HOW TO MAKE MONEY WHILE YOU SLEEP

Money-Making Tips for Earning Cash While You Are Asleep

Everyone who does not work has a scheme that does.
— Munder's Law

The avocation of assessing the failures of better men can be turned into a comfortable livelihood, providing you back it up with a Ph.D.
— Nelson Algren

Today’s Most Exciting Unconventional Business That Allows You to Make Money While You Sleep 

Perhaps you have financial problems because you earn way too little and can’t cut expenses. In this case, if you want to upgrade from a dump you’re living in today to something closer to the Taj Mahal in the next few years, you have to make some changes in your life so that you make more money.

One way is to earn money while you sleep in an unconventional job associated with the information business. Some people call the information business “the real estate of the twenty-first century.”

Money doesn't sleep.
— Unknown wise person

For many decades, the best way to become wealthy was through real estate. Today it is information. The person who creates timely information, and markets it effectively, can prosper and generate more wealth than most people can with real estate.

What I like about the information business is that it is an exciting business, in fact, one of the most exciting in the world. It can also be a difficult business if you don’t have a decent product or don’t know what you are doing. If you develop a good service or product, and pay your dues to learn the ropes, however, this exciting business can be highly lucrative financially and very rewarding personally.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?
— Harorld Rosenberg 

The information business has been experiencing unparalleled growth for several years and will continue to do so for decades. Why not get into this business? You can be the source of ideas, data, and entertainment that people and businesses want. Here are some of the benefits of being in the information business:

• Easy to create 
• A large global market
• Easy to research, particularly on the Internet
• Inexpensive to produce
• Can sell information from practically anywhere in the world
• Fun to sell
• Prestigious career compared to most jobs

Since there is no lack of information in the world, the opportunity is not so much in coming up with new information as it is in packaging it properly. You want to make the information user-friendly. User-friendly means time-friendly — information that is easy to read and takes as little time as possible to read.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. . . . Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.
— Andy Warhol

The great thing is that you don’t have to come with anything new. Better still, you can sell the same information that other people are selling and make a lot more money than they are. To do this your information should be simpler, cheaper, easier to understand, smaller, and/or more timely. It can also have more value because it has more features.

Another great benefit to being in the information business is that you can develop multiple layers of products and programs by leveraging your information into residual streams of income. You don’t want to specialize in too narrow of a field; the more specialized you become, the more dependent you are on that specialty. Broadening your opportunities allows you to make much more money in good times and still be able to do well when one of your information-making programs falls on bad times.

Ways to Sell Information

• E-books
• Audio books
• Audio programs
• Video training
• Multimedia programs
• Workbooks or manuals
• Coaching programs
• Consulting
• Keynote speaking
• Seminars
• E-zines
• Newsletters
• Branded retail products such as T-shirts
• Foreign rights
• Licensing for websites and cell-phone promotions
• Mentoring and apprenticeship
• Infomercials
• CD Rom/DVD Training
• Joint ventures

What makes the information business so delightful is its expansive nature. You can start with only one product or service but additional opportunities are sure to keep evolving over time. What’s more, the inherent nature of the information business provides you with an ongoing education as you learn more and more about your subject or area of expertise.

The information business is all about ideas. Figure out what the market wants and deliver it in a way no one has before. A key to making it big in the information business is to create and market information that you are passionate about.

Put another way, you have to be in love with your product, whether it’s a book, video, or branded retail product. If you are crazy about the information you repackage, the marketing part becomes so much more enjoyable — even a breeze.

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria — anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.
— W. P. Kinsella

Possibly the most powerful aspect of the information business is that you have the opportunity to create intellectual property that will give you residual income for many years to come. New or repackaged information can become your intellectual property. Whether through games, training franchises, books, tapes, or videos, intellectual property can provide you with residual income that continues to come to you long after you have created the product.

Indeed, the staying power of intellectual property will earn you money while you sleep. Take, for example, The Joy of Not Working. This book was first published in 1991 and today it still earns me over $20,000 a year in royalties.

To bug my friends working in real jobs, I say, “Why do you think I often sleep in until noon? I do this to earn an extra fifty bucks or so from my intellectual property. I also often take a nap late in the afternoon and make myself another twenty-five bucks.”

One of my favorite examples of the staying power of intellectual property is the album Bat out of Hell by Meat Loaf, the legendary rock-opera singer, born Marvin Lee Aday. Aday was given the nickname Meat Loaf by his abusive and alcoholic father.

At the age of eighteen, after the death of his mother to cancer, Meat Loaf left his Dallas home to make it on his own, and in 1977 he released his first album Bat out of Hell. The amazing thing is that almost thirty years later the album still sells over 500,000 copies a year and has now sold thirty million copies. As you can well imagine, Aday and members of his band still get a handsome royalty check every year.

