Get started on these passive income streams without investing a dime.
Want to create passive income but don’t have any money to set it up?
It’s a sad fact that many business ideas and passive income sources require an upfront investment to get things going. It’s still less than starting a traditional business but something like Amazon FBA can cost upwards of $5,000 to buy inventory.
I’ve got three strategies you can start today that cost nothing and will make you money every single month. Just one of these alone can make you thousands in passive income.
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The Power of Passive Income
We’re wrapping up our three-part series on passive income streams and this one is going to be my favorite. We’ve already ranked those 18 passive income ideas in our first video, detailing each, and then walked through three great passive income investments in our last video. Now I’m going to reveal three income sources you can set up with no money and start making a monthly income immediately.
That’s where I started with my blogs in 2013. I created three blogs from scratch, boot-strapped everything on no budget. It gave me the opportunity to learn that business of blogging and I now make over ten grand a month through online assets.
Let’s get to those three income ideas because I guarantee there will be something in here that is going to boost your bank account and something you can get started on today.
Passive Income with Bundle Sales
Our first idea is going to be setting up bundle deals for a percentage of the sales. You see these more commonly around Christmas but you can run them any time of the year. Basically it’s a bundle offer of books, courses or other products, usually from different people.
For example, you might create a bundle of 10 business books or five courses to help people grow their online income. The bundles are sold at big discounts compared to buying each product separately, like a 50% or more discount. Most of these bundles you’ll see are sold for between $50 to $100 so it’s just a great value and affordable for anyone. Not only is it a great value but you also sell it for a limited time, like five days, so you build that sense of urgency and sales for these things are always through the roof.
As the organizer here, you reach out to authors and course creators to see if they want to be included in the bundle. Besides the money they’ll get, which we’ll talk about next, they also get access to new audiences so it’s a great way to make follow-on sales.
Payout on sales goes like this, you provide trackable links to each person in the bundle. They get a 70% commission on any sales from people that click on their links. You can also sign up bloggers and social media influencers to help advertise and give them 40% of sales on their link even if they don’t contribute to the bundle.
This way, you get lots of people advertising the bundle offer. You send out images they can use as banners on websites or just social media posts they can make to promote. With the huge discount on the bundles and limited time, these things get hundreds of sales minimum and you get a commission of thirty- to sixty-percent on each sale for putting everything together. Even on an inexpensive offer of $50, that’s upwards of $30 each. You don’t have to create any products yourself, you didn’t have to do much marketing, it’s all for organizing the offer.
You’ll need a basic landing page or a blog page to advertise the bundle and that’s it. You can deliver courses through a free account on Teachable or just deliver everything by email. It’s a great no-cost income stream you can re-launch every couple of months.
Creating Passive Income with Affiliates
This next passive income idea is something we’ve never talked about on the channel but a great way to get started by writing for bloggers and affiliate marketing. There’s a strategy for bloggers called guest blogging where you write a post for another person’s blog to get links pointing to your blog. It’s a good way to reach more people and build up the Google value for your site.
In another strategy we’ve talked about called affiliate marketing, you add links to your blog to affiliate products. If someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase, you get a commission, usually 30% or 40% of the sale.
Well here we’re going to be combining these two strategies for that affiliate marketing but without the work of having your own blog.
How it works is you reach out to other bloggers to write for them. A lot of bloggers pay upwards of two or three hundred dollars to freelance writers but instead of charging for the post, you’re going to ask for a link to a landing page. The landing page is just a web page you have set up on a site that talks about the affiliate product or service. You can even offer some kind of freebie to get them to sign up first and then send out emails promoting the product.
I love this idea because you don’t need a big website or blog to use it. You might create a basic site with a page about yourself and maybe a resources page but it’s really just a site of different landing pages for each of the affiliates you’re partnering with. This is a great one to combine with the affiliate funnel system we talked about in a recent series.
