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Passive Income

Passive Income Online – How Much Does It Cost To Start

Passive income – to my way of thinking is the best income to have. Why? Because I’m bloody idle that’s why!

Labradors have the right idea! Oh and because I know its possible to. My partner and I own several rental properties in New Zealand, we bought them several years ago and every month we get paid the income from them. Is it passive income – sure it is – we’ve never met our tenants, we don’t mow lawns, we don’t take calls about broken toilets at 2am – my property manager does.  Property investment can be as active or as passive as you want to make it – but you have to pay someone to do the work for you.

Property investment is not risk free either. Our rental properties are exposed to interest rate risks, tenant availability, natural disasters, property manager going bad etc etc. If we’d borrowed the amount the bank was prepared to lend us a few years ago we would be in a nasty position now.

Making passive income online, to my way of thinking is a much better thing than making passive income from property investment. Why? The risks are lower much lower. The investment required is much lower. It’s not zero though – this is what I think it takes to start making passive income online.

BTW I am not talking about working from home jobs here or freelancing – that’s not passive income – if you are unclear about the difference check out my analysis of what’s the difference between passive income and work at home jobs.

Personal Attributes

  • be teachable – that’s it really if you can take on new attitudes and learn new skills – you’ll make it. That’s it really I listed a long list of skills I’d developed working online, previously – but if you are teachable none of this will be an issue.

How Much Money Do You Need

  • if you don’t have a reliable computer you need one. You don’t need anything fancy though and my 4 year old 14″ laptop does just fine.
  • you need a fast broadband or cable internet connection. I really don’t think you can do this with dial-up though some may disagree, the time you waste on a slow connection more than justifies the cost of a faster one IMHO
  • you need enough money to support yourself for the first 12 months and enough to subsidise your expenses (assuming you want to live about the poverty line ) for the next 12 months. Or a helpful spouse/partner/SO who will do same.

That’s it so basically the right attitude and 18 months worth of living expenses. That’s a pretty low cost entry point for a business. If you can’t afford the time without cash coming in you can always start part-time while working a “real” job

But you say – what about special software? what about hosting ? what about domains? what about paying for links? what about  mentoring programs? what about e-books?

What Software Do You Need to Earn Passive Income?

The first software I  bought for this business was Dreamweaver its a very nice piece fo software and I used it to build my first site- nice software does the job – but so does WordPress and its free.

I use OpenOffice to write in and often a simple text editor called Q10 – both free.

Yes I use other tools – I use SEOElite, Keyword Elite for research and other services and tools to create links for me – but you don’t actually need any of them.

Do I need Domains and Hosting

Nope – but I would probably pay for them before I paid for software.  I buy domain names from time to time – like this one, I have a reseller hosting plan with Hostgator which I recommend.

But you don’t need any of it – you can create money making sites of free hosts such as blogger.com

But How you ask – well for that you will have to buy the e-book – but because you are my valued reader I’ll give it to you for a special price…Well I’m a beginner at this so I’m not going to tell you.

Instead I can point you over to Frank Carr’s blog and check out his post on how to earn online cash with a niche blog. His method is not original, in fact its similar to how Grizz makes money with Adsense – but it works – its not sexy, it may be differnet from what the A-listers tell you about list building – but it works. Oh and it won’t cost you any money either! And Frank doesn’t even want to collect your email address – and neither do I!

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17 replies on “Passive Income Online – How Much Does It Cost To Start”

Hey There!

Thanks for your comments on my blog. I’m digging your blog as well, and you get bonus points because you’re from Australia! My fiancee has family in Brisbane, and I was just over there last year in August for the first time. Beautiful, I must say. We’re thinking of buying a place in Melbourne someday.

Anyways, as far as start up costs, I got started making passive income online for just about 100 bucks, which was used for the domain name and hosting 🙂

I’ll definitely be on your site more. Cheers!

-Pat

Well actually Im a Kiwi but living in Perth – I wondered if you were downunder given you were posting at this time of day! Yeah $100 sounds about right Thanks for visiting

I started earning residual income online without spending anything but time. I didn’t even have saved-up money to live on — I built up residual income while still freelance writing for pay, little by little, until I could quit the paid work.

Profiles on eHow.com & HubPages, a free blogger blog and membership in Amazon and cj.com affiliate programs were all I had to start, and my old desktop computer.

You really can start for free or next to nothing, and then as you earn, invest in tools that can help you maximize your earnings.

Maria @ Residual Income Web’s last blog post..Why Blog Earnings are not Passive Income (But I’m Still Blogging)

Hi Maria – thanks for stopping by. It sounds like you didn’t get sucked into the make money quick scene complete with the $97 ebook -well done!

do people really buy those $97 dollar make passive income ebooks?? I imagine they say “write an ebook, get suckers to pay $97 dollars for it”

Great post! I am right behind your numbers, only all of my residuals come from online sources as I’m working to build my residual income online (I guess I could count the rental income as dividends…)

Thanks for the detailed post–I did the same this week for my readers and I think it is helpful.

The internet is all about passive income. Many people fail to realize this and just how automated you can make things by setting up several passive income sites. It is the only way to generate a substantial amount of income.

Gianna’s last blog post..Craigslist Phone Verified Accounts – How to best use them – Mar 18,2009

I started with just a hosted wordpress blog (I mean, hosted on wordpress.com, not on my own server)

VERY quickly I got annoyed with the wordpress hosted blog, and got myself a cheap hosting, with fantastico.

Fantastico I find is an amazing tool for those starting out, as it allows you to install the likes of wordpress, cubecart and SMF forum with just a few clicks, meaning you can have a blog, online shop and forum for free in (pretty much) an instant!

Have you used fantastico on cpanel before?

tom’s last blog post..Take That As Fans Scammed Out Of Ticket Cash

Passive income is great and there are a number of ways in which you can accomplish it. Websites running ads or adsense is a great idea for people with a little bit of web knowledge. Good luck!

VERY quickly I got annoyed with the wordpress hosted blog, and got myself a cheap hosting, with fantastico.

Well compared to other businesses it can cost a lot less to start an online business and if done right the risk/reward ration is much higher too.

I have just recently started an online business and agree the great thing is that it comes at near zero cost, allowing you to become your own boss without losing the house. But for those thinking of starting, make sure you are willing to work, work, work and learn every day. I would probably spend 20-30hrs a week solely researching the internet for new ideas, techniques and things I can do with my website.

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