Passive income is the unicorn that everyone on the internet wants to achieve. Imagine having digital real estate that makes money while you sleep?
But why do so many people have a difficult time creating passive income online? The main reason is that they’re not thinking long-term and aren’t building assets that will create the income for years down the line.
You must think long-term when creating a passive income. That means you must emphasize less about today and more about the years that come. If you keep your focus on the big picture, you’ll eventually build up the type of digital real estate that will turn passive.
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What is passive income?
Passive income is money that doesn’t require you to work for it. This is the most obvious definition of passive income, but let’s go deeper into the world of digital real estate.
However, this is misleading because you must work for the money to achieve passive income. You first put in the work, and then over the years, you reap the rewards.
If you work at a job, you get paid for the work you put in today, and that’s it. With passive income, you put in work today, and you continue to earn money off of it for years to come.
6 best digital real estate to earn passive income
1. Start and grow a profitable blog
Blogging is an excellent source of passive income because each blog post you publish can receive traffic for many years to come. This is a very simple passive income strategy that requires very little skill to implement. You simply need to write quality content and wait for Google to send traffic to it.
Blogging is a long-term way to make a passive income. It will take roughly a year for every blog post that you publish to climb in the ranks of Google. Blogging isn’t a get-rich-quick overnight scheme, but you can turn it into a nice passive income if you hit that publish button enough times on your blog.
To start a blog, sign up with HostGator here. You’ll get a free domain name and you’ll be set up to use the free WordPress blogging platform from the start.
2. Become a YouTuber and build a community
YouTube is another excellent source of passive income that requires little to no capital upfront. You just need a smartphone or camera and a YouTube account. However, becoming a successful YouTuber is difficult because you must work on your brand, and it takes time to build up an audience.
It will take time for your videos to climb the ranks of YouTube. However, it’s one of the most lucrative avenues to make passive income online. If you build up an audience and monetize your videos, you can earn a ton of money from YouTube.
The trick to building a passive income with YouTube is to create many evergreen videos that will appeal to people for years to come. If you have a channel with hundreds of videos, you’ll receive a nice amount of money every month that will grow as long as you continue to upload.
To learn how to start a successful YouTube channel, take this course from their Creator Academy.
3. Create an online course
Creating an online course is another way to succeed with passive income. It’s a bit more difficult because you need to create a very detailed course and then market it to people. If you do it correctly, an online course can earn you passive income for years to come.
4. Write and sell eBooks for Kindles
This is another way to earn passive income that takes a bit more skill. To sell an eBook on Amazon, you need to create a quality product. You also need to market your eBook through Amazon, and you’ll have the ability to give your eBook away for free if you wish.
This is another passive income strategy that will take time to get started. However, it can remain profitable for years to come if you continue to create eBooks that people like to read. The trick to turning this into a great form of passive income is to write many books and have many people buy if they discover they like your work.
You can get started with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing here.
5. Create a software product
This is a very lucrative method of making passive income online. Software products are created by very skilled developers and sold to the masses. The amount of money you can make with this type of passive income varies. It depends on if your software costs a one-time fee or if you charge a reoccurring fee.
The best route with software is to create something that people are willing to pay for every month. This is referred to as Software as a Service or SaaS. There is big money in SaaS products, and it can become passive after you create the software and get many monthly subscribers.
6. Become an affiliate marketer
Becoming an affiliate marketer is very easy and can be done within weeks or months. You need to focus on niche markets and products that people want to buy. Pick a product that you know people will want to buy and then promote it to them.
The trick with affiliate marketing is consistency. If you want to earn a full-time income from affiliate marketing, it takes time and effort.
To turn your affiliate marketing career into passive income, you need to create content that will be online for years. You can do that in YouTube videos, blog posts, or by building niche sites that link to the affiliate offer.
Here is a tip that most people aren’t going to tell you about affiliate marketing:
Do you want to build up a passive income without making YouTube videos or writing blog posts? It’s possible, but you need to do one thing that most people completely overlook.
The way you earn a passive income with affiliate marketing without having tons of content online is, you promote reoccurring offers. You must promote affiliate offers that people have to pay a monthly fee for that you receive a commission.
Let’s say you get a $25 monthly commission for an SEO tool that you promote. If you have ten customers, you earn $250 per month. You earn that money passively every month without having to do anything at all.
If you’re promoting things people find useful with a recurring commission, you will build up a passive income. However, not everyone will continue to pay the monthly fee, and over time your commissions will begin to dwindle if you don’t seek out new customers.
4 tips to grow your digital real estate
The best traffic for passive income comes from free sources
The best free traffic sources to earn a passive income are blogging, YouTube, and social media. Yes, social media can be a source of traffic for a passive income because once you build up a social account, it will bring in traffic for years as long as you’re posting valuable content.
The trick to turning your social media into traffic is to build up a brand and then monetize it. To do that, you must treat marketing like a business. You can’t just post one time and think people are going to come in droves.
Focus your time on content creation and not on marketing
If you spend all of your time focusing on marketing, you won’t build up enough content to generate a passive income. The best passive income earners don’t focus on marketing, instead, they create content that people want to consume.
Before creating content, ask yourself if people will find this helpful five years from now. If the answer is no, don’t create the content. It’s better to save your time and energy on content that will remain useful.
Creating content can be a great passive income strategy when you focus on quality. If you’re going to spend your time creating content, make sure it’s something that people will find helpful in the future.
It takes years for digital real estate to earn passive income
If you think that you’re going to build up a passive income in the following weeks or a few months, you’re greatly mistaken. Building up a passive income takes time. To become passive, you need to have content that people will want to consume for years.
If you focus on creating quality content, you will build up a passive income in the future. However, it will take time and effort—a lot of time and what will seem like an extraordinary amount of effort. Though, the effort will pay off once you’re able to relax without having to do much of anything to earn a living.
Learn how to generate a passive income and scale it up
The fantastic thing about generating passive income is, you can scale it. After you learn how to create content that gets a consistent amount of traffic, you can hire other people to do the same thing for you. At that point you become like a CEO, and your job is only to make sure everyone does what you tell them to.
Digital real estate: The bottom line
Don’t let people tell you that passive income is a myth. It’s real. It just takes a lot of time and effort to build.
There are no shortcuts to building a passive income. It takes hard work and consistency to earn a full-time income from passive sources. If you have the patience to build it up, it can be more rewarding than anything you’ve ever done for a paycheck.
Think long-term and realize that generating a passive income takes years. After you’ve created enough content in the span of those few years, that’s when the real magic happens, and you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.
