Although income in the form of 9-to-5 slavery dominates much of our 21st century working world, people utilising multiple streams of income are making more money with less stress. Rather than relying on one source to generate income, an increasingly popular way to earn is through passive income as opposed to active. This article will highlight the benefits of passive income over active and how you can diversify your income.
What’s the Difference?
The words passive and active are thrown around everywhere from science textbooks to marketing and finance, but what do they actually mean? In terms of income, an active salary requires a person to actually be working. This may be in a full-time/part-time job in which a person will need travel to their place of work.
Passive income, however, may require some activity to start up (although this is usually minimal) but will automatically generate money hereafter. Examples of passive income streams may include making money from blog posts, online stores or writing an eBook. All of these sources can generate money over time without any active input.
The Benefits of Passive Over Active
The benefits of passive over active income are innumerable.
- Passive sources of income also give rise to geographical freedom. If you are able to make money without being paid by the hour at a particular place, you can travel the world, move houses and visit friends whilst still earning full-time pay. Many sources of passive income require little more than internet connection and spare time! Active jobs require you to stay local and have limited allowances for holidays.
- Active income costs more. Although a 9-5 job may appear at first to pay more, many people forget that with this come fuel costs, the costs to maintain the home you’re now tied to because it’s near where you work and your time and effort that could be spent with loved ones. Passive income takes minimal time to set up, has very low (if any) startup costs and does not require you to travel to any workplaces.
- Passive income can be done alongside active income. While yes, passive income avoids much of the stressors associated with active income, setting up a passive source to tick away whilst still working on your job could double, even triple your total income.
- Passive income comes with no contracts – no notices to hand in before you quit, no fixed hourly rate and no risk of being fired. It allows you to be your own boss and take full control over your income.
How?
With all of this information you may be begging to find out just how you can start. It may all sound too good to be true, but you can thank your lucky stars that this is real – and it works.
There are a plethora of ways in which you can diversify your income and build multiple revenue streams. Some may require certain skills, others none, but all, if you’re committed and willing to put some time into starting up, will generate constant money for as long as you wish. Feel free to explore the following methods to find which ones work best for you.
Education
With education being such a ginormous industry in today’s world it’s a gem when looking to generate passive income. People like to learn, and people will pay you to teach them. Whatever you know, or don’t know and would like to learn more about, there will be somebody out there that requires your knowledge – so use it.
Create a Course
There are bundles of studies out there that conclusively show that around 90 percent of people claim they learn information online. Whatever it is you know – music, art, building, programming, literally anything can be transformed into a course. By course I mean a paid resource from which people can learn about a certain area of expertise. A drawing course, for example, would teach people how to improve their drawing skills.
Begin with a Word Document (or any space onto which you can let your ideas flow) and write as much as you can about the area you know most about. At first you may just have words on a page, but see if you can draw these ideas together into some sort of structure. From here, think about how you could teach somebody your knowledge and the best ways to do this. You won’t create a course in five minutes so persevere. It may take a week or two to have everything ready, but these two weeks could generate a lifetime of income with no further work needed.
Resources for Your Course
- Free course about building online courses
- Everything you wanted to know about creating a $300k+ online course
- Gumroad Discover
eBooks
Similar to a course, an eBook can also be used to transform your knowledge into long-term wealth. You can brainstorm ideas for an eBook in the same way as before. Below are some resources to help you get started.
- Coschedule: How to Brainstorm Ideas for a Book
- Part 1: The underground world of kindle ebooks
- Part 2: Confessions from the scammy underground world of kindle ebooks
- Part 3: Confessions from the scammy underground world of kindle ebooks
Photography
Photography (and I mean literally just taking photos rather than snapping and editing pics of models on a $10,000 camera) is another great platform for generating passive income. You can simply take a few decent shots on your mobile phone, upload them to various sites and get paid every time somebody uses them. It’s that easy.
- ShutterStock: get paid 25 cents for every download of your photo, and get paid for referring other photographers
- iStockPhoto
- DreamsTime
These are just a handful of the ways in which you can build your hands-free empire and there are thousands more out there. Find your niche, decide how to use it and let time do the rest of the work for you.
