“Marketing is what gets you noticed, and that side of it something – this side of it, if you like, doing interviews – is the side of it that I least enjoy, and yet is 50% of the project.” — Rowan Atkinson

Creating passive income will require you to have decent marketing skills at times. You’re eventually going to have to promote something.

You need to know how to promote your eBook if you want any sales.

If you want a tenant for your rental property, you have to know how to get the word out.

You have to possess some basic marketing skills if you want to improve your situation.

I like to go on beach vacations fairly often. Whenever I go away I usually chat with everyone there from the tourists to the locals and especially the resort workers. One of the bar staff actually added me to Facebook because we spent lots of time chatting. The funny thing is that over the years I’ve managed to learn a lot from the resort workers at these various destinations when it comes to marketing and selling your products.

I wanted to share what I learned about marketing from resort workers on my past trips:

You need to build connections.

Marketing and promoting your stuff is all about connections.

Every time that a resort worker has tried to sell me a time share, excursion, something illegal, or just general crap, they started off by trying to become my friend. They would ask me where I’m from and get into a discussion about your usual stuff. They would do their best to build a connection. Then they would promote their offer.

This is also generally what you learn in school about marketing. It’s just fun to see it in practise and then apply it to your own life.

It pays to make people feel comfortable.

You need to build trust with your audience and the person on the other end if you want them to hand over any money to you. We all work hard for our money. It’s not easy to get it. If someone is uncomfortable or uneasy with you, then they won’t be buying anything from you.

How can you influence others to trust you more?

• Be honest.
• Be transparent.
• Show both sides of the equation.
• Offer a money back guarantee.

Trust is everything in life and in sales.

Persistence is key.

It’s not going to be easy to promote your eBook or you rental property. This is why you need to be persistent. You can’t just give up after the first try. This is almost what happened to me. Nobody bought my eBook so I wanted to just give up and call it quits. I then realized that persistence is key and there’s no point in feeling sorry for myself.

Resort workers often live off commission. If they don’t sell, they simple don’t eat.

Imagine framing things like that? You’ll be much more persistent when you realize that failure is not an option nor is it a final destination.

That’s what I picked up from resort workers and applied to my own marketing efforts. You never know when and how you can learn something new. This is why I do my best to open up a conversation with everyone that I meet. You could help someone out or vice versa. That’s the good part of getting out there. Building passive income is all about getting out there and testing out new ideas. You don’t if something works or not until you test it out.

At my part-time job we were debating real estate and stocks the other day. One friend swears by real estate. He just purchased another small building that he’s going to renovate and then rent out the units one by one. He has always promoted the idea of investing into real estate to me.

Another friend chimed in by saying that he’s a huge fan of the stock market because it’s easy. He claimed that he makes easy money by being involved in stocks and day trading.

That’s when I froze. There’s nothing easy about investing in the stock market. I used to invest my money in the stock market when I first got into the idea of creating passive income. Then as time went on and I did more research, I took my money out of stocks and into other areas.

Why is trading stocks not passive income?

You have to be following the news consistently.

Anyone that wants to be a day trader needs to be an avid follower of the daily news. Trading stocks is not something you do on the side. You need to be on alert at all times. You need to keep up with the news and know exactly what’s going to happen. As soon as something happens, you have to be ready to make some moves. You might have to buy more shares or dump your shares before the stock tanks completely. All in all, all of the news that you watch will make stock trading pretty active. If you have a 9-5 gig, you won’t be able to devote the time and energy that it takes towards success in day trading.

You need to save up a ton of money to invest.

To even have enough money to make an impact or any real passive income with the stock market, you need to save up serious amounts of money. You need to build up enough money to play around with and allocate towards stocks that you feel are going to appreciate in value.

You need to take more risks.

When you sell an eBook or build a blog, you’re not going to take many risks. The only real risk is going to be your time. When it comes to day trading, you’re going to have to take some serious risks. There’s no guarantee that your money will be safe. There’s no guarantee of anything. Your putting your money into something that doesn’t exist. The stock can tank, causing you to lose a good amount of your savings.

Could you handle losing your savings? I personally couldn’t handle the risk associated with stocks. This is why I got into other streams of passive income. I can’t sleep at night knowing that I could lose my savings. I work too hard for my money.

That’s why trading stocks will never fully be passive income. While I do feel that trading stocks can be profitable for some, it can cause most to go insane!

Have you tried investing your money into the stock market? Have you earned passive income from stocks?

