How to Build Multiple Streams of Income

Many people ask about; how to build multiple streams of income. Well, in today’s financially challenging world, people need to see how they can diversify their income-earning streams. You may have a full-time job you are doing, and it may be paying you well, however, that doesn’t limit you from pursuing other streams of income. When you read many wealth management books and inspirational content, you find that we have a lot of potential for making money, but we never realize or take action to pursue the opportunities we have at hand.

If you have read books like the Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter and the 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, a New York Times best-selling author, you will most likely be obsessed with making extra income.

Most millionaires you find today have multiple streams of income- averagely seven income streams, so you can see why you also need to take that direction. You probably have celebrated one or two work anniversaries; however, you may not know what the future holds for you. 

Today, with the global COVID-19 crisis and the lockdowns, people are finding that they cannot manage to meet their financial obligations; especially those who didn’t create an emergency fund or cash cushion. The reason you would want to create multiple streams of income is to allow you to still make money if one income stream nosedives or dries up completely.

Having said that, let’s look at how to build multiple streams of income.

Consider Index Funds

If you want to invest in stock markets without actively involving yourself, you can try out index funds. They provide you with an opportunity to passively early extra money. For example, you can invest your funds in an index fund build on the S&P 500 Index. Your funds will be invested in the market, and you will not actively manage or work on the investment.

Someone will handle things like rebalancing your portfolio, selecting an investment, and deciding when to buy or sell individual companies, among other things. The index fund handles all these activities and the fund portfolio will be based on the makeup of the index. However, you can choose a fund built on any index you prefer.

There are index funds created for every market sector you can find - including precious metals, banking, energy, emerging markets, technology, and others. There are also index funds built on selected market sectors. When you decide to participate in a particular index fund, you contribute your money and that’s it – sit back and relax. You will be making money from your stock portfolio that is set on automatic pilot.

Make YouTube Videos

Earning from YouTube has been around for some time, but it’s only until recently it started growing rapidly. In the past, people would create videos and place them on YouTube, but they didn’t know that they could earn income from them.

Today, you can create a video about anything you can imagine – comedy, opinions, tutorials, movie reviews, music, and others. You then place the video on YouTube and add your Google AdSense account to those videos where Google overlays the videos with automatic ads. As viewers watch the views, they click the ads, and you earn money from AdSense.

What you need to do to succeed in building income on this kind of platform is to create compelling videos – videos that can go viral. You also want to promote the videos; you can share them on social media channels or send them to your network circles who share them with their friends. To help increase your earnings on YouTube videos, you can create many of them so that you have multiple sources of income.

Think of Emily Eddington, a former morning news anchor; she managed to receive over 66 million YouTube views and she has turned her passion, which is makeup, into success – she actually quit her full-time job. 

Do Affiliate Marketing

It has been there for a long time and many people have tried it, some succeed others fail – affiliate marketing. If you want to make passive income, you can try affiliate marketing. This is suitable for people who own blogs and active websites.

When you sign up with affiliate sites, you begin to promote products or services that you select. From the sales you make on those products, you are paid some percentage in the form of commission or a flat fee based on the amount of the completed sale.  While many people think that affiliate marketing is difficult to do, if you can manage to build targeted traffic on your blog or website where you promote the products, you are able to make good sales and hence get more commissions or fees.

Many affiliate companies want you to sell their products. It is paramount that you take some time to learn which products you can promote effectively and how likely you are to make sales. You can find the affiliate offers by contacting companies directly or by enrolling in dedicated sites like ClickBank or Rakuten Advertising.

Turn Your Photography Hobby into an Earning Machine

Do you love photography? If so, it is possible to turn it into a passive income stream. Platforms like iStockphoto and Shutterstock can offer you income-earning slots where you can sell your photos. You may get a flat fee or percentage for each photo sold.

Considering that a single photo can sell multiple times, you could have a cash flow source from that one photo. What you can do is to create your portfolio of photos and place them on one or multiple photo platforms. Now, you have a completely passive activity going on with your photos where they sell and sell and sell. The web platform where you place the photos handles all the technicalities and processes of the sales. 

Sell Products on the Internet

You can sell products on the internet and the possibilities are endless. Many people are doing it and they make a lot of money. You can sell anything – a service or a product. You may sell digital products like instructional videos, DVDs, software, eBooks, and other products. You may also manufacture and sell your product. It is also possible that you could do drop-shipping.

You can build a dedicated website where you promote the products or services. If you already have a blog or a website, you can promote the products there. You could also sell through platforms like ClickBank or sell on affiliate sites.

Probably you have a job that pays well, and you think that you cannot make that kind of money from selling a product online – this is retrogressive thinking. If you look at Steve Chou of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, you find that his wife left her full-time job to be a stay-at-home mom. Today, she had turned that to be a full-time job. While being a stay-at-home mom, Chou’s wife started an online business. The business grew to surpass her former salary and soon it expanded to earn her a six-figure income. You see, just like Chou’s wife, you can turn any opportunity into a goldmine.

Invest in Real Estate

Although this may not be precisely a form of passive income, it can offer you money as you continue pursuing other opportunities or your full-time job. It most often falls under the category of semi-passive income.

Investing in real estate requires some involvement; it’s an active venture where your input may be needed. That being said, once you purchase a property already rented, what you need to do is manage the property and ensure it keeps on performing.

Besides, there are expert property managers you can hire to manage your property on your behalf. This ensures that you spend your time on other core aspects and leave the task of managing the property to the professionals. The professionals take about 10 percent of the amount the property earns.

Since the real estate property managers take the managerial work, it means you don’t have to worry about finding tents, doing repairs, handling complaints of tenants, and other issues. The manager takes care of those things. Employing a manager to take the role of managing the property somewhat makes the investment more passive, however, it takes a bite of the cash flow streaming from the property – and that’s understandable.