One of the biggest challenges for new bloggers is all the time each week to create blog posts and promote on social media. With this strategy, you don’t have any of that because you’re really not trying to build up your blog. You’re just using it as a home base for your affiliate marketing. Starting a blog will cost less than $3 a month with the special deal I’ve negotiated with Blue Host for webhosting and that’s all the costs you’ll have.
You can find bloggers in topics related to your affiliate products by doing a Google search for blog lists then just start reaching out by email. This is one that really builds on itself because those articles on the blogs stay live forever. Create a few posts each month for other bloggers and each one will start generating passive income for years after it’s published.
Starting a YouTube Channel for Passive Income
Our third passive income source, creating YouTube compilation videos, is something we’ve talked about before but I just had to highlight it again because it’s such a great no-money strategy.
If you spend any time on YouTube, you see your share of videos that are just a collection of video clips. Search for anything like animal videos and you see these get millions of views and the channels have millions of subscribers.
So while the rest of us yahoos are busting our butts, spending hours creating videos and editing, these channels are proving the rule of working smarter not harder.
And just so you can see how much you can make with this. I average about a penny per view from YouTube ads plus I sign sponsorship deals for the videos. Personal finance is a money-making niche so these compilation video channels might only be getting around a third of a penny per view but they’re hitting millions of views on each video.
I actually thought these compilation videos were against YouTube rules at first because all they’re doing is copying other videos. Turns out this is a legit strategy called creative commons. When you upload a video to YouTube it can either be restricted usage or creative commons which means other people can use it. So these compilation channels are just repackaging other videos for their own, getting millions of views and making boatloads of money in the process.
That’s how this income strategy is completely cost-free. You pay nothing to create a YouTube channel. You get these video clips for free and you can edit everything on free software.
So let’s run through an example to show just how easy it can be to do one of these videos and make money this way. Say you want to do a funny cat video, because if there’s one thing that always goes viral…it’s funny cat videos. So you type in your search, you see some videos pop up and then you go to filter and click on that creative commons under features. Now you can click through to any of these videos and if you look in the description, you’ll see creative commons reuse allowed.
The process for grabbing some of these videos for your channel is super easy. One thing though is that you want to create compilations, so clips from different videos. You don’t want to just grab videos and upload them as your own. You’re going to be putting several clips together all in the same topic to make your own super-video that will get those millions of views.
After you do a search for the videos you want, and you want to copy down the URL address for each. Then you can do a Google search for YouTube to MP4 converter which is going to snatch the video file and download it to your computer.
With these full videos, you can use any editing software to cut the clips and put them together. I use Camtasia but there are a lot of free video editing programs you can use as well. You want to cut the clips out, maybe add some graphics like a countdown.
You also want to edit out any music if it’s in the original video and this part’s important. The video might be creative commons but that doesn’t mean the music is so strip that out. You can add in your own music from the free files available on YouTube which is an excellent resource for any type of channel.
When you publish your video, it’s good practice to add a link in the video description to the original videos where you got the clips. I couldn’t find anything on YouTube that said this was required but it’s just accepted practice. It’s also something that will help your video get views though because if YouTube sees people watching these other videos and yours together, it will start suggesting them together so you’ll start getting views when the other videos do.
That’s the basic process but I’ve got a few more tips here to boost your views and help you make even more money. First is don’t forget basic SEO for the videos. If you look on most of these videos, they have next to nothing in the description. This area is gold for telling YouTube what the video is about so write out a couple of paragraphs here using keywords to help YouTube understand your video and serve it up to people that will watch.
You also want to include some affiliate links or some Amazon affiliate links. Maybe you affiliate with a couple cat food or pet toy companies and put the links in the video description. Anything with a million views is going to have a few tens of thousands of people looking in the description and could be a few grand just in affiliate commissions.
You can get it to where it might only take you an hour or two to put together each of these compilation videos. Even on those lower Youtube ad rates, you can make hundreds a day on less than 100,000 views and that’s not including affiliate sales you make or those videos that go viral.
Don’t forget to check out that first video in the passive income series where we rank each passive income stream and talk through each.