Recurring Passive Income
I was telling someone about the fact that I have a business making web sites the other day and they responded with “cool, not very many people out there can do that sort of thing and people need web sites made..” He misunderstood me and thought I made web sites for other people. That got me thinking about it and I thought to myself “there is no way to make money online building websites for someone else”. Sure you might be able to pull in a reasonable hourly rate, but once it is built you’re done getting paid. To me this seems like a huge waste of time. Nobody would pay you to build them a web site that wasn’t going to either directly make them money or otherwise assist them in doing so. A friend of mine offered me several thousand dollars the other day to build him a site that he was sure was going to make him rich. I declined and told him to find someone overseas that will do it for peanuts, because if I’m going to spend time working on a site it is going to be one that will generate long-term revenue for me, not someone else.
So that brings me to recurring passive income. This should be your goal when thinking about ways to make money online. You need something that will generate income for you whether you choose to work on your sites that day/week or not. Subscriptions are a great way to make this kind of recurring revenue. There are lots of people out there that have active subscriptions for things they don’t use. Auto-rebill is your friend.
Another great way is to promote affiliate programs that pay out multi-tier commissions, such as Mallcom or PECash. With programs like that it is possible to generate significant income without having to sell anything yourself. Just by referring other webmasters to the programs you get a small percentage of commission from their sales. The best part of this is that your affiliate isn’t losing any money signing up under you. The company pays out that additional cash out of their profits.
The more people you can get making sales for you, the less you need to worry about the day to day operations of your web site(s). By having many sub-affiliates you also diversify your revenue source, so one unfavorable Google update is highly unlikely to wipe you out completely (which happens to so many webmasters it is surprising).
Recurring doesn’t quite apply to the sub-affiliate program section mentioned above, but more to subscriptions. Adult sites often have subscription affiliate programs like this that pay a commission each month that a member continues their subscription. One great adult affiliate program like this is Adult Friend Finder. AFF alone pays out millions of dollars evey month in commissions.
Of course there are non-adult sites that work the same way, I just used the examples mentioned above because they are programs I am familiar with and have been promoting for a while.
So, Wealthy Webmaster in training, I leave you with this… Don’t spend too much time working on things that will make you a little bit of money now. If you want to get rich online, you need money coming in that doesn’t require active effort on your part.
Think passive, aggressively. 