14 Income Producing Assets To Help You Build Inside Hustle Cash Flow. What's up, what's up Nick? Loper here, welcome to The Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network because you're the CEO of your life. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Really important topic for you today because you know you can make money with your time. Yes, but there's a powerful unlock that comes from making money that's not directly tied to your time.
Once income from assets will grow exceeds your monthly expenses, you're financially free. And one way to start to build up that is with income generating assets. Income Producing Assets, these are things that you own or control that pay you every month, every quarter, every year. These are stackable, scalable, honestly pretty addicting and can help you improve that ratio of active to quote unquote passive income in your personal income pie chart.
But you probably heard the saying that it takes money to make money. To be sure, starting with money, it's not going to hurt you, but you can also create income producing assets with a little sweat equity. Now when I think of income generating assets, real estate is one of the first things that comes to mind. And that's number one on this list.
Real estate can come in all shapes and sizes we've covered on the show rental property investing, mobile homes, rental arbitrage, house hacking, real estate wholesaling, land investing, Airbnb co-hosting, a ton of different strategies, right? But a basic example would be buying an investment property and running it out. You profit on the spread between your monthly rent and your expenses, those being your mortgage, your insurance, your maintenance costs.
Now this is a realistic way to build both cash flow and long term wealth. In fact, not surprising, rental income is one of the most common income streams of millionaires. Here's how Dustin Heiner explained his out of state rental portfolio in episode 387. The way to start is to number one find which state you're going to invest in and then zoom into which city you're going to invest in. And the way you do that is I usually use Zillow, Zillow's a great site to get big broad picture.
Actually, it's a start as we look through that. It's a tool for us to do more due diligence and that's basically just making sure we're making a right investment. But you're looking at the entire state, look for population areas that have a lot more properties than not and you zoom into that city and you get even closer and closer and you're going to look at all the different properties in that specific city to see if they meet your criteria.
How much money you have to invest the type of properties that you want and how much Brent it's going to make. So you're making here's a principle for everybody listening. You want to buy for $250 or more in passive income after every single expense that goes into your pocket because that's how I provide for my family. I have 30 plus properties now and so we literally live off of a real estate.
The next thing we need to do is build the business, finding the right people to actually run the business for us without us doing any work. With all my properties, I literally only work 30 minutes a month, 30 minutes a month for every single one of my properties and other people do the work because I built the business. Now let me give you an example of what building the business looks like.
If you're going to start a convenience store, you're not going to just get a location, open door, put a box of chocolate candy bars in the center and hope to run a business. That's essentially what you're doing. If you just buy a property anywhere without building the business, no, you're not going to do that. You're going to get the gondolas, which are the shelving units. You're going to get the countertops.
You're going to get the fountain machines, the cold storage, the cash registers, bank accounts, employees. You're going to build the entire infrastructure before you put one piece of inventory into that business. When you're doing that, you now have a solid business. Every piece of property with my 30 plus properties now, I literally view them as inventory. It's not a home for me to live in. It's a piece of inventory just like a candy bar.
Once I have the business built, every new property is like another box of candy bars inside my business. I could just keep adding and adding and adding into that business. Does that make sense? Dustin went on to explain that your property manager is the most important member of that team to have in place. He called them your quarterback. Other players on your team might include realtors, contractors, wholesalers, bookkeepers, stuff like that.
He's trying those team members in place to make a rental business more hands off. The most important thing, or the most powerful thing that Dustin said in that interview, actually came at the very end of the call and it was him describing getting laid off from his government job. The job he thought was super secure. In that moment, the identity shift of becoming an investor first and an employee second. He did have to go find another job.
He might have only had one or two properties at that point, not enough to live on. He saw the path forward, he saw the way out and it took another 10 years to build that portfolio, to build up that cash flow. It started with that really low point of getting laid off and shifting that mindset to be I am an investor. My day job, even though it's bringing in the lion's share of my revenue right now, my day job is now my side hustle. That's episode 387 in your archives to go check it out.
The biggest drawback to real estate is that obviously houses are expensive. That's why it might be worthwhile to take a look at platforms like Arrived, which make it easy to invest in income generating properties with as little as $100. I've got a direct referral link for you that I'll add to the show notes. If you want to check it out, the company pulls money to go buy these properties. It manages them and then distributes the cash flow every month.
Income generating asset number two is dividend stocks. Dividends are a portion of the company's profits that they pay out to shareholders. But not every company pays a dividend and some pay more than others. One strategy is to buy shares and companies with long histories of paying and increasing their dividends. These include name brand businesses like Target, Chevron, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Proctor and Gamble.
