17 Ideas for Adding Passive Income Streams to Your Business as a Digital Entrepreneur

Your typical monthly membership site is one where your members pay their monthly fees every month, and in exchange you send them fresh content or give them continued access to a service each month. While the residual income in theory sounds good, there are two problems with this model:

• You become a slave to your business. You need to keep uploading new content each and every month, even if you’re sick or on vacation (so it's not really passive).
• Members tend to drop out. This often happens around three or four months. One of the reasons is because members don’t see any end in sight.

Here’s a fix to this problem: set up a fixed-term membership (FTM) site. The site only runs for a specific duration (such as six months). Best of all, you can set it all up using an autoresponder, so the site runs on autopilot.

For example:

• Offer a three-month training course on building a better resume and polishing your interview skills.
• Offer a six-month course on how to train for a marathon.
• Offer a yearlong course on how to set up, plan and run a new business.

If you’re already selling products, then one quick way to add extra cash to your bottom line is by installing an upsell or cross-sell on your order form. Basically, this is where you promote a highly related product.

For example:

• If you’re selling a blogging course, then upsell a WordPress plugin.

• If you’re selling a meal-planning app, then upsell a dieting course.

• If you’re selling a marketing course, then upsell the resell rights to that marketing course.

You’re probably already building a list, which is great. But for best results, you need to create an initial autoresponder sequence that focuses on selling just one offer—a tripwire product.

What’s a tripwire?

It’s a low-cost, high-value product that’s a no-brainer for your prospects.

For example, let’s suppose you’ve set up a five-part autoresponder series called, “The Five Secrets Of Boosting Your Metabolism.” Each email would share one of these secrets, and at the end of each email you’d promote a meal-planning app at an amazingly affordable price (such as $7).

And once someone buys your tripwire? Then here’s the next passive income stream…

Now you need to upload an autoresponder series for new customers to introduce them to your backend offers.

In continuing with the example above, let’s suppose someone just purchased the meal-planning app. Now you’d send out a series of emails such as “Five Ways To Get Leaner With Less Effort.” Each email would tell people how to use the new app for maximum effect, plus you’d pitch an in-depth dieting guide to your customers.

The key here is to post really useful content on YouTube with a call to action at the end which points to a related offer.

For example, you might post a classic car-restoration tutorial. Within this tutorial you’d provide demos of how to do a specific task, such as change the headliner. You’d then include a link and call to action at the end for a complete video series that shows car enthusiasts how to restore their cars step by step.

Whenever you post on your blog, you should cross-post to social media. The good news is that you don’t need to do this manually. Instead, use a plugin on your blog to automatically post new content to Facebook, Google+ and other platforms. It’s an easy way to get your marketing messages in front of more people.

Here’s another way to create passive income with your autoresponder – just create and upload a week-long ecourse.

For example:

• Five Days To Better Sales Copy

• How To Create a Bestselling Product In Five Days

You can take orders on your site and let your autoresponder do all the work for a truly passive income stream. Or you can install a premium upsell for personalized coaching. The choice if yours.

The downside of selling a Kindle book is that you don’t get access to the customer information. There is a way around this, however: simply insert a page at the end of your book with an enticing lead magnet to get your customers on your mailing list. And if you have an autoresponder sequence set up, then even your backend sales will be totally automated.

Here are the three main advantages of this strategy:

• It’s truly passive, as you don’t need to deal with order fulfillment or customer service.

• Amazon does a lot of promotion on your behalf.

• Selling a Kindle book helps establish you as an expert in the niche.

The idea here is to sell a popular product, and give 100% commissions to your affiliates. They get the frontend income, while you get the valuable customer mailing list and all the backend income. It’s a win-win opportunity, especially if the product carries a high price tag and a superb conversion rate so that your affiliates can make a lot of money with it.

One good way to create another stream of revenue is to create another product. The good news is that you don’t need to do this all from scratch. Instead, you can take your existing content, compile or modify it, and create something entirely new to sell.

