Passive Income Ideas - Challenge Yourself Now and Profit Later

As the global economy gets progressively worse and worse every day, many people are beginning to look for ways to earn a little extra money! Whether it is to help pay the power bill or to save for retirement, building passive income is your best option.

Developing strong streams of passive income is not easy. In fact, it can be one of the most difficult things you will ever do. Unless you have loads of cash up front, your streams of income will seem more like drips. Building this type of income can take months of effort to produce results. If you take a long-term perspective, however, you will soon realize just how powerful passive income can become.

Passive income is simply income earned with no additional input required. A perfect example is stock dividends. Let's say you purchase shares of ABC stock. Each quarter, ABC's management authorizes a $0.50 per share dividend. If you owned 100 shares of ABC, you would earn $50 every three month, as long as the company continues to declare a dividend.

Many people do not have the initial money necessary to buy shares of publicly traded companies. These people, myself included, must develop different methods of generating passive income. A few of my favorite include article writing and affiliate marketing.

In order to build your portfolio of income earning endeavors, sometimes it is necessary to challenge yourself to greater heights. Here are a few ways to challenge yourself now so that you can profit later.

Infobarrel Challenge

During May of 2009, Infobarrel is holding a '30 point' Adsense challenge, of which anyone can win. Currently, Infobarrel shares Adsense revenue with its contributors. If, like myself, you are always trying to figure out how to get more of the 'pie', then this contest is for you.

During May, you will earn points for any articles that you publish on Infobarrel. Once you receive a certain amount of points, you will 'win' a larger share of Adsense impressions during the month of June. Reaching a 90% threshold involves earning only 30 points. Points are calculated as follows:

1 Point - 250+ Words

2 Points - 500+ Words

5 Points - 1000+ words

Basically, this means to have your ad code show up on your articles 90% of the time during June, you only have to write six 1,000 word articles. Any combination will work. Creating thirty 250 word articles may seem a bit challenging, but if that is what you need to do, just go out and do it.

Creating these articles should continue to produce for you long after you have completed writing them. It would not surprise me to be earning money from them during the summer of 2010.

HubPages Challenge

Another option is to join the 30 Hubs in 30 days challenge over at HubPages. This is truly a challenge in which you need to be completely self-motivated. You do not earn any additional impressions, or win anything, other than increased exposure to your articles and content. Earning passive income from this site can be done in one of three ways; Google's Adsense, eBay & Amazon Modules and affiliate marketing.

If you are one of those truly motivated individuals, you can join the challenge of trying to create 100 Hubs in 30 days. While this may seem overwhelming, creating 100 hubs really only involves making 3 new hubs per day.

Try not to focus on how big the overall task is but on your smaller, daily goals. If you have an extra thirty minutes in the morning, create a hub. Instead of watching Seinfield reruns before dinner, create another two or three hubs. Before long, you will have completed 100 hubs which will continue to produce results for many years.

Article Marketing Challenge

Do you have a blog or website?

Do you get the amount of traffic that you want? If not, holding an article marketing challenge may be what you need to achieve more success.

Challenge yourself to write at least one article every day for a month. Submit your articles to a few articles directories, such as ezinearticles or goarticles. Make sure that you put a link back to your website in the resource box. In addition to building traffic, article marketing helps to build your linking authority with Google. He who has the most links wins!

In addition to linking to your website or blog, you can also link to an affiliate product or site. Producing thirty articles in a month should continue to produce passive income month after month after month.

Passive Income Opportunities

The whole point of this article is to help motivate you to produce more content. Instead of being satisified with a few pennies of passive income every month, why not shoot for making a few hundred dollars a month.

When I began working online, the first thing I tried to do was build a blog. I had always heard that having your own blog is where the real money is at. While this is true once you have established yourself as 'the authority' in your niche, when you are just starting out I would be surprised if anyone even knew your blog existed.

If you do not receive traffic, you will not make money. Period! End of story!

Challenging yourself to complete a few of the ideas listed above will help you earn money now. Once you start to make passive income each and every month you can outsource anything that you hate doing. If you detest writing articles, you can find someone to write them for you. If you are terrible at html, you can find some amazing coders on Warrior Forum.

The key is to work your tail off now, so that you can profit later. Passive income tends to build as time goes by. Creating these streams will pay off in the long-run.

Learning any new affiliate internet marketing program can be confusing. The easiest method that I have found to generate passive income is One Week Marketing. This simple, yet highly effective, technique provides you with a direct action plan in which to implement. Even better is the fact that you learn how to do everything you need to do using FREE techniques.

Do yourself a favor! Go check out One Week Marketing!