Tag: passive income

passive income ideas challenge update

Passive Income Ideas Challenge Update

Okay, so back in August 2018 I posted my top 5 passive income ideas and presented it as a bit of a challenge, for both myself and my readers to follow.

My personal aim with this challenge was to make myself accountable for creating both brand new passive income streams from nothing, and also to transform my current business income streams into passive ones.

The latter is built upon years and years (the last 10, to be precise) of extremely hard work, with very little reward – it’s only through both personal development and the awareness of the importance of my time, and the hard work that preceded this transformation into an automated revenue source, that allowed me to make passive income here.

And, to be frank, who wants to learn about that? Do you want to sacrifice 10 years to be able to generate a modest passive income? Didn’t think so.

And to be honest, given the opportunity, I wouldn’t do it again either.

My mindset, over the past decade, has shifted severely.

From a workaholic entrepreneur, focused on building the biggest empire I could, reinvesting every penny in my business to allow it to grow.

Through to where I am today – understanding there is a huge difference between GBP and GB’Fuck You’P, and appreciating the importance and value of my own time.

There are far quicker and easier ways to generate a passive income online – and these are the ones I’m most interested in sharing with you here.

To summarise the 5 top passive income ideas from my challenge post (if you want to read more about each idea, click here), here they are:

  1. Create YouTube videos
  2. Become a Udemy instructor
  3. Become a lender on Funding Circle
  4. Trade cryptocurrencies
  5. Create a digital product

And which one has been the most successful for me?

Well, aside from the slow build-up of interest repayments from Funding Circle (which get instantly reinvested anyway, so that they can produce compound returns – I’m playing the long game with this approach), number 2 and number 5 have shown most success for me recently (although I didn’t stick strictly to a digital ‘product’ for number 5, more on this further down).

Here’s a summary of what I did for each of the passive income ideas under my challenge:

1.Create a Youtube Video

So, for this one I chose to do product reviews on some of the items we sell over at vitalifehealth.com.

I figured, if the video gets plenty of hits, it’ll be a double-sided benefit – we’ll achieve more awareness for the products we sell, make more sales, and be able to monetise the video with ads too.

It’s a win-win scenario . . . if you achieve the views.

Which they unfortunately, did not.

The most views one of the videos got was 250+, which is obviously nowhere near the minimum Youtube level to even turn-on monetisation, and even farther away from earning a meaningful income from Adsense revenue and product sales/referrals.

Undoubtedly there is a ton of money to be made on Youtube, but to get there you have to be one of the big players (the average earning potential is around £1,000 per 1,000,000 views – so we’re talking 10s or 100s of millions of views to make any meaningful level of income), and to be one of the big players you have to be churning out interesting, engaging content daily – which goes against the principles of a passive income.

Like I mentioned in my original passive income ideas challenge post, if I try a passive income idea, and it turns out you have to pile a ton of time and effort into the concept to not just get it off the ground, but to sustain that income once you’ve started to generate it (which, by standard business practice, is a given), it gets ditched.

My goal is to seek out the most effective passive income techniques, not to start other time-sapping, regular entrepreneurial ventures.

I’m effectively trying to find the holy grail – a business that doesn’t need constant time and attention to sustain beyond the setup process, doesn’t require the funding of a small Country to setup, and one that, forever thereafter, generates consistent income at a meaningful level.

The brief isn’t easy. So I expect, and have already experienced, a lot of dead-end experiences like the one I had with Youtube videos.

Onto the next idea . . .

Income generated: £0

2.Become a Udemy instructor

This one I had already got a head-start on when I created the original passive income ideas challenge post, since I already had a live, income-generating course over on Udemy.

So my challenge was to follow this up with a second Udemy course – and in late 2018 I did just this with my course ‘Boost Productivity: An Entrepreneur’s Guide’.

I always take the strategy with my courses to make them free during the first few months, so they can build up some reviews/feedback, then switch them to paid once they have some visible credibility in the marketplace.

Otherwise, I find, courses can sit there for months with no enrolments whatsoever – the Udemy marketplace is quite crowded, and noone wants to risk their money (even at the lowest price bracket of $19.99) on an untested, unreviewed course.

Due to the first 2 reviews on my second course only coming in at 3 and 3.5 out of 5 stars, I have had to keep this unpaid for a little while longer than I had hoped.

