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The BEST Way to Make Passive Income in 2020

Sharon Tseung Side Hustles Leave a Comment

Here are my thoughts on the best way to make passive income. After having worked on income streams I’ve decided this is my favorite – watch on to find out!

The BEST Way to Make Passive Income in 2020

Transcription

Below is a transcription of the podcast. This transcription was taken from Otter.ai so it might not be completely accurate:

0:02
This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income, become financially free and design the best lives.0:14
Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad0:16
quest and today we’re gonna talk about why building and long lasting brand is the best way to build passive income. So if you guys are new to the channel, welcome I’m all about teaching you how to build passive income, become financially free and design your best life. So if you are interested in any of that, make sure to subscribe for more so let’s just get right into it. So I’ve experimented with many different passive income streams. I’ve experimented with Etsy I’ve experimented with merch by Amazon Amazon FBA rental investments and affiliate marketing. And what I really can say is when you build a long term brand, the payoffs are way better than just building short term passive income streams. So what I found was when I depended on marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy, I found that marketplace rules can always change algorithm Things can change, they can just like ban your account or shut you down without any valid reason and you’re gonna have to like spend a lot of time trying to combat them. So that’s actually a scary thing about when your whole business is dependent on someone else’s invention of a platform that you’re basically depending on the whole marketplace to make sales. If you’re not building a brand that then you can lose all of that in an instant, right? That is something to consider when you’re building passive income if you’re just trying to get some short term cash flow might be okay, I highly recommend like Etsy and merch by Amazon if you want to try to start making cash flow quickly and don’t want to spend as much money or capital into the business yet merch by Amazon is very passive. But the thing is like usually you’re not really building a brand. You’re just selling t shirts online and stuff like that, hoping that you can rank for certain items and start getting sales that way. So you’re usually dependent on the search engine of Amazon or the search engine of Etsy to start getting sales. Now if you’re trying to build a long term brand where you actually have your own website, you’re collecting emails, you’re actually getting sales on your own website and stuff like that. Way more powerful because you own that audience email list. So if anything ever happened to Etsy or Amazon, you still have your email list and you have that brand awareness well, where people remember your brand name, and they’ll come back for more. So that’s a huge reason why I think building a brand is way more powerful than just like selling short term stuff on marketplaces for passive income. This is what I found because when I was doing this, I was just pursuing that cash flow for financial freedom. But when it came down to it, I came back from Thailand while I was digital nomad in building passive income, because it was not fulfilling, right, I wasn’t building any long term brand that had impact or anything like that. And if anything happened to these marketplaces, I could get shut down really quickly, and I wouldn’t have that control over my business. So to me, like building a brand over these marketplaces is really powerful. You can also make a brand while you’re building it up in those marketplaces, for example, you sell on Amazon and you’re selling it under a brand name, then maybe you can expand on Etsy, expand on your own website. So ultimately, you can still obviously build a long term e commerce brand You just need to think in that way when you’re selling products on your marketplace. So you just have to think that way when you’re selling on those marketplaces, I don’t regret it. But I didn’t make sort of that mistake of I just want that quick cash flow. I just want the short term gains which worked and they still make some money. But like if you actually built a longer lasting brand that can work in your favorite long term. Now when comparing to like a rental investment, the reason why I think building an online brand is even better than buying rental properties is that rental properties cost a lot of money to get in right, it costs like a few 10s of thousands of dollars, maybe even hundreds of thousand dollars for the downpayment now for an online website. If you’re building up an online website, it only costs you really like maybe a few hundred dollars to get started. You might hire writers and stuff like that and maybe spend like a couple thousand dollars but ultimately rental properties you put in way more cash for less return. For example, they say that the 1% rule is what you need to look for when you’re trying to cash flow on a property. So the 1% rule means that the monthly rent should it be equal or greater. Than 1% of your total purchase price of an investment property, so say you bought a property at $100,000, then your rent should be $1,000. So after everything on $100,000 property, you’re probably making like $200 or less. And that means you’ve probably put in 20 to $30,000 of your own money for downpayment for that $200 of cashflow. So as you can see, the return is pretty small. It is pretty passive, but it is smaller than what you could make you put $20,000 into your own online brand. I’ve seen bloggers and youtubers make 40 to $50,000 a month even more than that some make like six figures a month selling their own products, doing affiliate marketing, doing ads, doing sponsorships, you know, there’s many ways to monetize your own brand. So I really think it’s powerful to create that longer lasting brand, whether it be an e commerce or whether it be your own personal brand where you’re teaching something or giving value because there’s so many ways to monetize it. If you have that strong audience that believes in what you do. You can sell products, you can sell services for them. There’s so many ways monetize that and give them value. And by building that brand, they’re going to be loyal customers to whatever you’re trying to sell or like give them value with, which is why I think branding is super crucial and the best way to make passive income. So if you’re trying to build a brand, you can either do the e commerce ways you can start on those marketplaces, but actually build up a brand that you create your own website for. You can also create your own personal brand where you start your own website, maybe you create a blog, you maybe create a YouTube channel or a podcast. These are great ways to start building up that brand.So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please make sure to rate review and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.Transcribed by https://otter.ai

About the Author

Sharon Tseung

Hi, I’m Sharon Tseung! I’m the owner of DigitalNomadQuest. I quit my job in 2016, traveled the world for 2 years, came back to the Bay Area, and ended up saving more money and building over 10 passive income streams on my digital nomad journey. I want to show you how you can do the same! Through this blog, learn how to build passive income and create financial and location independence.

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