Passive Income: The Sexiest Freelance Income ~ Work for Yourself

A little bit ago, I talked about the importance of diversifying your income. I can't stress the importance of this. As an independent worker, you should never feel forced to rely on a single stream of income. If you do, you may as well have remained chained to your old 9-5.

The beauty of working independently is that you can do all kinds of stuff. If you want to dabble in a variety of different projects, you can. Your clients typically cannot set any unfair non-compete clauses on you. If they do, I'd probably suggest that you run far away. Why? Because you are not their employee. Non-compete agreements seem too much like employment. Stay far, far away...

I digress, one cool way to diversify your income is to get into creating passive income. What is passive income, you say? It's income that you earn with little to no future effort. For example, if you create a training seminar and sell it online, you likely won't have to do much with it after the fact, but you will continue to earn money as it sells. That's like earning money while you sleep. That's sexy.

One of the goals I announced was to work on earning at least $500 per month in passive income each month by the start of October. How do I plan to do this? One way is through this blog, but I know that blogging for money is a long-term thing, so I can't wholly rely on that. I haven't quite had a chance to really think through what else I can do to earn passively, but I will keep you all updated here. I will likely look into creating some product specifically related to freelancing and start selling it. Again, I'm not sure.

I've been listening to a few podcasts and consistently reading Pat Flynn's blog (he talks about earning smart passive income). He is an advisor and mentor for many of us in the business blogging world - myself included. He is always very candid in everything that he posts - all the way down to him posting his monthly earnings.

I will no doubt be talking more about passive income, but I'd like to know, are you aiming to start earning (or increase) passive income this year? What are your goals? Let's keep each other on track...