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Plenty of people like the idea of earning a passive income. You probably won’t get rich off this kind of side income. However, earning a little extra money with minimal effort is definitely appealing.

Earning a passive income is also much easier than you may assume. So why aren’t more people doing it?

There are many reasons, but often, people simply don’t expect to succeed. As a result, they don’t even try. That’s why it’s helpful to learn about others who have successfully generated regular passive income. While some of examples here are exceptions, they illustrate how it’s absolutely possible to earn money on the side with little effort. Here are three case studies about passive income success you need to know about.

 

  1. Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn is one of those exceptional cases. Flynn has actually leveraged passive income streams to get rich. Now he makes a living helping others do the same.

That said, Flynn certainly didn’t expect to achieve this degree of success. He actually started earning a passive income accidentally. It began when he wanted to make himself a more valuable employee in his field. That meant passing a notoriously difficult exam to earn a special certification. Flynn created a blog about studying for the test to keep himself focused.

What he didn’t realize until later was that his blog had attracted a following of people who used it to improve their own study habits. Flynn decided to monetize the blog with ads. He also wrote an e-book and sold it via his website. He earned over $7,000 from sales in the first month alone.

True, he did have to put in some effort, but he was going to write the blog anyway. That’s what many successful passive income streams consist of: “work” that you were going to do even if it didn’t yield any extra money. People like Flynn simply find ways of monetizing these projects.

 

  1. Joseph Michael

Pat Flynn’s story inspired Joseph Michael to pursue a similar form of income. He had a family to take care of, and was eager to earn extra money so he could give them a better life. He even applied to pizza delivery jobs just to bring home some more money, but was consistently rejected.

Still, he managed to dramatically change his situation over the course of just about a year.

E-books and online courses are popular sources of passive income. Like Pat Flynn, Joseph Michael realized he could turn his specific expertise into a money-making side gig. He decided to create an online course about using the writing software Scrivener. With a full-time job, he was forced to record sessions for the course in his car during lunch breaks.

Joseph Michael also didn’t have an audience. Instead of creating a blog to try and build one, he relied on affiliates to market his course for him. Eventually, he reached the point where he was making $40,000 in monthly sales from his course alone. This gave him the freedom to quit his day job.

 

  1. Lorna Leeson

The examples above illustrate how people can turn what they already know into a form of passive income. However, there are also opportunities to turn what you love into a means of making more cash on the side.

That’s what Lorna Leeson did. As a fan of riding horses, she realized there was probably a market for people who wanted lessons but didn’t always have the time or money to work with a trainer. This inspired Leeson to create a series of audio lessons customers could download and listen to while riding.

This also gave Leeson the opportunity to expand and market her existing business. She already had a riding school in South Africa, but she was looking for a way to reach a wider audience of potential customers. Additionally, she wanted to help people who wished to learn how to ride but didn’t have regular access to a school or trainer.

That’s not easy to do with an offline business, where geography can place limitations on your growth. Taking her passion for horse riding and coming up with an innovative way to train riders via the internet was a smart solution to the problem that also happened to earn her a few extra thousand dollars in revenue every year.

Again, because this is something Leeson loves doing, the “work” involved doesn’t feel like work at all. Others have also earned passive incomes by selling their art online or finding similar ways to make money off their passions.

While these three examples are unique, they all illustrate how you can also earn a passive income. Don’t convince yourself that success is impossible. Plenty of people have already demonstrated this isn’t the case.