I loved reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. It’s still one of my favorite books to date. It’s actually where I was introduced to the idea of creating passive income. It’s where I first learned about lifestyle design and how you can travel the world and still actually make money at the same time. It was a book that really opened my eyes.

On the flip side, I also found a few issues with this book and the idea of creating passive income. I’m pretty realistic when I read anything so I wanted to share those thoughts with you guys.

What are the main flaws with the idea of the 4-Hour Workweek and the idea of creating passive income?

Not everyone can focus on business while traveling.

I’ve done work while traveling, but it’s not always easy. It’s really easy to get caught up while travelling if you know what I mean. Not only can the social life take over when you find yourself hanging out with new friends. It’s also easy to get distracted with the transportation and day-to-day stuff. You have so much on your mind that the last thing you want to do is work.

The idea of starting a business to do something else is flawed.

I just don’t get the reasoning behind starting one business to do something else. For example, you can’t start an iguana grooming business in hopes of becoming a rock climber on the weekends in Thailand. I don’t get that logic. In my opinion, a business is something that you should take seriously. A business is something that you believe in. If you wanted to make money and do other stuff with your spare time, that’s what a regular job is for. Most of you looking to create passive income, are looking for something to really sink your teeth into.

Too much focus on yourself.

When it comes to creating passive income or any source of income, it makes sense to focus on others. You can follow your passions, but the goal is to solve problems and help others. This book puts a lot of focus on yourself. I’m just not selfish enough to cut the whole world out from my life. Ferriss is an avid believe of cutting people off and sticking to yourself. While this could work for him, it certainly wouldn’t work with my family and circle of friends. I also feel that anyone paying you, deserves your attention and not some random voicemail.

No love for your work.

There are many people that hate their work. However, there are many of us that actually enjoy what we do. I don’t find the emphasis on loving your work in this book. Ferriss doesn’t talk about the love for your work and how you can enjoy what you do. That in my opinion is a major component of creating passive income. You want to create something that you love and are proud of.

Those are the main issues with the 4-Hour Workweek and the work of Tim Ferriss. You can still create passive income if you choose to be realistic. You just need to understand that we will all create passive income through different strategies.

When creating passive income you’re going to have to decide if you should outsource the work or learn how to do it on your own. You can easily pay someone to do the majority of your work while you focus on collecting the money. You can also do the work yourself and learn how to do everything.

My friend recently purchased an old building with 16 units with his business partner. The building came at a really cheap price. It was a damn good deal if you asked me. There’s just one obvious issue with the building, it came in poor condition for such a low price.

Instead of outsourcing the work, my friend has opted to do every thing all on his own. This includes emptying out the garages filled with trash to be used as storage in the future. He’s also going to be touching up every single unit to ensure that the units are of the highest quality in the area. His logic for doing all of this is that he wants to learn how to do all of the work so that he never gets ripped off. He now spends every moment of his spare time working on the building. Others would have outsourced all of the work.

There are bloggers like Mike of The Financial Blogger that completely believe in outsourcing work. There are others that want to do all of the work on their own. Today I wanted to compare outsourcing to learning on your own.

What are good reasons for outsourcing work?

You want to focus on higher value work.

When you outsource the mundane tasks, you can focus on doing work that you want to do. If you read the 4-Hour Workweek or anything on lifestyle design, you’ll area that you should spend as much time as possible on doing work that matters to you. Why spend your time on the boring stuff when you can pay someone else to do it?

You don’t have enough time for everything.

There’s not enough time for everything, especially when you have a full-time job and a family. When you have a busy schedule, the most valuable commodity for you is time. This is why many bloggers and business people choose to outsource work. They’re simply buying more time. More time for other work. For time for family.

Outsourcing can be very beneficial when building up passive income.

As you can tell be the title of this piece, you can’t always rely on outsourcing when building up your passive income. When should you learn and get things done yourself?

When you’re a beginner.

I almsot outsourced the property management for my first rental property. My excuse was that I wanted to create total passive income. My friend told me I was just making excuses. I realized that he had a valid point. If I wanted to learn anything about real estate, I needed to experience it. I end up doing all of the work myself and now I’m far for a beginner on rental properties. I’m not an expert, but It was wiser to learn how to get things done.

When you do have time.

Sometimes it makes more sense to use your time to learn. If you have a busy job and a full-time gig I’ll believe you when you say you have no time. When you’re young and full of energy, you have nothing but time.

