There are many ways to make money, and one of the most reliable is also the most traditional: get a job and work 9-5 for a contracted salary. This is what most people do, but while this does usually work, this isn’t always the case for everyone. The biggest problem is that it is akin to putting all of one’s eggs in one basket. Lose that job for any reason, be it redundancy or outright dismissal, and you risk ending up unemployed. Alternatively, one can work multiple part-time jobs, which can get convoluted very quickly, increasing commuting costs. Freelancing doesn’t necessarily fare much better because until one has a reliable track record, one has to spend hours unpaid chasing clients for new temporary contracts. The holy grail of income is to do the work, hand it in, and then let the results of that work generate income for you; this is what’s known as passive income, and here are a few examples of it.
Writing an e-Book
If you have a way with words and the mental stamina to creatively write narratives for many thousands of words at a time, then you have what you need to write an e-Book and self-publish it through platforms like Kindle-Direct or Patreon. That’s the easy part. The hard part is convincing people to actually buy said e-Book because generally, in the absence of publicity and a book deal with a reputable publishing house, nobody will have even heard of you or your work. This is where social media becomes a vital tool for the self-publisher to promote and market one’s work to potential readers.
Creating an App
If you have a way with code, then another option for tech heads is creating apps for iOS and selling them, thereby claiming royalties per sale. A great tip here is to invest one’s time in something like a swift bootcamp to hone one’s iOS programming skills and obtain the versatility one needs to produce multiple apps and generate some renown within that industry.
Long Term Investing
Traditional stock trading is a short-term, very high-risk, high-reward version of generating passive income. Simply buy when the value of stock is low, and sell when the value is high, and hope your educated guess pays off. The safer, more long-term equivalent strategy is to invest in things like index funds, such as the S&P 500, which tracks the financial growth of the top 500 companies in the US at any one time, which shareholders can then invest in. This can be paid automatically, with a fairly high confidence of returns if committed for any serious length of time. The only way this wouldn’t work, realistically, is if the entire US stock market collapsed overnight, although, that said, that has happened before.
Affiliate Marketing
Finally, we come to generate income by affiliating with digital marketers in exchange for visibility. For example, if one runs a successful blog or vlog channel with a significant following, then this is automatic of interest to companies looking to market their products by investing it in the value that is your popularity. Many of these companies are willing to pay per click in exchange for you helping to raise awareness of their products. If the influencer in question has clicks numbering in the hundreds of millions across multiple countries on a global scale, then this can very easily lead to a millionaire’s income without necessarily doing that much work.
