Saturday, September 20, 2014

Alternative stream of income..

Multiple streams of income has been preached to death in financial literature to boost your networth.

You can be a tutor on the side-lines, take free lance programming project, usher the audience in concerts, be a part-time property agent, insurance agent and also taxi-driver. The sky is the limit to what you can do.

Though I have to acknowledge those are unlikely to scale much as you are using time to exchange for money. It is good enough for paying your expenses while your earned income can be saved and invested.

Pouring your heart out into a business would be the most ideal as you could build it part-time till you feel you have enough traction to take the leap of faith and quit your paying job(the one that brings the bacon home) to run the business fulltime.

That is why the most interesting fascination I have currently is ONLINE MARKETING. The earned while you sleep dream painted by many online marketers. Your ability to generate content interesting to your target audience is the key to getting eyeballs. You don't need a large capital to start. All you need is a free blog like blogspot for a start and I am quite sure you will have a happy problem when you need to migrate out of blogspot (though i think it will take quite a lot of eyeballs to force blogspot to evict you). If you are a student without the capital to get monthly passive income from stocks, you will be surprised you can actually get $xxx monthly from setting up a blogspot, getting relevant content and setting up your ads and referrals links. Thus far, I am against the setting up of a website or sales landing page to promise people they can make $x,xxx or $xx,xxx monthly by selling high converting digital products (which usually ends up being another how to make $xx,xxxx online).

I have experimented with it and I am still not good with it thus far. Case in point, Google Ads and Amazon Ads brings me only the low $2xx combined monthly (it has been quite consistent the past one year). I am still unable to bring it to the next level as I have not committed enough effort into it. Taking it slow and easy and there's no hunger in me.. sob sob..

And being a cheapskate, I don't really want to pay thru' my noses for courses conducted in Singapore and I prefer to look for materials online by proven gurus who have shown their income to be consistent(based on good faith, there's no audited records of course).

It quite obvious after a while, everyone who seems successful are able to keep their website interesting with contents to be able to command a high eyeball traffic and then depend on the conversion rate to generate income thru' the sales of digital products, referrals fees, private product reviews/endorsement, etc etc. It's much like any other real world business where you have to do marketing and sales of  external/in-house product to reach your target audience and hopefully convert leads into sales.

A simpler but not easy way would be to do content aggregation like thefinance.sg or a news reporting website like temasekreview.net or ba-gua website like STOMP.sg

Below are the three recommended ones I have been reading whom I believe are worth their salt.



I am still learning, this is based on my experience and I might be wrong. Please do share about your experience.

P/S : Another new HNW entrant to the blogosphere? Do check out his website as he is invovled in internet startups. How cool is that! http://limdershing.blogspot.jp/. Starting to read his 1st blog on January 2013. LOL.. loos like my weekend is filled up.

9 comments:

Investopenly said...

Interesting post! Yes, multiple stream of income (online or offline) is the way to go (to me at least). I have some experience in Internet Marketing like affiliate marketing and ads placement etc but the experience is somewhat similar to you ie negligible at the moment.

Personally think that the wave now is one mobile marketing (app development or gaming etc..) and social media marketing will still be at force now.

Cheers!

Lim Der Shing said...

I have built an internet business before and invest in quite a few startups directly and via vc funds as lp. An Internet business is still a business. Sales, marketing, Cash flow, headcount, business planning etc are all part and parcel.

Those you read saying they make xxxx per mth doing nothing are selling their ebooks or online courses that are making the xxxx. It is a sad industry much like mlm where the few who make it make money selling to new entrants, you are much too savvy for this. Also can this be fulfilling?

My latest startup is in area of personal finance. It is called drwealth.com. Growing it to with an aim to be another regional useful web portal. Check it out. I have also written much about Internet business at http://limdershing.blogspot.com

Lim Der Shing said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wealth Journey said...

Cheers guys for sharing your thoughts.

Der Shing,
Yes, will check out your website. Calvin Yeo runs the operations and you are funding him? Nice site :) Though I am still a bit hesistant on putting the details of my portfolio online. Looking forward to more articles on how we can make more money ! :)

Richard,
Yup.. maybe have to read the master Der Shing's personal blog more. And keep on trying and pivoting till we find our niche?

Wealth Journey said...

Der Shing,

Yes, I understand the 3 links provided are selling you courses(No referral link from me). But I have learned quite a bit from their free contents on content creation, marketing and sales via the internet.

I have to agree with you the massive value creation lies in providing a service solving people's problem or fulfilling their needs.

Example we've seen recently of solving offline problems online. GrabTaxi - Finding a taxi in the physical world is hard, aggregate the demand and supply thru' your service and create instant value!

Hope I have the next big idea to pitch to you soon! :p

Lim Der Shing said...

Calvin is my cofounder for drwealth. We both like the idea and started it with another tech founder almost 1 year ago. Idea is to educate masses with right knowledge and to also provide great mobile and desktop tools to replace that spreadsheet we all have and do an even better job!

Any comments and help is always appreciated. Grab taxi is a proper internet business.

Internet business can be divided largely into saas (consumer or business), content/media (mass or niche), ecommerce, platform plays , social, search/aggregation, analytics.

Those pure buy my ebook and selling courses type is more suspect in my opinion. They are a very small subset under media/content and the entire culture is too much like mlm for my comfort.

Numbers said...

Yes, internet marketing or online marketing can generate quite a good form of passive income.


However, the right effort and effective marketing must be in place in order for the passive income to come in.


Similarly, the physical or digital products or services must be worth more than the value paid for, in order for good reviews, referrals and continuous marketing of that product/service to have good continuous sales.


You have identify one aspect of marketing, which is to find the demand for a problem, and provide the right solution that many others are looking for. So as long as the demand is there, and the solution continues to solve and improve on the problem, then a good form of income will be seen.

cookie said...

interesting post.

well said. all roads lead to rome.

thanks!

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