(”25¢ balls”; courtesy of adamantine)
As I explained in my previous article, Lessons to Teach Your Children (Part 1), passive income is a type of residual income where you make a strong initial effort to get the income started, but then do minimal work to keep it going. It’s income that is not linear to the amount of work that you do, so one hour of work can create an amount of passive income that falls within a wide range and can continue to provide income for many years. You are not constrained by the number of hours that you put in, but rather the results you get depend on the strategy you use and the quality of the work you create, as well as the number of people you are able to reach.
The following five options for creating passive income are probably not going to create large amounts of income for you, but they’re a way to get started for those who don’t have lots of cash to spare and who are just becoming familiar with the concept of passive income. As an example of starting out small and then gradually growing your passive income, Brian Lee from geniustypes.com–who started off making passive income by investing in bulk candy vending machines–explains the following:
“A quarter vending machine that offers three different types of candy can be bought for about $200 and the candy to fill it costs around $50. In a good location the machine can easily bring in around $25 per month. That means that you can pay off the entire asset in about six months or roll your profit into a second machine. After another six months, you can buy two more machines.
This may not seem like big money, but it is planting the seed for big money in the future. If you don’t have the money or credit for real estate, this is one way to turn a couple hundred dollars into a couple thousand.”
Become a Squidoo Lensmaster
Squidoo is a Web 2.0 site founded by Seth Godin which allows anyone to set up a single page—called a lens—on any topic, for free. Advertising revenue is shared with these content creators, and some of it is given to charity. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people–Mother Theresa, Prince Charles, Brad Pitt, or even your grandmother–places, hobbies, sports, pets, products, philosophy, politics, and so on.
Squidoo lenses are made up of “modules”, and there are many different types of modules to choose from so that you can create interesting, informative, and attractive lenses. There are modules for making lists, adding Flickr photos, adding links, adding YouTube videos, creating text, and so on. As an example, you can visit one of my squidoo lenses: www.squidoo.com/100things (on April 21, 2008 this was one of the top 100 squidoo lenses).
Users who create lenses are called lensmasters, and squidoo gives 50% of its advertising revenue to lensmasters. In addition to getting a cut of the advertising profits from squidoo, you can monetize your lens by adding an Amazon module, an e-bay module, and so on. You can also add your own affiliate links to your squidoo lenses.
Some of the advantages of squidoo are:
- Squidoo lenses get indexed very quickly. It is not uncommon to make a lens and find it in Google search returns in 48 hours.
- Squidoo lenses often rank very high on Google. Most lenses will climb to the top of the results for their keywords pretty quickly.
- In addition to being a revenue maker, squidoo is a great way to drive free traffic to your website or blog.
Making a lens is easy, it’s fun, you can make cash, and it’s free. Join squidoo right now, just click here.
Sell Use of Your Photographs
iStockPhoto.com allows you to contribute your photographs on their site and get paid royalties when others buy them. Just follow the instructions, upload your photos, and sit back and collect your checks.
Create a Store at Cafepress.com
CafePress.com is an online retailer that allows you to create and sell a variety of customizable products with zero upfront costs and zero inventory investment. Opening and operating a basic CafePress shop is free.
After creating a shop, the owner can proceed to select products and upload files, such as images to print on t-shirts, posters, mugs, bags, wall calendars, and so on. The shop is effectively managed by CafePress.com, and the shop owner only has to take care of customizing the products they want to sell.
Cafepress.com will do all of the following:
- Give you a free online shop to promote your products.
- Produce each item when ordered.
- Handle all payment transactions.
- Ship the products worldwide.
- Manage all returns/exchanges.
- Offer customer service.
- Send you a monthly check for your earnings on sales.
Write E-How Articles
Join E-How’s Writer Compensation Program, write How To articles about what you know, and make money. Every month you can make money for every article that you submit.
Create an E-Book
Right now one of the best businesses in the world is information publishing, and you can take advantage of this trend by publishing an e-book. E-books are the perfect information product to sell on the internet because there’s no inventory, near-zero overhead, high profit margins, no printing costs, no shipping costs– e-books are delivered as an electronic PDF file over the Internet–, and they’re quick and inexpensive to produce.
Charlie Byrne from Early To Rise explains that it’s not really about selling information—these days people are bombarded with information all day long–, it’s about selling advice, ideas, original concepts, analysis, expert guidance, how-to pieces to help people solve their problems, and opinions people can trust.
Naomi Dunford over at the blog “IttyBiz” just wrote a four part series on e-books. You can read the first part of the series, “How to Make $12,246 in a Day, Part One: Finding and Wooing the Market for your E-book”, by clicking here.
How do you create passive income? Please join the conversation by leaving a comment below.
