How I turned a $400 investment into $4,000 in a few hours
After reading a few insightful articles about successful blogging techniques, I have decided to put a more personal touch into this weblog. I am already working on a redesign of the layout, but I thought I would make the first step and talk about my personal experiences with the billionaire woman lifestyle. The first topic that I wanted to discuss relates to money, because most people who are researching the lives of millionaires and billionaires are looking to increase their personal wealth. I strongly believe that learning from others’ successes is the way to go. Although I have yet to make my first billion, I have learned a thing or two during my time about creating passive income.
What is passive income?
Passive income is money that you can earn or make without being actively involved in making it. That might seem a little bit strange to most people. That is because we are mostly trained to believe that the only way to make money is by trading time for dollars. But with the internet and indeed even before the internet, there are ways to create an income without putting significant time or resources into the process. Of course I am not saying that you will be able to just flip a switch and floods of money will come pouring it to your life. But I do believe that anyone can create additional streams of income using their skills, their talents and interests. First, let me explain what a wise man once told me about the two models for making money.
My father once told me that there are two ways to make money in this world:
- You can sell a product.
- You can sell a service.
So how do these two methods relate to the idea of selling time for money? Well the most widely known models require that a person be present to provide a service, for example in the case of a sales clerk, a dentist, a hair dresser or a consultant. When it comes to products, you must invest the time to create the products and then invest the time to generate sales - either by cold calling, marketing or creating a buzz through word of mouth. Either way, both of these models have required someone to run the business operations - until now. With the advent of the internet and other forms of telecommunication, we are now able to provide a service without being present and sell products without being available in real time.
My personal experience with passive income
First I will explain how I turned a $400 investment into $4000. I am not saying that I am a genius for creating this return on my investment, but I think that by sharing this experience I will be able to help other women and men in this world to break out of the old thought paradigms and make things happen for themselves. When I decided that I wanted to create some passive income, I had been searching the internet for many months and buying tons of hyped up internet marketing products. In fact, I probably spent more than $400 just on information products that promised to make me rich overnight. Fortunately for me, most of these products had refund policies and I soon got burnt out from reading so many poor quality products. I am not saying that all internet marketing products are of poor quality, but that I was not doing a lot of thinking before buying all of these products. I also was not very used to having a credit card to play with, so I’m going to forgive myself and call it “the phase of the first time credit card user with internet access.”
Photo by: Brandy
Finally, I got frustrated with all of these guides and business proposals and decided that I would just build web sites and see if I could earn money from Google’s Adsense ads. I bought my last information product, which was Joel Comm’s Adsense Code. This ebook gave me the motivation to take this business model seriously. I also decided to purchase a software product to help me create the web sites more easily. Although I had been designing web sites since I was 12, I wanted to automate the task of designing layouts. I really wanted to focus on writing quality content and on increasing my rankings in major search engines. I opted for the X Site Pro software package, which cost me about $230 Canadian dollars at the time. After creating my first web site with the software, I started generating a significant amount of adsense income. In fact, in October of 2005 I made over $500, which more than covered the costs of the X Site Pro software. I never looked back!
I have been creating web sites using X Site Pro ever since. In fact in 2007 I made $4000 with adsense alone. I am not claiming that this amount is an earth shattering sum of money. However, considering that I did not actively work on my web sites for more than a few hours per month, I would say that this is a good stepping stone toward my long term goal of generating passive income. Now why did I say I turned $400 into $4000? Well I would have to say that I spent roughly $400 on purchasing domain names, hosting, a few software packages (like X Site Pro) and a few ebooks along the way. Although most of the costs were upfront, I have continued to earn residual income on all of my web sites since then. I have in fact made more than $10,000 since October 2005. Of course I plan on increasing these figures in the coming year and I look forward to sharing my findings with all of my readers here.
So what can you do if you would like to start generating your own streams of passive income? My advice is to pick a business model and stick to it. The internet is littered with possible residual income generating schemes, but if you keep buying ebooks you will get information overload and never get anything done. In fact, this is what stopped me from generating any money in my first few years learning to use the internet for business purposes. Here is a short list of possible ways to create passive income that I have come across. If you want a complete list of possibilities, visit this guide by Freelance Switch.
Passive Income Generating Ideas
- Blogging - see ProBlogger
- Stock Photography
- Content Web Sites
- Affiliate Marketing
- E-mail marketing
- Copywriting or Freelancing - not necessarily passive
I hope that this article has provided you with a more concrete example of how to create a passive income stream in your life. Here are action items:
- Research different passive income opportunities.
- Pick a passive income generating scheme and stick to it.
- Set up your system.
- Manage it every now and then.
- Watch your bank account collect the dollars and smile knowing that income is always flowing.
Similar Posts:
- Sweet Dreams for an Entrepreneurial Woman with a Passion for Pajamas
- Increasing Numbers of Female Billionaires
- Self-Employment: One Selfish Way to Financial Independence
- The Gardens of Billionaires
- Break Out Of Your Money Box
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