Building passive income online is not for the faint of heart. A leap of faith is required, in that the work you are doing today will actually pay off tomorrow. Of course in business, nothing is guaranteed and there is always going to be some risk of failure.
You may have very little support for your entrepreneurial adventure from your friends and family, because they are probably employed in a more traditional role. Thus, you must be fearless if you want to be successful online, and attack the business with all of your energy.
Here is what you can do to help insure future online income:
- Have a daily quota.
- Focus on income growth.
- Have a long term vision of success.
- Avoid distractions and be persistent.
Have a daily quota
Every day is an opportunity to grow your business. The world does not care if you take weekends off or if you work on your business 3 days each week or 6 days each week. In the end you are working for yourself and building your own business.
The income that you generate is a direct result of the value that you deliver to other people online. Create something amazing and useful and be rewarded for it. Each day that you do not produce something of value for your audience is a missed opportunity. This is because every time that you do create something of value, the Internet can deliver that value over and over again.
So each day is an opportunity to grow the total value that you can deliver. Each day is an opportunity to grow your future income stream. Take a month off from producing anything online, and that is a full month that you can never get back.
Just look at someone who has an existing authority website that is already successful. Maybe they earn several thousand dollars each month from their web property, and they invest a certain portion of that income or their own time in reinvesting for future growth. They appear to “have it easy” because all they have to do is continue to build their online empire, laying one brick at a time, to keep the cash flowing in.
It is the same with a newcomer starting out. Build your business each and every day. Do not take days off. Put your online efforts first if you want future passive income to be your priority. Have a daily quota and stick to it. Mine is two quality articles per day. Sometimes they are published on my own web properties, but other times they serve as quality guest posts for promotion.
Either way, I do not go to sleep until I have completed my daily publishing quota. This is a simple but highly effective method for growing a business. It does take some discipline to implement, but how else do you expect a successful business to be created?
Focus on income growth
The goal is to grow your online income. It can be surprisingly easy to forget that once you immerse yourself in the world of Internet marketing. For example, you may get caught up in attempting to:
- Get RSS readers and subscribers.
- Install fancy widgets on your blog.
- Get Twitter and Facebook followers.
- Do well with social media services.
And so on. Depending on your business model, some of those things may actually result in income growth. The point is, you should be measuring your income growth and figure out what actions stimulate it directly.
For most marketers this will be the creation of new content and promotion of that content via link building.
Figure out exactly what actions grow your income, then focus exclusively on those actions. Do not get caught up in chasing useless “vanity metrics” that only serve to boost your ego.
Have a long term vision of success
Your vision of success is to create passive income online. The key is that you need to be realistic enough to have a long term vision rather than a short one.
Most people who try to create success online give up because their time frame is way too short. They expect to see income within weeks or months when they should be looking at more like a year or two. There is nothing wrong with a two year timeline to profitability. The time is going to pass anyway. Why not build a successful business?
Just realize that it takes time and it takes consistent effort. Have a long term vision that you will be earning a part time income online within a year or two, and a full time income online within two to four years. If you make a consistent daily effort then these numbers are not unreasonable, and are actually a bit conservative.
Aim high and have infinite patience. Keep your expectations realistically low and be pleasantly surprised as age and trust factors kick in later on.
Avoid distractions and be persistent
Creating a profitable website is a matter of scale. Earning 20 dollars per month with your 20 page website should be all the validation you need.
Make a thousand page website and earn proportionately more. Publish daily and you can achieve numbers that at first may seem unrealistic for you.
You may object with: “I don’t have time to build a website.” Can you squeeze out an hour each day in order to buy your freedom? In time, that hour each day should be enough to create two quality articles.
Keep it up for two years and you will likely have a powerful income stream in your life, one that allows you the freedom to build a better business.
All businesses have risk involved. At some point, you have to jump in with both feet and make a commitment to yourself that you are going to do the work. Without the commitment to do the work, no successful business can be created.
