Ok, the thing that really got me going about this was Tim Ferriss’ new book The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich. I won’t try to repeat the book here, I’ll just state that the book is about starting a business, and then automating it with the ultimate goal of making a living working something around 4 hours a week. It’s not about getting rich, it’s about making a living. His approach is that you live in a foreign land where one can live like a king on what would be a modest salary in the US.
The book is good in that it is empowering, and has a lot of useful resources. It’s also a bit optimistic. Especially in the part where he discusses start your company (he calls it a Muse) to start building the passive income. He stipulates several requirements for the product, all quite sensible, but he kind of glosses over how hard it is to make a successful product. Even a not very successful product. Even one that sells at all. But, for his method to work, you have to have something that you can sell. Even if you keep to the guidelines he gives, you’re talking about blowing something around $300 to $500 on each product getting to the moment of truth where you find out the thing is viable or not. I’m guessing an average person is going to go through 3 to 10 ideas before they hit something that really works. That’s a lot of money, at least for me it is.
My approach is going to be different.
I’ve got several other blogs, most of which have ads. I used Google Adsense for a while and once or twice made $20/month. Usually it was about $8. Not much, although it paid for the hosting. Then I found Text Link Ads and am up to about $70/month. Not bad - pays for the hosting, and some other stuff. Real professional bloggers will snicker a bit, but we have to remember Tim’s main point: Whatever you do, design it so it takes up as little of your time as possible.
I spend about 2 hours per month blogging. I’m not talking about fiddling, or tweaking - activities that are entertainment and not productive. I’m talking about actual writing and site maintenance. That’s $35/hour, and that’s not too bad. Most of that comes from one blog, with a smidge coming from two others. The professional bloggers making 10 or 100 times I do are most likely working many hours each day. It’s work you can do anywhere, but it’s still, well, work unless you love doing it.
My point here is that it can be quite hard to come up with a product that produces thousands of dollars of income per month, but it’s not very hard to come up with a blog that makes $10-$50 per month. Why try to come up with one giant income stream when many little ones may be easier to do? More work, but less risk and uncertainty.
So instead of creating one or two really successful businesses, my plan is to learn how to create micro businesses, each earning a little, quickly and with as little maintenance as possible. If you create a good article, and you get search engine traffic primarily, you don’t have to post every day or even every week. The traffic just comes. Over time, if you create enough articles, well the pennies add up.
But I don’t think blogging alone is going to do it - it would take about 50 blogs minimum to make it work, and that’s starting to get to be a lot of site. Especially when the software needs to be upgraded True, I could outsource that.
So I’ve been thinking and I finally decided what to try next. I’ve opened a t-shirt shop on one of the print on demand sites like CafePress.com, Printfection.com, Zazzle.com, etc. It’s basically zero investment if you want, but I added a domain ($20 through godaddy.com because I got the .net and .info as well) and I’m paying a guy in India (found on Guru.com) $75 to develop a logo. I think I may start an LLC ($130, but it will cover all of my sites and business activities) and perhaps a PO box ($50 per year). I suspect I will have to spend several hundred on advertising to get things rolling, and then several hundred more in print ads to get it really rolling. It may not work. But I will know before I spend even the $250 that Tim advocates for market testing, and even then the store can be reused with different designs. By the way, the designs can be made anywhere using The Gimp - an open source alternative to Photoshop.
Even in the niche I’ve chosen, competition is stiff. Since there are no barriers to entry everyone who can is starting a store, so it’s a marketing problem as much as a design problem. But the goal isn’t to get rich - if I can get a stead $50 to $250 per store (each store devoted to a different niche) then I’ll consider it a success. Then I not only have more passive income, but seed money for any really good ideas I come up with.
