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