a big list of real residual income streams

801: write an article or blog and stick an affiliate banner or adsense banner on it. (my examples: ants and aphids article, farrowing hut article)

802: later, try to think of an affiliate link thing to stick in there. (my examples: cast iron skillets article, light bulbs article)

803: write a bestselling book which is published by a reputable publisher that just sends you fat royalty checks every quarter

804: write an ebook and self pub (my example: the permaculture playing cards mashed into an ebook like thing)

804.1: sell your ebook on lots of online platforms. If your ebook is related to permaculture, you can sell it on the permies.com digital market (how to).

805: be a movie star of a huge movie and receive a fat royalty check every quarter

806: put something up on youtube (my examples: my youtube channel) - youtube used to pay more.

806.1: Make a bit of a short movie and charge a couple of bucks for it. Justin Rhodes came to my place and edited up an hour of video. 15 minutes he made free and 45 minutes he charged for access. You can see the results here.

806.1.1: Make lots of these and then offer one to all sorts of entities to leverage into email lists and stuff. This draws attention to all your other stuff. Justin did that for me!

807: create a massive business and hire a freakishly awesome and trustworthy person to run it (and hope it doesn't turn into an episode of "Murder She Wrote")

808: Get some huge amount of money and invest it wisely (note: I have zero advice on what "wisely" means here).

809: make music and put it up on music sites where folks can download it for a buck or two. (permies examples: jimmy pardo formidable vegetable)

810: make 300 podcasts on something awesome, like permaculture, and put them up as a big gob in our Digital Market. (my example: giant podcast gob)

811: go to some forum and write helpful answers. After a year, massage all of those answers into an ebook.

812: go to some forum and write helpful answers. After a year, massage those answers into a collection of monetized articles or blogs (my examples: chickens article, micro heaters article)

813: set up a website that is focused on selling something where you get a fat affiliate fee. Then do all the SEO junk to get it ranked well on google. (naturally, I suggest you do this for my stuff first!)

814: create a digital market so other people can sell the sort of stuff you think it cool. I set one up here. I take a 1% cut.

814.1: if the seller sets up an affiliate fee, use your resources to tell people about the product and harvest the affiliate fee. I use the advertising space on this site to tell people about products that are not mine, within my digital market, so I can harvest the affiliate fee.

815: every time something makes you angry, write a permaculture solution into a blog or permies.com post. After a year, massage all that into an ebook (my book has now sold more than 20,000 copies).

816: find a product on amazon or ebay and write some comparisons, complete with affiliate links.

817: find a product in our Digital Market with a 40% affiliate fee and do the same thing.

818: take hundreds of pictures and post the best pics on a stock photo site for money. Then post low res versions all over the internet, complete with a link to your stock photo stuff.

819: make worksheets for teachers

820: write a review of every book and every dvd and every site and every permaculture everything - complete with amazon/digital market affiliate links.

821: attend a permaculture convergence/conference/workshop and video all the stuff. Put 40 videos up on youtube.

822: attend a permaculture convergence/conference/workshop and video all the stuff. Put 4 videos up in the digital market (and four previews up on youtube). Here is my video of a permaculture design course.

823: read 20 articles on a topic and write your position referencing those 20 articles. Put an adsense banner on it for now. Optimize the income later.

824: give one thousand things away for free. Videos, articles, podcasts, ebooks ... it is so weird, but after a thousand it is as if you now have mystery income, good luck, money offers for stuff, and all sorts of money things that you could never have predicted before. It's a bit like magic.

825: if you already have a web site, set up an automated way for people to advertise on it - like this.

826: do what jack spirko does with MSB. I am trying to do this with PIE. The idea is people pay a monthly amount to get premium access to stuff.

827: make drawings of oodles of things on sketchup and sell the sketchup plus pdf and other documents on the permies.com digital market. Like Davin's stuff.

828: put your art up at deviant art

829: make art for tshirts and other moichendize and put them up at a site that will give you money for every shirt/thing sold.

830: hold an online event where you record everything and then later make the all the recordings available for sale. Like the eat your dirt summit

831: make a movie and then put it up on the permies.com digital market. (A DVD is not a residual income stream, but a streaming version of it in the digital market is.) (my example: world domination gardening 3-DVD set)

832: take your ebook creations that you have put on the permies.com digital market and now put them on amazon kindle and a few other ebook sites.