I’ve noticed on Udemy that they only really rank courses that have a rating of 4.5 or more stars, so switching it to paid with a rating substantially lower than this just wouldn’t produce results.

I briefly questioned the value that the course was delivering following the two less-than-perfect reviews, re-watched the whole course again, and felt confident that it delivered on what it promised, so persevered.

More recently I had a couple of 5 star reviews land for the course, which has bumped the rating up (beyond the category average) and just today I switched the course to paid at tier 7 ($49.99).

One thing to bear in-mind if you are going to create your own Udemy course is that in over 3,000 student enrolments for my first course, not 1 student paid the ‘RRP’ – not a single one! – I’ve only ever made sales during Udemy promotions and, to a more limited extent, via my own coupon issuing and promotion.

This was even true when I priced my course at the lowest bracket of $19.99, people were only paying $10 for the course on promotion. In fact, I had more sales when I boosted the price to $99.99, because the promotions were still offering it at $10 – making it look like a much better discount than when it was priced at just $19.99 RRP.

Be aware of this when pricing your course – even if you price at the very top tier ($199.99), most sales will probably come through at around the $10 mark. So to make a meaningful passive income here, the key is volume of sales – so either choose a popular category that doesn’t have a great deal of competition already (hard to find, by the way!) or be prepared to launch a number of courses, and not just rely on one.

Meanwhile, my first course has been consistently delivering around $150 per month in passive income, following this same launch strategy that I employed for my Productivity course – so fingers crossed, I can bump this passive income channel up to $300pm once the second course gathers the same pace.

I’ll then look to build on this some more with further courses in the future.

Income generated: $150pm

3. Become a Lender on Funding Circle

Again, this is one I had a bit of a head-start in prior to launching my passive income ideas challenge in August 2018 – I’ve been consistently lending and feeding any spare savings into Funding Circle since around September 2017.

One thing I’ve learnt about Funding Circle investing following my first full year at it, is that, the first year is normally the best in terms of annual return (I averaged 7.9%pa after fees and bad debts).

You have to remember that you are lending your money to mostly small, entrepreneurial businesses – they are taking risks with these funds, and sometimes those risks don’t quite work out – leaving debts unpaid (bad debts).

Typically, you’ll not see any defaults (bad debts) from borrowers within the first 6 months, but thereafter, you’ll experience a ‘correction’ period as some of the borrowers start to run out of capital and fail.

This is where your projected annual return will also start to ‘correct’ and typically fall (Funding Circle are quite open and honest about this phenomena – and show that returns can dip throughout years 2 and 3 due to this, but then rise back steadily thereafter as some bad debts are recovered).

After almost 18 months of lending, my annual return has fallen from 7.9% to 5% after fees and bad debts, and now currently sits at 5.2% after a slight recovery.

Funding Circle should always be viewed as a long-term strategy, and one that you consistently top-up with additional savings. The more you put in, the more you get out, and when you also feed what you get out straight back in (via their fully-automated bidding tool), your returns start to compound, and over time, that’s when figures can really start to become interesting and a modest 5-8% annual return, on an initially modest amount of money, starts to look anything but modest.

Surprise yourself, and use the The Calculator Site’s compound calculator to project your own returns.

Income generated: 5.2% pa on capital invested

4. Trade Cryptocurrencies

I still think cryptocurrency has huge potential, as does blockchain (we’re already seeing big companies like Amazon launch their own technologies built on or around blockchain), just perhaps not so much so in the area of speculating on their value – the days of huge rises (and falls) I think are mostly over, as the concept of cryptocurrency matures and they find their useful place within the economy.

More interesting investment opportunities in the way of FOREX trading are situations such as that in South Africa where they seem to be replicating the fate of Zimbabwe in forcibly stealing land back from white farmers (who have actually financed their land and farming operations with loans from the South African banks), and when removed from their land, will default on these loans – leaving the banks, and therefore the Government, with a big black hole in their finances.

This will pretty much leave them with one option – print more money. Which will cause inflation. Which will negatively impact the value of their currency (ZAR).

The only difficulty I’ve had in exploring ways to exploit this is that all retail trading platforms don’t seem to offer an easy/simple way to ‘short’ on a currency.

If anyone knows how this can be achieved at a retail trading level, please leave comments below. I’d love to hear how it can be done.

