List of business models

Hey everyone! Xavier here from Houston. While putting together this week's list of problems that startup can solve I compiled this other list of business models that a startup can pursue from a couple of articles and thought it can be useful to you guys so here it is:

1. Advertising

The advertising business model has been around a long time and has become more sophisticated as the world has transitioned from print to online. The fundamentals of the model revolve around creating content that people want to read or watch and then displaying advertising to your readers or viewers.

In an advertising business model, you have to satisfy two customer groups: your readers or viewers, and your advertisers. Your readers may or may not be paying you, but your advertisers certainly are.An advertising business model is sometimes combined with a crowdsourcing model where you get your content for free from users instead of paying content creators to develop content.

Examples: CBS, The New York Times, YouTube

2. Affiliate

The affiliate business model is related to the advertising business model but has some specific differences. Most frequently found online, the affiliate model uses links embedded in content instead of visual advertisements that are easily identifiable.

For example, if you run a book review website, you could embed affiliate links to Amazon within your reviews that allow people to buy the book you are reviewing. Amazon will pay you a small commission for every sale that you refer to them.

Examples: TheWireCutter.com, TopTenReviews.com

3. Brokerage

Brokerage businesses connect buyers and sellers and help facilitate a transaction. They charge a fee for each transaction to either the buyer or the seller and sometimes both.

One of the most common brokerage businesses is a real estate agency, but there are many other types of brokerages such as freight brokers and brokers who help construction companies find buyers for dirt that they excavate from new foundations.

Examples: ReMax, RoadRunner Transportation Systems

4. Concierge/customization

Some businesses take existing products or services and add a custom element to the transaction that makes every sale unique for the given customer.

For example, think of custom travel agents who book trips and experiences for wealthy clients. You can also find customization happening at a larger scale with products like Nike’s custom sneakers.

Examples: NIKEiD, Journy

5. Crowdsourcing

If you can bring together a large number of people to contribute content to your site, then you’re crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing business models are most frequently paired with advertising models to generate revenue, but there are many other iterations of the model. Threadless, for example, lets designers submit t-shirt designs and gives the designers a percentage of sales.

Companies that are trying to solve difficult problems often publish their problems openly for anyone to try and solve. Successful solutions get rewards and the company can then grow their business. The key to a successful crowdsourcing business is providing the right rewards to entice the “crowd” while also enabling you to build a viable business.

Examples: Threadless, YouTube, P&G Connect and Develop, Cuusoo

6. Disintermediation

If you want to make and sell something in stores, you typically work through a series of middlemen to get your product from the factory to the store shelf.

Disintermediation is when you sidestep everyone in the supply chain and sell directly to consumers, allowing you to potentially lower costs to your customers and have a direct relationship them as well.

Examples: Casper, Dell

7. Fractionalization

Instead of selling an entire product, you can sell just part of that product with a fractionalization business model.

One of the best examples of this business model is timeshares, where a group of people owns only a portion of a vacation home, enabling them to use it for a certain number of weeks every year.

Examples: Disney Vacation Club, NetJets

8. Franchise

Franchising is common in the restaurant industry, but you’ll also find it in all sorts of service industries from cleaning businesses to staffing agencies.

In a franchise business model, you are selling the recipe for starting and running a successful business to someone else. You’re often also selling access to a national brand and support services that help the new franchise owner get up and running. In effect, you’re selling access to a successful business model that you’ve developed.

Examples: Ace Hardware, McDonald’s, Allstate

9. Freemium

With a freemium business model, you’re giving away part of your product or service for free and charging for premium features or services.

Freemium isn’t the same as a free trial where customers only get access to a product or service for a limited period of time. Instead, freemium models allow for unlimited use of basic features for free and only charge customers who want access to more advanced functionality. For more on the freemium model (and other pricing models popular with SaaS businesses), see this article.

Examples: MailChimp, Evernote, LinkedIn

10. Leasing

Leasing might seem similar to fractionalization, but they are actually very different. In fractionalization, you are selling perpetual access to part of something. Leasing, on the other hand, is like renting. At the end of a lease agreement, a customer needs to return the product that they were renting from you.

Leasing is most commonly used for high-priced products where customers may not be able to afford a full purchase but could instead afford to rent the product for a while.

Examples: Cars, DirectCapital

11. Low-touch

With a low-touch business model, companies lower their prices by providing fewer services. Some of the best examples of this type of business model are budget airlines and furniture sellers like IKEA. In both of these cases, the low-touch business model means that customers need to either purchase additional services or do some things themselves in order to keep costs down.

Examples: IKEA, Ryan Air

12. Marketplace

Marketplaces allow sellers to list items for sale and provide customers with easy tools for connecting to sellers.

The marketplace business model can generate revenue from a variety of sources including fees to the buyer or the seller for a successful transaction, additional services for helping advertise seller’s products, and insurance so buyers have peace of mind. The marketplace model has been used for both products and services.

Examples: eBay, Airbnb

13. Pay-as-you-go

Instead of pre-purchasing a certain amount of something, such as electricity or cell phone minutes, customers get charged for actual usage at the end of a billing period. The pay-as-you-go model is most common in home utilities, but it has been applied to things like printer ink.

Examples: Water companies, HP Instant Ink

14. Razor blade

The razor blade business model is named after the product that essentially invented the model: sell a durable product below cost to increase volume sales of a high-margin, disposable component of that product.

This is why razor blade companies practically give away the razor handle, assuming that you’ll continue to buy a large volume of blades over the long term. The goal is to tie a customer into a system, ensuring that there are many additional, ongoing purchases over time.

Examples: Gillette, Inkjet printers, Xbox, Amazon’s Kindle

15. Reverse razor blade

Flipping the razor blade model around, you can offer a high-margin product and promote sales of a low-margin companion product.

Similar to the razor blade model, customers are often choosing to join an ecosystem of products. But, unlike the razor blade model, the initial purchase is the big sale where a company makes most of its money. The add-ons are just there to keep customers using the initially expensive product.

Examples: Apple’s iPod & iTunes, and now MacBooks & Pages, Numbers, and Keynote

16. Reverse auction

A reverse auction business model turns auctions upside down and has sellers present their lowest prices to buyers. Buyers then have the option to choose the lowest price presented to them.

You can see reverse auctions in action when contractors bid to do work on a construction project. You also see reverse auctions anytime you shop for a mortgage or other type of loan.