833: find a book that you love that is self published. Get permission from the author to make a crappy audiobook (complete with a strong recommendation to buy the physical book at each chapter break; especially good if the book has pictures and tables that will not convey into an audio format and the message between chapters points that out). Read the book into an mp3 file. Put this up on the permies.com digital market.


834: write a post here on permies that is good, helpful and well within the publishing standards, that includes an affiliate link (hopefully to my stuff, but it could be to anything)

835: after a lot of posts to permies, change your signature to include an affiliate link (hopefully to my stuff, but it could be to anything)

836: build stuff and then sell the plans. Like all the E&E rocket mass heater plans or davin's solar dehydrator plans

837: add an affiliate link in the description of your youtube video. And maybe in a comment on your video. And maybe point out the link in the content of the video.


850: be creative. Come up with a dozen things not on this list.

851: try 100 things. 2 will work out and you never know in advance which 2.


852: I had to update several items on this list that used to refer to a digital product service called "scubbly" but scubbly went out of business. I couldn't find anything I liked as much, so I made my own, here on permies.com. Scubbly charged 9% (with paypal fees) and I charge 1% (plus paypal fees). But now a bunch of people post their stuff here and I clear 1% of every sale. Pretty sweet. Further, I advertise some of the products and harvest their affiliate coin! So I guess the thing I am suggesting is to host digital content.


What else can be added to this list?

Did I duplicate anything? It seems like I was editing and re-editing this for hours.

I don't want this thread to discuss this stuff - that's for hundreds of threads in this forum. This thread is for making the most complete list of residual income stream stuff we can think of.

Do non internet examples count?

For instance, plant lots of wildlife attracting plants on your land. Hunters pay a fee to hunt your land, year after year, since the plants and animals regenerate themselves.

Does renting something out count?

Popularize a concept. License the merchandising rights (the right to make tangible items with the logo/character/slogan) to someone else.

Amazon's ACX (ACX.com) is a platform for authors to find narrators for their books.

Or, it's a place for aspiring narrators to find books to narrate, where the author is already promoting the work themselves, and like scubbly, an intermediary is paying you. Amazon/Audible sells the audiobook and gives 60% to the author and 40% to the narrator, without anybody billing anybody.

Royalties last seven years.

Mike Cantrell wrote:Amazon's ACX (ACX.com) is a platform for authors to find narrators for their books.

Or, it's a place for aspiring narrators to find books to narrate, where the author is already promoting the work themselves, and like scubbly, an intermediary is paying you. Amazon/Audible sells the audiobook and gives 60% to the author and 40% to the narrator, without anybody billing anybody.

Royalties last seven years.

Thanks for this, Mike! In one of my previous careers I was a voiceover artist. Now I mostly read bedtime stories and give sermons but this is an interesting opportunity. My previous work was on an hourly basis, good pay but all the residuals went to the company I worked for.

I can imagine at least 20 topics/opportunities I'd like to write about/work on. I need to scheme ways to fit the time in somewhere. I bet it can be done, even with kids and farm.

If a person publishes lots of posts on permies, does that person retain the rights to the material to then republish? Or is that what the massaging is about?

I see I have to learn how to 'massage' my forum answers into a book or e-book Of course I can illustrate that book too ... But will it sell?

Matu Collins wrote:
If a person publishes lots of posts on permies, does that person retain the rights to the material to then republish?

Technically, everything that gets published to permies.com is the property of me. And I use this super power from time-to-time to give bad guys a kick in the nuts.

But people have many times taken what they, themselves, have put here and massaged it into something else and I think that is awesome.

So this is one of those weird things where I need to diligently be a bear about copyright here, and nurture what I think is good use of the stuff here.

If somebody has written stuff here and then that author wants to make it into a book, you go for it! You don't even need to ask my permission. Of course, if you use other people's stuff .... stuff that you did not write .... that's a different story. We would have to talk about that.

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:I see I have to learn how to 'massage' my forum answers into a book or e-book Of course I can illustrate that book too ... But will it sell?

It will definitely not sell if you don't make the book.

I create worksheets and sell them on Teachers Pay Teachers.

So far, I have created 54 worksheets, and haven't done any promoting. I made $20 in November and didn't add a single item to my store. Of course, sales are a roller coaster, based on the time of year (your sales will come screeching to a halt during summer vacation and Christmas break). I would imagine that, since September, I have about 10 hours of work into my store.