Income generated: In the last 4 months – £0.

5. Create a Digital Product

This is the one where things got interesting – I had a lot of fun on this one.

Okay, so the first thing to explain is my approach here.

In the end, I didn’t go with a digital product – I didn’t like the upfront investment of both time and money that it required, and the fact that I’d have to offer some form of aftersales support thereafter.

So, how do you avoid these burdens?

Become an affiliate instead.

At first, I was thinking along the lines of becoming an affiliate for an existing digital product. Then, my mind switched to Amazon’s affiliate program.

Why?

Because Amazon sell everything under the sun, and no matter what the customer buys, provided they go through your affiliate link and order within 24hrs of clicking your link (used to be a 30-day cookie, but hey ho), then you get paid for it (somewhere in the region of around 5%).

I know this because one of my old niche sites teareviewblog.com used to display Amazon affiliate links to teas (naturally) but I remember seeing payments on our statement once for a dildo (who switches from artisan teas to dildo-shopping?? Teas must really put that person in the mood) and vegan shoes (yes, they exist).

So with this in-mind, you can see how the Amazon affiliate program opens up your revenue potential far beyond that of the products you’re actually directly promoting.

So, my original plan was to setup an Amazon affiliate ecommerce site and promote it via CPC advertising, organic search, and a little social activity.

In order to make the financials work, I had to choose a product category that included some high ticket items – since I’ll be spending a fixed amount per click to bring the traffic to the site, and I’ll be getting paid a %age (around 5%) of sales that get completed.

Starting a 99p store on this model just isn’t going to stack-up.

So after a little research, I landed on the product category of tools and DIY. It has a good number of high-ticket items (power tools, mowers, and so on) with a good selection of lower-ticket lines to cross-sell as complimentary items (saw blades, hardware, building materials and so on).

I also did a little research on price competition in this area, and Amazon were really keen on pricing in most of these subcategories – putting us at a distinct advantage over other online DIY retailers, since our range and prices would be Amazon’s.

To highlight this pricing advantage, I chose the domain bandwho.com. Rhymes with the name of the huge DIY retailer B&Q, and is like ‘B & Who?’ – as in, who are they? Our prices will have you forget about them.

I chose this for PR, mostly. If we can get under B&Q’s skin with this approach, and the similarity of our logo (below), then we may be able to drum-up some media interest in the conflict it creates – and media interest can equal high quality backlinks from credible online sources, just what you need to rank higher in the organic results.

But I didn’t want to rely solely on this potential media interest to make this project a success, so I also bought the domain cheapdrills.co.uk (after a little research on Google’s Keyword research tool to show me some good high volume, low competition terms in the industry).

From experience with niche sites, I know the keywords in your URL can have a huge impact on your rankings – I also chose the .co.uk suffix for this project, since we’ll be targeting just the UK audience, and it may help with rankings in this locale, more so than a .com suffix.

To double-down on the media approach, I also figured we could annoy the heck out of Sean Paul – of all people – by posting some funny memes across social media about his love of cheap drills.

This isn’t a random attack on Sean Paul – I figured his similar namesake song ‘Cheap Thrills’ with Sia, made it a perfect punchline (for those with an exceptionally childish sense of humour).

As for the actual site infrastructure, I built it using WordPress (my Udemy Course Fast Track Entrepreneur: Start an Online Business in 4 Weeks covers step-by-step how to setup and install WordPress on a domain, if you don’t know how to do this bit).

I then installed the ‘Kingdom’ theme and the ‘Woozone’ plugin – which allows you to directly import products from Amazon into your site, and runs on Woocommerce. I bought the theme and the plugin as a bundle for $70 from Code Canyon here.

Much of the development time was spent on the ‘insane import’ module of Woozone, drawing in over 5,000 related products and organising the menus to show meaningful categorisation of this vast catalogue.

Then it was a case of forging ahead with the promotion of the site to bring in the traffic.

I setup an Instagram account and immediately incorporated this on my ‘Followliker’ Instagram edition software – which auto-follows related accounts, auto-likes related images and so on, to gradually increase your following and awareness on Instagram without you having to spend every waking moment on it.

Next step was to setup some form of CPC advertising. I started with Adwords – and those with more affiliate marketing experience than me will immediately know right now, that was a mistake.

Google are super, super strict when it comes to affiliate sites.