Examples: Priceline.com, LendingTree

17. Subscription

Subscription business models are becoming more and more common. In this business model, consumers get charged a subscription fee to get access to a service.

While magazine and newspaper subscriptions have been around for a long time, the model has now spread to software and online services and is even showing up in service industries.

Examples: Netflix, Salesforce, Comcast

18. API | Data

The API business model startups serve the emerging developer economy, typically monetizing via a subscription, SaaS like model based on API usage, in other cases monetizing via transaction fees if processing currency. ****

Examples: Stripe and Twilio.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all business models that exist—but, hopefully, it gets you thinking about how you might structure your business.

31 Passive Income Ideas To Get You Off The Hamster Wheel

Many people imagine life after passive income as laying on a beach all day without a care in the world. The real point of earning passive income is not to sit around on your butt all day. It’s to free up your time to do more fulfilling ventures.

Having passive income streams means freedom. True financial independence. An escape from the 9-to-5  job. There are dozens of ways to generate passive income. Here are our favorite 31.

Passive Income: What it is and Why You Want It

There is a lot of chatter in the personal finance world about passive income, why you need it and how great it is. But what is it and why is it such a topic of conversation?
Passive income is when you continue to get paid after the work is done. This includes royalties from books, movies, or songs and also revenue that comes from real estate investments or business investments where you don’t have to be present to earn it.
Some passive income ideas take a degree of upfront work to earn, like writing an e-book and some don’t take any effort at all, such as investing with a robo advisor.
Pursuing some of your passive income ideas can also speed your path to financial freedom.

How Much Can You Earn?

If you read a few stories about passive income ideas, you might be under the impression that you can start a blog or write an e-book and two weeks later you will be raking in $20,000 a week. Sorry, it doesn’t usually work that way. Creating multiple income sources is definitely not a short-term strategy.

While some people make a great living from one form of passive income, it’s more common that you will have small amounts from a few different sources coming in.Choose a few things that sound interesting to you and try them out. Try to choose a few that do require some work as an e-commerce site and some that don’t like buying dividend-yielding stocks.
Something will emerge that either you enjoy the most or is making the most money. Focus on that thing. Put some time and effort into it. We all hear stories about blogs making thousands of dollars a month but what we don’t know is how much time and effort went into that blog before it was able to break even, never mind make money.

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Finding passive income ideas with this list

Each suggestion is ranked by how much effort you need to put in upfront before you might start seeing some money come in. 1 is the least effort, and 5 is the most.
Remember, usually just one of these is not going to be the million-dollar answer. You should try out some of the low effort passive income ideas and one or two of the higher effort ones and see which work best for you.

High-Interest Checking & Savings Accounts

This one is a quick and easy win. Plenty of online savings and checking accounts are available to people who want a little more bang for their buck.
If you’re looking for a low-risk, high interest-earning cash account, Betterment Everyday Cash Reserve, currently offers a 1.85% APY(most savings accounts average a 0.10% APY). Grow your rainy-day fund with no fees.
Schwab and Ally are two other high-quality companies offering competitive rates.

Investing

Investing is the ultimate and most accessible form of passive income. You can undoubtedly devote lots of time to researching companies and markets, but you don’t have to do that to invest.

Robo Advisors: Effort 1

Betterment: Betterment has been our go-to suggestion for years. There is no minimum to invest, the fees are low, between 0.25-0.40%, and you don’t have to know anything about money or investing to get started. Betterment offers automatic rebalancing and tax-loss harvesting.
To make things even easier, you can set up automatic deposits from your checking or savings account into your Betterment account. We did an extensive review of Betterment and also compared it to other robo advisors.
Personal Capital: Personal Capital has a minimum that is out of reach for many of us, $100,000. The fees they charge are also higher than some fellow robo advisors at 0.49-0.89%. Even though the minimum is high, we still want to include Personal Capital for the free tools they offer.
Personal Capital allows you track your investments and help you to monitor your budget. And the more information you have, the smarter your investment decisions will be. You can use Personal Capital to track the performance of your investments across all of your accounts.
They also have a 401k fee analyzer. We’ve talked in the past about how even seemingly small fees can eat into your retirement accounts. As low as 1% can eat up a whopping 28% of your returns over the course of 37 years!
The tool will show the impact of fees on your 401k over time. Armed with that information, you can move your money to an account with lower fees, like Vanguard which charges just 0.20% and has a record of excellent performance.
We did a full review of Personal Capital and a review of their 401k fee analyzer because we feel it’s so important.
Blooom: Blooom is like Betterment but for your 401k, 403b or TSP. Chances are the funds in your account are loaded with fees and that should scare you because even 1% in fees can eat 25% of your returns over 30 years.
Not only will they slash your fees so you keep more for retirement, they’ll also rebalance your portfolio based on your age and provide open-ended fiduciary grade advice.
Want to know if you should refinance your mortgage? Ask them. Should your grandma invest in Bitcoin? No, but still, you can ask them. Plus, they will give your retirement accounts a free analysis so if you’re of the DIY type you can simply take their advice and go implement it yourself, for free.
Acorns: Acorns is a great way to start investing and building wealth. As it turns out, Acorns will pay you $5 to start investing with them for as little as $1. That’s a 500% return, plus it’s probably time you started investing for your future. They even have features like round-up and found money that allows you to get free money from places you already shop at.
 
Wealthfront: Wealthfront is the best for students and small-start investors. They let you invest your first $5,000 free. There is nothing that even comes close at the free level. Wealthfront is not only easy to use but you can borrow against your investments as well.
Vanguard: Vanguard has a minimum of $50,000 and a fee of 0.3%. Rebalancing is done automatically once every quarter and tax loss harvesting is done on a client-by-client basis. We included Vanguard because clients who invest between $50,000-$500,000 have access to a team of financial advisors. Those with accounts over $500,000 will have a dedicated advisor.
If you’re looking for a place to start, these are what we think are the best vanguard funds.  We also did an episode on what Vanguard is all about.

