I Reached A Passive Income Milestone! Let Me Show You How You Can Do It Too.

I’ve written before about passive income and why it is great. It’s the underlying basis for this blog – I plan on paying for my Tesla with passive income.

Sometimes, passive income can be boring. Actually, I prefer it to be boring. When I talk about passive income, I want the same, predictable amount coming to me each month (or, even better, an increasing amount). I’m not looking for huge gains one month and losses another. Slow and steady wins the race. But then, there's boring and there's boring.

Boring Boring

The most boring type of passive income is bank account savings. If you have an account that pays you any interest at all, it’s probably under a buck a month. *Yawn* That’s boring and even I will admit it’s probably a little too boring.

Run-Of-The-Mill-Boring

If you own a dividend paying stock, that can be boring too, but it’s a bit closer to the type of boring I like. Hopefully, the company you’ve invested in regularly increases the dividend and rarely, if ever, reduces it. If you are reinvesting the dividends, you end up buying more shares of the stock each time the dividend is paid. Because the stock price varies, the amount of the stock you get when reinvesting will vary. This is my kind of boring. Still, unless you own a good chunk of shares, it’s probably a small amount you get each time the dividend is paid.

Exciting Boring!

My favorite kind of boring, the exciting boring, if you will, is royalties. Royalties are the income you receive for something you created. You spend some time once creating something and then you can sell that something over and over, making money each time, with no further effort on your part. Royalties can be really small – check out some of my monthly updates and you’ll find sometimes I receive a penny for my ebook royalties – but they can be larger as well.

Source Of Passive Income Excitement

With royalties, the excitement comes from two components: volume and time.

The more of something you sell, the more money you make. Even if it’s a small amount on each item individually, if you sell enough of something, those little amounts join forces and become large amounts.

Time is the other big component. You’ve already invested your time creating whatever it is you are selling. If you can keep selling that item for years, your income will add up.

This really hit home for me this month because my online courses just crossed a major milestone:

That's a lot of smackaroos!

This month, I crossed the $10,000 threshold for income from my online courses! I created and sold my first course in August 2013. My total monetary cost was $149 for a microphone. I spent several hours developing and recording my first course. The subsequent three courses were made more quickly, as I had gained a lot of experience with my first one.

After that initial work, I have done next to nothing. I’ve had a spend a few minutes here and there answering questions from a student or two, but for the most part, once I published the courses, my work was done.

Four years later, those courses have made me over ten thousand dollars! They are still generating income. Furthermore, I recently posted them on another training site and they have started earning me money over there as well.

Small incomes over a long time period. That’s the type of boring I like.

You Can Do It Too

There are many ways to create a royalty stream and you should pick the one that best suits your skills and knowledge. I chose to create computer-related courses, but you can make courses about almost anything. See my post here about this type of side hustle.

If you are musically inclined, try writing, performing, or producing music. Create some songs and sell those.

Do you prefer words to music? Write stories.

Paint.

Take photographs.

The internet makes it very easy for anyone to create content and sell it. If your content can be delivered electronically, you have no ongoing production costs, no shipping charges, no assembly. You can sell your creation over and over, automatically. Just sit back and collect the income.

I know that is making it sound easy. You do need to be able to produce something that people want or have a need for. It helps greatly if you are knowledgeable in your subject. But if you really enjoying doing something, you probably already are knowledgeable about it anyway.

The costs of entry are so low, there is really no excuse to not try. Look what my investment of $149 and a couple of weekends has returned so far!

Get out there and create your own passive income stream!