– Marelisa
译文:
五种简单方法帮你赢得被动收入
正如我在我的前一篇文章Lessons to Teach Your Children (Part 1)（将给孩子们的课第一部分）中提到的，被动收入是一种剩余收入，想要获得这项收入的话，在最初的时候你需要很大的投入，但之后只要花很少的精力就可以让它继续下去。这种收入与你的工作量并不呈线性关系，因此，一个小时的工作就可能创造大量的被动收入，并在接下来的几年时间里继续为你创收。你并不受你所投入的时间的限制，相反，你的收入是与你所使用的策略，你工作的质量，以及你用到的人脉。
下面所提供的五种方法可能并不会为你创造大量的财富，但是对手上没有多少闲钱的或者刚刚接触到被动收入这一概念的人来说，应该是一个很好的开始。为你举一个由小到大逐步增加被动收入的例子吧，来自geniustypes.com，Brian Lee讲述他以投资大量糖果自动贩卖机开始创造被动收入的故事：
“买一个可以卖三种糖果的自动贩卖机需要200美元，其中糖果的费用在50美元左右，而在一个位置比较好的地方每个月可以很轻松就赚得25美元。而这就意味着大概六个月你就付清了整个机器的钱了，然后将你获得的利润拿去购买第二台机器。再过六个月，你就可以再买两台机器了。”
这点钱看起来或者并不算多，但是却可以为将来赚大钱播下种子。如果你没钱或者存款投入设备的话，这里倒是有一个可以把几百元变成几千元的方法。”
成为 Squidoo的会员
Squidoo 是由Seth Godin 创建的一个Web 2.0的网站，它允许任何人免费创建一个独立的可以是任何主题的网页--lens。它的广告收入会分给这些创建者，还有一些则是用于慈善事业。网页lens可以是关于任何东西的，比如说，一些好的点子，人物--Theresa修女，Charles王子，Brad Pitt,甚至你的祖母，一些地方，兴趣爱好，体育运动，宠物，产品信息，哲学，政治等等。
Squidoo的lens都是由一个个“单元”构成的，为了让你建一个有趣的，信息量大的，吸引人的lens，有很多各种各样的单元可供你选择。它的单元可以帮你列清单，共享照片，添加链接，增加 YouTube视频，创建文本等等。你可以访问我的一个Squidoo lens地址www.squidoo.com/100things（在2008.4.21日那天这可是排在前100位的）。
创建lens的用户们被称作是lens的主人，squidoo把50%的广告收入分给这些用户。另外，你也可以削减squidoo的广告利润，自己添加一些Amazon，e-bay等的广告单元来获得收入。你还可以在你的lens加上你自己的相关连接。
squidoo的优势：
Squidoo 的网页很快就可以被编入索引。做一个网站，然后在48小时内在Google上面找到它，这并不罕见。
Squidoo 的网页在Google上的排名通常比较靠前。大多数网页可以很快的通过关键词爬到搜索结果的最上面去。
除了可以创收之外， Squidoo可以帮你网页或博客大开方便之门。
建一个lens吧，很简单的，而且很有意思，你还可以赚钱，当然，还是免费的哟！
利用你的照片
你还可以把你的照片传到iStockPhoto.com上去，一旦照片被人采用，你就可以获得版税了。只需要按照操作说明，上传照片，然后等着收支票吧。
在Cafepress.com开个商店
CafePress.com 是一个在线零售平台。你可以制作各种各样的富有民族特色的商品在上面卖，零预付款和
存货投资。开一个CafePress shop 小店是免费的。
开店之后,店主可以选择产品并上传产品相关的文件，如可以打印在T桖上面的图片，张贴画，杯子，包包，挂历等等。 CafePress.com 会帮你进行有效地管理，而店主则只需要定做好他们想要出售的商品就好了。
CafePress.com 会帮你解决下面这些事：
为您提供一个免费的网络平台来提升你的产品
收到订单后帮您做好每一项工作
解决所有支付业务
运送货物到世界各地
管理所有的利润及汇率
提供客户服务
每月为您提供销售收入账单
写E-HOW 文章
加入E-HOW的Writer Compensation Program（作家补偿项目），写一写关于你所了解的how to 文章来赚钱。每个月你都可以从你提交的文章来获得收入。
做一本电子书
目前，世界上最好做的生意之一就是信息出版，你可以紧跟潮流，出版一本电子书。电子书在因特网上是最完美的信息产品，因为它不需要详细清单，零经费投入，高利润空间，无印刷费用及运输费用，它是通过PDF格式的文件在互联网上流通的,还有，它做起来既快又便宜。
Early To Rise 上的Charlie Byrne说，这实际上算不上销售信息--现在，人们整天都被各种各样的信息狂轰乱炸，这是一种建议，电子，原始概念，分析，专业指导，来帮助人们解决问题,当然，这些意见需要是值得人相信的。
Naomi Dunford在博客“IttyBiz”上写到，在电子书上写四个部分就可以了。你可以在第一部分看到这样的话：“怎样在一天内赚12，246美元，第一部分：为你的电子书找一个市场”。