Dividend Investing: Effort 1

When you own stock in a company directly or through a fund you may receive dividends. A dividend is a distribution of a portion of a company’s profits. They are decided by the board of directors and can be issued as cash payments, like shares of stock or other property. It’s an opportunity for a company to reward shareholder loyalty.
The amount you receive depends on how much stock you own and how much profit there was to divide. Investors, mainly retired investors, like the steady income that dividend stocks provide and also like the option of reinvesting dividends to buy more shares of stock.
A great place to start investing in dividend stocks is M1 Finance. Not only does the platform enable investors to create diversified portfolios and access a variety of financial tools, but it’s also offered completely free to individual investors. You can read our full review of M1 Finance here.
You can find dividend stocks using Google Finance Stock Screener which is free to use. Set the search criteria for the P/E Ratio, and Dividend yield (shown as a percentage) criteria.
You can set minimum and maximum values; in the dividend yield box, set it between 2 and 100. This will search for stocks that pay dividends worth between 2-100% of the current stock price.
For the P/E box, set the values between 0-18. This will show stocks with a current price between 0 and 18 times more than the company earns in a year.
After you set the criteria, you will see a table showing the details of stocks that fall into it. You can click on Div yield (%) to sort by highest dividend yield. Now you have a good list to work with.
The S&P 500 has a fund called The S&P 500 Aristocrat Fund that has over the last five years had returns of 17.56%.

Real Estate

Real estate is one of the best passive income strategies. It has a significant place in the world of passive income but a lot of people just think of it regarding rental property, and that is out of reach for many. But the truth is, you can start investing in real estate with as little as $500.

Rental Property: Effort 3-5

The difficulty level depends on how involved you want to be. If you ‘re going to be a hands-on landlord and take care of everything from finding a tenant to fixing a clogged sink, or flip houses – that is a 5. But there are much more laissez-faire options.
Roofstock: Roofstock is a turnkey real estate marketplace for single-family homes. The properties listed are independently screened, appraised, and certified, giving investors the complete picture of the home they are buying. Some homes even have tenants already in place so the investor can cash-flow from day one. We did a full review.

Crowdfunded Real Estate: Effort 2

Real estate investing used to be seen as the preserve of the wealthy but crowdfunded real estate sites want to bring it to the public at large.
PeerStreet: PeerStreet is a marketplace to invest in high quality private real estate loans. The minimum investment is just $1,000, but you must be an accredited investor. You can set parameters to customize your investment. Investments made with Peer Street are a real estate loan and not an investment in the actual real estate.

REITS: Effort 1

A REIT is a real estate investment trust. It’s a company that owns or produces income-producing real estate. Think of a REIT as a mutual fund for real estate investing. You can invest in real estate the same way you can invest in any other industry, by buying stock.
When you own stock in a REIT, you earn a share of the profit produced by that real estate investment. It’s a way to invest in real estate without the hassle of being a property owner.
Fundrise: Fundrise allows individuals to invest in commercial real estate online through an eREIT. Their crowdsourcing model sets them apart from a traditional REIT allowing the average investor to participate in deals for as little as $500 with lower fees than typical open market REITs. Read our review here.

Online Businesses that are Scalable aka Residual Income

Start a Blog: Effort 3

We wrote this article to make money, and the way to do that is by providing value to your readers which drives traffic to your site and then monetizing it with affiliate links. Remember, the more niche your website and topics are, the better. When you’re building for residual income, the less competition the better.
If we go back to our discus aquarium example, you can provide value by writing updated information. The number 2 result on Google is three years old. You can make affiliate marketing income by linking to Amazon to all of the products you write about on the site.
Part of providing value is building trust. Don’t link to things that aren’t of good quality or people won’t trust your recommendations. The other part of making an audience is consistency. It matters less how often you post than how consistently. If you only have time to do one post a month, that post should come out on the same date and time each month.
An excellent way to stay consistent is to write several posts before you release the blog. That means if life gets in the way and you don’t have time, you have a backlog of material you can consistently publish.
We highly recommend starting with HostGator since you can get started for $2.75 so the risk is extremely minimal.

Learn How to Start a Blog That Earns over $400k a year

How to Monetize: Affiliate marketing works well when you discuss products on your blog. For our fish tank blog, we would link to all the things you need to buy for an aquarium and then when people click on that link and buy that item (and other items they purchase with it with some exceptions) you get a percentage of the purchase. Amazon Associates is the best-known affiliate marketing program, but there are others like Impact Radius, ShareASale, Commission Junction, ClickBank, and Rakuten too.
Google Adsense pays to post ads on your blog. There are two ways to make money with Adsense; impressions which give you money for every 1,000 page views and clicks which provide you with money when a visitor to your site clicks on a displayed ad.
You can sell the information to your readers. If you write a travel site, for example, you could write a series of city guides and charge people to download them.
You can design courses and charge for access to those. In fact, plenty of bloggers sell classes on how to make money blogging. There are numerous ways to earn money online, but monetizing your site with the above ideas are some of the best.

Write a Guide or Online Course: Effort 3

The best vacation guide I had for any trip was not a book but a free site a friend recommended to me; Tom’s Guide to Paris. Tom wasn’t a travel writer he is just an American ex-pat living in Paris and knew the city well. I would happily have paid for the guide he wrote for free.
If you know anything well, a place, how to fix something, how to make something, how to do something, you can write a guide for it. You can sell your guide as an e-book, offer it as a download for a fee on your site or reach out to bloggers with similar content and ask if they will offer it as a paid download on their website (for a price of course).
If you are looking to make a course, Teachable is an awesome place to host it. They’ve done all the hard work of running the course website for you, all you need to do is make something awesome and share it with people.
Another great place to host a course is Udemy, they also have a built-in audience which could help in selling your course.

E-Commerce: Effort 2

The level of difficulty depends on what you’re selling. If you are making things yourself, it’s harder than re-selling already existing items. Either way, E-commerce sites have made it easier than ever to make money selling items online.
Shopify: Selling stuff is a great way to make extra money whether you sell things you make or re-sell stuff you buy. If you want to build an online store, Shopify makes it easy. They have ready-made templates, so you don’t have to spend time designing your store.
They also have a lot of tools to help you do things like create coupons and promotions, process payments, handle returns, and share your store on sites like eBay, Google Shopping, Facebook, and several price comparison sites like Nextag, Bizrate, and PriceGrabber.
It goes without saying that Shopify is the platform of choice for drop shippers.