I knew this when I signed-up, and I read through a version of their ‘bridge page’ policy which advised that you need to own the full checkout process, with the only exception being where visitors are channelled away to, say, PayPal, or any other payment processor, to complete their purchase with you.

Now, Woozone works in a way that you have a cart on your website, so customers can read about items, add them to their cart, and continue shopping – it’s not just a case of channeling traffic straight through to Amazon following a click on a product.

In this sense, I kind of felt there was an argument that Amazon are effectively like our payment processors, and only the very final stage of checking out is completed with them – just like it is with, say, PayPal checkout.

Google thought not.

They suspended my account, and the only other workaround I can fathom is to turn on Woozone’s dropshipping tool – where checkout is owned fully by you, and you take payment from the customer, but then you have to manually place the order on Amazon, on behalf of your customer – you effectively just apply a ‘tax’ ie your markup, to all Amazon items, and that’s how you make money with this approach.

Aside from my questioning of whether this would sit comfortably within Amazon’s own purchase terms, I just didn’t like the idea of having to bump-up the price to the customer in order to make money on the sale – it renders your platform non-competitive, you always lose on price competition to Amazon, and also the non-passive process of manually processing orders for customers – I then thought about having a module custom-built that would place these orders with Amazon in an automated fashion, but the pricing issue still wouldn’t be overcome.

So I have to stick with the affiliate model, and not transfer over to the dropship model.

Next idea: Bing ads

Bing are far less stringent in their approval process for Shopping ads – and I got approved here just today! So it’s too soon to report on any metrics or the performance of the ads – but I’m super-pleased I still have this avenue open to create traffic for my affiliate site.

NOTE: One important point I did notice with Bing, and this probably explains their leniency regarding affiliate/bridge sites, is that they themselves are affiliates of Amazon – so they’ve gone ahead and signed-up for an affiliate account, created a shopping feed to display on their own search engine platform (which, I’m guessing, will cover the entire Amazon catalogue of goods), and earn commissions from referrals.

I can imagine it’s a big money-spinner for them – but what it does mean for us smaller players is that you’ll always be competing with direct links from Amazon, and Amazon aren’t the guys with the ad spend budget – it’s Bing themselves. So don’t even think of trying to outrank the Amazon shopping listings you see on Bing.com – just accept that you’ll always be at least 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in the shopping result rankings, and appreciate the fact that you’re still allowed to market your affiliate site this way.

You’ll still win traffic – since your price will be just as sharp as the direct Amazon links – you’ll just have to accept that Bing will be taking the lion’s share of traffic for your items.

Now it’s simply a case of watching the metrics on the Bing campaign and our Amazon affiliate account, making sure these stack-up financially, and continuing to try to piss-off the biggest player in the industry and an International superstar.

With the Instagram marketing alone, I have seen around £12 of commissions already be earned – which is far from noteworthy, but proves that the revenue model works in principle – now we just need to crack the traffic challenge, and we should see that commission figure grow accordingly.

I’ll provide updates on this project as time goes by. Stay tuned!

Income generated: £12 (very early days – this was just in the first week of launch with no CPC advertising running)

So there you have it – my full passive income ideas challenge update.

I’ll be updating my blog over time to show any further progress I make with these revenue streams.

I’d love to hear about your own passive income projects – please share them below in the comments.

What is Fuck You Money

What is ‘Fuck You Money’? And Why Your Financial Goal Should be ‘Fuck You’

Fuck You Money is the level of security you need, in order for you to be able to tell anyone to ‘fuck you’ without it having a direct impact on your earning potential or what you want to do in life.

Granted, this rule is never absolute – there will always be people who you can’t, or indeed don’t want to, tell to ‘fuck you’.

Close friends and family should probably be excluded from this rule (with a few exceptions, depending on the circumstances) along with the taxman, police officers, and judges – but the premise remains firm.

Ultimate freedom is the ability to wake up every morning and tell the World to ‘fuck you’ – you’re doing what you want that day, and every day thereafter, and there’s nothing and noone that can stop you from doing that.

It’s probably explained best by John Goodman in the film ‘The gambler’:

As eloquent as ever.

Why work all the hours god sends, for big money, a big house, a garage full of fancy cars, when you’re still in a position where you HAVE to answer to someone, whether it be your boss, the bank manager, customers, clients, a regulatory body, whatever.