This is why you must abandon all fear and follow through with a commitment if you want to reap the rewards.
Any questions? Please ask me in the comments!
[box]This is a guest post by Patrick Meninga of Make Money With No Work. He recently sold his website for $200,000 dollars.[/box]
Image © tiero – Fotolia.com
Samuel August 28, 2012 at 9:00 pm
Patrick, you do know what you are talking about.
It takes long vision to create a business online.
Measuring success every month is going to be the measuring stick for your site’s growth.
Peter Jones July 3, 2012 at 4:20 am
If you are a good enough writer and follow all your steps it seems like a sure thing! As with most professions, hard work and determination (as well as a bit of flare) will get you there in the end.
Haroun Kola July 1, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Thanks for the tips, they come at just the right time that I’m directly focussing on building passive income.
Brenda June 24, 2012 at 10:56 pm
I like the idea of having a daily quote for myself. Sometimes my marketing tasks get to the bottom of the list as I work on client projects. Thanks!
Shalu Sharma May 4, 2012 at 3:06 pm
These are best tips I have come across. Reading those words makes me fearless. So far a lot of people just given up after a few months trying a hand at passive income. Having a long term growth plan is going to be important. Thanks for these tips.
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Anton Koekemoer April 18, 2012 at 9:04 am
Wow – What a lengthy post – Still provided a lot of important and viable information. You’ve really provided a lot of Important and viable content in this post , And when writing about the topic at hand one cannot write a short post and still provide the amount of viable content that you have in this post. So I take my hat off to you for such an excellent and well written post.
Thanks for sharing. Will be sure to keep an eye on your blog.
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raymond April 17, 2012 at 12:34 am
Being innovative and persistent is just about the ways on how attain success using passive income, well it doesn’t have to be much of a sophisticated thing or stuff, but take time to imagine those people who think of something very useful and unique and believe that it will work and pursue it, those kinds of people are one of the finest rich men over the world.
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Nishadha April 16, 2012 at 11:48 pm
Persistence is the key in online businesses. Because it take time to get established and gain traffic. Also you need to be prepared to do some investing on training.
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edgar April 16, 2012 at 11:34 pm
I beg to disagree with jack sander, making money online is never easy. It takes a lot of hard work and patience before even earning a buck. But once you’ve passed all the initial hurdles, earning online can be BIG. Choosing a niche is never easy as well. I did a blog with a niche that I am very passionate about, and it gained a good ranking within 4 months. Unfortunately when it comes to earnings I am a bit frustrated since I only earned a bit of income from it. I should could have chosen a sure earner niche like insurance but I just simply don’t have the passion for it.
Gautam April 15, 2012 at 12:33 am
Nice post Patrick and I believe you are right.I’m familiar with your point of view while I noticed many interesting options in your article.It’s not easy to make money online but not impossible and the profits as you say are according to the number of pages and this is something very realistic and gives the chance to achieve big things.
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Philos April 14, 2012 at 5:30 am
Making passive income is quite hard sometimes. Thought I now it is possible, when one sticks to producing great stuff and networking with others to grow their businesses.
It is only that distractions sometimes stubbornly keeps us waiting on the road for months before we start seeing good results.
Have a great day.
Philos recently posted..How to get more out of how to articles, blog posts, podcasts, infographics, screencasts and videos
Becca April 12, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Nice info which will be prove so useful for all new blogger and online marketers. I think to generate passive income is depends on the person making promotions and advertisements. It’s only a matter of making the right choice and taking the right actions.
Austin April 12, 2012 at 5:44 pm
These are some fantastic tips, Patrick. Avoiding distractions is something I definitely need to work on. It really disrupts the flow of things in my office and I need to learn to focus on the task at hand and not get side tracked.
Franchesca April 12, 2012 at 11:03 am
I often hear it said that people earning a good pass income “have it easy”. People saying that seem totally ignorant of the weeks, month and years of often unpaid effort that went into building up the source of the current passive income. Nothing good comes easy!
