I'm doing 10 things
Thinking out loud… I’m a believer in TNSTAAFL (There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch) so passive income for me at least isn’t “something for nothing” it’s more of a thing where I don’t have to be actively and synchronously engaged in turning the crank to make the income come in. I’m totally OK with there being asynchronous work I have to put in, there might be some initial seed money, there might be some work I need to do to talk to people and connect people who can together make something great that wouldn’t be happening otherwise, there might be efficiencies or opportunities I could set something to automatically watch for and profit from whenever some “low hanging fruit” becomes available, etc.
For me this isn’t a desire for “something for nothing” it’s just that with a full time job already going I don’t have time to do a second job on the side. I did two jobs once and earned a lot of money but had no life outside of work and it made me feel like a slave, it was work/sleep/work/work/sleep/work/etc.. I still feel that way to some degree and would like to earn my own freedom and this seems like one way to do it.
My basic idea so far is…
- treat each passive income stream as it’s own ‘business’ even if it is only generating 10 bucks a week
- wrap my mind around the fact that some income streams could pay regularly and others might be unpredictable – don’t toss ideas out because they might only generate a windfall once a year
- invest my time in building a system – build the system and then have it work for you
- invest small amount of capital if necessary, reinvest profits, pay myself back as soon as possible, have that incubate the additional revenue stream that will then support itself
- have the system work for me in the future
- maintenance of the system is automatic or can be outsourced to someone else
- have a constant risk assessment function built into the system (make fish and cut bait decisions easier)
- have a plan for selling individual systems eventually and know enough about income potential and cost of maintenance to know when the price is right, if there is anyone else involved make this clear from the beginning so they know that ‘selling out’ is part of the plan
- exposing myself to personal liability
- working for someone else as an employee
- having employees (unless it’s possible to outsource HR and all other work associated with that)
- anything that relies on success of gambling with time and money, day trading, etc. (trust good people, not the dice roll)
- MLM
- informercial style “get rich quick” schemes
- sales businesses where you have to pay a big up front cost to get the stuff you are then supposedly going to sell to others and make all sorts of money and win a cruise or other fabulous prizes
- manipulating others, breaking the golden rule
- speculative real estate schemes like “flipping”
- renting land,property,labor,capital to others might be OK if I can work out reliable risk management functions- put down the capital myself or use someone else’s capital – not if it’s debt financed and I’m on the hook for it, with where I feel the economy is headed I would rather be earning interest than paying it.
- online sales
- developing a “brand” of something that others create and I sell via online website or something
- come up with a system that does some innovative new form of online advertising that helps close sales – some kind of long tail niche
- systematically start applying that system to other niches – each one becomes its own passive income stream
- look for boring dumb jobs that highly paid but not very intelligent people do on computers that could be automated, then offer this service for sale online
- identify a way that someone else can make money doing something they are already doing but not getting paid for (like Google AdWords for a blogger), and then sell them the service of setting themselves up to get paid for it (or in the right circumstances, set up a contract to be their agent, handle the payment processing for them and give them their cut) – or set up a platform that lets people do this type of thing automatically in such a way that within your platform you get a percentage of their profits and they get paid better than they could elsewhere for something they would have been doing for free.
- identify what skilled labor (handyman, home improvement, plumbing, locksmith, etc) exists in my area and help them coordinate trades of time and skills between each other in exchange for paying me or doing some kind of trade on something I need to get done
- take something that is already selling and find a way to sell it more efficiently – put it in a common sales system – every time you find another product like that there is a new stream of passive income
- look for and be prepared for seasonal sales or special event type situations to take advantage of the fact bigger competitors might not be on a passive income stream mentality. When you see the single trigger for this income stream, you go-go-go and sell whatever it is that is selling like hotcakes at that particular moment in a way that the other stores can’t compete with. (items that aren’t consistently purchased but have a history of demand spikes that other retailers are not prepared for) Maybe monitor inventory of competitors for just those things they are sold out of, and then offer those via your channel.
- some kind of intellectual property or software that can be easily duplicated and sold over and over again once created
