Passive Income Building Update
It seems that most entrepreneurs that I talk to end up becoming so tangled up in their businesses that they become more trapped than they were before they left the cubicle. Once the excitement is over, your business just becomes a lot of work and a huge burden.
It was on my birthday this year that I fully realized that if I don’t set up systems now to achieve a healthy passive income, I’ll be working my butt off until the day I die. After reading the 4 Hour Work Week, choosing a business model based on automation just made absolute sense.
A few months or so ago, I wrote a post on my goal to create passive income.
Passive income is a goal that each of us at CBG is working at and judging by your comments, so are you. After a lot of research, David, Fred, and I each individually chose the same venture to pursue to achieve this goal and that is through private label travel.
Reasons why each of us chose this business model:
- Excellent product – the travel engine is powered by Travelocity
- Large revenue share – 60% commissions on all travel bookings
- A product people already use – think of all of the businesses, event planners, etc who are already booking travel. Building relationships with these companies means access to lots of automated sales.
- No customer service – this is all handled by a 24/7 support staff
- Group health care – this was a very important decision making factor for me – starting in December, all travel agents in the company are eligible for group health care.
- Low start up cost - $450 gets you an extremely feature rich travel booking website with all of the bells and whistles. All of us have built websites for a living and know that even the design for a standard website can cost more than $450.
Here are some more great posts on creating passive income from around the blogosphere:Freelance Switch’s Guide to Making Passive Income
Breaking Free’s 6 Ways to Generate Passive Income that (Sometimes) Work
Chuckles Best Online Businesses - Advanced Methods For Building Passive Income
Your Opinion!
What Are You Doing to Create Passive Income? Do you feel trapped by the business you started? What do you think of this travel agency opportunity? What is your plan to create passive income?
Isn’t there already a ton of competition on the travel niche? Wouldn’t it be better to use a blog to test a segment of the travel niche before investing $450? I’m not saying that it is a bad idea to buy a travel website template, jut that it might be harder for beginners that don’t understand marketing.
BeachBum Michael
BeachBum Michael (love the name!)
That was EXACTLY my first thought and why I originally put the idea on the back burner. The answer is YES - I think it could be hard for people that don’t understand marketing. However, my goal is to connect with people that already have systems in place to sell travel (traditional travel agencies that are losing business to the internet, event planners, resorts, website that offer courses and service that offer travel, etc). This is a winning situation for them. For example, when I was building website and was constantly directing people to obtain hosting, I became a hosting reseller and started making money from that instead of sending the business away. (This still provides residual income for me several years later though I haven’t done anything to build that revenue stream in almost 2 years)
I already help people build businesses and set up websites so this makes perfect sense for me. I can either help them set up their own private label travel business so that they can make a percentage on the people that are already traveling because of their business model (I would make a % of this too) if they don’t want their own portal, I can offer them an incentive to book through my travel site.
But yes, I think it would be difficult and not worthwhile if you were to put a website without any sort of creative promotion. However, with creative marketing, I’ve decided this is a great business model ~
Thanks for sharing!!!!
Christine
I get passive income from various sources
blogs
2nd trust deeds
canadian income funds
dividends
interest
oil royalties
rental income
hopefully i’ll be able to replace my regular salaried income next year.