all right in this video we're gonna talk about seven different passive income
streams that I have used over the last probably 10 years or so and I'll tell
you about the successes in the failures and maybe it'll give you some ideas for
yourself and things that you can kind of explore
all right so I just finished creating my garden for this year
which I'm really excited about I've kind of
had like a toy garden for the last few years and I finally created like a big
one that I'm really pumped about so I like to plant perennial flower bushes
that I plant one time and they come back every year and that's how passive income
works and also why I love it so much so for me it was about 10 years ago
when I first kind of discovered this idea of passive income as someone who
had just worked hourly and just gotten paid by the hour my entire life since I
was probably 12 I started doing some work by the hour it was just such a
fascinating idea that you can go in there and do work one time and then get
paid over and over and over again alright so let's dive into seven of my
actual streams of income and I will talk a little bit about each one and show you
some of the failures and successes and we can kind of go through those
all right so the first one for me was a dividend paying stock so I did this about 10
years ago and for me I was just buying a local utility company tend to be fairly
safe and secure stocks although who knows what's gonna happen in the future
with them but they paid a 3 percent dividend I made a $500 investment and
that yielded me about $3.75 every 3 months so I was earning just over a buck
a month from this but that was my first taste of passive income I had taken this
$500 I had invested it and he was earning me a dollar or so every month
that was coming to me now obviously that wasn't making me a ton at that point but
it just got my mind spinning about the potential and the possibility of this
whole idea of passive income and that was thrilling
so number two for me was starting a blog
and beginning to write blog articles about something that I was learning about
or something that I knew about and just sharing that with the
world and of all of these strategies this is one that has worked the best for
me I've had the most success with this I've been doing this as a full-time gig
for the last eight years at the time of this recording and while not every aspect of
blogging is passive a lot of pieces of it can be especially once you're kind of
up and running so one of my favorite things is
I've been writing articles for this blog almost 10 years now and some of the
articles that I've written seven eight years ago are still getting traffic from
Google passively each month and then also earning me money each month so it's
not like I'm only earning from the new articles I'm writing I'm earning from
all the old ones and so everything is just continuing to build and in it's a
really really fun business to be in just because of that not too long after I
started my blog I tried my hand at this third stream of income which was a site
called HubPages hubpages.com and there's a whole bunch of different sites
like this but basically where you can go on there and write an article about any
topic of your choice so it's less commitment than starting a blog but
essentially you're writing an article that's gonna help somebody or inform
someone or something like that and then they display ads on the side and then
they give you a percentage of the revenue that your article generates
based on the number of views and clicks through the ads and things like that so
what's also cool about this is if you're someone who just has interest in a
variety of things and you have ten different things you're passionate about
and can't figure out which one or two I want to focus on to start a blog this
can be really really helpful because you can go there and write about anything
you want and it doesn't matter if it's topically focused so this was something
that tried many years ago and I probably ended up writing a little over a hundred
of these actual articles for this site and I probably haven't added one in at
least four or five years and to this day I'm still earning over two hundred
dollars a month from that work I put in all the way back then just writing some
those articles just on things that I was interested in or maybe even something
that I just learned about that day because I had to do a lot of research on
it or whatever it was
all right and the fourth one is writing a Kindle book and
so this also is a writing one and not all of these are writing one so stick
with me if you just don't want to write but essentially this is an
experiment where I took it very long and thorough article I'd written for the
site and kind of modified it and turned it into a Kindle book and writing a
Kindle book is extremely easy you can literally upload a word doc file
to the Kindle platform and you'll have to format it you know they give you
specifications on how to format it but it's a very simple process and I just
want to throw it up there and see what would happen and and this was one of
those things that just worked really well if you
again it's like if you can write something topically focused on a
particular topic that you know something about or have something a unique angle
to share on it tons of people are going to the Kindle Store trying to find books
on really specific problems that they have and and you can write a Kindle book
really quickly and easily to kind of solve that problem for them and then
sell books in the process and so for us right now this probably generates about
a hundred dollars a month so it's not a ton but it's been much higher in the
past when we were maintaining it
