The Holy Grail for entrepreneurs is to work toward a business model where they have to work less over time as their profits grow rather than having to work more.Â
We get calls from MANY consultants, service professionals and people with jobs that have figured out that exchanging their time for money not only puts a ceiling on their income, but is also exhausting and is not without risk in the case where something happens to them or their partners – what then?Â
First, I’m not a big fan of the term “passive” income…it sounds too unreal, has been mis-used so much that most of us pass it off as pure hype.Â
I prefer the word “leveraged income” which means you leverage initial effort into long-term sales where the ongoing effort is MUCH less than the original effort taken to get the business off the ground. How can that be done?
3 Ways To Leverage Initial Effort Into Higher Income Online:
1. Build a Platform (Mailing List or Social Networking Brand)  – The idea here is that over several months of working like a mad-man to get people to notice you, watch you, and like you – the result is a bond built onloyalt. Once you have that bond with a good portion of your market you can maintain (leverage) that effort by putting in a  few hours work each week (producing useful, valuable content) you bank leverage that you can tap into once or twice each month with promotions.  Now, when you have something to promote, your loyal audience responds, you make good profit and you continue to maintain your followers over time.Â
2. Create your own infoproducts – this is my favorite. We have products that we created in 2000 and 2001 that are still selling 4-5 figures a month today…all we really do is continue to generate some backlinks (through content development), manage affiliates and update those products once or twice a year. This is by far our biggest source of leverage
3. Membership sites – Another spin on information products, membership sites can be significant effort to setup and do require some ongoing effort to maintain current – but the accumulation of valuable information over time means less work in the future (if you design it correctly)
Nothing really beats content creation (paid or otherwise) when it comes to leverage online. With content comes eyeballs, and done correctly, you turn those eyeballs into champions for your online business. When you have champions, you have an extremely strong, leveraged income base from which to grow.Â
Over the last 10 years of doing business online, I have yet to find a better way to leverage my time than creating information products (ebooks, books, courses, membership sites). When you factor in a couple of weeks time and then calculate the return over years of selling those products, you can’t come close to finding a better way to make money on the internet…hands down, infoproduct creation and marketing is the #1 source of leveraged (or passive) income. Take a look at InfoMarketer’sZone and see how others are buidling their passive income one word at a time.