You’re still in a position where, if you don’t turn in to work, if you consistently avoid their calls, if you miss a meeting, or if you outright tell that important someone to ‘fuck you’ – your World as you know it will come tumbling down.

You have no power, you’re a puppet to someone else, maybe several people – and they ultimately still control your destiny.

To me, money in this scenario is worthless (unless you are investing it in something that can eventually earn you freedom from your current position of powerlessness). And be careful here, because a lot of ‘investments’ you make, can still rob you of the ultimate reward in life – freedom.

Money is only useful insofar as it can create freedom.

Despite what a lot of people may think, money is not the ultimate goal. Money is a facilitator to the ultimate goal.

Even seemingly wholly materialistic goals, like earning enough money to buy a Lamborghini, is based around freedom – the freedom to be able to buy a Lamborghini, should you wish.

This is freedom most people will never feel.

And by the way, if you’re ever fortunate enough to gain this freedom of choice – please choose to NOT buy the Lamborghini. Or I strongly suspect your feeling of freedom will be short-lived, as the payments, the depreciation, the fuel, the maintenance, the insurance, the fact you’ll still be stuck in that same traffic jam the guy in the Ford Fiesta is stuck in, the unwanted attention and jealousy, will soon bring about buyer’s remorse.

So what amount of money is ‘Fuck You Money’?

It’s not actually as much as you might think.

See freedom and income are not in any way relative to one another – you don’t need a great deal of income to achieve absolute freedom in your life.

Ask the top CEOs in the World how free their lives are – with constant scrutiny from the media, the public, boards of Directors, shareholders, and other stakeholders – and I guarantee, relative to the income they receive – even though it may be in the millions – they are earning less freedom per dollar or pound earned than most people.

Earning big bucks isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.

Unless you’re earning big bucks in ‘fuck you’ money.

But here’s the great thing – the exchange value from regular currency to GB’FUCKYOU’P is extraordinary – if you engineer your life, your income, and your responsibilities properly, each GB’FUCKYOU’P can be worth 10, 20, even 100 times more than any regular GBP you earn.

How much ‘fuck you money’ you need depends on you, and your personal goals and needs at this point in time – and ensuring you see these clearly.

I’m talking re-assessing every single outgoing you have – that car you have on finance, those big mortgage repayments, all those gifts you buy on special occasions like Christmas, those designer clothes you wear, all that alcohol you drink (just to damage your health and feel shitty the following day), the cigarettes you smoke, right down to the god-damn toilet paper you use. Assess every £ you are regularly spending, and whether it’s contributing towards earning your freedom, or whether it’s actually keeping you trapped.

And here’s the biggest key to releasing your freedom – leave your ego and your ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ mentality at the door.

Do you think you’re really driving around in that fancy car, wearing those designer jeans,  living in that obscenely huge house that’s well beyond necessity, purely for your own satisfaction, and it’s not in any way related to how you like to see yourself being perceived by others?

Fuck off. Get real.

Don’t live life for other people, and certainly don’t trade freedom to feed your ego. If it’s not absolutely necessary, or aligned with your own goals (peer pressure, competition, and ego aside), don’t do it. Don’t trade your hard earned GBP for all this bullshit, convert it to GB’FUCKYOU’P instead.

‘Fuck You’ is the only currency I want to be dealing in – because it’s the only currency that buys freedom. If I’m getting paid in anything but GB’FUCKYOU’P I’m channelling as much of that regular currency into something that will eventually be, or is, generating GB’FUCKYOU’P.

So what is ‘Fuck You Money’ and how can I earn some?

For me, the epitome of Fuck You Money is passive income.

In other words, income you earn each day whether you choose to get out of bed, or not.

Once you’ve done the above, and removed any outgoing that isn’t directed towards achieving your own goals, you should be directing every GBP saved in doing this exercise, into passive income sources that can in-turn supply you with ‘Fuck You Money’ – the holy grail.

I have a ‘passive income challenge‘ going on right now, and that article will help you to understand what passive income is, and provide some ideas for how you can start to generate your own passive income.

I’ll soon be posting an update on my progress with the passive income challenges that I set for myself, and I have some very interesting results to show – so stay tuned to my blog for this.

Passive Income Ideas for UK

Passive Income Ideas for UK Residents

There are a ton of passive income ideas for UK citizens – but which one generates the most income?