There will be times where outsourcing is the wiser move for you. In building up this site I outsourced all of the the design work. Instead of losing my mind with coding work that I’m useless at, I chose to focus my energy on writing more content.

Do you believe in outsourcing work or do you prefer to do it on your own?

You’re obviously looking for passive income opportunities. You’re here because you want to get serious about your passive income. Chances are that other passive income options didn’t work for you in the past. You’re here because you want to try something new. Let’s do this!

I wanted to look at alternative tips that you could apply to help you increase your passive income. There are a few tactics that will require you to spend more money or to do work that will be unfamiliar to you. The good news is that the rewards can be profitable.

What are some alternative investment strategies for creating passive income?

Outsource all of the work.

You can outsource every single little bit of work. This is an interesting approach because we often plan on doing all of the work when we want to create passive income. As you have likely learned already, doing all of the work can lead to burnout or it will take you much longer to reach your passive income goals.

How can you outsource all of the work to build your passive income?

• Buy a blog that has already been established.
• Hire writers for your main blog.
• Hire writers to help you build a new blog.
• Hire an SEO consultant.
• Pay a designer to switch your blog up.
• Hire a consultant to help you grow.

That’s how you can outsource the tasks to help you create more passive income. You’re going to have to spend a little money, but you’ll see results much quicker.

Publish eBooks based on Amazon.

A few months ago I published an eBook for Amazon Kindle. I paid someone off Fiverr to turn a .doc file into a kindle ebook format file. I then submitted this file to Amazon and it was launched a few hours later. Instead of trying to create your own mall, you can setup a kiosk in an already established mall. This is what I learned when my eBook launch failed and I decided to turn into a Kindle eBook. The main benefit is that more readers visit Amazon and it established a higher amount of credibility than a PDF sold on a personal finance blog.

What if you’re busy? Then you can turn your old posts into a huge .doc file, pay someone to covert it, and have your very own eBook ready to sell on Kindle.

What if you don’t have any posts? Instead of writing about what you’re good about, find a topic to write about from Amazon. The company simply the best at up selling. Look through “best sellers” and “similar tittles” to see what are topics worth covering. Instead of creating a product for a non-existent market you find a hot market and create for them. This makes much more sense to me.

You ever notice how Amazon can read your mind? That’s because the company has re-invested its money into marketing on the site. Amazon knows exactly what do promote to you and what to do to get you to buy more. If you want to build more passive income, you need to get in on the Amazon publishing game.

Those are two unique approaches that you can use to start creating passive income right now. What are you waiting for?

When you’re trying to go after that passive income, you’ll quickly learn that things don’t always turn out the way you expected them to. Sometimes life will throw you a curveball. Other times, you might get lazy. Then there will be those times where everything seems to be working against you. For some this is how it feels like to deal with an economic downturn while trying to make more money.

How do you deal with an economic downturn? Can the economy prevent you from earning that passive income?

I wanted to touch upon my views and experiences with making passive income during a recession. This piece is for everyone that thinks you can’t prosper during rough times.

Great work is always in demand.

If you want to generate passive income through content distribution your saving grace will always be the fact that great work always had a market. I’ve personally failed with launching eBooks so I don’t have much personal experience here. However, from reading transparent income reports, I’ve seen many of my blogging peers earn a killing from eBook launches and content creation. All of this in a supposed recession.

What’s your excuse for not creating great work?

You still need to save up.

Saving money is always important. If you don’t build up that savings account, you won’t be able to invest into various income sources. What are income sources that require savings?

• Rental properties.
• Owning a franchise.
• Building up a new blog.
• Any sort of physical business.

Without savings, you won’t be able to get off the ground. This might mean working a full-time job, finding a side gig, or starting a business for extra money. Whatever it takes for you to save up more money.

There will always be ways to make more money.

There are so many ways to make money in this world. One of my business professors told me once how his parents took him outside of the Vegas strip as a child. All he saw was the flashing lights. His father pointed at the Vegas strip and said, “son there are so many ways to become rich,you have no excuse for why you can’t become a millionaire.”

There are simply so many ways to earn passive income. If there’s a recession, it just means that you’re going to have to work a bit harder to separate people from their money. You might have to switch up your product offering. Either way, you can still fine tune your strategy to find a way to be profitable.

Excuses will always exist.

A poor economy can be a legitimate excuse only to an extent. You can only blame others for so long for your problems. You eventually need to step up to the plate and swing a home run. The economy and external factors won’t always work in your favor. You need to hope for the best and plan for the worst.