These boring old companies aren't likely to have explosive share price growth, but they do spin off consistent passive cash flow. You can think of it this way. Every time Coca-Cola sells a soda, the shareholders are getting a portion of the profits and they didn't have to do any work for it. Dividend investing was one thing that helped me get off the sidelines as an investor and really start to build my brokerage account.
Over the course of almost 10 years now, it's grown to over $2,000 a month in income. Like a lot of things, it starts out slow. As you feed it and give it more time, it starts to add up. Income producing asset number three is bonds. Where dividend stocks give you an ownership stake in a company, bonds are like loans that you give to a company or to the government. In return, they promise to pay back with interest.
Bonds are theoretically less volatile, but they're not particularly novel or exciting. So, we're going to keep moving on. More income producing assets, including the one that let me quit my job and the other one that's earned me over $80,000 right after this. That's the sound of another sale on your online Shopify store. But did you know Shopify powers in-person selling too? It's true. That is the sound of selling everywhere, online, in-store, on social media, and beyond.
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Just go to Indeed.com-side hustle show right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com-side hustle show terms and conditions apply need to hire. You need Indeed. All right, income producing asset number 4 is websites. Now, there is a lot to learn to turn a website into an income generating asset. But what it works, it can be extremely lucrative and extremely time leverage.
For example, we've heard from Scott in episode 510 about his bird watching blog, six figure business on a bird watching blog. We heard from Shelley Marmer earning 50 grand a month from her travel blogs in episode 573. And we heard from Andrew Febert with his $1.2 million gift ideas site in episode 537. That was giftlab.co. So these sites are monetized with advertising affiliate partnerships and product sales. But the cool part about that is all of those easily scale as your traffic grows.
For example, here's Shelley Marmer from travelmexico solo.com in episode 573. I do a lot of affiliate marketing and I don't care if it's a 10 monthly search volume. If I can rank number one in two days and these are really high price tours and I'm going to make $500 commission off of some of these tours. I don't care if it's only 10 people searching. So it's kind of like I tell people you have to kind of know what's your goal is your goal traffic or is your goal making money today.
So usually people say, yeah, usually it's I want to make money today kind of thing. So you run your numbers and I do have some tours that are high ticket tours and they will bring in a couple hundred dollars in commission for each one. So that's okay if there's 10 people searching every month and one of them buys that's $500 off one article for that month and it's evergreen content. Like you mentioned, so that's month after month while I sleep. So that's totally fine with me.
Andrew Fiebert from gift lab had a similar strategy. He shared an episode of 537 going after relatively low volume keywords, but with high buyer intent in almost no competition. Our thesis is to avoid competition at all costs, which is why we have a possum gifts and dolphin liver gifts and stuff like that. So we're going to take the time to write this article that nobody else has and hopefully no one will and nobody ever will because it's so random.
Okay, so the keyword difficulty is the primary metric. Is there a minimum search? Like how many people are looking for gifts for dolphin lovers? So in the beginning, we would not do anything that was less than a thousand volume or anything higher than 10 keyword difficulty. And then as we built, we realized that we'd be ranking, say, and I don't know the number specifically for dolphin lovers, but maybe it gets like five, six thousand visits a month on a one thousand a month term.
And we realized like the long tail is actually so much bigger than the head term. There was so many more keywords in search console than even appeared in a herfs. And so we kind of looked downward because it's like say 300 volume. As we built the site, we learned that if it was very specific like dolphin lovers or that number in it with for an age like 13 or boys, six year old girls, the conversion rates were just insane.
And so we would eat almost any volume in those realms, given low difficulty. Now, if you want to start a blog of your own or website of your own, check out my free six part video course on how to do just that quickly and affordably. You can find that at side hustle website.com. And I also want to mention that building a site from scratch is just one option. You can go out and buy a site from a marketplace like flippo we've heard from guests doing.
This is a leading marketplace to shop for websites that are already producing income. Of course, I would only recommend doing that if you already have some operational know-how and you can kind of see a path forward to increasing the revenue there or improving the traffic there.
But that brings me to the other point in that websites can actually be sellable assets, build something up over the course of a few years, enjoy the cash flow it produces in the meantime, and then sell it, take some chips off the table, focus on another project. In episode 426, we covered the story of my virtual assistant website where I did exactly that over the course of nine years. In my case, actually slowly built it up.