Well, first of all, we need to understand the true meaning of a passive income.

A passive income is an income that is generated without your ongoing involvement. In other words, unlike paid employment or managing a trading business, you don’t have to make a trade-off of your time in order to generate passive income.

It ticks along in the background and generates you the same amount of money, whether you decide to spend the day working, or spend it laid in bed.

Sounds great, right?

Well, it really is the holy grail – to earn money without having to make an ongoing effort to keep earning it.

But it’s not the easiest income stream to create.

In fact, it’s pretty darn difficult.

I’ve spent the past couple of years testing different passive income techniques, from niche sites, to investing, to Youtube videos, to online courses, to automated trading businesses.

And my success rate?

Pretty poor.

Although I will state at this point that my time is still consumed by our trading businesses and my approach to creating passive side incomes is very cut-throat.

I will not, and can not, pile more time and effort into these passive income attempts once they are initially created and launched. For me, it just goes against the concept – if you have to continually push something in order to make it work, it’s no longer passive. You have just created a job for yourself.

If it doesn’t work from the outset – I leave it alone.

It really is the opposite of what I feel is necessary to succeed in any other business. It’s the totally lazy approach, and the notion that you’ll see success right from the off.

If you were starting a regular trading business, or anything else for that matter, I’d be advising you the opposite –

‘Hey, keep your head up. Things never work out right away, you have to keep on consistently working hard, sometimes for decades, to see the results you want to see’.

But this is just why a passive income is so difficult to achieve – by its very nature, it goes against the requisites of (what I believe, at least) make for a successful business.

And it’s also the same reason this ‘holy grail’ maintains my interest – I have to crack it. It’s against all standard business advice and practice, and that just makes me want it even more (because, let’s be honest, the entrepreneurial struggle sucks – it really does).

I know it can be done, and I have some indicators of what may be a successful route if explored further.

My niche site pizzaovenhub.com that I created just over a year ago, still generates a measly £5 per month in advertising revenue.

The most views I’ve ever had on a Youtube video was 700,000 or so, and the copyright wasn’t owned by me so I couldn’t monetise it (I researched, after Youtube take their cut, you earn an average of around £1,000 per million views). Videos on which I own the copyright to, have up to 2,500 views at best.

My Udemy course ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur’, although it has a great number of students and reviews, hasn’t generated that much income after Udemy fees and promotional discounts (around £2,000 over the past 2 years).

And when it comes to investing, I’m really playing the long-game with this – using a lending platform called Funding Circle to earn a steady but respectable 7.2% net yield, and consistently pumping as much spare cash I have into this platform on a monthly basis.

The effect of compound interest (earning interest on interest payments) is easily felt with Funding Circle because they have an auto-reinvest and auto-bid function, so over time, this should become more and more impactful in generating a passive income. But that’s going to be way down the line. I’m talking a couple of decades away. So that one’s a slow burner – kind of like my plan E.

The most success I’ve seen thus far has been with automating processes in my existing trading businesses, but this kind of feels a little superfluous to share with readers on my blog because these businesses I have already spent up to a decade building, and reinvested hundreds of thousands of pounds in their infrastructure.

They’ve consumed a mountain of time, blood, sweat, tears, and cold hard cash to even get to the point where automation is a possibility.

I’m not putting anyone off going down this route – heck, thus far, I can’t really advocate anything less than a ‘bust-your-balls’ amount of effort to make something work to the point where you can support yourself with a half reasonable income. This is all I know. Right now, I don’t have the answer on how to ‘get rich quick’ with minimal effort – I wish I did.

But that’s kind of the point of this blog post.

I’m not giving up.

I want the holy grail of a healthy, sustainable, totally passive income – and I won’t stop until I find it.

Life’s too short to keep on trading time for money – my time is worth more than any amount of money. So to me, this is the only option. I have to find the answer.

Based on my own experiences of limited success with generating a passive income thus far, I’m going to lay down 5 different passive income ideas that I believe have the best chance of succeeding.

Then I’m going to start from scratch with each one, with a small figure – £100 startup capital for each of the 5 ideas. So it’s easily replicable for you guys reading this post.

And let me just reiterate at this point – when I say these are passive income ideas. I mean passive . . . for a lifetime.