Online Arbitrage: Effort 3

Arbitrage is defined as, “The simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset to profit from a difference in the price.” It’s a fancy way of saying, buy low and sell high. This type of selling isn’t simultaneous, but the definition still fits.
Amazon: Forty percent of Amazon sales come from third-party sellers – merchandise stored in Amazon’s warehouses. Earn money from what’s already selling on Amazon. It will show you what types of products are doing well.
Choose a category and then Best Sellers. Monitor best sellers for a few days or even a few weeks to help make your decision. Within those items, choose some things you have some familiarity with.
Some people find whole sellers and re-sell their products but this method can tie up a lot of your money, and unless you find a relatively unknown one or negotiate an exclusive contract with them, there is too much competition to make it worthwhile.
Much better to trawl thrift shops, post-holiday clearance sales, and estate and garage sales which can be terrific places to buy a lot of merchandise cheap. We wrote a detailed article on the process.
eBay: Some things sell better and for more on eBay than Amazon. If you have a “one of a kind” item, your grandmother’s antique lamp brought over from the old country, for example, eBay will be better.
They also accept some things that Amazon doesn’t sell, like used clothes and some used baby items. eBay is even better for large pieces, like cars and furniture. It’s more work to list things on eBay and more time consuming than to sell on Amazon though. We interviewed Jordan Malik about this.

YouTube Channel: Effort 5

We’re in YouTube’s golden years, growth is insane and it’s still on the new side. There aren’t nearly as many videos as articles so it’s easier to find an audience. Also, videos are much harder to make which means less competition.

E-Book: Effort 4

This is another place to find a niche, and you’ll do better writing some non-fiction like a how-to or a book on some aspect of fitness or wellness. This is not the format to try to make a splash with your “great American novel.”
Ebooks don’t have to be terribly long either, so you don’t have to write an opus to make some money. There are several places you can publish including Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Booktango, and Lulu. The essential services on most of the publishing sites are free, and you can pay for premium services like marketing and editing.

Audio Book: Effort 4

Doing an audiobook is more complicated than an e-book but you’ve already done the work of the e-book so why not get it out there in another format. You don’t have to have all of the specialized equipment to do it yourself; outsource it to someone else on a site like Upwork or Guru.
You can use AudioBook Creation Exchange to create and sell your audiobook.

Stuff You Already Do

Spending: Effort 1

Rewards and Points Cards: There is a ton of competition among credit cards, and one of the ways they try to entice new customers is a sign-up bonus. Some cards will give you as much as $150 back in the form of statement credits when you spend a certain amount of money on the card within a set time frame.
Do not spend money you wouldn’t ordinarily spend to get the bonus, or you aren’t making money.
Cash Back Cards: Cashback cards give you a small percentage back for every dollar you charge to the card. Some give back on only specific categories like groceries or gas, and some offer cash back on all purchases.

Eating Out: Effort 1

Seated: Probably part of the reason you need $100 fast is that you spend so damn much money going out to eat. That’s why you need Seated. This is probably the best thing on this list. It sounds too good to be true, but I know it works because Andrew and I both use it.
It’s an App that you use to book restaurant reservations. Every time you complete a reservation, you get a gift code for $20-$50 for Amazon, Uber, or Starbucks. Amazing! The rewards are available within 24 hours of your completed reservation. We exclusively use this to eat out as it often reduces the bill by 10-20% for us.

Driving: Effort 2

Uber: The hourly pay after expenses varies from city to city, but you can expect to make around $10 an hour. In larger cities, it will often be much more and in smaller cities, sometimes a little less.
The appeal of Uber is that you can set your schedule and there is no commitment. You can work your regular job and make your $100 in just a few hours on a weekend or some evenings.

Shopping: Effort 1

Earny: When you shop online, you should be comparing prices and looking for the best deal. It’s so easy to compare prices using Google Shop that there is no excuse not to. But even if you do your research and buy something at the lowest price, that might only be the lowest price at that moment.
If you buy something and the price goes down within a specific time frame, Earny works to get a refund of the difference.
Ebates: This is a site that gives you cashback when you shop online. It’s not a shopping portal but an affiliate of more than 2,000 stores including Amazon, Macy’s, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Each store shows what percentage cashback you get when you shop with them.
Your money is paid out four times a year to your Pay Pal account or sent by check.
Swagbucks: When you join Swagbucks you can get cashback when you buy online from more than 1,500 retailers including places you probably already shop like Amazon, Target, and Starbucks. You earn points for each dollar you spend and also get exclusive coupons and deals exclusive to Swagbucks shoppers.
Also, you can earn points when you use the Swagbucks Yahoo search engine, and when you watch exclusive videos, Swagbucks has put together. You can redeem your points for gift cards or get cash back through PayPal.
Ebates: This is a site that gives you cashback when you shop online. It’s not a shopping portal but an affiliate of more than 2,000 stores including Amazon, Macy’s, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Each store shows what percentage cashback you get when you shop with them.
Your money is paid out four times a year to your Pay Pal account or sent by check.

Rent it Out

You can make money by renting out lots of things.

Rent a Room: Effort 2

A lot of places are cracking down on renting out an entire house or apartment, but there aren’t restrictions on renting out a room in your home. You can do this on sites like Airbnb if you don’t want a full-time roommate or Roommate Finder if you do.

Rent Your House: Effort 3

Airbnb: If you live in a desirable place, a big city, a charming hamlet, the chances are that someone would like to stay in your home for a few days. And they’ll pay you! Airbnb connects those with space to rent to those looking for a place to stay. We wrote an article on the process.
Rent Like a Champion: Do you live near a college campus, famous golf course, race track, or other venues where major sporting events are held? You can rent your home out to people attending those events through Rent Like a Champion.
You set the price and availability of your rental. Most rentals are from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, and the site says the average host earns $1,100 per weekend. The company provides up to $1,000,000 in insurance coverage which acts as your primary insurance policy for the time your home is rented out.
The policy covers liability, structural damage, and damage to items and property. You are paid via direct deposit 5-6 business days after the guests check out. The site currently has listings in 25 cities in the US.

Rent Your Stuff: Effort 2

Peer Renters: Are you one of those people who decides to start a new hobby, buys all the stuff you need to partake in that pastime, do it once and then realize you hate it, and now you’re stuck with all this expensive stuff?
Or maybe you do use your stuff, but you probably aren’t using it all the time. You can rent out things like your camping gear, sports equipment, camera equipment, and tons of other stuff to people who had more sense than you and didn’t buy them, at Peer Renters.

