Develpreneur: Become a Better Developer and Entrepreneur

It is hard to flip through a magazine or sit through television commercials without being exposed to a cashback program. These come in many forms. Some provide points or tokens of some sort, while others credit your account or even send you cash. No matter how these work, they are all ways to get paid for spending money. While not fully passive, these are good programs to take advantage of. Cashback Is Passive We all have to spend money. These expenditures may be in small or large amounts, but it is a fact of life. We spend money to live, whether through food, clothing, or shelter. All of these are essential to our existence and require us to do some level spending. Thus, getting paid for these transactions requires no real extra effort on our part. That is almost the precise definition of passive income. Buy Some Fun Usually, when we talk about passive income, we work in dollars and cents. That is not always the case. We can earn credits, coupons, points, or other items of value. These should all be considered a form of income. Better yet, we often are limited in what these non-cash items will buy. That makes these perfect earnings for us to spend on things we enjoy. Why not use this form of passive income to make your life a little more enjoyable? Take advantage of frequent flyer programs or discount coupons for your favorite store. Any of these options can bring you more joy in your life. That should make these ways to earn income even more fulfilling than cold cash. Even a buy X get one free program can put you in a little better situation. Think about it, is having fun better when you get it for free or when you pay for it?

One of the best ways to generate a passive income stream is to profit from what you already do. We have looked at a couple of ways to do this. However, a hobby may be the best of these options. We are essentially taking what we do for fun and turning it into a way to make money. This discussion is not just about loving your job. It is about getting paid for the things you love to do. A Hobby Is Fun We have hobbies for many reasons. One of the essential reasons for a hobby is that it "makes us happy." It may be that we do these things to reduce stress or find solitude, but even in those cases, we are increasing our happiness. We will go ahead and call that "fun." We do not want to discount other benefits from a hobby. However, the critical factor for our discussion is that we are fulfilled or "recharged" by doing these actions. Keep It Fun We all want to get paid for having fun. However, that can sometimes mess up our good thing. The introduction of payments to our hobby can make it feel like a job. Think of rich and famous people or artists that "sold out." There are plenty of stories about these people hating the thing they loved. We should consider those as cautionary tales. Is it worth it to make money having fun if it eventually sucks the enjoyment out of that activity? Yes, this is a philosophical question. Nevertheless, it is one we should contemplate as we step into this area of passive income. Expand Your Horizons One part of turning a hobby into a revenue stream is adding to that activity. You might need to record yourself, write about experiences, or market your self. Each of these additional tasks is valuable in and of itself as a way to become a better developer. Thus, when you explore ways to generate a profit from your fun, you can also learn new skills. You might even stumble across some new things you enjoy doing.

We have looked at regular content like blogs and podcasts for passive income. However, there are better options for passive income that are one-time content products. These include things like books, instructional videos, white papers, and more. These products are excellent options since they provide recurring revenue from a single push to create it. One-Time Content Takes On Going Effort One-time is a description for the creation of the content alone. It is not a way to describe the effort required to keep that income rolling in. The good news is that the work to keep things going is often small and can provide a sizable return on a few hours of work. The content itself is key to how much work will be required to keep it "fresh" and draw in more (or repeat) customers. Beyond that, you will need to refresh ads, participate in communities, or provide interviews and feedback to bring in people. Carve Out Time The time required after your content is made available to the public should be minimal. Thus, we have a passive income solution. Even better, the kind of work required can quickly be scheduled around your normal activities. These chunks of time can often be addressed in a late-night session or by getting up early once a week. You might even be able to group your time into a weekend afternoon once a month. Thus, all of these options should make it as easy as possible to expend the time needed for your content freshness without impacting your daily activities. This approach can even be used to provide regular enhancements to that content with minimal time expenditures. Many Options To Choose From The number of one-time content options available makes it easy to find one that works for you. Each of these has some strengths and weaknesses. However, they are all common in passive income circles. Therefore, you have numerous resources at your fingertips. Here are a few available on this site alone. Writing A Book – What You Should Know Before You Begin Creating a Podcast – Not Just a Lot of Talking Writing for Fun and Profit: A Business Communication Primer