People who promote the heck out of their stores can make a solid, 5-figure income. Or, you can leave your store sit there and let the money slowly trickle in. It would be cool to see some Permie-themed worksheets out there!

And, you don't actually have to be a teacher to sell (I am not a licensed teacher, but I do work in schools).

what an amazing concept: all levels! sharing and brainstorming it with my children who are creative and tech savvy, its our christmas break project...
my residual income stream idea? use your spawn to implement these ideas....

For years I was moderating fitness forum and writing fitness and "how to loose weight" short articles, about 300 in total. One day I took all these articles to my own website, and I have automated their publication - an article is published every Tuesday, stays on the website for 3 months, then goes to the archive, and then when all other articles went through the cycle, it is being republished. No work involved. There is a small add at the bottom of the page, something like adsense. In 9 years it has made $300, a bit less than I pay for the domain name and web server hosting. I keep it alive because it contains valuable free advice that can actually save someone's life. If it helped one person and saved him/her from diabetes, or heart stroke, or whatever, it is worth keeping. I have never figured out how to make this website to make any more money. I could probably make more by making one or more ebooks out of these articles, publishing them somewhere and by getting rid of my own domain and web space. Actually, maybe it is a time to do so, 9 years of observation is probaly enough to make a final conclusion

Richard Gorny wrote:/an article is published every Tuesday, stays on the website for 3 months, then goes to the archive, and then when all other articles went through the cycle, it is being republished.

If you're just talking about how the articles are displayed via your content management system it's one thing. But if the URLs to the articles are changing -- and especially if your archives are not web-visible -- your system is non-optimal from a revenue perspective. Persistent URLs that can accrue inbound links and traffic over many years ought to do quite a bit better from a traffic and revenue perspective.

Dan Boone wrote:

Richard Gorny wrote:/an article is published every Tuesday, stays on the website for 3 months, then goes to the archive, and then when all other articles went through the cycle, it is being republished.

If you're just talking about how the articles are displayed via your content management system it's one thing. But if the URLs to the articles are changing -- and especially if your archives are not web-visible -- your system is non-optimal from a revenue perspective. Persistent URLs that can accrue inbound links and traffic over many years ought to do quite a bit better from a traffic and revenue perspective.

URL's are not changing, they stay the same, but when the article is in the archive, it is not accessible for viewers and search engines. I created that site without residual income in mind, actually I did not plan to have any income from it. But time is passing by, I pay for the domain and web space once a year, my interests have shifted enormously since then, it is therefore time to at least have this money I pay for the hosting back. I might try to publish all articles and never hide them again and see what happens.

Richard Gorny wrote: I might try to publish all articles and never hide them again and see what happens.

I don't know how successful this will be in absolute money terms but I'm pretty sure you'll find it works quite a bit better than the current regime of intermittent publishing.

paul wheaton wrote:Did I duplicate anything? It seems like I was editing and re-editing this for hours.

811 and 812 are dups

Conrad Farmer wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:Did I duplicate anything? It seems like I was editing and re-editing this for hours.

811 and 812 are dups

Look again ....

paul wheaton wrote:

Conrad Farmer wrote:

paul wheaton wrote:Did I duplicate anything? It seems like I was editing and re-editing this for hours.

811 and 812 are dups

Look again ....

looked and :chagrined: - indeed they are - it's all in the >very< fine details!

Are there 851 items on this list, or are there only 51? All I see is numbers 801 through 851, and would love to see a lot more if they are somewhere.

Design a knitting pattern. Post it to Ravelry, charging an industry average fee for each download. Develop a clientele and do it again.

Write blog posts/forum posts with referral links to Bing Rewards and Swagbucks. Bing gives you $1.50 per referral for up to 5 people (at this time... this number goes up and down), and Swagbucks gives you 10% of your referral's earnings for life. You do have to log in to redeem your cash, so it's not 100% passive, but every penny counts!

Plus, if you use Bing as your search engine instead of Google, you get points for searching. Again, not entirely passive, but if you are doing internet searches anyway, might as well get paid for them!

G Duke wrote:Are there 851 items on this list, or are there only 51? All I see is numbers 801 through 851, and would love to see a lot more if they are somewhere.

G, that's a thing that Paul frequently does, to start numbering his list somewhere arbitrarily large. I believe it serves to express something along the lines of, "There are many, many items on this list, so many I can't name them all. I want to put numbers on them so that we can refer to them by number, but I don't want anybody to think that I've named them all."