Storage Facility: Effort 3

If there is one thing Americans have a lot of, it’s crap in their houses, garages, and sheds. And even that isn’t enough room for all the stuff we buy, so we need more storage space. There is almost no maintenance for storage units, and they don’t require the same level of management as a rental property.
The units are self-serve. People let themselves in and out of their units. If they don’t pay the rent, the stuff is sold off, and the unit rented to someone else. You can peruse storage facilities for sale at LoopNet.
If you don’t have the money to buy or build a facility, you can invest in a REIT that specializes in them like Public Storage or ExtraSpace Storage Inc.

Lend Money

Peer to Peer Lending: Effort 2

Banks don’t lend money out of the kindness of their hearts. They do it because it’s profitable. You can get in on some of that action through peer to peer lending. Peer to peer lending matches those who need to borrow money with those who have money to lend.
The benefit for the borrowers is that they often don’t qualify for traditional loans from banks or credit unions. For the lenders, the interest they get on the loans can be higher than that of more conventional investments, sometimes averaging above 10%.
Lending Club: Lending Club brokers deals for amortized loans and these types of loans favor lenders because they receive a higher portion of interest earlier in the loan which means the lenders doesn’t care so much if the borrower pays the loan off early. Andrew did a full review of Lending Club and shared his investment strategy.
Credible: Upgrade is similar to Lending Club but has higher standards for borrowers. Borrowers must have a credit score of 640 or higher, and while there are no set requirements for income level, the average borrower makes $86,400.
Borrowers are “graded” based on things like credit score and debt-to-income ratio. The grade is what determines both the interest rate and the origination fee and is the criteria lenders look at when deciding whom to loan to.

Buy a Small Business

Americans spend an average of five hours watching TV every day. Use a few of those hours to make some money while you’re at it.

Buy a Blog: Effort 3

Flippa: You can also buy an existing blog that is already making money. People sell successful blogs for all sorts of reasons; they’re tired of doing it, they no longer have time to do it, it’s not making enough money, or your offer was too good to refuse.
It takes some research to find a blog worth buying though, kind of like choosing the right rental property. There are some minimum criteria that should be met before you delve further.
The blog should be at least 12 months old and get at least 10,000 visits a month with at least half those coming from search engines (meaning the site’s SEO is pretty good), and it should be under-monetized meaning the current owner isn’t fully exploiting the potential.
You can then choose to take over the blog yourself or make an offer to keep the founder on as a writer and perhaps the face of the blog too while you collect the income generated. You can peruse sites for sale at Flippa, and some can be had for just a few dollars.

Buy an Existing Business: Effort 3

The barrier to buying an online business is much lower than purchasing a brick and mortar business. They can be had much more cheaply, and there aren’t a lot of any physical assets to deal with, and there isn’t much overhead.
You can find online businesses for sale on sites like BizBuySell.

Buy Royalties: Effort 2

Had no idea this was a thing! Music ownership is managed via royalties. Having ownership of those rights means the holder earns money on the earnings of that music. Royalty rights are not affected by financial markets and provide a steady stream of passive income.
You can bid on royalties on the site Royalty Exchange.

Buy and Sell Domain Names: Effort 3

Internet domain names can be valuable! That’s why famous people rush to trademark their children’s names because if someone is going to pimp out a baby, it’s gonna be Beyonce and Jay Z and not some internet nerd.
There is some luck involved in choosing a good domain name to buy, but there are also ways to research what might be a good one. You want to look for hot keywords and buy a name that in the future, a business would want to buy. You can purchase domain names at Flippa. We interviewed Adam Dicker about this process.

Brick and Mortar Businesses

The right brick and mortar business can be a good investment, but there are much more overhead and more moving parts. Therefore much more research has to be done than you needed to invest in an online business.

Invest in an Existing Business: Effort 3

Starting or buying a business indeed isn’t passive, but you can invest in the business as a silent partner. For some of us, this is harder than it sounds. When you agree to become a silent partner, you have to stay silent which can be hard when it’s your money on the line, and you think things should be done differently.
You can search sites like Angel Investors Network for additional revenue stream opportunities.

Pyramid Schemes

A pyramid scheme is a form of investment where each person involved recruits others to join. Money made by the new members funnels up to the older members. Herbalife and Amway call themselves multi-level marketing companies but both have been accused of being pyramid schemes.
There are a lot of lazy people who don’t want to get real jobs but want to pretend to have a career. These are the kinds of people you can recruit for your very own pyramid scheme.

Start One: Effort 3

Decide on a product to sell. There are lots of fat people who want to be thin but who don’t want to eat less and move more, so some kind of magical weight loss product like a shake or a body wrap are two good ideas.
Make all kinds of crazy claims about your product, with regulatory agencies gutted, who’s going to stop you? This shake will help you lose ten pounds overnight! This wrap will eliminate cellulite in just two weeks!
It helps if you are good looking, fit, and charismatic. Even very dumb people will sometimes have a moment of credulity, so you need to be able to overcome that with your charm. Now you have to recruit stupid people for your scheme.
Where do you find them? Anywhere and everywhere.
Set a minimum purchasing requirement for your product. If people want to get in on this once in a lifetime opportunity, they must pony up $X. Let them know that while this product is guaranteed to sell itself, the real way to make money is to recruit others. Not only will they make more money, but they’ll get to be someone’s boss!
They go out and rope their equally dumb family and friends into this, and you sit back and watch the money roll in.

Join One: Effort 2

Admittedly, starting a pyramid scheme is a lot of work. Much less work just to join an existing one. You need the same skills listed above, good-looking, charismatic, but you don’t have to develop a product, just get dummies to sell it for you.
You won’t want these dullards living with you or even near you in your new haven so if it were me; I’d buy a piece of property whose roads flood, get snowed in a lot, etc., throw some used trailers on it and store them there. Probably still an upgrade from how they were living so you can feel good about that!

Financial Independence

Not all of us are going to get rich from our jobs. Soon some of us may not have jobs given that so many are set to be eliminated through automation. If we want to achieve a level of financial independence, we are going to have to start earning passive income.
This list should give you a few passive income ideas. Pick one and get started. But put some effort into it. We did a month-long series on starting an online business that will earn $1,000 a month within a year. Front load the work or the investment now so you will have a stream of passive income within a few years.
If you want even more information check out Passive Income on Reddit and the Passive Income Wikipedia page. Some of the best passive income ideas are found on sites like these.