A side hustle is an excellent way to improve your income. However, that word "hustle" implies that it is anything but passive. While that may be the case when you start, there is a path to passive income from many side hustle jobs. You need to take advantage of automation and outsourcing. The Manual Side Hustle We almost always start with a manual side hustle. That is the nature of such a venture. We want to generate revenue quickly and are happy to trade sweat for dollars. Thus, we jump in and spend little time planning our approach. This phase is all about the hustle and quick victories. In fact, we typically start with precisely the opposite mindset from a passive income stream. Step Away From the Ledge Once you get things moving in the right direction for a side hustle, it is time to start refining it. The first step is to completely define the process you go through for your work. That process can then be reviewed for opportunities to automate actions or outsource some of it. Even a little success should free up some of your time. Use those time savings to further review, refine, and automate the process. There will eventually be a limit, or the work will be completely automated. In either case, that time saved can be turned into new opportunities. Better yet, you can use it to build passive income from scratch instead of that hard-working launch. Better Late Than Never The best thing about this particular approach is that you can start it anytime. You can look for opportunities to automate or outsource from the beginning or once you tire of the hustle. This can also be a cure for burnout as you will have a new point of view about the work once you start the passive process.

Real estate is an area where many investors make their money. However, in the past, it has required a sizable investment to get started. That is no longer the case. We now have sites that we can visit that help us use the concept of crowdsourcing to buy into a piece of a real estate transaction. Now that we can start small, it makes sense to look at this as a way to save, invest, and earn a passive income from those savings. Traditional Real Estate Investments There are a few ways to make money from real estate. We can buy, hold, and then sell at a higher price as the holding becomes more valuable. On the other hand, we can buy, improve the property, and then "flip" it by making value-enhancing changes to the property. Finally, we can rent the property either on an annual or weekly basis. We might even combine these as part of maximizing the return on our investment. Do Your Homework While this type of investing can bring a substantial return, there are many ways to make mistakes. You can buy a money pit, in a bad neighborhood, or fail to attract renters. The good news is that most of this will fall on the site when you are micro-investing. However, there will still be questions you want to be answered that require you to do some research. Take your time and do the hard work upfront. That will help you improve your chances of an impressive passive income down the road. Get Started Today We mentioned a couple of sites during this episode. When you want to look into micro-investing in real estate, the links below can help you start your research. These articles list several sites that can help you start with this investing style, as well as providing a bit of a review of each site. This form of investment is one that will require you to perform due diligence. If you skip that work, then you might find yourself owning a small piece of nothing. https://yourmicrofinance.com/how-to-invest-in-real-estate-with-less-than-100-dollars/ Best Crowdfunding Real Estate Sites

As forms of passive income from investing go, the idea of micro venture capital investments is the best fit. These options can lose all of your funding. However, they can also lead to huge earnings. Think about owning a small piece of Amazon, Google, or Facebook when they started out. Those are outliers, of course, but the success they had will probably occur again. Micro Venture Capital - Invest in The Ideas of Others There are numerous similarities in venture capital investing and purchasing stock. In general, both of these are ways to own a piece of a company. The difference is that VC investing is often a larger portion of ownership. However, the micro venture capital approach is ownership on a scale close to buying a stock share. This option is also a perfect passive income stream. There is no need to come up with an idea, spend time on growing a business, or materially participate in any way. You just put your money on a company you like and see where it goes. Not Kickstarter The basis for Kickstarter is to stir up interest in customers and crowdsource an idea or product. There is not an exchange of money for ownership. The transaction is far closer to simply buying a product, not investing. There are some great ideas on that site and the odds are that some will appeal to you. However, all you can do is buy what they are selling. A piece of the company is not going to be on the menu. Check It Out The essential part of micro venture capital investing is finding that company you want to own. That means there is going to be research required to find that product or organization. Then, you will need to find or haggle your way into purchasing a piece of that company. There are many ways to learn more about this, but experience and specifics are the best teachers. Take a look at some of the sites that offer this option and poke around. You might find your Amazon.

Anyone that has ever been in debt has seen how lenders can make money. However, we often see the level of entry for a lender is far beyond our means. Never fear, microloans are here. This investment instrument allows us to step into the loan side of the equation with less than a hundred dollars. Fundamentals of Microloans This form of saving/investing involves contributing your funds to a pool of other investors. The funds are then used to provide short-term loans. Your money offers you a percentage of the overall loan and thus, a cut of the profits as well. Your money is going to be tied up in the loan until it is paid off. Therefore, this is not a valid short-term investment option. A Better Long-term option There is more risk in microloans than there is with some of the other options mentioned in this episode. You can compare against Certificates of Deposit (CD) and high interest, long-term savings accounts. While the results vary, it is not uncommon for microloans to return five to ten percent interest on the investment amount. Of course, there is a risk of losing all of your money. A loan is a form of investment that does require some upfront research to help you craft a good strategy for your situation. Getting Started There are a lot of details to microloans that are not very exciting. It is essential to know them. However, I am not an expert and may not convey the right information for you. That being said, check out some of the microloan sites for more details. Even if you are not interested in this form of investing, it is worth your time to learn how they work. Prosper Lending Club

