How Can You Make Passive Income Online?
I had a meeting with a friend and his business partner last week. The request was to “pick my brain” on the best way to move forward to generate some passive income streams online.
These two particular people are like a lot of people I know. They’ve got tech skills, they know the Internet well and they have lots of ideas for cool Internet business applications and websites.
Unfortunately they’ve managed to dig themselves into a situation where they spend all their time working on client jobs, running what you might call a “consulting” tech firm, completing various programming and web development projects for other people’s businesses. The money in this business model can be good, but it has some serious downsides too, namely -
- You have to deal with clients, usually one-on-one, a very low leverage interaction and often just painful as you have to work you way through lots of annoying clients to find the good ones
- You work very long hours, which my two friends could certainly testament to
- You know a lot about a lot, yet have difficulty specializing in anything
- You’re in competition with every other jack-of-all trades web development firm out there, which means you unfortunately end up competing on price, and it’s certainly not nice to have to undercut yourself simply to work with bad clients
Those points aren’t necessarily true across the board, but I’m pretty sure any person who has ever consulted or done any kind of web development work for clients will know what I’m talking about.
My friends are smart enough to realize the path they are on is not going to lead them to where they want to go, so they’re looking to make some changes.
The goal is to develop some form of income stream, or several, that could replace the need to take on client work. As always, the relationship between time, money and freedom of choice is heavily integrated here, as my friends are looking to make more money without drastically increasing their workload and eventually freeing up their time so they can do what they want to, rather than what they have to.
Let’s Not Be Strict About Passive Definitions
I’m about to reveal what I talked about during our meeting with my two friends. In terms of what I suggest you do if you are looking to make some passive income online, I don’t want people to get too caught up on the idea of “pure” passive income.
The methods I’m about to talk about are not pure passive income sources, however they have the potential to be low work, high return income sources that can potentially become very close to pure passive longer term. The fact is, it takes time to develop these income streams, but we all love the phrase passive income so I’ve decided to use it here in the title of my post.
So to clarify, what we are looking to do is start up completely new projects that have the potential to become good sources of near-passive and possibly pure passive income, it just might take some time to get there.
First, Understand Your Unique Opportunities
One of the first things I discussed with my friends was taking their present situation and turning it into something that’s less work for them. Sometimes the “lowest hanging fruit” is just a simple adjustment to the business model you are following now, transforming your core skill from labor intensive, to hands-off delivery, or at least much less work.
Here’s some examples of how you might do this -
Living The 2-Hour Workday: What Is A Travel Buffer & How Can You Create One
Towards the end of my trip around the world in 2008 I started to lose interest in seeing the typical tourist spots, even if the destinations were exotic countries or ancient monuments from cultures long passed.
After visiting many amazing buildings and sites in cities like Edinburgh, London, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Athens, I was feeling a little tired. Not to discount the wonders of human history, I was just missing home and seeing building after building was losing its magic.
I had plans to visit Egypt on the way home, but I decided to skip it as I didn’t want the pyramids to be “just another monument”, so I put them on the list of places to visit in the future when I recharge my travel batteries.
This is going to sound strange and perhaps small minded, but towards the end of my trip, especially in my last European stop Athens, one of the remaining motivations I had left to visit the sites was to simply say “I had been there” and capture a photo of the experience.
Throughout this time I was thinking about what I wanted to work on next. My focus was turning towards the concept of the 4-hour workweek, or my spin on it, the 2-hour workday (this to distance myself from Mr. Ferriss – Hi Tim! – and avoid copyright infringement and because I like working a couple of hours a day).
Regardless of what you call it, clearly there is huge interest in the lifestyle I lead, especially when you can travel and earn great money at the same time. The idea of coming back from 8 months of travel with more money in your bank account than you left with is so appealing as a concept, I just knew I wanted to tap into that idea and help more people experience it.
The idea for a new training program started to germinate. I still wanted to visit ancient monuments to snap my photo, so I’d have lots of proof of all the places I had visited for the product I was thinking about creating next. The current design of this blog, with rotating travel photos at the top, is very much in line with this idea.
