By Tina Dietz
November 6th, 2013 Edition
Somewhere…out there in the business wilderness there exists a legendary creature called Passive Income. This magnificent beast, who is said to shower riches upon those that find it, is the quarry of many a questing entrepreneur. Promises of freedom and wealth without effort! Checks and PayPal notices just showing up in your inbox as if rained down from the heavens!
Ah, but how to capture this famed and wondrous chimera? Is it just a myth told by shysters to relieve unwitting folk of their hard earned money?
No. Passive income exists. But the path that leads there is anything but passive.
The mechanics of creative passive or semi-passive income streams are relatively simple. You create, license, or distribute a product through primarily online sales or phone sales, and that product is delivered through automated channels. Think of it as an assembly line.
Here is a simplified way of thinking about the process:
– You find or create a product you want to sell
– You create a point of distribution (I.E. a website)
– You create the marketing, visibility, and sales strategies (and implement them!) to draw your target market to your point of sale
– Assuming you’ve created a persuasive sales process for your product and demonstrated value, people buy the product
– The sales order is fulfilled through automated means (I.E. an auto responder, fulfillment house, etc.)
If you pay attention to this process, you’ll notice that just like in any other business model, it’s a combination of technical, managerial, and marketing skills that make the process work. Primarily though, where you will find yourself spending the majority of your time working with passive income streams is in the marketing end of the spectrum. Again, this is true with all business models, but especially with passive income streams. The beauty of this model is that the burden of product fulfillment is eased or completely eliminated. That is, once the product is sold, unless there’s an issue with someone getting the product into their hands or it’s somehow defective, you don’t have to deal with it.
How do you get products to sell?
There are lots of ways to create passive income products, or acquire products to sell, and these are a couple of the most popular. Probably the one that comes first to mind for most people is network marketing products, sometimes also called multi-level marketing. This is a perfectly legit business model, and network marketing is a billion dollar industry worldwide. Personally, I prefer to have total control over my business policies, procedures, and product lines, but if that’s not an issue for you or you’ve never owned a business before, it’s not a bad way to get your feet wet.
Distributing products that are already created is another obvious choice. You can go to a wholesaler and create a “drop ship” agreement with them where you are selling the product, but they are fulfilling the order. For newbies at this kind of business model, Amazon.com is a good place to start. You can create an “A-Store” as part of your existing website where you recommend products that are already on Amazon. If someone purchases through your website, Amazon fulfills the order, but you get a commission on the sale.
My favorite passive or semi-passive products are information products. While any business can benefit from creating this type of product (really, ANY business), it’s an especially nice fit for those in the service industries. Why? Because the service industries are often limited in the amount of income they can generate because in providing a service you are trading time for money. By adding products to your business model, you can exponentially grow your earning potential while still protecting your brand and spreading your expert status. Information products can be very simple or very complex, but getting started with them is very easy with minimal investment. Special reports, E-Books, Home Study Courses, DVDs, Educational Video Series, and Podcasts are all examples (and there are more!) of information products beautifully suited for businesses who provide services.
Would you like to expand your business ventures to include passive income? Got ideas but not sure how to fulfill them? Share your thoughts, comments, and questions on a blog. We can only crack the binding on this beautiful fairy tale here, but when you’re ready to go deeper there’s a complimentary no strings attached consultation thisistinadietz.com/contact waiting for you. Have a fantastical week!