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How to Make Money with the Amazon Associates Program

It’s no secret that Amazon is a pioneer in ebooks and expanding opportunities for indie authors. But Amazon also led the way in online affiliate marketing. In 1996, Amazon was a small online book retailer run from Jeff Bezos’ garage. With a limited marketing budget, Amazon decided to tap into readers’ love of books to help spread the word. Instead of having an initial outlay of money to buy advertising, Amazon paid people a commission when they referred buying customers to Amazon. This commission was paid after the customer bought, eliminating upfront marketing costs.

When the Amazon Associates Program launched in 1998, there weren’t many easy, affordable ways for budding Internet entrepreneurs to make money online. Amazon's affiliate program changed that. The only problem was that making any significant income as an Amazon affiliate required selling a ton of books. Fortunately, as Amazon has expanded its product line, the ability to make income from Amazon has become easier.

Amazon still has a fairly low payout compared to other affiliate programs (4% to 8.5%, depending on the product and sales volume), but with a vast product line, huge customer base, and credibility, odds are that you can find something to promote and make money.

Like any other home-based money-making scheme, earning an income with Amazon requires research, work, and marketing. Here are some tips for maximizing the Amazon Associates Program.

Pros of Becoming an Amazon Affiliate

There are several great reasons to join the Amazon Associates program, including:

• Amazon is a highly visited, well-known name that people use and trust every day.
• It's free to join. 
• There are no traffic thresholds or other metrics you need to be accepted into the program. 
• There are tons and tons of products you can promote.
• Amazon has many tools to help you sell specific items or a category of items.
• There is a good reporting system so you know what's getting clicks and what's selling.
• You can receive direct deposit payments into your bank account.
• Amazon offers good customer service to its buyers, so you reduce the risk of having your visitors get mad at you if they have a problem with the product. 
• Even if your visitor doesn't buy the product you referred, if they buy something on that visit, you earn a commission.

Cons of the Amazon Associates Program

Nothing is ever perfect, including the Amazon affiliate program. Here are a few downsides:

• The commission rate is relatively low compared to other affiliate programs, 6-10% depending on the items. It offers flat-rate for the bounty programs, such as $15 for business account sign-ups, $3 for Prime referrals, and $5 for Audible referrals.
• Their cookies only last 24-hours. That means if your referral doesn't buy within 24 hours, you won't get credit. (However, if the product is added to their cart, the cookie lasts 90 days.)
• You're not allowed to send Amazon affiliate links in emails. That includes blog posts that get sent as an email. Since email is an excellent way to send great offers to your readers, this rule is particularly disappointing.
• If you have a U.S. site and are promoting products in the Amazon U.S. store, you won't get credit for referring someone who ends up buying the product from outside the country (i.e. Amazon UK).
• Payment options are only through direct deposit, check, or Amazon gift card. There's no PayPal option.
• Minimum payout is $100, which isn't that much if you make lots of sales, but a lot of you're only earning a few dollars a month.

Ways to Promote Your Amazon Affiliate Links

Here are different ways you can promote your Amazon links:

Blogging

Blogging is probably the most common way affiliates make money with the Amazon Associates program. Some bloggers have a general topic site and use a variety of affiliate programs and other monetization options. Other bloggers have a niche site, zeroing in on select products that the site covers. Either way, making money with Amazon Associates on a blog can be done by:

1. Writing content for your blog or website about picking or buying a product available on Amazon. Now more than ever, people go online to research their buying options. If you're a mom blogger, you can write an article on picking a low-cost vacuum with a link to your top choice or several links to your top choices. A food blogger can link to cooking tools. A photography site can link to cameras and other photography equipment.
2. Writing reviews of new products. Again, people want to know about items before they invest money in them, especially if they're new and there isn't a lot of information available. 
3. Writing about best-sellers. You can use the best-sellers listed on Amazon, or if you have an affiliate sales history with Amazon, check your stats to see what has sold best in your blog's community.
4. Promoting special offers on the blog. This works well if you have a daily deal blog. This step requires that you watch Amazon for special promotions on products that fit in your website's topic area.

Social Media

You can use social media to share your blog content with affiliate links, or you can directly share your affiliate links. Note, that you should give an indication that the link is an affiliate link when you post to be transparent and not annoy your followers. People don't want to be sold to all the time, so posting affiliate links should be interspersed with non-affiliate and non-sales posts.

YouTube Videos

You can offer much of the same types of content on video as you do on a blog, such as reviews. The advantage of video for generating income is that you can give tutorials, tours, and other visual content that better help potential buyers decide whether to buy the items or not.

Lead Magnet and Email

Many successful affiliate marketers have a basic two-page website and an email marketing system that does their affiliate promotions on autopilot to make passive income. One page is a landing page that promotes a lead magnet to entice people to subscribe to the email. Once subscribed, the visitor is sent to the second page, which often has information about an affiliate product.

The email delivers the lead magnet, as well as a series of other emails that provide helpful tips and information, as well as promotions for affiliate products.

Add Amazon Offers to Your Existing Business

You can promote Amazon products as part of your other business offerings to create an additional income stream. Whether you sell a product or service, chances are there are products and services your customers and clients can benefit from on Amazon. For example, if you're a business coach that has found increased productivity with a Bullet Journal, you can promote dotted-page notebooks.

Getting Set Up as an Amazon Affiliate

Getting started with the Amazon Associates program is free and easy. Here's how:

1. Signing up by visiting Amazon and fill in the forms.
2. Be sure to read the rules. For example, it's against Amazon Associates policy to include Amazon affiliate links in an email. 
3. Determine the product(s) you want to promote. Amazon allows you to search based on keywords, ​ISBNs (for books), and product numbers.
4. Decide how you’re going to promote the products you choose. Amazon provides ad scripts that you can run on a blog or website.
5. Build traffic. All affiliate income does best with a large, steady stream of targeted traffic. There are many easy and affordable ways to get people to visit your blog or website.
6. Make product recommendations fit with your website topic. If you blog about surviving zombies, don't have a link to tulip ​bulbs unless tulips repel zombies.
7. Choose products carefully. Don't promote something you wouldn't buy or don't like just to make money. It will backfire and cause you to lose credibility with your website visitors. People are more likely to buy products you personally recommend. If you don't have experience with the product, be sure to check out reviews to see what other people's experience with it is.
8. Include multiple links and linkable photos in your content. Web readers can be blind to ads. They're more likely to click links and photos within an informative article.
9. If you’re a blogger, don't forget to include a disclosure that the link is an affiliate link per the FTC blog disclosure guidelines and GDPR.  While it's the law in the U.S., it's also important to ​​​keep your readers' faith in you.

