What do you think of this no-cash-required approach to earning passive income?Every month or two, search google.com/trends, which lists the currently most searched terms.
Pick out a hot topic that intrigues you but is likely to fade in popularity in six months to a year.
Quickly crank out a 25-page ebook on that topic. That's not as difficult as it may seem. It's like a term paper using reader-friendly rather than academic-stuffy language, with no citations required. Use Google as a key research tool, which speeds the process.
Sell your ebooks on Amazon, eBay, and Scribd. Money should start rolling in.
You'd get your book to market long before a traditional book publisher could or would--By the time such publishers would get the book out, that trendy topic would have faded.
Sure, this is not a totally passive income source--After all, you have to write the ebooks. But the only truly passive income sources require a cash investment, on which you hopefully get a return. I'm assuming you don't have enough to invest that you can live off investment income. Writing ebooks on trendy topics requires an investment of $0 and, like all passive income, brings in money while you sleep.
2 comments:
there probably are ways to find things that are evanescent, but > 1 week evanescent. google trends doesn't look like one of those places.
Zennie Abraham basically uses google trends to drive his blog, which the Chron picks up. He probably gets paid per page load, or a percentage of the ad impressions on the chron, or perhaps he has permission to sell his own ads embedded inside that part of sfgate that's devoted for his use.
He illustrates a lot of how much of an oaf you can be with this technique, and he's actually fairly successful at it.
That`s a cool idea, Marty. I didn`t realize you could sell e-books easily on Amazon.com.
I have thought of ebooks before -- even actually wrote one once that was about 90 pages -- but could never figure out how to sell it easily without setting up a complicated website, setting up a way for people to pay with credit cards, etc.
In other words, writing the ebook seemed like the easy part. The hard part was finding a way to easily sell it (never did figure out "Clickbank"). But if it`s on Amazon.com, it basically will look like ANY OTHER BOOK -- and your "sales copy" can just be the description and reader comments. Brilliant!
Believe me, if it`s a popular topic, someone will buy it. Didn`t know you could sell on Ebay either. I guess you just sell the PDF.
I think the future of selling information is going to be less and less about standard book lengths, which are really just an artifact of traditional publishing, and more about just timely quality information.
Personally, I like short books that get to the point. I would buy an ebook on an interesting topic. I have gotten more out of some of your articles than I learned reading 500 page books!
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