Building passive income online is not for the faint of heart. A leap of faith is required, in that the work you are doing today will actually pay off tomorrow. Of course in business, nothing is guaranteed and there is always going to be some risk of failure.
You may have very little support for your entrepreneurial adventure from your friends and family, because they are probably employed in a more traditional role. Thus, you must be fearless if you want to be successful online, and attack the business with all of your energy.
Here is what you can do to help insure future online income:
- Have a daily quota.
- Focus on income growth.
- Have a long term vision of success.
- Avoid distractions and be persistent.
Have a daily quota
Every day is an opportunity to grow your business. The world does not care if you take weekends off or if you work on your business 3 days each week or 6 days each week. In the end you are working for yourself and building your own business.
The income that you generate is a direct result of the value that you deliver to other people online. Create something amazing and useful and be rewarded for it. Each day that you do not produce something of value for your audience is a missed opportunity. This is because every time that you do create something of value, the Internet can deliver that value over and over again.
So each day is an opportunity to grow the total value that you can deliver. Each day is an opportunity to grow your future income stream. Take a month off from producing anything online, and that is a full month that you can never get back.
Just look at someone who has an existing authority website that is already successful. Maybe they earn several thousand dollars each month from their web property, and they invest a certain portion of that income or their own time in reinvesting for future growth. They appear to “have it easy” because all they have to do is continue to build their online empire, laying one brick at a time, to keep the cash flowing in.
It is the same with a newcomer starting out. Build your business each and every day. Do not take days off. Put your online efforts first if you want future passive income to be your priority. Have a daily quota and stick to it. Mine is two quality articles per day. Sometimes they are published on my own web properties, but other times they serve as quality guest posts for promotion.
Either way, I do not go to sleep until I have completed my daily publishing quota. This is a simple but highly effective method for growing a business. It does take some discipline to implement, but how else do you expect a successful business to be created?
Focus on income growth
The goal is to grow your online income. It can be surprisingly easy to forget that once you immerse yourself in the world of Internet marketing. For example, you may get caught up in attempting to:
- Get RSS readers and subscribers.
- Install fancy widgets on your blog.
- Get Twitter and Facebook followers.
- Do well with social media services.
And so on. Depending on your business model, some of those things may actually result in income growth. The point is, you should be measuring your income growth and figure out what actions stimulate it directly.
For most marketers this will be the creation of new content and promotion of that content via link building.
Figure out exactly what actions grow your income, then focus exclusively on those actions. Do not get caught up in chasing useless “vanity metrics” that only serve to boost your ego.
Have a long term vision of success
Your vision of success is to create passive income online. The key is that you need to be realistic enough to have a long term vision rather than a short one.
Most people who try to create success online give up because their time frame is way too short. They expect to see income within weeks or months when they should be looking at more like a year or two. There is nothing wrong with a two year timeline to profitability. The time is going to pass anyway. Why not build a successful business?
Just realize that it takes time and it takes consistent effort. Have a long term vision that you will be earning a part time income online within a year or two, and a full time income online within two to four years. If you make a consistent daily effort then these numbers are not unreasonable, and are actually a bit conservative.
Aim high and have infinite patience. Keep your expectations realistically low and be pleasantly surprised as age and trust factors kick in later on.
Avoid distractions and be persistent
Creating a profitable website is a matter of scale. Earning 20 dollars per month with your 20 page website should be all the validation you need.
Make a thousand page website and earn proportionately more. Publish daily and you can achieve numbers that at first may seem unrealistic for you.
You may object with: “I don’t have time to build a website.” Can you squeeze out an hour each day in order to buy your freedom? In time, that hour each day should be enough to create two quality articles.
Keep it up for two years and you will likely have a powerful income stream in your life, one that allows you the freedom to build a better business.
All businesses have risk involved. At some point, you have to jump in with both feet and make a commitment to yourself that you are going to do the work. Without the commitment to do the work, no successful business can be created.
This is why you must abandon all fear and follow through with a commitment if you want to reap the rewards.
Any questions? Please ask me in the comments!
[box]This is a guest post by Patrick Meninga of Make Money With No Work. He recently sold his website for $200,000 dollars.[/box]
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