon
  • Create courses for a topic and sell them on Udemy, Skillshare or Coursera
• Digital Artworks
  • Create digital tracks and sell them on …
  • Create digital artworks, photography, videos and sell them on Adobe
  • Sell merch with your artworks on Amazon Merch
• Build Mobile Apps
• Build Website Templates and Plugins

All of this needs upfront work, but it would keep you earning passive income as long as people find value for your product.

What If I Don’t Know How To Create A Product?

Then answer is to use affiliate marketing to build passive income. This is when you do not own the product but you are referring people to buy that product created by someone else. When a person you referred buys that product you get a commission.

Amazon Affiliate is one of the most famous ones.

If there is a product that you like using, try searching if they have a referral program.

How Do I Earn Passive Income From Attention From Content?

To earn passive income from the content, your content needs to be valuable. It can be a tip, advice, free resource, tutorials, etc. The more good quality content you put the more attention it gets.

This content can be published on a website or blog, shared on a mailing list or on shared on social media like twitter, facebook and instagram.

In general, the more views or traffic it receives, the more chances it can be monetized.

Build a decent following of people that trust you.

Companies can pay you to promote their product if you have a decent following. The more views, likes or reach your social media post generated, the more you would earn.

In the case of Youtube, if you have your channel monetized. The more views your video gets, the more earnings you receive.

With the attention you get from your content, you can direct your users to your products or affiliate products.

So, What To Do Next?

Now that you got an overview of what passive income is and how it can earn you money while you sleep, now is the time to hit that subscribe form on the bottom of this page.

I’ll be covering more topics on different types of passive incomes and hopefully, one that tickles your fancy and gets you all riled up and excited.