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Bishwajeet April 10, 2012 at 9:05 am
To earn passive income you need to think on long term plans of your website, If you don’t have any long term plan then you ll ultimately fail in the money making adventure.
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Patrick April 10, 2012 at 8:57 am
@ Christine Rage – Having a quota is easy….meeting it every day consistently is tough! Good luck to you….
@ Jack Sander – Yeah I would agree, it is tougher to make money in the long run. You need a solid strategy for that, in order to survive all the search updates. Good luck to you.
@ Jacko – Selling a profitable business requires a calculation, one that basically says “Is it worth it to unload this asset for X amount of money right now?” For me it was worth it, because the buyer paid me so much more than I could really hope to make with it. He was higher up on the monetization chain than I was, so I did well to sell out.
Patrick recently posted..How Can I Make Money with no Work?
Jacko April 10, 2012 at 7:36 am
awesome. I really don’t understand selling a website that is making money though.
The problem is you have to build a profitable website again instead of continuously growing the one you had to even higher levels. Look at techcruch, now they have content syndicated on cable shows like discovery. The sky is the limit to successful websites. I wouldn’t sell one making money. facebook guy marky z is still holding on to his share of fb too.
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Jack Sander April 10, 2012 at 3:31 am
Making money online is easy, the tough part is to have a vision and to reinvest them wisely to maximize the results. I’ve seen many people making 5 dollars a day, hoping that this will go on forever without doing any work. In reality, having website or blog requires a lot of work to improve the earnings on the long run.
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Sara April 9, 2012 at 2:55 pm
Nice post Patrick and I believe you are right.I’m familiar with your point of view while I noticed many interesting options in your article.It’s not easy to make money online but not impossible and the profits as you say are according to the number of pages and this is something very realistic and gives the chance to achieve big things.
Amit Shaw April 9, 2012 at 1:18 pm
I think to earn Decent Money From Blogging we require to Avoid distractions and be persistent.
Earning from Money is not one day its need hardwork than only you will get success.
So @Trung Be Persistent and Avoid Distractions Just Focus on Building Email List, and dont forget to gain visitor than only you can earn Passive Income.
Thanks for this awesome article Patrick.
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Rashmi Sinha April 9, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Passive income comes with an excellent idea for me.. But that is not the only criteria for this.. These tips are greatly informative and i hope more can read this..
Thank you
PS: Daily quota is the most important for me!
Rashmi Sinha recently posted..Google Drive
Christine Rage April 9, 2012 at 12:49 pm
I like the idea of having a daily quota, I never thought to look at it like that before. Hoover I have done retail sales when I was in school, and having that quota motivated me then. Why not now? And the daily article thing is actually easier than people think. I commed myself to writing one a day and now I typically end up cranking out 2-4 now that I’m used to the discipline. It is a leap of faith, but we do have bloggers who represent that it’s a calculated risk worth making.
Patrick April 9, 2012 at 12:04 pm
@ Trung – Well the time it takes to earn your first dollar is not that long necessarily….anyone can get lucky of course. I would say a matter of months.
But in order to be earning a steady one dollar per day, that will take a bit longer in my opinion. And then of course you want to scale it up from there.
Just earning one dollar is not really “passive income.” It’s just a dollar. But if you can get your site earning that every day, then you are on to something. Then you can work on it, grow it from there. Build it up.
I think the timeline for success should be long term. If you want it quickly, then you might fall into a trap of creating lower quality material, or using cheap outsourced content, etc.
For me I think it took at least a year before I was at a dollar per day. But i was not working real hard in the beginning, either….
Good luck.
Patrick recently posted..How Can I Make Money with no Work?
Trung Nguyen April 9, 2012 at 12:00 pm
I have a question: How long can we earn our first dollar online with passive income – Patrick? About your case??
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