When you think of your money working for you, there are several options. However, the stock market is one of the best potential returns with easy entry. This option does not come without spending time to choose your investments. Nevertheless, some hard work early on can pay off for decades to come. Winning in the Stock Market It is no secret that the best way to make money in the stock market is through long-term investments. That should not be too surprising. We can evaluate products and companies as being a good (or bad) bet easier over the long run than in weeks or months. Often, it takes a lot of time and effort to get a company to where it is dominating the market. While day-to-day fluctuations are harder to estimate, the long-term viability of a company will balance out those short-term "corrections." Instant Money There is no way to get money immediately from the stock market. You primarily earn on your investment through buying and selling shares. However, there are beautiful things called dividends. This is an amount of money paid out regularly for each share of stock owned. For example, assume you have ten shares of a company that has a $1.25 dividend quarterly. That means you will be given $12.50 each quarter just for holding those shares. That money can be spent how you like or invested in more shares of the stock. There are even automated plans that purchase partial shares of the stock based on the dividend without a fee. When you use this option, there is no transaction fee. Thus, you have the lowest cost way to build shares in the company. Learn The Game The stock market is not hard to understand. However, the way companies are scored and talked about has its own language of sorts. You will be far more likely to be successful with your investment strategy if you spend time understanding how the market works. Here are a few places to get started. The Motley Fool E*Trade (U.S.) Great Places For Beginners To Start

There are several passive income and side hustle options that get mentioned over and over. Public speaking is one of those options. It seems like it is a trendy way to earn a little income while building a brand or name recognition. While these side effects are excellent, the revenue side is not what it is often portrayed to be. Public Speaking Everywhere One of the challenges with making money as a speaker is the flood of options. While there are more opportunities to speak, there is also a flood of people wanting to do so. The competition is fierce at the high end, and the dollars available are sparse until you can reach those upper levels. It takes a lot of work and investing in yourself to get to the point where you can sort of coast through speaking engagements. Storytelling Public speaking as a path to revenue is not available to everyone. I think that there are several skills that can be learned. However, at the core, a good speaker must be a good storyteller. If you are not generally charismatic or able to entertain those around you with stories, then do not expect to be able to do so with crowds. Even then, it often takes a lot of time, practice, and maybe even unique experiences to hold the attention of an audience. A Little Help From Your Friends It is hard to get around how not passive this particular type of income is. Nevertheless, there are ways to keep public speaking from becoming just another way to trade time for money. When you become comfortable enough with a topic to handle Q&A sessions, then you will be able to piggy-back off of the feedback from others. This not only is a way to spin a short presentation into a longer one (and better rate), it is also an option if you want to go into an engagement cold. Of course, you have to be solid in your knowledge to go into a sort of town hall approach to presenting your story or topic. That means you will have a lot of up-front work required to achieve this type of passive income.

While not precisely passive, a content producer can open up multiple streams of revenue. We will point back to this option as a potential step in several episodes of this season. Thus, we set the stage early for ideas that can lead us to take this step with a minimum of additional effort. I guess that makes this "passive-ish" instead of a genuinely passive income topic. Hobbyist as Content Producer A secret to producing compelling content is being excited about your topic. Thus, the content producer that is most likely to succeed is the one that loves their work. Our hobbies and activities that we would do for free are the best topics to consider. That is where we find a way to view this income option as passive. We may be splitting hairs, but the idea of getting some revenue out of our "fun" times can be seen as passive. We are not putting forth extra effort. Many Options What is a content producer? That is a good question. We can produce content in countless ways. There are written means like books, blogs, and white papers. On the other hand, there are presentation methods like videos, podcasts, and the like. However, that is not all. Training courses, web sites, and speaking are all potential ways to deliver content. Better yet, we can utilize all of these in tandem to bring in a broad range of audience members. Start with the content and the delivery methods will be there as you need them. Committing to the Content No matter the delivery mechanism, the key to being a regular content producer, is consistency. This result can be anything from annual down to multiple times per day in implementation. While the frequency is up to you, your audience is the best source of that requirement. Their needs for content should dictate your rhythm of doing so. When you combine quality content with a meaningful time frame, your success is far more likely.