As you can see, it was hard for me to put the Internet marketer’s hat down, even while visiting amazing places around the world.
Travel Without The Financial Headache
Can Your Business Make You Rich?
Many years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the reality of how much money you actually make when you run your own business.
You can read the article here – Do You Want to Run Your Own Business? Read this First!
My premise back then was that most business owners don’t make a whole lot of money until they sell their business.
This situation is very similar to what an employee, who stays with the one company for many years, goes through. A business owner can make a salary level income year after year, and then one day, likely at retirement age, the business is sold and a nice lump sum of cash is returned, much like a superannuation or retirement settlement an employee receives at the end of a long career.
Obviously this situation isn’t ideal if you are an entrepreneur looking to create freedom in your life, both time and financial freedom. If you spend all day, possibly beyond normal working hours, in your business, and you’re taking home an income pretty much equivalent to a salary (plus you have many more responsibilities than an employee), you are not in a great situation.
Turning Cash Into Assets
If I look back over the last five years of my business life, there have been a handful of significant “spikes” in my income.
The spikes have occurred because of either of these events -
How To Invest In Websites In Your Spare Time
I remember my first website sale. I made $13,000 Australian dollars selling a website that I had built from scratch myself. That sale was a big windfall for me and a moment I won’t forget because it was the first time I saw the real potential of online property investment.
Since that sale I’ve gone on to sell more than $150,000 USD in websites. Some of the sites I built myself, investing my own time and sometimes money, while others I have purchased and then sold for a profit at a later date.
I’ve never lost money on a website investment, although I have bought some sites that were not big money spinners – I got out with pretty much the same as I went in with. When profits are made though, the worst I have done is double my money.
Long Term Investing?
On the Internet you might call what I do long term investing since most of the sites I bought were sold no earlier than 18 months time. The websites I built myself take as long as five years to reach the point of sale, although I could have sold earlier for less or held on longer for more.
The best return on investment from a flip (a site bought and later sold) was 1,000% – 10 times the money I put in. It took a little over two years to do that. Another trade was a set of sites I purchased 18 months prior that brought in a little over double my initial investment.
In the offline world, returns like that in 18 and 24 months would be considered exceptional and certainly not standard. If a share portfolio or investment in physical property returns 20% a year you are doing well.
The world of the web is different. Everything is changing fast, yet with so many websites and so many people online, the size and potential of the market is tremendous. There are bargains out there all the time and as long as you don’t screw up what you purchase, simply allowing a site to grow organically can result in significant profits, if you are prepared to wait.
Flipping Part Time
I’ve never focused all my energy on buying and selling websites, which is why I haven’t done that many trades. Most of the time I work on whatever my main business projects are at the time, but I keep my eyes on some of the website trading forums to see if bargains come up.
When a site matches my criteria, I act fast with an offer, do some basic due diligence and if all things go well, make a deal. I miss out on more sites than I purchase because other people out-bid me, the site sells before I find it or due diligence convinces me to pass on a particular site.
As a result of buying websites purely as a side project, I’ve focused on a certain type of website and made sure I have people working with me who can help with the activities I don’t have the time to do. You definitely need to be careful if you want website flipping to be a part time job, it can quickly suck all your time, especially if you choose the wrong type of site.
Criteria for Part Time Website Flipping
Here’s some advice from what I have learned in the previous years flipping websites part time.
How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit
The stock market and real estate industry have long been populated by day traders and “flippers”, those that buy and sell in a short period of time in order to make a quick profit. In the real estate industry the life of a house flipper can be very appealing. Buy a renovator’s dream property at a discounted price, renovate and modernize it and then sell it at a few months later at a profit. This process can then be repeated over and over for a reasonably stable income. You might even get rich.
Flipping Fun
The life of a house flipper is often romanticized, with images of married couples buying old houses, spending a fun-filled six months working renovating and then making a cool $20-$50K profit on the sale and moving on to the next property. Do this three times a year and you have a recipe for a fairly nice lifestyle.