Of course, I don’t expect you to become a singer to capitalize on the power of intellectual property — although you would probably have a better chance of doing this than I, given what a terrible singer I am. The point is that rock stars aren’t the only individuals eligible for royalties. You can create an audiotape, syndicate a cartoon, invent a product, or sell an idea to a major corporation.

Keep in mind that not only am I a terrible singer, but I am also a lousy writer — according to some people, anyway. But I still make a decent living. You can also earn a decent living from intellectual property, particularly if you agree by now that I am a lousy writer and are sure that you can write better than I can. What more proof do you need?

Most people are too busy earning a living to make any [real] money.
— Joe Karbo

Many obscure individuals are starting out today in the information business about whom you will be reading in two or three years. You can be one of these people. You don’t have to be a genius and you don’t have to own a big company. Best of all, you can do it from your kitchen table or home office. It’s within your grasp. Get started today.

You may object that we are already bombarded with way too much information; so who needs more? A lot of people, in fact, want the information. Corporations want it also, simply because a lot of corporations, particularly large ones, are too sluggish to effectively generate useful and timely information. As a creative and ambitious individual working on your own, you can produce much more valuable information.

The key is to make your presentation of old information — whether through videos, training programs or documentaries — more timely and more user-friendly than what is already out there. Several readers have told me that although virtually all the principles in The Joy of Not Working were well-known to them, they loved reading the book because of the unique way I presented the information.

Real estate guru Robert Allen claims, “There’s a lot more money in the information business than there ever will be in the real estate business.” Old information reorganized, repackaged, and remarketed in new ways provides many people with an interesting livelihood and has made some of them millionaires. As already emphasized, the cool thing is that you don’t need to create new information.

Here is another personal example of how I repackaged existing information in creative and user-friendly ways: Two months before starting this book, I thought about how money and work were two of the most talked-about subjects in Western society. That led to the idea that there should be a book of great quotations about each topic.

Immediately, I started working on the two books of quotations for about three hours each day. Remember that there are dozens of quotation websites and there have been hundreds of quotation books published. This would have deterred most people from pursuing the ideas further.

This didn’t stop me, however, because I knew that presenting the quotations in creative and user-friendly ways was key. Besides, if I couldn’t sell the books to publishers, I had several ideas on how to use them as viral marketing tools to help sell my other books.

About a month after starting the projects, I had completed both in PDF format. I called them The 777 Best Things Ever Said about Money and 1001 Best Things Ever Said about Work (and the Workplace). I spent $350 for approximately 200 images from www.istockphoto.com to enhance the books and made sure that the quotations in each book weren’t the stale, boring ones that are found in most quotation books.

My three hours of work each day for a month paid off. Within three hours of my sending the PDF file for The 777 Best Things Ever Said about Money to a Japanese literary agent (actually by mistake since I thought I was sending it to another agent), my contact there had an offer for me. It so happened that a Japanese publisher was coming to the agency an hour after I sent the agent the PDF file. The publisher ended up offering $8,000 as an advance, which I gladly accepted.

Below is the cover of the Japanese edition of The 777 Best Things Ever Said about Money for which I received the $8,000 advance.

Clearly, the payoff from packaging and marketing information does not always come that quickly. Opportunities abound, however, to make a great deal of money from a modest amount of effort. With a few winning ideas on how to repackage existing information, and proper marketing, you can spend the rest of your lifetime experiencing career success without a real job.

You Don’t Have to Be Able to Walk on Water to Make Money While You Sleep

Here’s the bottom line: The biggest downside to working in a traditional job is the work model to which one must subscribe. It is the working drone’s work model which I will call The Regular Person’s Work Model.

Following this model is not the greatest way to make a living.

The Regular Person’s Work Model

Work. Get Paid. Work. Get Paid. Work. Get Paid. Work. Get Paid. Get Laid Off. Get Unemployment Benefits. Look for Another Job. Get Another job. Work. Get Paid. Work. Get Paid. Die Broke.

The above work model ensures that you have to work long and hard for the corporation. Now, this isn’t a bad work model for most people. Fact is, career success without a real job isn’t for everyone. Weirdly, some people enjoy a corporate job and the hour or two commute that comes with it. They even like having a boss who tells them what to do, along with the routine of working nine-to-five for a mediocre salary that in many cases hardly pays the mortgage for a dump.

Frankly, I think that they are nuts. The reckless pursuit of insanity is not for everyone, however. If you are like me, you want an alternative work model so that it works hard for you and you don’t have to work all that hard for yourself.

Ability is the poor man's wealth.
— Matthew Wren

It just so happens that there is such a work model. It even ensures that if you drop dead one day, the money will still keep coming into your bank account. Your heirs won’t even know where the money is coming from.