all right number five is recording music as
an artist and this is something I've grown up playing music I've been in
bands I've been a worship teams and so again this was also an experiment but my
wife and I decided to record a few songs worship songs that we just really like
throw them up on YouTube and just kind of see what happens it's kind of how I
do things it's like to throw it on the wall and see what sticks and then kind
of go from there and so we did this and a couple things became very clear so
it's not real easy to make a whole lot of money as a musical artist there is
another way which we'll talk about in a minute here it also can be pretty
passive as well so in our case we recorded four different songs we put
them up on YouTube we kind of went through CD Baby to kind of get them
distributed everywhere we earned probably about thirty to fifty dollars a
month so it's not a big earner for us by any means but it's just another little
passive stream that just keeps coming in in any one of these streams even if
they're not earning a lot if we just continue to work towards them like we
could get them to earn more like I'm saying I'm throwing things up on the
wall scene with sticks and seeing what I want to do and what make is the best use
of my time and so even though it's not a ton of money it's still some money
coming in which is beneficial but also it gives me a hint as to the potential
of what could be if I continue to put effort into that project
all right so number six was another experiment we tried where I bought a
DSLR camera and I was having fun with it and I decided alright well I'm gonna shoot some
stock photos and try to sell these in a stock photo site so this one was probably the
biggest failure of all in that we spent a pretty good amount of time taking a
whole bunch of good photos probably four hundred weeded those down to about the
forty best and then uploaded them to a handful of stock photo sites and ended
up only getting about like I think five accepted by them
and then of those five they were now in the database for people to search and
download and buy from that effort that we put into that we probably earned less
than a dollar a month and so it just never really amounted it very much for
us now that said I think if you're a better photographer than I am which
should be a very very low bar for you I think you can probably do better and it
might be something worth pursuing because again what's exciting about it
is that it's passive and you're doing the work one time and then you just
continue to get paid
all right and number seven for us has been rental
income and this is one that people commonly think of when they think of
passive income but basically we turned our first house that we bought after we
got married into a rental property now for it to be kind of completely passive
you probably need to bring in a property manager which is what we did because
even though I don't know how realistic it is I always get nervous I don't want
to get a phone call at 3:00 a.m. because there's a problem with the plumbing or
something like that so we hired a property manager who takes
care of all of that for us he takes a cut and then he just mails us to check
so literally all we do is just get a check each month and that's really nice
okay so real quick update I've actually made some changes since I originally
recorded this video and we have actually sold our rental property and the thing
we're doing now that I'm really excited about it's called Fundrise and
essentially what it does is it allows you to be a real estate investor
completely passively and not have any of the headaches of real estate investing
and in our case we actually earned more from this than our rental property and I
did a thorough kind of comparison and review that you can check out on the
site I'll have it linked up down below but anyway this is a really cool one to check out
okay so that's all seven of them
now for number eight we'll call it
as a little bonus here what I would do if I had more time is probably record
some stock music so as you probably know amateur video like this is growing
exponentially and everybody's making video buying those background tracks is
not real cheap so I typically pay ten to twenty dollars for a two-minute
instrumental kind of background track and that tends to be the going rate for
something like that now if you look at that compared to an average artists
album that they sell for somewhere from ten to fifteen bucks we're talking
almost ten times as much for an instrumental track so you don't have to
record vocals you know to come up with words it's just so much
easier to create and you're able to charge a whole lot more for it so as a
musician who could create something like that that's really really enticing to me
that it's a whole lot less work and the potential for earning is a whole lot
higher so if you're a performing musician who can get a pretty decent
recording at home that's something that you might want to look into ok so just
kind of summing this up and finishing out this video there are just tons and
tons of strategies these are just a handful that I've tried and there are
just so many others out there and honestly this is probably the best time
in the history of the world to kind of create some passive income for yourself
even if you don't earn anything from it like the fulfillment and satisfaction
from having created something that has helped someone else is really really nice
so do us all a favor and get out there and create something you have
something that the world needs to hear you have something to share you were
gifted with something that you can give out and I encourage you to get there and do it