Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

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 -

Read the rest of this entry >>

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 -

Read the rest of this entry >>

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.

Read the rest of this entry >>

With a title like that you would think this article is going to be all about taking the money you make from blogging and sticking it in shares or property or some other form of investment, and you would be right, but the investment method I’m going to explain to you today is not exactly typical. In fact I bet not a single blogger reading this article will have done what I do with some of my blog profits (feel free to leave a comment and prove me wrong though).

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about reinvesting the money you make blogging into web property, in particular buying websites that generate passive income.

I’ve long been a fan of flipping websites, in fact if you type that phrase into Google this blog turns up as the number one ranking article for the previous article I wrote, How To Buy A Website And Flip It For Profit. At the moment though, I’m not much of a flipper, more a buy, renovate and hold type of investor.

Bloggers Are Broke

Let’s face it, most bloggers when they start out are broke. Chances are you don’t have a few thousands dollars lying around for investing in anything and as a result a low-cost start-up, like a blog, is a common pathway for a budding web entrepreneur to follow.

Blogs might not turn a profit quickly, but provided you put in the elbow grease and follow some principles (Blog Profits Blueprint anyone?) you will start making some money eventually. That’s exactly what I did with my blog, although I had the advantage of a nice salary sized cash-flow coming in from my existing web business when I started blogging.

There is an inherent risk when buying websites. I would say that buying a site and optimizing it so it makes more money is an “easy” way to build passive income (I’ll explain how it is passive in a moment) and it’s a much less labor intensive way to make money online than blogging is, but for most people it’s out of the question. You either don’t have the money or don’t know how to do it or you have too much fear holding you back. Starting a blog is a much less scary proposition for most people.

However, once you build a great blog and your income source is stable, why not start to experiment and build income sources that are not as labor-intensive as blogging? A blog cash-cow can be the perfect fuel for building a nice portfolio of web property which quietly makes you money in the background while you spend your days writing a blog and enjoying the fruits of your labor.

It’s Early Days In The Web Property Market

Read the rest of this entry >>