Maximizing Sales and Your Amazon Affiliate Income

Here are additional tips to boost your affiliate income.

1. Discuss or promote related products. When you order a burger, you're asked, "Do you want fries with that?" Many items work best or are enhanced with accessories or other products, which you can promote.
2. Check what other items your referrals are buying. One great feature of the Amazon Associates program is that you get paid on items your referral buys, whether or not they buy the specific item you referred. Amazon stats will let you know what items your referrals bought. If you haven't yet promoted the item, and it's a fit for your blog or website, you should consider adding to your product list.
3. Monitor your analytics to see what's selling, what gets clicked on your website, and other data to understand what your market wants and will pay for.

Affiliate marketing with Amazon and other vendors is a great way to make a living at home. But it takes more than starting a website or blog and posting a few affiliate links. It takes knowing a market’s needs, providing information and resources to meet those needs, and then helping the market find your solutions.

guide on how to get reach

Nowadays, when I endeavor to check my Facebook statistics, I do so with the window open, birds singing, a pint of ice cream at my desk, and party jams playing on my jambox.
I must balance the bad news with some good.
Checking Facebook statistics has been bad news for a lot of us lately as we wrestle with declining numbers and shrinking reach. As the Facebook algorithm continues to change and adapt, we continue looking for answers. Why can’t we reach more fans with our updates? What kind of content should we be sharing?
What can we do about our declining Facebook reach?
The question comes up quite often, in the comments here on our blog and in discussions we have here at Buffer. We’re looking for the answers ourselves, and we believe we share this conundrum with a lot of other marketers. For our experience, Facebook has been on the decline for some time now.

• Our posts on Facebook reach an average of 4.5 percent of our fans.
• Overall reach has been on a slow decline for the past several months.
• Twitter is far and away our top referral source to the blog. Facebook brings in little more than 1/3 the traffic that Twitter does.

Do these numbers sound familiar? Do yours look similar? We’re keen on finding the answers and experimenting with ways to reverse this trend and to get our Facebook content seen by more fans and followers. We imagine you’d like the same for your business. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far.

The problem with Facebook reach, explained in a single graphic

Facebook reach is on the decline for just about everyone. A study by Social@Ogilvy found that organic reach has declined to 6 percent, a drop of 49 percent from last October. In other words, if you don’t pay Facebook to boost your content through advertising, you can expect an average of six people to see your content for every 100 fans you have.



Facebook has its reasons for limiting organic reach, of course. The sheer volume of users, brands, and content on Facebook makes it such that the news feed could become a vastly overcrowded place without Facebook’s intervention. More than 18 million business pages are competing for space on Facebook.
There are other financial reasons, too. One of the quickest ways to boost your reach is by paying Facebook for advertising. The connection is not lost on Convince and Convert’s Jay Baer who put two-and-two together to come up with this mashup graphic of the declining Facebook reach and the rising Facebook stock price.

How Facebook calculates what shows up on your news feed

The short answer here is that no one knows exactly how Facebook determines what shows up or—more frustratingly for marketers—what doesn’t show up on a news feed.
What we do know is that the process is complicated. According to Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom, as many as 100,000 individual weights go into the model that produces a news feed.
So the solution to declining reach is not as simple as tweak this or fiddle with that.
There are a few elements of the algorithm that are public knowledge, including the following:

• Post types (e.g., photos vs. text vs. video) that receive the most interaction from a user
• Which posts a user hides or reports as spam
• A user’s interaction with Facebook ads
• The device and Internet speed of a user

In addition, the three pillars of EdgeRank, Facebook’s original news feed ranking system, remain part of the current news feed algorithm.

Affinity – This refers to your relationship with the user, how much he or she interacts with your page.

Weight –  Facebook places priority based on post type, giving top priority to videos and photos.

Decay – How old is your post? The longer your post has been around, the less likely it will be to show up in news feeds.

Here is a snippet of an infographic by PostRocket that sums up how these EdgeRank factors work:

While not the only factors in the news feed formula any more, these EdgeRank areas do still hold value, and you can strategize a little by optimizing in these places. There’s no cut-and-dry answer for how to get your content into a news feed, but at least this gives you a place to start.

A counterintuitive way to combat Facebook reach: Stop caring about it

Maybe we’re looking at Facebook reach all wrong.
That’s the theory posed by Jon Loomer who suggests that our pursuit of more reach is misguided.
Facebook reach might mean very little.
We could be chasing the wrong stats.
Not to be making excuses here, but it’s hard not to chase Facebook reach. The number gets top billing on Facebook’s analytics, and it appears on each and every update to a Facebook page telling us how many “people saw this post.”

Loomer’s point is that there are better indicators of success than reach, and these are the numbers we should be more concerned about.

Reach means very little because it is rarely a good indicator of success.
If you’re an advanced Facebook marketer (and I know you are!), you measure things like traffic to your website, leads and purchases that came as a result of your efforts on Facebook.
If you follow your metrics closely (and I know you do!), you know that a high Reach doesn’t guarantee these things.

He even goes so far as to be grateful for a page’s small reach. In essence, Facebook is showing your update to only those fans and followers who are most engaged with your brand and who are most likely to click, share, and interact with your content. Facebook is doing the efficient thing, sparing your content from those who wouldn’t care or click in the first place.
It’s an interesting idea and one that might make us all quite a bit saner when we’re checking our Facebook stats. As you can see below, if we were to base our Facebook performance on factors other than reach, the Buffer page would be quite a bit more rewarding to check.

6 tips to expand your Facebook reach

Jay Baer, who connected the dots on Facebook’s declining reach and burgeoning bottom line, came up with a few solutions to fixing the problem of reach.

1. Forget Facebook and go to Google+ and Twitter.
2. Pay for advertising on Facebook.
3. Get better at Facebook.
4. Enlist others to do your Facebook marketing on their own profiles.

