Stop and consider the typical dynamics of a conventional job. You wake up in the morning, clean yourself up, eat some breakfast, and fight the morning commute into the city. Those hours are entirely unpaid. You arrive at the office, put in your hours and earn a set amount of money for the time you contribute. You then fight the evening commute back home and hopefully enjoy some rest and relaxation. The inherent problem with this kind of arrangement is that you are only being paid for the hours that you work and thus your earning potential is limited by the number of hours that you can work… and there are only so many hours in the day.
And herein lies the greatest appeal of passive income. With passive income, you can continue to earn more money, even when you’re not actively working. You can earn more money while you’re sleeping or on vacation. This means you can increase your earning potential, increase your leisure hours, or both! And you can leverage the power of affiliate marketing with your business to achieve this goal.
Some tips to keep front of mind:
1. Seek out affiliate programs for offers with recurring subscriptions. You refer a new customer once and continue to earn a commission for as long as they stay with the advertiser.
2. Look for affiliate programs that go beyond the first-sale commission. Many offers will only pay a commission on the first referred sale, but some give you credit for that customer for life. Any subsequent orders can also generate a commission.
3. Monetize a website with mostly user-generated content using affiliate marketing. Public forums are a good example of this. The site continues to be active and the advertising continues to generate revenue.
4. Write an e-book with links to affiliate products. The e-book itself can be sold or it can be given away. The key here is that the affiliate links are integrated into the text (and possibly included in an appendix). As the book continues to be distributed, you can continue to gain referrals and earn commissions.
5. Outsource your blog writing. By hiring a freelancer to update your blog on a regular basis, a blog that is monetized with affiliate marketing, you can focus your energies elsewhere as the blog continues to generate income.
6. Attract new affiliates. From the perspective of the advertiser in the affiliate marketing relationship, you can continue to generate sales and leads without actively seeking out these new customers yourself. If your product is one that is delivered automatically and digitally, this can be a true passive income source. Let the campaign and the affiliates do the work for you.
7. Get your own domain and software. While free services like Tumblr and WordPress.com are tempting, they have severe limitations for customization and design. A small investment in your own domain and web hosting can go a long way in ensuring you maximize your passive income potential.
8. Automate social media. Using dashboards like HootSuite, you can schedule many updates in advance and have them naturally spread out throughout the day and week. Intersperse some original content with affiliate links. Some software will even make it easy to import a CSV or text file for even easier automation for weeks or even months.
9. Create a rating and review site. People are always looking for opinions on products and services. Open this up to the public and monetize the site with corresponding affiliate links. People coming to these sites are in a buying mood and convert really well.
10. Recognize it won’t happen overnight. Perhaps the most important tip of all is realizing that setting up a passive income business does take a good deal of initial legwork before it starts to generate a steady flow of revenue. The passive part comes when the system is in place, but you need to establish that system first and that takes time. Be patient. Be persistent. And be ready to adapt.