You can’t blame the economy for not earning passive income. You’re responsible for your own situation. You can’t blame anyone else for your bank account balance. Are you ready to accept this responsibility?

You come to Passive Income Now in hopes of finding new sources of income. You really want to find a way to put more money into your pocket. You want to find better ways to utilize your spare time. You want to either crush your debt or build up your savings in your 20s. That’s what this site is all about. Today I wanted to look into some new income sources that you need to get in on.

What are the new income sources that you should consider moving forward?

Blogging.

There’s just so many ways that you can make money with blogging. When I first got into the game in late-2008 I didn’t know what to expect. I had heard rumors that bloggers were making money. I didn’t know that this was true for a fact. Then one day I was offered $20 for a text link. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe that someone would pay me money just to put a link on my blog. From there on I really diversified my income through blogging and blogging-related tasks.

The good news (for many of us) is that you don’t have to run your own blog to make money blogging. How can you make money through blogging-related income sources?

• You can be a freelance writer.
• You can be a virtual assistant for bloggers.
• You can design blogs.
• You can create blog designs.
• You can install blogging plugins.

How will you start making money through blogging?

Personal training or anything fitness related.

I attend an MMA-related gym. I’ve noticed that with this whole UFC and MMA craze going on, there are many trainers for all of the different martial arts and forms of training out there. At my gym there are literally trainers working there for everything possible. I know this because I do my best to go to every class that the gym offers. There are trainers for Muay Thai, wrestling, BJJ, kettle bell swings, Yoga, extreme cardio, and the list goes on forever.

If you find yourself in the gym for long periods of time already, why not try to make some money? You can start off by asking at the front desk about what sort of certification you need to get hired as trainer. I took the personal trainer course a few years ago. I sadly realized that I wasn’t patient enough to deal with certain clients. You can end up becoming an amazing trainer.

Are you ready to start making money from your fitness life?

Tutoring.

Are you good at anything? It was once explained to me that the best way to make money is to learn how to do something unique, become great at it, and then teach others how to do this. The best part is that you can get decent enough to be a tutor at anything. You just need to be a few steps ahead of the students. The other good news is that with enough practise you have a fair shot at becoming good at most tasks. This means that you have no excuses left. You can start tutoring and making money in the very near future. What are you waiting for?

Have you given these income sources a consideration in the past? Which strategy will you try to generate more income in the near future?

eBooks have become wildly popular in the past few years, especially with the affordability of eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. Instead of working your butt off to find a publisher who will enjoy your book enough to endorse it, people are taking matters into their own hands and self publishing their books in eBook format. In reality, you’re actually making your writing more accessible to the masses by going this route, and you get more money in your pocket when you self publish an electronic version of your story. So how can you make your dreams of being an author come true? Here are some steps to publish an eBook:

• Write a compelling book: First and foremost, the book has to be something that people want to read. Give it your all, and have someone proof read it. You can either hire an editor or just give some advance copies to friends and family and see what they think. The hardest part about publishing an eBook is writing it. So stop with your excuses, and start typing away.
• Start designing: Although eBooks are much more about the text than the design, you’ll still need an attractive cover and have your text organized well. Pick an easy to read font, arrange your paragraphs and page breaks, and maybe include a nice design for chapter pages. You can either design your own cover using a program like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, or you can hire a graphic designer to do it for you.
• Decide on a format: eBooks come in different formats for different eReaders. Do you want it universally available? Choose PDF, one of the easiest versions to publish. Amazon has their own format for Kindles, Barnes & Noble has their own format for Nook, Apple has their own format for iBooks and more. It’s up to you which format or formats you want your book to be available in.
• Choose a price: Now how much is your ebook worth? Decide on a price that works for you. eBook prices range from less than $1 to about $15, but don’t go straight for the cheapest or straight to the most expensive. Really consider how much you think your book is worth, what you’re giving your readers, and how much profit you’re comfortable with.
• Decide on marketing: What good is a self published eBook if it has no readers? People have to know about your book. They’re not just going to find it by chance. Depending on the topic of your book, reach out to media in that niche. Offering a free copy for review for bloggers is a great way to let people know you have an eBook coming out. You can set off on a blogger book tour, and get the word out to the masses. Don’t forget to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to reach out to potential readers. Set up a website just for the book, which includes a description, brief synopsis, and maybe even a sneak peek. Marketing your eBook will certainly decide your success.

Next week, we’ll discuss multiple resources for self publishing your eBook. In the mean time, come up with your plan and start writing!