Better still, with this alternative work model, your heirs couldn’t stop the money from coming into the bank account even if they so desired. Clearly, a regular job isn’t going to provide this money stream. If you work once and you get paid once, that’s dumb. If you work once and get paid many times, that’s smart.

Following is the work model that I subscribe to and that I advocate that you adopt:

 The Smart Person’s Work Model

Work. Get Paid. Get Paid More. Get Paid Even More. Get Paid Some More. Keep Getting Paid More and Still Some More Until You Die. Then Your Heirs Get Paid for Years after You Die!

As you can see, the beauty of The Smart Person’s Work Model is that it works hard for you but you don’t have to work all that hard for yourself. This model is one that only a small percentage of people enjoy. Typically they are individuals who have developed intellectual property and get paid year after year for the efforts that they performed some time ago.

As indicated earlier, I still get paid around $20,000 a year in royalties for my book The Joy of Not Working that I wrote over eighteen years ago. Another book called The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness took me only three and a half weeks to write and has earned me over $60,000 since I created it eight years ago. The book continues to make me up to $4,000 a year in royalties. If I drop dead today, the royalties from my books and my revenue-generating websites will be deposited into my bank account for many years to come.

If you believe that money can buy happiness, then why don't you try selling some of yours?
— from The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness

The good news is that you don’t have to be able to walk on water to make money while you sleep. This is because you don’t have to create “intellectual property” in the traditional sense of the term to adopt The Smart Person’s Work Model. The Internet has made this possible. The cost of entry is so much lower than most other businesses and the upside profits are enormous.

Regarding upside, I can give no better example than Club Penguin (www.clubpenguin.com), a social networking site for nine- to twelve-year-olds that was formed by three individuals in Kelowna, B.C., in October 2005. I can assure you that there were millions of people in 2005 saying that there was no more opportunity to make money on the Internet because it had become so competitive and saturated. This is the same nonsense that is being uttered today by the millions of unknowing and unmotivated people in this world.

The idea for Club Penguin was planted when Lance Priebe, Lane Merrifield, and Dave Krysko got together not so long before they launched the website. Priebe, Merrifield, and Krysko combined their business, creative, and technical skills to come up with the idea for a kid-friendly social networking site that they would let their own children use without worry.

Less than two years after it was launched, Club Penguin had over 12 million users in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, with more than 700,000 paid subscribers. In August 2007, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walt Disney acquired Club Penguin for $350 million.

Of course, $3.5 million or $35 million would be amazing, but $350 million for a two-year-old website shows the incredible upside. Granted, Club Penguin is an exceptional case. I can nevertheless give many more cases of websites that were started from scratch and were eventually sold for hundreds of thousands — even millions — of dollars.

Your goal, however, should not be to make a big pile of money by selling a website; it should be to create one or more websites that can help you escape the corporate maze and make you a decent living by working two to four hours a day.

Here is a list of areas where internet marketers prosper:

 
• New age development
• Dieting
• Dancing
• Dating/Relationship
• Real Estate
• Pets training and care
• New age development
• Dieting
• Dancing
• Dating/Relationship
• Real Estate
• Pets training and care
• Self-Help
• Fitness
• Natural medicine
• Music Lessons
• Sports
• Multi-level marketing
• Child Development
• Business-to-Business training
• Cars

Let’s get back to the cost of entry: The great advantage of most Internet businesses is that you don’t have to “bet the farm” when you start them. Many successful on farm” when you start them. Many successful online businesses have been launched for around $500, with some costing less than $200. If an idea turns out to be a dud, you will find out fairly quickly, walking away having lost only a few hundred dollars. At the same time you will have acquired valuable knowledge to move on to another idea.

In fact, one of the tricks to becoming a successful online entrepreneur is to diversify and multiply your streams of income. Of course, you should never put all your financial eggs in one basket at the best of times. If you have several websites all targeting different markets, one that starts failing will not present a big problem.

You can sing a happy song and focus your efforts on your other websites — in addition to starting new ones that offer great opportunity. Once you have successfully set up one or more money-making websites, it’s relatively easy to start another one to capitalize on another opportunity.

What’s more, as you become more knowledgeable, it will take you less effort, less money, and less time to set up each successive website. A lot of the features of websites can be automated which means that you will eventually have a decent income by working a few hours a week. The key is to start small, but think big. Stay within reason, however! Rome wasn’t built in a day — or in five years, for that matter.

When starting your online business, you don’t even need to sell your own product to adopt The Smart Person’s Work Model, which earns you money whether you are awake, asleep, or dead. You can earn a reasonable income selling other people’s products, without having to handle the products. This also means that you don’t have to invest in risky product development or put out a huge amount of cash to buy inventory that will never sell.  

COPYRIGHT © 2010 by Ernie J. Zelinski
 All Rights Reserved