Mike Cantrell wrote:

G Duke wrote:Are there 851 items on this list, or are there only 51? All I see is numbers 801 through 851, and would love to see a lot more if they are somewhere.

G, that's a thing that Paul frequently does, to start numbering his list somewhere arbitrarily large. I believe it serves to express something along the lines of, "There are many, many items on this list, so many I can't name them all. I want to put numbers on them so that we can refer to them by number, but I don't want anybody to think that I've named them all."

Too often, people start a list at 1. And then somebody replies with a new list that starts at 1. And then somebody addresses point number 1 - but which number 1 is it?

There are a lot of good ideas here, but since I don't have experience doing any of these things, it is going to take me a lot of research and trial and error to figure out how to implement these ideas. I would quickly pay $2.95 for someone to tell me how they did it. Soooooo....

860 - Write an eBook providing a step by step instructions and all necessary links for writing and selling an eBook. How do you promote your book?

861 - Write an eBook providing step by step instructions and all necessary links for posting and selling your photos online.

862 - Write and eBook on how to make money with youtube, and provide all necessary links.

863 - Write and eBook on how to create a blog. What software/hosting sites are the latest and easiest to use? How do you post ads? How do you link to other blogs. How do you promote it?

864 - Write an eBook on how to create an online store, and provide links and instructions how to set one up. How do you promote it?

865 - Write an eBook on how to make and sell a DVD.

I bet people that have done these things could write a short ebook in a day or two of how they did it. Then....

870 - Once a year, spend a few hours updating all your ebooks with updated info on the latest and greatest software, web sites, practices, and most important of all: updated URL links for everything that has changed. Many people that bought your first book will buy the updated edition for $2.95 just to make sure they are not missing out on any revenue by not being on the hottest, latest and greatest site. Become the expert in one little residual income stream, so we all don't have to.

871 - Put all these ebooks on Paul's site so we can find them all in one place.   It doesn't matter if someone already wrote a book about your subject. Tailor it to Permies. Or not. I would rather buy something Paul recommends than spend time evaluating all the books out there to figure out who's book is best for selling photos online, for example.

Perhaps we could have some synergy here. I need an editor. Anyone need a photographer or videographer? Perhaps a residual income cottage industry may spring up at Ant Villiage so we can spend the bulk of our time doing other things besides make money. Cottage industry? or would that be called a Wofati industry?

BTW, Paul, I would love to do a documentary or reality series on the Ant Village Challenge. I can move out there sometime in February.

Perhaps we could have some synergy here. I need an editor. Anyone need a photographer or videographer? Perhaps a residual income cottage industry may spring up at Ant Villiage so we can spend the bulk of our time doing other things besides make money.

Try my brand new forum called "agile work"

https://permies.com/forums/f-199/agile-work

Paul, I would love to do a documentary or reality series on the ant village Challenge. I can move out there sometime in February.

I think that sounds like a great idea.

Send email to jocelyn at richsoil.com to make arrangements. If I remember correctly, you will be coming here as a natural building candidate.

paul wheaton wrote:

Perhaps we could have some synergy here. I need an editor. Anyone need a photographer or videographer? Perhaps a residual income cottage industry may spring up at Ant Villiage so we can spend the bulk of our time doing other things besides make money.

Try my brand new forum called "agile work"

https://permies.com/forums/f-199/agile-work

Paul, I would love to do a documentary or reality series on the ant village Challenge. I can move out there sometime in February.

I think that sounds like a great idea.

Send email to jocelyn at richsoil.com to make arrangements. If I remember correctly, you will be coming here as a natural building candidate.

Yes.

Email sent. Thanks!

This is only relevant for the graphic artists.

Brief, Skippable Preface: I resigned from a job-which-shall-remain-nameless in the entertainment industry in the city (Portland, OR), cashed everything out and moved to 8 acres with my wife to raise our children up on our little permie homestead. A good-to-know (and painfully learned) lesson is that "High End Graphic Designer" is essentially useless in rural areas. Because everyone out here has a brother's-wife's-third-cousin-in-highschool who "does web sites". I'll skip a long story and share the relevant tidbit.