If you plan to renovate yourself then you better have the skills to do it or have the friends or family willing to help out. Alternatively you can hire professionals to perform the labor but you must factor in the cost into your expenses. There are also many other variables that need to be carefully controlled such as financing fees, real estate agent costs, legal fees, government charges and all the other issues that come with buying and selling property. Those with a keen eye for a bargain can do exceptionally well but it’s just as easy to lose money if you don’t do your research and plan. Watching the real estate market, tracking house prices and monitoring economic conditions are all important activities for a successful house flipper. Provided you do your homework and control your variables you stand a fair chance of succeeding.
Trading on the stock market is another area where the educated and diligent researchers can succeed. Knowing market trends, tracking company performance and economic indicators can all provide an extra edge and if you work on it full time you just may come out on top more often than not. Both the stock market and real estate industry have long been considered staple investment opportunities and even full time careers for those that choose to take on the challenge.
There is unique breed of entrepreneur that has taken the concept of flipping to another area; buying and selling businesses. A shrewd entrepreneur will locate an underperforming business, buy it, work their magic to improve performance and then sell it for a nice margin. It is by no means easy and certainly requires a lot of research and due diligence, but the rewards are there and no doubt it’s a heap of fun too (entrepreneur’s wet dream 
).
Flipping Websites
Buying and selling businesses is appealing but given the high costs of making the purchase it is quite difficult to start, especially as a young entrepreneur. If you go wrong you may end up loosing a lot of money (just as you can with the stock market and real estate), so you really want to be sure of your skills and ability before investing.
The Internet is very new and the whole online commerce industry is just establishing marketing practices that work. Quite frankly, and this may sound harsh, but most of the people running businesses online have very poor websites. A lot of people running popular sites are not taking advantage of their traffic by monetizing it (this could be by choice or ignorance). Making a profit may be as simple as implementing a smart AdSense campaign on a popular site after buying it from an owner wishing to move on to other things. Perhaps an e-commerce site could use some search engine marketing or some tweaking to an AdWords campaign might do the trick, or better still, monetize, optimize, affiliate and upsell for maximum gain – make use of all the marketing tricks at your disposal.
I’m sure if we did some statistical sampling of the web industry search engine optimization techniques would be understood by a minority of webmasters and implemented well by even fewer. Search engine optimization is becoming mainstream and no doubt as the web continues to mature more and more people will study, test and build better websites, but it’s definitely still early days.
What this says to me is “business opportunity“. For those with the know-how, the energy to implement and a little bit of funds to buy the sites there are big gains to be made. What makes it even more appealing, especially for young or new entrepreneurs, is the price – we are talking about a lot less funds then it would take to invest in shares, buy property or purchase a bricks and mortar “real world” business. Websites with potential go for as low as a few hundred dollars.
The Advantages of Buying A Website
The big advantage of buying a site is you don’t have to establish an audience and wait for the site to be indexed within search engines. Most webmasters, even those that don’t know their SEO from their XML, will understand the benefit of link exchanges. Even the most poorly managed sites should have some form of backlink network developed and return a result in the major search engines. It may not be a top ten search result but it will be a result ready for you to optimize and improve.
Taking over a mature site (at least 12 months old) will mean you avoid the Google sandbox, a significant perk of buying established web property. Of course it really depends at what stage you take over a website as to how much of a step-up you gain and will no doubt reflect how much the owner will expect to receive for it (traffic for cash in simpler terms, but there are other variables to consider when selling a website).
Top 7 Website Acquisition Strategies
Before undertaking a search for a website acquisition a smart web entrepreneur will stop and have a good think about what she wants the site to do and how it will fit within her overall web business strategy. Here is a list of the top 7 strategies to consider when buying a new website:
- Buy a site that has targeted traffic for a product or service you already produce or sell. You can direct traffic from the new site to your products/services through advertising, email lists or sales pages. This is a great way to establish a customer base very quickly but you have to be confident that the traffic is quality, targeted traffic. Don’t fall into the trap of buying a high traffic site that consumes lots of bandwidth but doesn’t have the type of user you can leverage for revenue, otherwise you might be buying a liability, not an asset.