If you’re interested in Solution #3, then the ideas below should help you brainstorm some ways to grow your reach organically. (We’ve got tips for Google+ and Twitter, too, if you’d rather pack up shop and move on.)

1. Try the cultivation strategies used by Fortune 500 companies.

A research study published earlier this year in Public Relations Journal looked at how Fortune 500 companies and non-profits strategized to grow their brands on Facebook.
In particular, the study looked at six cultivation strategies:

Openness and disclosure – Showing what goes on inside the company

Access – Showing availability for customers and fans to reach and interact with the company

Positivity – Efforts to make a customer’s experience enjoyable and pleasant

Assurances – Making customers feel that their concerns are important and valid

Networking – Showing shared interests with followers and fans

Sharing of tasks – Collaboration with followers and fans to solve problems of mutual interest

The top three strategies used on Facebook were openness and disclosure, access, and positivity. 
What might these strategies mean for you? Openness and disclosure could mean a shift toward more transparency on your Facebook page, sharing the inner workings of your company with your fans. Access could be as simple as sharing ways to that your customers can interact with you, and positivity could be part of your social media marketing voice.

2. Post at non-peak times.

There is a lot of research about the best time of day to post on Facebook. These studies make for a great jumping off point for experiments with your own sharing schedule. You can test and iterate from there.
Another interesting way to look at the question of “when to post” is to take the opposite advice from what most people tell you. Instead of posting when the majority of your audience is online, try posting when the majority of your audience is offline.
We’ve covered this effect before in our discussion of social media frequency, calling it the late night infomercial effect. Basically, it works on the assumption that when there’s little else being shared online, your content is more likely to stand out.
Again we’re grateful for Jon Loomer trying this theory out on his Facebook page. He compared the content he posted during peak hours (6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.) with content that he posted during non-peak hours (10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m.). He even went so far as to break the posts down into types: photos, links, and updates.
In every case, the reach was greater for content posted on non-peak times.

There are some interesting theories for why this is the case. First, this bump could be due to the late night infomercial effect where Loomer’s late-night content faced less competition from other updates and shares at these times. Another reason could be audience. If you enjoy an international following, then many of them could be online during your off-peak hours.
Interestingly, this content could also benefit from an extended stay at the top of the news feed because of all the attention it gets late at night. When the peak hours begin and users log on for the first time, the late-night content will have had time to gain popularity and could surpass many of the brand new posts that have yet to gain traction. Posting at night might mean starting at the top of the page in the morning.
So where do you find when your peak and non-peak hours are? Facebook Insights has a helpful chart that you can access by clicking on the Pages tab at the top of your analytics dashboard. Here is what our fan timeline looks like at Buffer:

We may want to try the 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. window for ourselves.

3. Share original, behind-the-scenes photos of you and your team.

We had the fortune of going on a Buffer retreat to South Africa recently, around the same time we started experimenting with ways to grow our Facebook reach. Wouldn’t you know it that our retreat led to some pretty amazing opportunities to share original content on Facebook!

We shared safari pictures, workday videos, and much more from our retreat, and as you can see from the below numbers, these posts worked quite well. (The retreat posts are marked in orange.)

Of course, now everyone’s back home. How can we keep this up when we’re not in South Africa anymore? How can you make this work for your own business when you’re not coming and going from retreats all the time?
We’re anxious to find the answers for ourselves. The first place we might start is with sharing behind-the-scenes photos of the way we work at Buffer, along with a continued push on insider videos from our founders Joel and Leo. We’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

4. Engage your community with questions.

Another strategy we’ve started employing is asking engaging questions as status updates. There are no links in these updates. No selling. No informing. We’re simply interested in hearing from our audience.

Here are the numbers on those tests.

In every case, we received more than 1,000 people in our reach, which is an above average result from the rest of the Facebook content we post.
Like the behind-the-scenes retreat photos and videos, asking engaging questions gave us enough bump that it’s worth pursuing further to see if we can impact Facebook reach for all posts. If certain elements of the Facebook algorithm are to be believed, the engagement here could lead to the improvement of some of our news feed factors in the long run.

5. Share self-explanatory photos.

You have likely heard the advice to share photos on Facebook. But these aren’t just any photos.
We ran some tests awhile back and determined that it takes a very specific kind of photo to see results on Facebook shares. Our internal rule is this:

“Posting pictures to Facebook only works well if the pictures are self-explanatory.” 

When posting pictures to Facebook, they should be detailed enough that a person can understand your content without reading any of the text you added to the update. Here are a pair of examples (one good, one less good) from our own Buffer account:
Example #1:


Example #2:

We obviously have not been immune to following the “post more pictures” advice blindly. Now that we know the value of a self-explanatory photo, we’re using it to create more high-quality image posts that will hopefully drive our engagement and our reach.

6. Look at the numbers differently.

The beauty of this tip is that it takes no marketing plan whatsoever to work (just some data extraction and finagling).
The key here is to look at reach from a different perspective.
Facebook makes it easy to see the reach of individual posts, and these are often the numbers that can bring you down and send you into crisis mode. Instead of focusing on reach from a granular level like individual posts, it makes more sense to take a step back and view your reach on a daily and weekly basis.
Jon Loomer tried this tactic with his Facebook page, and he noticed that instead of an individual post reach as low as 8.6 percent of his total fanbase, he reached 26.8 percent of his fans with daily organic reach.
Digging up this stat will take a bit of work. You’ll need to go to your Facebook page analytics and export data by clicking the button in the top right corner. The export button will open a popup where you can select what you want to download.

Under “Select Data Type,” be sure that “Page level data” is selected.
When you open the data file, you should see a column for Daily Organic Reach, and this can show you how well your page did from a slightly more positive vantage point.

Takeaways

What can we do about declining Facebook reach? We have options—paying for advertising, going some place else—and we have some organic tricks to try. If you decide that Facebook is worth it for your business (and with a userbase of over a billion people, your audience is likely there somewhere), then hopefully these tricks can help.

• Be transparent, helpful, and accessible.
• Share behind-the-scenes content.
• Engage your audience with questions.
• Share self-explanatory pictures and visual content.

And if all else fails, take some pressure off by not worrying about reach so much. There are other stats you can chase with just as much fervor.
What has been your experience with Facebook reach? Are there some tactics you’re trying to boost your numbers? I’d be interested to hear your experience and what you’re up to. Please do share in the comments.