Americans are struggling financially, and with COVID-19, things are about to get much worse. About 75% of workers live from paycheck to paycheck. Almost a third don’t have an emergency savings fund.
These numbers paint a bleak outlook, but there are tons of opportunities to create passive income or residual income. This is income that you earn based on an investment of time or money.
Read on to learn the ins and outs of making residual income and grow your wealth.
1. Write a Book
You can write a book that’s a bestseller and make money from the royalties. Your book would have to be successful and sell a lot of copies.
You’ll also want to have a book that doesn’t need to be updated often. For example, a travel book would sell, but you have to update it every year because businesses change.
What you can do is have a successful book and launch it as a platform to become a speaker. You can also create products around the book that can bring in more income.
2. Launch an Online Course
Speaking of courses, launching an online course is a good way to build residual income. There is a lot of work that has to happen on the front end because you’ll need to find the right niche for your course, research the course, and create a course that fills the needs of your audience.
You’ll also have to have a plan in place to build awareness of your course. This involves a detailed marketing plan. The entire process can take months or years to build.
However, once it’s done, then you have an audience and residual income. You can leverage both into building more wealth by investing your income and creating more courses.
3. Invest in Real Estate
Real estate can be a good investment. You need to purchase the right property at the right price. You want to have a plan in place as to what you want to do with it.
If investing in a property and managing it is too much for you, you can still invest in real estate. There are crowdfunding sites that let you invest in commercial real estate for about $500.
An alternative is to get into house hacking. You can take something that you already have and leverage it into residual income.
House hacking is the process where you take extra space in your home and rent it out for cash. You should read this and learn about house hacking with FIbyREI.
4. Peer to Peer Lending
Do you have cash that you want to invest, but you want to help others while doing so? There are some mutual funds that are centered on environmentally sound companies or have a certain set of values.
You can make a direct impact on someone’s life by loaning them money. You can go through a peer-to-peer lending network, which matches investors with borrowers.
You can help someone out when they need it and make money off of the interest.
5. Drive an Advertisement
If you have a car, you can place advertising on the car and make money doing so. There are companies that will provide car wrappers that you put on the exterior of your car.
You drive around like normal and make money. It’s that simple.
Top Tips for Building Residual Income
If these ideas seem pretty doable, that’s because they are. It will take work on the front end, but the payoff will happen. You have to have faith that the work will pay dividends.
Your mindset will determine how successful you are in these endeavors. If you choose to ignore that, you’ll only wind up frustrated and ready to give up.
You want to approach this with a growth mindset that’s ready to make mistakes and learn from them. There are other tips that you can use to be successful in creating residual income.
Be Consistent
No matter which residual income idea you choose, you have to be consistent at building it up, especially in the beginning. With just an hour each day devoted to your dream of creating residual income, you can build enough momentum for the project to take off.
However, what usually happens is that life gets in the way. That can create a spotty effort where you’re scrambling all of the time with nothing to show for it.
You have to make time in your schedule and stick to it. Every single day.
Create a Real Working Space
You’re starting a business. You should treat it that way, too. Creating your work from your couch can easily give you the impression that you’re working on a hobby.
If you treat residual income like a business, then you’ll get better results. You want to have a dedicated area to work in your home to put yourself in the working mindset.
Learn About Marketing
If you choose to write a book or sell a product to create residual income, you are going down a hard road. The odds are long that you’ll be successful, but you can beat those odds.
You have to know a lot about marketing when you’re creating your book or product. Study concepts like your target market, messaging, and branding.
You will need to learn these in order to promote your book and product. You should also learn about promoting your work on social media. You don’t need to be on every channel, but pick three that will be the most effective.
Making Residual Income Work for Your Financial Future
It’s everyone’s dream to live life on their own terms. That can be hard to do when you have a job to go to every day and spend 8-10 hours there.
You can start to build your own freedom by making residual income. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to do it. You can invest or leverage what you already have or build something new.
You just need to have commitment and consistency to make it a reality. For more tips to help you improve your life, check out the Life section of this site for more insights.
