Dec 30 2010
By ingerjohnson

Passive Income Ideas

Passive Income Ideas

Passive Income

Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing EJ Thornton, publisher and author of Secrets To Creating Passive Income.  I’ve known EJ for a year now and she never ceases to amaze me.  Every time I talk to her I learn more and more about creating passive income.  During the interview, EJ shared some examples of how to create passive income.  So, of course, I want to share one strategy that I thought was brilliant!  Here is an excerpt from the interview:

EJ Thornton:

In [my book] Secrets to Creating Passive Income, the main example that I use is a thing we call Spock Boxes.  That came from a single problem that my husband had, John.  Every time he saw a car top carrier, he would comment that it was aerodynamically mounted backwards.  The sleek end was in the front and the big blunt end is in the back and that aerodynamically is just wrong.  You need the blunt end in the front so that the air streams back down off the point.  It’s much more aerodynamically efficient.  Every time he’s see one, which is several times, every time we’d go out and he would talk about it.  I said finally, “Honey, if I give you a platform, will you be quiet?”  He said, “Okay.”

So, he wrote up about a three-paragraph argument about why he thinks Spock Boxes should be turned around.  He calls them Spock Boxes because they look like the box that Spock was buried in, in Star Trek 2 and was shot out into space.

Inger Johnson:

That’s a great description

EJ Thornton:

So we looked on amazon.com and low and behold they sold them.  We put his article in the middle of this web page and several links into amazon.com to find out more about Spock Boxes.  We called this page Fuel Efficient, How to make your car top carrier more fuel efficient, got a ton of hits right off the bat and, of course, they would read the article there and, whether they believed it was irrelevant or not, they would click on in Amazon.  If they bought a car top carrier, which is a several hundred dollar ticket item, we would make 7 percent commission off of them.

We didn’t have to make that product or even sell that product, we just had to facilitate that customer going into Amazon through our web site.  They came in because they found our article.  All it was, was three-paragraphs! Anybody can write three paragraphs and move forward.

Inger Johnson:

That’s awesome.

EJ Thornton:

Now, when I saw how successful that was, I thought, that’s pretty duplicatable.  Now, we have more than, I think, 90 websites, or so, each dedicated to a specific niche.

I wanted to share this with you because it’s the simplest of ideas that can reap big rewards.  EJ reveals that “Everybody has the raw material to create product with their experience, or dream….it just takes a single idea.  They say ideas are God’s gold coin and just to flush out an idea is really pretty simple.  You need to brainstorm and then, go forward and figure out what you want to actually accomplish with a certain message.”

EJ shared with me a few other ideas, which I will share with you again at another time.  Meanwhile, you can check out her book, Creating Passive Income, here or you can listen to the audio interview Passive Income.

What ideas have you had and acted on to pull in passive income?

Categories: Financial Advice for Young Adults, Money Intelligence for College Students, The Parent Zone
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