Brandon Turner, a co-host on the famous BiggerPockets Podcast and a lively real estate investor says that the key to attaining success with rental properties is to buy smart. You need to realize that not every property can offer a good return or it can prove to be a passive income stream.

You need to analyze the market and see if there is potential for the estate to earn you money. When you get the analysis right and you invest or buy smart, you are able to get good returns.

Besides, investing in rental properties can provide you with the benefit of loan pay down. When you get a loan to purchase property, you find that each month, the tenants' payments or the rent you collect helps you pay off a certain amount of the loan. You use the money you collect from tenants to pay off the loan.

Here, you are not directly taking money from your pocket – you are using that of the tenants and this helps repay the loan without a hitch or it speeds up the repayment period. It’s not like purchasing a home that does not earn you any income. Once you finish paying off the mortgage, your cash flow increases dramatically and now your investments skyrockets to offer you more income. You have an investment that can help with your retirement financial needs.

Buy or Set Up a Blog

Many blogs are set up every year and some are abandoned by their owners soon after or later on. If you can purchase a blog that attracts a considerable amount of traffic and it has proven cash flow, it may provide you with passive income. However, you will need to invest some time in it.

A majority of blogs use AdSense to get a monthly revenue stream built on the ads Google places on the sites. You could also have affiliate programs that - through the website or blog - generate additional revenue. There are many ways you can monetize your blog so that it has multiple streams of income.

Alternatively, you can decide to set up your own blog where you build it slowly until you grow it to a point where it begins to draw huge traffic. Here, you can follow the same steps where you link it to your Google AdSense account so that Google can place ads there. You begin to earn from the click-throughs.

To grow your blog, you need to continue revamping it with new, quality, informative, and engaging content so that audiences love and share it. This will help you build a group of fans or people who love your content and would want to relate with you in many ways. The moment you start selling or promoting products and services on the blog or website, your audience can easily buy from the site.

A downside with creating your own blog is that it may take time before it becomes established, so you have to be patient and consistent.

Something to mention here is that, if you can purchase a blog or website and you bolster it with quality, fresh content, it can help raise your revenue. This can allow you to sell the blog or site more than what you bought it.

Create an Online Tutorial or Course

Many people have their area of expertise – they know something, a subject, or a particular topic too well. You can use your expertise to earn yourself passive income. For example, if you’re a carpenter, you need to realize that there are many people who want to involve themselves in DIY projects at home.

In fact, people consider do-it-yourself as a way of learning, keeping themselves busy to avoid bad habits, and recreating their body and mind. Do-it-yourself projects also help people save money – they don’t have to hire professionals to handle some simple tasks that they could do on their own.

So, as a carpenter, you can build tutorials that show people how to make or repair different items. For example, how you can make or repair a chair, a table, a cabinet, and other things. You can sell the tutorials in the form of an eBook on sites like Amazon. This way, you begin to earn passive income.

Also, you can start a blog where you publish content to help readers find you and begin to learn more about you as a carpenter. You can then lead those audiences to your Amazon page where they can purchase your product. The idea is to build trust and confidence with your audiences by engaging them constantly through content. This is called “personal branding.”  

There are many people selling lessons and tutorials online, and you can do that too. If you have a technical skill, don’t let it lie dormant in your mind, even if you utilize it in your normal job or business. See how you can diversify and begin to sell that knowledge to other people.

You will find that in the end, you gain a lot of reputation and recognition in your area of expertise. This also helps build your resume and portfolio – many customers begin to seek your services.

If you want to host an online course you created, you can place it on platforms such as Udemy. With millions of students on this platform, you can find some who want the lessons. When creating an online course, you need to add video lessons, a checklist for completing the steps that you recommend in the video lessons, audio files to allow people listen to the lessons while on the go, eBooks to supplement your lessons, and informative interviews with experts in your field or like-minded individuals.

Build an App

The business of apps is a lucrative one with many companies, organizations, corporate firms, and governments or even individuals seeking apps to help solve problems and streamline their processes. If you have coding knowledge, you can try to build apps that you can sell.

You can imagine how many people use smartphones today. In 2020, the global users of smartphones hit 3.5 billion translating to 45.4 percent of the global population who own a smartphone. With this number, people are downloading different kinds of apps – and the rate of downloads is crazy, why?

Apps make the lives of people easier. Think of the things you have done online with help of an app – you use apps to put together great pictures on your blog, you use apps to track your tasks, you use apps to monitor your health, you use apps to improve your sleep – name it all. Apps have become part of our lives because they make things easier.

The question you may have is; there are pretty many apps out there, so why would you attempt creating an app? With all the competition out there, does it make sense for you to build an app? Well, it makes sense, but you need to employ fresh, creative ideas – it will win the completion.

Try to imagine something unique and dwell your app around it. See that the app is able to solve people’s problems. The reason people are downloading or using apps is that they want to solve problems. Selling apps can bring you a promising passive income if you get it right.

If you don’t have coding skills, and you have an idea, you can hire a developer to do the coding for you. Although this may be expensive, it may allow your app to establish itself pretty quickly and begin selling fast. 

Conclusion

If you are wondering about how to build multiple streams of income, there are many ways you can build multiple streams of passive income and the sky is the limit. What you need is to focus on your idea and let it thrive. Do not handle multiple projects at a time. You can work on one, and when done, you go to the next. With time, you find that you have developed several streams of income.

Always ensure that you are passionate about what you’re doing and you have the courage, determination, and motivation. Utilize your time properly and ensure that you face criticisms positively. If you hit a dead-end, bounce back and begin walking. Don’t despair when you fail the first time, note down the mistakes and weaknesses and make them your building blocks to make your project a success.