Passive Income Ideas

This is a living, breathing scratch-pad page for passive income ideas that I come up with during my spare time.

Think of this page like a “passive income purgatory” of sorts where ideas sit and stew before getting trashed or implemented later when I have the time to act on them.

Amazon Marketplace and Fulfillment

I already earn a fair amount from the Amazon affiliate program. If I can instead source and promote my own products via their marketplace, plus have Amazon fulfillment handle the shipping and refunds, this could easily turn out to be a very lucrative passive income opportunity. I have always wanted to get into actually “owning” my own physical products instead of being an affiliate for them.

One thing that I realized when glancing at the costs: If I affiliate for my own Amazon products I can essentially subsidize or even break-even and have Amazon list and fulfill my own products for free. Lol, nice huh?

Mobile Apps

I know people are earning SOME money by developing and distributing mobile apps (mostly ipad and iphone) but I haven’t researched this idea too heavily. I know that Pat Flynn has some pretty interesting posts about developing apps, here’s some of them:

5 Things You Must Know About Creating Your Own iPhone Apps
iPhone App Business Models: Paid vs. Free
Starting an $800,000 iPhone Application Business with FreeTheApps

P2P Lending

Because I’m self employed I really like the idea of having some long-term investments and building a small nest egg for myself and my family. Compound interest is a powerful force and peer-to-peer lending really lets you take advantage of it.

I have engaged in P2P lending off and on for about the past year. I need to get back into this and start documenting my progress with it. For the record my lending club account currently earns 10.72%. Not too shabby. I’ve written a blog post about peer to peer lending and documenting where I currently am. I’m setting a new goal for my account which you can see the progress on the sidebar.

Lending Club Love: A Smart Lenders Guide to Picking Loans and How To Make Money Being the Bank

Saas Applications

This is something that I know has been gaining in popularity lately and I know is going to just get bigger and bigger.

Because I love the webmaster market, if I was ever to have my own saas application created I would probably do something related to this industry. I don’t have much in terms of programming skills so creating and scaling a saas app is all very foreign to me but it’s something I would like to jump into once I at that road.

E-Book Creation and Distribution

Writing and selling your own digital e-book is easily one of the most common ideas for generating a passive income. It’s also the most over-done, in my opinion. This is probably why there’s a lot of skepticism and backlash when it comes to selling these products, most of what’s being sold simply isn’t any good.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say that this is one of the more difficult ways for a newbie to get started. If you actually manage to run uphill and get customers to buy your e-book despite their inherent distrust in the product you’ll find copycats getting ready to pounce just around the corner. Or even better your work will be torrented and given away for free.

The best thing, of course, about writing an e-book and selling it is just how hands-off it can become. Print on demand services like LuLu also make it possible for you to sell physical versions of your book for a premium price.

If you wanted to get started in the info product business the best person to study on that would be Dan Kennedy, hands down.

With all that said, I would steer clear of this one at first unless you’re really passionate about a certain niche topic and you can share a lot of valuable gems with your fanbase.

Brokering Local Leads

More and more offline businesses are putting themselves online. I can only imagine how difficult it would be for someone who runs a brick and mortar biz to finally decide they want to have their own website created and marketed. Web marketing is full of snake oil salesmen and clueless SEOs that charge high premiums for services as simple as article marketing, wading through all the crap must be task if you’re on your own.

Some local businesses have decided to avoid all the BS and go straight for the leads. I know one person who runs local adwords campaigns and brokers plumbing leads to local plumbers.

If you’re already sharp with online lead generation then this is a tactic you might want to look into. Here’s a list of a ton of resources to get started.

At one time I wanted to get into this but dropped it in favor of something else. I probably won’t be pursuing this strategy again, I just wanted to leave it here as an idea.