- Buy a site to generate advertising revenue. In this instance you might not change the site other than by working to increase the amount of traffic and improve the performance of advertisements on the site. Sites with lots of good content but are poorly optimized are perfect for this strategy. Once you own the rights to the content you can then further leverage it by repacking and republishing the content in other ways – perhaps information products, article marketing or as free give away enticements to join an email list.
- Buy a site specifically to flip it quickly. This is perhaps the most risky venture (day-trading!) because you need to find sites that are clearly underperforming with the potential for a big upside result after you complete your renovation. Ideally you should locate e-commerce sites selling a product that has an established market that is only just starting to take off online AND the current owners are not good at search engine optimization or online marketing and are willing to sell.
The theory is that you can quickly implement your changes, tweaking a few percentage point increases in multiple areas, resulting in a good double figure increase in sales in a short period of time. If you can complete your work just before the general marketplace catches up you can make a mint by selling the site at a premium before the Internet becomes saturated and your early mover advantage is eroded or the market slows.
The web is one of the fastest industries in terms of competitive action due to the very low barriers to entry. To execute day-trading style website buying and selling requires an entrepreneur with their finger on the pulse of the web. They must be in tune with what’s new and willing to gamble on what’s going to be new tomorrow in order to have success.
- Purchase a community driven site. A site with a massive forum filled with a nice target niche audience can be a gold mine to a entrepreneur. Often these sites were built by hobbyist fans, not aimed to profit in any way. Their website might have ballooned in growth to the point where the bandwidth is costing them a lot each month and since they are not skilled in website monetization they will be willing to sell the site at a bargain price. This can be a great strategy to make advertising revenue but be very careful with audience selection. Some forum communities are very difficult to make money from and may end up costing you more in ongoing hosting fees. Ideally choose a community demographic that has established high keyword prices in AdSense/high value to advertisers (electronic gadgets for example), has a good selection of affiliate products you could market or suits some products or services you already sell yourself.
- Look for a site operating in a highly popular keyword niche or one you expect will become popular in the near future. Keywords drive search engine traffic and if you can pick the trends before they become trends you may own some valuable property. Consider if you could guess what tomorrow’s “blog†or “podcast†will be and buy the sites with established keyword rich content before they become mainstream topics and overpriced.
- Remove the competition or merge with the competition. In this case you buy competing websites or negotiate a merger to combine with them to create one large enterprise. Depending on the industry you operate in this can be a very smart strategy to create market dominance. One of the best examples is website hosting. Often smaller hosts are bought up by larger hosting businesses with the result increased stability and professionalism.
- Purchase a site strictly for the domain name. Obviously in this case you don’t care too much about what is already developed in terms of website content, you just want the street address (URL). Imagine a few years ago if you purchased
mp3.comorblog.com. In this case the address itself is of significant value regardless of the website, or if you are good at picking trends, you might see the future value in a domain name before the market realizes it.
There are many other options available for how to use a new website acquisition and of course what you do with a new website and what type of website you search for will depend on your skills, the industry you operate in and your cash to spend. Remember to take some time listing a few goals you want your new website to achieve and strategize exactly what you will do with the new website before you buy it.
Investing Time And Energy Into Your New Website
Make sure you have the time to manage your new investment in web property. Remember just the transfer process and daily maintenance of your site will take time and energy and if you don’t have it available now then maybe you should hold off making the purchase. It would be a shame if your good intentions to improve a website result in you instead killing it because you don’t have the time to maintain the status quo. Remember a new website comes with new responsibilities, for example support emails and phone, server maintenance, SPAM control and the usual day-to-day activities of a webmaster. Don’t get caught up in the excitement of the purchase making you blind to the reality of how much additional work will be added to your daily activities.
Where To Locate Websites For Sale
I could point you in the direction of a few good website trading sites (this article has some links – How To Sell A Website) but you will be very lucky if you find a bargain there. To find good sites you have to search deep into the web. Use the main search engines to find websites operating in an industry you feel confident buying into. Don’t look for the big sites, the sites on the first few pages of search results unless they show clear potential – perhaps in industries with low competition so “bad” sites show up in the first page of search results. Professional or popular keyword sites are usually too expensive, well managed (they wouldn’t appear in the first few pages of the search results if they weren’t) and the owner likely won’t be interested in making the sale or will be looking for six figures if they are.