Even the passive income king, Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income), isn’t really earning all of his income in a truly passive fashion – he has to constantly maintain his blog, his podcast, attend talks and media events. If you took a look at his daily schedule, I’m pretty sure it’s still rammed.

True, if Pat stepped back completely and retired right now, even after his blog becomes a dust-covered relic, he would probably still earn a respectable (truly passive) income for the rest of his days – but this guy has now become a Passive Income god!

He’s a true success story in the field of passive income and online business. An idol.

But not necessarily (as I’ve found) someone who you can easily follow in the footsteps of.

Successes on the scale of Pat’s are outliers. Very rare. Very hard to replicate.

What I want to offer is an entirely replicable solution, by anyone.

Will it take you to the heights of $150,000 per month in passive income like Pat Flynn? Probably not.

But it will be this:

  • Totally, 100% replicable by anyone reading this right now (with at least £100 to spare)
  • Totally passive once established
  • ‘Passively compoundable’ – yes, I just made that up – in other words, the income from them does not erode as time passes, it grows (without further time investment required) *Disclaimer: this, of course, only extends as far as the lifespan of the technology or platform you are using*
  • It will (eventually) provide enough passive income to live on (modestly, at least)

In a nutshell, it brings the crazy, seemingly unobtainable notion of earning an income for doing nothing, back into the reach of the masses.

These are realistic, pragmatic approaches to generating passive income that will, one day, generate you enough income to live on.

I’ll be documenting my own progress regularly with these 5 different passive income ideas for UK residents, so you can see how my own efforts are performing and which one of the 5 ideas is outperforming the rest.

So, here goes:

  1. Create Youtube Videos

If you develop a popular Youtube channel, the income can be huge. It really is one of the most lucrative passive income ideas for UK individuals.

Just check this one out:

I know. What the frig did I just watch?

But this lady generated over $3m a year in advertising revenue from her toy review videos.

You read that right – over $3m!

Seems toy reviews, kids cartoon videos, and gaming walkthroughs/commentating are the highest earners.

Provided you outsource the actual video production aspect, it can be 90% passive right from the outset.

I’ve taken to Upwork to launch a new project for someone to create me a kids cartoon video for £100, and, since it won’t cost me any extra and gives me an opportunity to approach this trial from 2 angles, I’ll be creating some other videos reviewing some toys.

Bear in-mind what i mentioned earlier regarding my income research on Youtube – on average it takes around 1 million video views to earn £1,000 after Youtube’s fees. So to achieve a respectable passive income in this field, you need to be hitting millions of views, not thousands.

These are big numbers, so research is going to be key to success here – understanding demand for certain content, and the Youtube SEO algorithms are going to be critical steps to take before even mapping out the specifics of the videos.

But just looking at the top-earners on Youtube gives you an indication of where the most demand lies – it just requires some thought on how you fit into these categories and don’t try to tackle the established players head-on here, because you’ll just be drowned-out of the rankings.

2. Become a Udemy Instructor

In all honesty, this one doesn’t excite me as much as the Youtube venture – the numbers are much more modest (typically instructors are earning between £0-1,000 per month – I was on the lower end of this spectrum with my first course, at around £100 per month), the audience (and therefore earning potential) is much smaller, and the platform is fairly saturated in most spaces (although the same could be said for Youtube).

But having said that, if you choose an ‘evergreen’ course subject ie something that isn’t a passing craze, and also one with a good balance of demand and lack of established competition, you can create a course that will dominate a niche category and generate a healthy passive income for years to come.

With me already being a Udemy instructor, this will be my second attempt at creating a course.

I already spent around £100 on the recording equipment, editing software, and backdrop, so i can’t spend any more on this one in order to keep the project on-budget.

I already have an idea of the niche I want to tackle having done some basic preliminary research, and will share more in future posts.

3. Become a Lender on Funding Circle

Perhaps the easiest one to set-up in terms of time invested, and the most predictable in terms of annual return.

Plus, this one sticks strictly to the rule of producing ‘passively compounding’ income – when you set the ‘autobid’ rule within your Funding Circle account, the system will automatically allocate your funds to various businesses and spread your lending risk, plus it will feed back any capital repayments and interest payments straight back into lending.

This means, you won’t be able to draw an income from this right away, but it does mean that your £100 starting capital will grow naturally and in the most predictable way of all these passive income ideas for UK residents.

