Today I’m going to give you 7 passive income streams you can use to monetize your website.
And this comes about because I met up with a friend that I haven’t seen for ages and we were talking about this online business stuff.
I’m only going to show you the passive income streams that are working for me personally inside my information product business.
Table of Contents:
What is Passive Income?
So what is passive income? What’s the real truth?
You probably already know that passive income is a big selling point and there’s a lot of training courses and training products out there that claim teach it.
But the truth is that passive income online does require some work.
Sometimes you might have to work for months before you see any kind of results.
Reality Check
I know there are a lot of people who don’t want to hear that, they want to believe the hype and they want to believe the lies that unethical marketers promise them.
If you hear anyone, including me, make promises that you’ll get instant riches or you’ll make a life-changing amount of money overnight, then they are full of shit.
It just doesn’t happen, and life doesn’t work like that. You gotta put in the time and the effort, or you need to buy your way in through advertising.
I made a video a couple of days ago that runs you through those two options, so be wary of anyone that promises instant wealth.
One of the main objectives of Profit Copilot is to give you all the stuff you need to know in order to build a successful business, without charging you for it or making any kind of silly claims.
I’m giving you guru secrets for free.
How do you use these Passive Income Streams?
So here are the 7 passive income streams that I personally use.
And you can use these on a single website, but I probably wouldn’t recommend it.
Or you can spread them out across multiple websites, and that’s how I do it.
Having everything running on a single website would be kind of overkill, and it would probably dilute your conversion rates dramatically.
CPA
The first passive income stream that I’m going to tell you about it’s called CPA, and that stands for Cost Per Action.
You get paid for sending leads to other businesses.
So you drive traffic into somebody else’s mailing list and those leads can be worth an awful lot of money.
The maximum that I’ve personally experienced is $125 per lead.
Now I don’t know what the standard rate is, I only know what has worked for me, but I have been doing this Internet marketing stuff for a very long time – 20 years, so you might not see the same results as me.
But I’ve got my fingers crossed that you’ll make more than me.
There’s a whole heap of variables and different factors involved, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
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CPM & CPC
The second passive income system is a combination of CPM and CPC.
These stand for Cost Per Thousand and Cost Per Click.
Typically, they are display ads and you get paid for every thousand impressions that the banner ad generates.
Or you get paid for every click that the banner ad receives.
A good example of this is Google Adsense, because they do a mix of both.
This can be really lucrative if you have a high-traffic website.
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Affiliate Marketing
Another of passive income stream that I use is affiliate marketing.
I get paid for referring customers to other people’s products and I’ve had varying degrees of success with this.
For example, with Amazon I’ve never really broken the hundred dollars a day mark on a consistent basis.
But I’ve managed to do a whole lot better with ClickBank, and that’s how I suggest you get started with affiliate marketing.
It works like this; you take a commission of every sale you make.
The commission is typically between 50% and 75%.
That means if you’re promoting a product that costs $100 you’re going to make between $50 or $75 per sale.
The best way to do this is through email marketing, so you build your own email list and then promote offers to that list.
But listen, if you consistently promote offers without providing value, you will eventually burn-out your list.
Your offers will become less effective over time, unless you have a consistent supply of new leads coming in who are ready to buy.
Remember that the number one thing you have to do before you even attempt to sell anything is to deliver enough value to gain trust.
But it doesn’t stop there, you gotta re-engage their trust over, and over.
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Merchandise
Then we’ve got merchandise.
The way I’ve done this is through selling t-shirts.
It takes the best bits of drop shipping, so there’s no hassle involved, you don’t have to purchase any stock, you don’t have to worry about shipping and handling, and you don’t have to worry about customer support issues too much.
Here’s how it works; is you create a custom t-shirt, maybe get someone on Fiverr to create a few t-shirt designs, then upload those to places like Cafe Press or TeeSpring, and sell them through your website.
In a previous video a couple of weeks ago I told you about how one guy made $100,000 in 5 months using companies like TeeSpring, so if you get it right merchandise can be highly lucrative.
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Sponsored Posts
The next passive income stream that I’ve got is sponsored posts.
You get paid to publish advertorials.
These are articles written by somebody else, that promote a product, that are published on your website.
Prices vary depending on your domain authority, but you do need to have a high traffic website to really make money from this.
The running theme here is traffic; you need high traffic websites to really make passive income work.
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Donations
Another passive income stream that I use is donations.
Your true fans want to support you, and they will be willing to contribute to the running costs of your website.
They’ll contribute a small percentage of their earnings every month, and this almost money for nothing.
I’ve found that it helps if you have a suggested donation amount to help decide how much they want to donate every month.
Asking for donations doesn’t work for every niche, if you are running a make money online website or you’re doing digital marketing agency, then I don’t think a donation button is going to fly very well.
But if you are in a niche that delivers little-known information or secret information that educates your audience, in my experience your true fans will be very keen to support you.
They will donate to encourage you to create content and keep the website running.
If you have a high traffic website then donations can be a fairly effective way to increase revenue.
Digital Products
And the final passive income stream that I use is the most lucrative, and this is digital products.
It’s almost unlimited; you can sell things like WordPress themes, apps, printables, ebooks, training courses and membership programs, etc.
They say that everybody has at least one good book in them, it can be 30 pages or it can be 200 pages – it doesn’t matter as long as it contains valuable information that helps people achieve something and get results.
You mat have noticed that I talk about digital products a lot on Profit Copilot because it works so well.
In my business I sell ebooks, training courses, video series and membership sites.
I try to deliver value to my audience on their own terms, in the format that they want to consume.
That’s exactly why I do videos, podcasts, blog posts. I hit the big three content formats to make sure that my entire audience can consume my content in the way that they choose to.
An if you apply that approach to digital products you can maximise the type of products you sell.
They’re also easy to make and people love to buy digital products because they get instant access.
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Final Thoughts
No matter which passive income stream you choose, it takes time and it takes hard work to bring your traffic up to a level that supports it.
My best advice to you is to create content consistently, and watch as that compounds over time.
This approach will set you up for years to come and if you stop creating content the traffic will still come to your website and you still make passive income.
Ao if you’re not content marketing at the moment, if you’re not creating anything any valuable contributions to your niche, then start right now. It will get you the results that you want.
Eventually your content will reach a tipping point it as it compounds over time – then you can walk away from that business and it will carry on generating revenue for you almost on autopilot.
And that is about as close as we’re going to get to passive income on the Internet.