I know of two ways to generate truly passive, unattended income.  In this post, I suggest three digital products to sell and explain the two ways to sell them truly passively online.

Products for Sale!

Sell digital products to generate money using the two techniques outlined in this post.  Here are some digital product offerings you might want to consider.

E-books: Write short Amazon Kindle e-books (e.g. 10,000 words) for sale.  Charge $2.99 per book (the least price you can charge and still get a 70% royalty from Amazon) generating $2.06 per book in revenue.  Write in a series to hook the reader and keep them reading.

Udemy Courses: Record and offer short online video training courses (e.g. 46 minutes) via Udemy for sale.  Make your offer via a $19.99 referral link (the least price you can charge for a Udemy course) generating $19.69 per course in revenue.

Affiliate Products: Provide affiliate links to products.  Affiliate links afford the linker up to 60% of the revenue from the sale of the product to which they link.  JVZoo and ClickBank offer two excellent sources of affiliate products.

Note that this website offers all three of these product offerings.

Passive Income From a Mailing List

All you need is a free mailing list and mailing list signup form to start generating truly passive income online starting today.  Everything is free.  No website is required.  Here’s how it works:

  1. Your mailing list signup form requests potential readers to add their email address to your mailing list via your signup form.
  2. Your mailing list signup form offers the potential reader something of value (e.g. short ebook or infographic) for signing up.  This is known as a lead magnet.
  3. Once readers are on your mailing list, use the 80/20 rule to distribute 80% information and 20% promotion to your mailing list
  4. Use automation to distribute regular emails in a sequence so that your campaign runs unattended.
  5. Drive traffic to your mailing list signup form (or embedded WordPress website signup form).

It’s as simple as that.  All you have to do is direct inexpensive sources of eager readers to your signup form and everything works passively from that point onward.

Sources of Lead Magnets

Public Label Rights (PLR) products are products that you can resell as your own.  Purchase an appropriate PLR product to offer as a lead magnet.  I prefer thePLRStore.

BookFunnels

BookFunnels provides an interesting alternative for distributing lead magnets while gathering email addresses.  The site includes instructions for downloading your e-book in MOBI, ePub or PDF formats to a variety of devices.  Check it out by downloading my free e-book via BookFunnels:

Price Your Book to Sell on Amazon at the Sweet Spot
https://dl.bookfunnel.com/234z0o88zr

Passive Income From a Blog

This is old school marketing, at possibly its least successful (I’m currently experimenting with this method and hope to post a verdict soon).  Here’s how it works:

  1. Create a blog containing lots of useful information on a niche topic.
  2. Pepper the blog with advertisements and promotions for your products.
  3. Drive appropriate traffic to your blog.

Note that I’m employing both the mailing list and blog techniques to generate revenue.  So far I’ve had splendid success in driving traffic to what I think is a great blog studded with promotions, but no one is clicking on the promotions.

This blog is a classic example of how to deploy this technique.  Browse around and take notes of what you think works and doesn’t work.

P.S. I read somewhere that website banner ads no longer work.  Site visitors now look right past them.  Perhaps this observation is correct.

Traffic Sources

You have two choices:

Organic: Perform on-page SEO and accumulate backlinks to improve your Google search ranking.  I currently use Yoast SEO to perform on-page SEO on all my blog posts.

Paid: Pay a site to drive topic related traffic to your website.  I’m currently paying to receiving 2,200 site visitors per day.

I’ll see you in the classroom,

—Brian