Passive Income Now is straight and to the point. We explain methods of passive income, what to do, how to be successful, tips and tricks. Real estate is known as a great passive income technique, and we’ve covered a few different ways like investing in real estate and flipping houses. So we know that those ways yield passive income, so the question is: is buying a rental property considered passive income? The answer: yes and no. You have to go through a few steps before it can become passive income, and even after achieving these steps, it still may not be a completely hands off approach.

Own the Property

First, you have to own the property, which is an expenditure rather than income. Some people choose to rent out homes that they no longer live in. Others choose new purchases specifically for becoming landlords. Whatever your case may be, you’re going to be coming out of pocket in the beginning.

Ensure Proper Living Conditions

Is the rental property in good shape? If you want people to rent your property, you have to make sure it’s livable. Make sure all the utilities are able to work. Is it enough space for a family or only room for one person? Are there things that need to be replaced, like the water heater or the carpet? When you’re checking to see things are up to code, you may have to pay for a few things you weren’t expecting. When my husband and I moved into the townhouse we’re renting, we found a few things weren’t working, like a few outlets, our shower, and our garage opener. Instead of the landlord paying for those things, we made an agreement that the costs would be discounted off our rent.

Check Out the Comps

What are other rental properties going for in the surrounding area? You don’t want to price your rental too high and scare off potential customers, or too low and not get the money you deserve. You can usually do your research online and look for places with the same amount of bedrooms, bathrooms, and similar square footage. If you believe you offer more amenities such as free utilities or a pet friendly home, you can price a bit higher. If you don’t have the same freebies to give, price more competitively.

Determine Your Profit Line

The point of passive income is to increase the amount of money you have. So far, we’ve listed things that you’ll have to pay for, but you have to consider where your profit line is. A profit will be anything over what you’re currently paying. If you completely own the property, meaning you don’t have a mortgage, any additional money will be a profit. If you’re still paying a mortgage, you’ll want to charge more than you’re paying monthly.

Find Suitable Renters

Since this is your property, it’s completely up to you who you want to rent to. Many properties that are operated by property management companies ask for an application, a credit check, and proof of income. If you’d like, you can just list the rental on Craigslist, wait for people to contact you, and sift through those of interest as you please. Finding a suitable renter could be free if you know someone who’s interested, or it can cost some money to post the rental in classifieds.

Is It Passive Income Yet?

After you find a suitable renter and you’ve signed the necessary documents like a rental agreement and possibly renter’s insurance, you’re now ready to start earning money by collecting rent monthly. However it’s still not passive income unless you choose a hands off approach to owning. This can be achieved by hiring a property management company, but this will cut your profit down. However, if you’re okay with interacting with your tenants and dealing with maintenance issues such as replacing things that break down, it’s still a great way to earn money. It’s certainly not a full time job, but it’s also not a get rich quick scheme.

The thing with creating passive income is, well, you have to create it. That’s the boring part. Putting in the man hours, earning no money, and hoping for money tomorrow, is pretty crappy. I won’t even try to sugar coat it. I’ve been going through this process for years with varying levels of success.

The only thing that pushes me to work harder towards my passive income goals is the fact that I’m working on projects that I love. Everything that I do I consider fun. Writing articles, chatting on Twitter, responding to comments, and so on is all fun to me. If you hate writing articles on a specific topic or interacting with readers, then you can consider one of the many other passive income sources (real estate, running a business, or writing a book). For me creating passive income online has been 100% deliberate.

Then there’s a totally different way to look at the idea of creating passive income and surviving. For some, they’ve created passive income online by accident or because they just sort of fell into it.

“Do not wait; the time will never be “just right’. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” – Napoleon Hill

Something serious like, having an accident at work, can force you to realize that you’re no longer able to generate money the same way you used to. Now you need to figure something new out. All of a sudden you can’t work a job that requires physical labor or you can’t perform at the level that you would like to. What do you do now? Do you feel sorry for yourself all day at home or do you try to figure out how to use the Internet to your advantage?

If you don’t have medical compensation, it’s going to hit you even harder that you need to bring some damn money home. You can check out how other bloggers made their first buck online or you can see how to start a business with no money. Either way, you’re going to go through plenty of trail-and-error to see what works for you and what doesn’t. I’m not here to judge. My goal is to help push you in the right direction.

At the end of the day, it’s totally possible to find passive income by accident. You never know when life will through you a curveball and you need to find another way to put money on the table.

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