You must look deep in the search results. Find the solo-webmasters that perhaps don’t take their site too seriously but have been diligent over the years adding content consistently, if not in large quantities. You need to find the good sites with potential, not great sites already optimized or poor sites going nowhere. The more research you do during the search phase the smarter buy you will make. No matter how much time you put into the search it’s going to be gamble when you do decide to buy. There are just too many variables to consider and control, but by being smart and patient you reduce the risk.
Buying The Website
Once you find a good site that meets your criteria start monitoring and researching it. Check backlinks, investigate it’s history (try the Wayback Machine) and if the site has a community (forums, chatrooms, comment system, helpdesk, etc) see what goes on there. Check the site design, the structure of the links, headings, titles and keyword density. Check the site statistics if they are available (look for those little webstat icons or try Alexa rankings).
Once you get a good feel for the site and you are interested in buying it’s time to contact the owner. You should be able to find an email address for the website owner somewhere on the site, if you can’t do a domain name lookup in the WhoIs database where you will find the email address for the person that registered the domain. Remember some websites will simply be hobbies for the owner which will make the purchasing process that much easier, while others will be fully fledged businesses making the transfer process just that little bit longer (think about business registration and incorporation detail transfers – now consider you may not even be located in the same country!).
Start casually by introducing yourself to the owner, state you like the site and then slowly gauge how much interest the owner has in their web property. Eventually you are going to have to express your interest in making a purchase and you can spend as much time as you like communicating with the owner to negotiate a deal. Like with buying anything, the negotiation process can be laborious as you gather the information you need to calculate a price. This process can be swift and easy or slow and painful depending on your attitudes and the willingness of the owner to make the sale and release private information about their website. You will need to know details like website statistics, revenues, and costs, all information that the current owner may be hesitant to give out (see How Much Is Your Website Worth? for a discussion of important website metrics when determining the value of a site). Demonstrating your sincerity at this point will go a long way in helping you to divulge as much information as you can order to properly evaluate the website.
If you are lucky the owner of the site may simply be so excited that their website will make them some money that a few hundred dollars will seal the deal, others, the more savvy owners will realise the value of their asset and you might have more difficulty negotiating and will pay a higher price. Remember you are never under any obligation to buy so don’t force yourself to offer too much because there are plenty, literally millions, of other sites out there.
Don’t Forget The Little Details
When you finally agree on a price don’t forget to look after the little technical details as you manage the transfer of ownership. Here is a list of some important factors:
- Transfer of the domain name registration details, the business name, incorporation information, hosting ownership and any third party software or subscriptions to your name. Check that everything, absolutely everything, has your name on it by the time the deal is done.
- Get a contract made up outlining the deal and have all parties sign and date it. Also consider creating a clause stopping the previous owner starting up a competing site immediately after the sale.
- Download the email lists. Download the email lists. Download the email lists. There is nothing more important in a web business then the mailing lists so make sure you have these safely in hand with backups.
- Outline how much support, if any, will be provided by the ex-owner for a transition period. Having the owner available for questions for a few months after the sale can make the transfer less stressful.
Buying A Website Is A Very Effective Entry Strategy
Given the time it takes to get a new website off the ground because of issues like the Google Sandbox and the amount of work and effort it takes to create a site, produce content and build backlinks, the prospect of buying a ready established domain and website is very appealing. If you have a sound understanding of search engine optimization and the industry you work in online, you should have no problem finding under optimized websites, or perhaps fully fledged web e-commerce businesses to buy. By adding content, fixing title tags, linking structure and all the other good search engine marketing practices you can very quickly start reaping rewards. Sites with quality traffic but no monetization strategy are huge opportunities ready for you to step in, stick some advertisements up, use your AdSense optimization skills and boom, start profiting immediately. Alternatively you might look for sites that augment your existing web enterprises and purchase the targeted traffic to effectively “buy customers”. No matter what your strategy, the web is ripe with opportunities for smart investors and you don’t have to have a wallet the size of Rupert Murdoch’s to start buying and profiting.