For example:

• Turn a series of blog posts into a report. Or you can take a series of reports and turn it into a course.
• Splinter off a piece of a larger product (such as a home study course) to sell separately. This brings in new frontend income, plus it also helps you effortlessly sell the main product on the backend.

While you can choose to hire a content repurposing agency to do the work for you, leveraging AI to do your content repurposing yourself is a much more cost-effective approach. but

You can use an AI content marketing platform such as Blaze AI to almost effortlessly repurpose your content. If you're not ready to use AI, then you can implement this content repurposing strategy that shows you how to turn one idea into 10 pieces of content.

The goal behind this idea is to get others to distribute your content as widely as possible so that your backend income links get a lot of exposure. A good way to do this is to sell the resell rights to your content.

Heads up…

Be sure you offer resell rights licenses only and not the PLR (private label rights). The reason is because you don’t want your license holders to be able to edit your content, as they’re likely to strip your links out. 

However, you CAN offer rebrandable content, which means you let your buyers put their affiliate links into the content. That way, both you and your license holders make money whenever someone takes advantage of your backend offers.

The idea here is to create viral content with embedded offers. For best results, make the content rebrandable, so that your affiliates can replace the links with their affiliate links. This creates an incentive for others to give away your content.

Here are two tips for optimizing this strategy:

• Create something unique. This could be something really useful, or even something inspirational. You might create something unusual, like a “State of the Industry” report, or a “manifesto” that shares deep insights.

• Make it easily accessible. People won’t share the content with others if accessing the content requires jumping through hoops. So don’t put your content behind an opt-in form. Instead, share a link that offers direct viewing or downloading.

This isn’t a completely passive idea, but it comes close – especially if you’ve already built up your platforms. That’s because the beauty of being an affiliate is that you don’t need to deal with taking orders, fulfillment, or customer service. You just put your affiliate links in front of a targeted audience and collect your commissions.

Here are two tips for making the most out of this strategy:

• Set up passive systems. Create a highly enticing lead magnet to attract prospects, and then set up an autoresponder sequence that follows up with these prospects and persuades them to make a purchase.

• Add value to offers. When you’re an affiliate, you naturally have competition with other affiliates. You can overcome this competition by adding value to the offer, which means you give away an enticing bonus to any customer who purchases through your affiliate link.

Do you have a blog or other content-driven section on your site? If so, this is a great place to add visual ads such as banners and other graphics. You can also add visual ads to your products, as well as your emails.

The advantage of visual ads is that they tend to draw in the viewer’s eyes. If you provide strong text copy with a call to action, you’re likely to get quite a few clicks.

Here’s where to put these ads:

• The header, footer and sidebar of your blog.

• Between articles on your blog.

• In the header or footer of your newsletter.

• Between articles in your newsletter.

• In a “Featured Recommendation” section of your product, such as a page at the beginning or end of a report (or both).

Udemy is a place where you can sell video courses. It’s known to be a high-quality place for video training, so your course will get exposure if you’ve produced something useful and professional.

There are three ways to do this:

• Do it yourself from start to finish.

• Hand your existing content to a freelancer, and have this person turn it into a series of high-quality training modules.

• Hire one or more people to create the complete course for you.

If you’re already making money with your business, then this is a great way to grow your business even faster. Simply reinvest some or all of your profits back into your business. For example:

• Run an ad campaign.

• Hire someone to create a product (like that Udemy course we just talked about).

• Hire someone to do conversion testing.

• Outsource blogging to a qualified writer.

• Hire someone to do market research for you.

These ideas grow your business while saving you time.

When you think of a service business, it’s easy to imagine trading time for dollars. Just the opposite of passive income, right?

But hold up…

What if you didn’t have to do the work yourself? 

That’s the idea behind this strategy. You serve as the middle-person between a freelancer and someone who needs a job done. You find those who need to outsource a task, and then you find a freelancer who can do the required task. 

For example, maybe there’s a small business owner who needs some writing done and is willing to pay $400 for it. If you find someone who will do the work for $300, then you’ll pocket the $100 difference. Not bad, eh?