As a retiree, you’ll need a steady stream of income, but you probably won’t want to work that much. One solution to this possibly contradictory dilemma is to build and maintain a business capable of generating income passively – or at least, mostly passively.
But what exactly does this mean? How can it help you retire successfully? And how do you ensure your business continues generating income indefinitely?
A passive income business, as the name suggests, is any type of business or operation that allows you to make money without having to expend effort to make. Traditionally, people make money by exerting effort; they earn income in the form of wages, salaries, or profits derived from services rendered or activities pursued.
Passive income businesses, at least hypothetically, circumvent this need. Once established, they’re capable of continuing to generate income, without much, if any, effort on your part.
If this makes you suspicious, good. As we’ll see, there’s no such thing as a source of “truly” passive income, at least not in the purest sense. But there are some business opportunities that can generate mostly passive income for you in retirement.
These are just a handful of the options available to you:
In the eCommerce world, you aim to create a website that generates sales on your behalf. That could mean building a website that sells physical products directly, digital products directly, or physical products indirectly by marketing existing products and dropshipping them from another source. You’ll have to devise strategies for marketing, sales, and, perhaps most importantly, order fulfillment. But with a solidly supported order fulfillment strategy and enough marketing juice, you can sell just about anything. Once established, with a steady stream of traffic, you should be able to generate consistent sales every month. As long as you have the right technologies and services in place, you shouldn’t have to do much in the form of maintenance or adjustment.
You can also create digital products for sale and list them on already-established platforms like Amazon or eBay. If your digital product is evergreen and useful enough, it can continue generating sales for years, if not decades. For example, you could write a series of educational books on a topic you happen to be knowledgeable about, or you could create an entire digital course teaching people how to do something. As long as your digital product is created and desired, it can continue earning money for you in the future.
Another option is to start an affiliate marketing business. In this avenue, you’ll focus on creating content or attracting people to a central online location, like a website or a landing page, through some other means. Once you’ve hooked these people, you can pitch them various external products and services, earning a small commission for each sale you make on behalf of the external party. With big enough traffic streams, this can be highly lucrative – though it generally does require some ongoing effort in the form of new content........