The Relevant Bit: I began working with small farms on their branding and packaging. To keep their costs down, but still produce good work, we agreed that I'd use their projects to build complex Photoshop mockup tools to sell on the side. Never using their artwork to sell of course. So the final presentation of their work was done in a nice little mockup for free which would've normally cost them an extra $400-600 to build. Makes them look professional beyond their budget and makes me look like a super-duper nice, incredible guy... so full of win.

Examples of what I'm talking about: http://graphicriver.net/user/nice_incredible/portfolio?ref=nice_incredible (browse the site to find other artists doing similar things)

This has done a couple of things.
1. It's allowed me to build a reputation for honesty and for putting in extra effort into every project. I actually DO give a damn and I love building relationships with and helping out local people.
2. I've now been able to pay my phone bill at least for the last few months.

While it's not a lot of money, I'm hopeful and I've several more tools in the works now.

So if you're a graphic designer, you can sell all sorts of digital thingies online at sites like:
http://market.envato.com (photoshop files, dev code, web packages, 3D files, audio clips, etc) This is where I sell my goodies.
http://www.istockphoto.com (to sell your photos)
https://creativemarket.com (photoshop files, vector files, logo kits, etc)

Worth noting for the not-so-technically-inclined artists: If you're not skilled with software, but still have awesome hand-drawn elements that could be used by others, it's still work considering. Designers are always looking for new, interesting hand-drawn textures and elements. I know I've built up a collection of hundreds over the last 15+ years. It's actually a little embarassing now that I think about it.

Anyway... that's my suggestion.

Just wanted to bring this up to the top, to remind people that there are ways to bring in a little bit of extra money, while you're working hard at building your permaculture homesteads, or whatever it is you're building.

So many great ideas here, and all it takes is a little ingenuity. I think that this list is meant to fuel the imagination and get the ol' creative juices flowing to think up more ideas. So, if you don't see anything on this list that appeals to you, or fits into your skill set, let's try to think of some more ideas.

I don't have any ideas to add yet, but I'm working on it . . . I'm also working on my website - which should be up within the month - and will be adding all of the affiliate links I can find that are for good, useful, permaculturey stuff. Baby steps.

Probably one of the most powerful residual income producers is -- the franchise. Most will think McDonalds or Subway. But one does not have to be that fancy to have a franchise op. If there is some thing you make as a sideline item on the homestead it is probably a candidate to be franchised. Your personal reach for your product is limited to your area but franchise your effort and it goes national at an organic rate. They come to you for the training, you get some free labor, show them the tooling needed etc. They pay you the franchisor say $100/yr or whatever. Rinse, repeat. 50 little agreements like that, its $5k in your pocket you did not have before for something you are already doing.

The meaning of a 'residual income' is laid out here.  Basically, it is something that you set up and then walk away from and it still trickles in money. These are the types of things that are great for people who want to spend time working on their farms or other projects, and can still count on a little bit of money coming from multiple residual income streams. Please take a look at Paul's original thread above, and see what he means by 'residual income'.

Those of us looking to set up residual income streams are seeking ways to free up time while still having money trickling in. Setting up affiliate links on your website, using Adwords, writing a book and then having royalties come in over the next few years - things like that.

I'll be setting up my website soon, and intend to use as many things as possible on the site to bring in residual income - without making it look like crap.

Incase you didn't know Ebay are doing comission on referrals now (how long did it take them to realise this was a good idea?!). Which is great because you don't have to immediately go for Amazon if you don't gel with thier 'overly efficient' business practices. Also a lot of small sellers like myself are not always on Amazon selling stuff like this :

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?ff3=4&toolid=11800&pub=5575262299&campid=5338022167&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fitm%2F201760566880%3FssPageName%3DSTRK%3AMESELX%3AIT%26_trksid%3Dp3984.m1555.l2649

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/710-53481-19255-0/1?ff3=4&toolid=11800&pub=5575262299&campid=5338022167&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.co.uk%2Fitm%2F201760566881%3FssPageName%3DSTRK%3AMESELX%3AIT%26_trksid%3Dp3984.m1555.l2649

You can go here to sign up:

https://partnernetwork.ebay.com/

Thanks, Henry! That's just the kind of thing we're looking for. Very cool.

Tracy Wandling wrote:Thanks, Henry! That's just the kind of thing we're looking for. Very cool.

Thats quite alright it should be quite useful for a lot people I am suprised they arent advertising it more. Should be useful for referals on second hand stuff e.g. an article about how good old cast iron pans are.