For me, this method really hits the nail on the head when it comes to the definition of a truly passive income idea for UK people – the only downside is the time it takes to build a reasonable income from it (assuming you don’t have £500,000 or so of starting capital to throw at it).

In fact, the returns are so predictable, we can take the average annual return and work out exactly how much the investment will be worth in, say, 30 years.

The Calculator Site have a really handy compound interest calculator to make this really simple.

With just £100 starting capital, and no additional payments, at an average annual interest rate of 7.2% net, your total portfolio would be worth £861.54 in 30 years’ time.

Pretty depressing, right?

Absolutely.

There is a ‘breaking point’ when it comes to long-term investing like this, and it really happens around £150k – this is when your investment really starts to gather speed.

So unless you can start with this figure as your initial deposit (in which case, after 30 years you would have a portfolio worth almost £1.3m), then you really have to make regular monthly deposits to supplement your returns – at least until you reach this ‘breaking point’ where your investment can snowball into some more meaningful figures during your lifetime.

Making a £100 initial deposit, and £400 monthly deposits thereafter for 30 years, provides you with a total portfolio worth of £511k (and a half reasonable annual income thereafter of £35k). And if you can hold out doing this for just 10 more years, that becomes £1.19m (and a healthier annual income thereafter of £77k).

To me this illustrates the importance of two things with this passive income technique – starting early, and pumping as much spare cash into it as you can possibly afford (especially in the early days). Because the bigger the portfolio, the bigger the returns, the bigger effect that compound interest starts to have. It really is a snowball effect.

4. Trade Cryptocurrencies

More speculative than Funding Circle investing, but with a higher risk/reward profile, is cryptocurrency trading.

Another passive income idea for UK individuals.

RIght now, things have cooled off substantially, and we appear to be in a slow and steady decline right now.

But that’s not to say you shouldn’t step in – in fact, this is probably the perfect time to get involved.

There’s a mountain of opinions when it comes to crypto investing – with billionaires and successful investors divided in their views.

The ones who have a negative opinion of investing in crypto are claiming it to be the biggest ‘bubble’ of all time.

My view is quite simple – the success or failure of an investment in this sort of market is dictated by timing. Get in at the right time, and get out at the right time, and you’ll do extremely well. Do the opposite, and you’ll do extremely badly.

Understanding and predicting these timings is the hard/impossible part – but due to the volatile nature of crypto prices, there exists huge opportunity to make very abnormal returns on your capital, far more than you could earn in any conventional investment.

And true, the reverse could also be said – there exists huge risk in losing all of your capital.

And there lies the risk-reward profile.

Now, this can be as involving or as passive as you make it. You could buy your £100 of crypto and literally sit on it, or you can try to anticipate and catch the peaks and troughs.

With historical returns on crypto hitting 4,000% in just one year, there exists the potential to turn your £100 into £4k within 12 months. But similarly, the market could literally crash overnight and you lose it all.

For me, looking at those numbers, the risk profile seems very controlled in relation to the potential upside.

5. Digital Products 

My background and expertise lies in ecommerce, so I’m keen to put this to work – I just don’t want to create another inventory-holding business as this isn’t passive, and it’s pretty difficult to eke a good income from dropshipping alone nowadays.

So my attention in this regard is switched to digital products – they are infinitely scalable and easily automated.

I’m not 100% sure which direction to take this one just yet – I just know I would like to steer clear of the ‘app’ world. To me it just appears very over-saturated, with an app out there for every conceivable requirement.

I’m sure there will still be gaps in this space, so feel free to explore this in your own experiments – but the level of research required to find the right gap appears too burdensome to me.

The same can be said for the digital information space – there’s just so much amazing free content available on the net now, that it’s pretty difficult to sell information-based products.

Instead, I’ll be researching and exploring the gaming, software, and online tool spaces to try to find a gap.

My aim will be to outsource development to a competent developer via Upwork, and get them to create a very basic MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Something that does the job, and can be taken to market to assess initial demand, and can be built upon if initial response from the market is positive.

I’ll provide updates as I go along with this.

So there you have it! There are my 5 top passive income ideas for UK residents.

I’ll be updating you on my progress with each of these as time goes by, including income reports and more detail on how I get things going.

Please feel free to share your own thoughts and passive income ideas for UK people in the comments below, I’d love to hear them.