This was like Yelp for outsourcing companies, directory plus review platform, banked a consistent few thousand dollars a month. I figured out what I was doing and then sold it on to the next owner where the total income, including the sales price for this part-time project, was over half a million dollars. Websites as an income-producing asset. Even before that, it was a side hustle website, a comparison shopping site for shoes, in my case, that let me quit my job.
It was three years, nights and weekends. Let me build this up and then call the quits at the day job. Incomproducing assets, this is powerful stuff. Remember the formula, when income from assets you own or control exceeds your monthly expenses, you're free. I feel like getting to that point should be everybody's priority. Asset number five is equipment and vehicles. Under this category are things that you can buy once and run out over and over again.
For example, we've done episodes on photo booths, on portable hot tubs, on mobility scooters, even people running out their cars. One of the fun recent examples was from Lenny Tim in LA, who was earning around $3,000 a month, renting mobility scooters and wheelchairs. He had these priced around $75 a day. The break-even window was pretty quick. A brand new one is about $1,500 right now. A little less, a little more. But I actually bought mine used. I look for about $500.
I go on Facebook Marketplace or any other local marketplace. I'm looking to get it for about $500. As you can see, I pretty much count my money back within one, two, three rentals. I'm thinking you have, it's 250 a week plus 75 delivery. A couple weeks later, I'm in the black on this unit. How many do you have at this point? Right now I only have seven. That's a pretty serious fleet. Yeah, it's not bad. I have seven right now and I make it work. I could definitely have a lot more.
I just keep it completely inside business. The other thing that I thought was interesting was to validate demand before ever plunking down for that first scooter. He put up the website and waited and waited once a year until he was getting a consistent stream of booking requests. Now, you probably don't need to wait that long, but he was minimizing his risk by validating it first.
He'd get enough calls coming in or enough requests coming in over email to say, okay, I think there is something here and I'm ready to go out and give this an actual go in the real world. I definitely make it a low risk investment. That's episode five, 64 in your archives to go check it out, renting out mobility scooters as an equipment rental business. There are marketplaces that specialize in running out cars, RVs, camera gear, boats, pools, baby gear, lots more.
Rich Dad, poor dad talks about the importance of spending your money on assets instead of liabilities and I don't know that anyone intentionally seeks out to just blow their money on a bunch of liabilities like lighting it on fire. We buy stuff that we think makes our lives better in some meaningful way.
But I think the important reframe here is how can you buy stuff that can spin off cash consistently, not just banking on some speculative future appreciation in this type of physical product rental business is one example of that. So that's income producing asset. Number five equipment and stuff like that. Number six on this list is digital products. It could be a book, it could be an online course. It could even be something as simple as a printable file, a spreadsheet or a checklist.
And what I love about these income generating assets is you can create it once and sell it over and over again. Here's how Emily McDermott described her downloadable spreadsheet business on Etsy in episode five, 60. I realize, wow, I'm on to something here in this keyword research thing is really working. So I continue to use it to identify other spreadsheets within my niche and that would serve my target audience. So for example, I made a debt payoff calculator.
I had a monthly budget spreadsheet, a budget by paycheck spreadsheet. And all of these terms were long tail keywords. And they were picking up traction really quickly on Etsy, which was excellent. But where my business really took off into six figure territory was when I decided to bundle a variety of these products into one higher price product that gave the customer an overall discount. So they were saving money. But because I had to find my target audience, I knew what they wanted.
I had a good idea of what they wanted. And I knew they'd be a person who was looking to make a monthly budget. They were looking to pay off their debt. And they were probably looking to organize their bills. And if I could just take all of those existing templates, plop them all together into one Google Sheets file, sell it for a higher price, which at the time was around $20, a file. That is where my business really took off.
Okay. So people kind of recognize the value of, well, I'm probably going to want all five or six of these different things individually. So I'll just get the higher priced things. You increased your average customer value at that point. Exactly. And I think a lot of times people get intimidated and they think, well, I could never sell a spreadsheet. I couldn't have had it or I could never sell a $20, $30, $40 spreadsheet because I just don't have the advanced skills.
But it's really not about the advanced level of your skills. It's about solving a pain point that a customer is experiencing. And it's also about offering them a complete transformation. Because at the end of the day, that's what people are buying with any digital product is a transformation. They want to go from point A to point B and I can also almost guarantee you that they don't want to look at something all that complicated either.
They want to see an easy solution that they can easily use too. I love me. A digital product, side hustle and love, Emily's call to solve a pain point and offer a transformation. Lots of digital product examples in the archives, including that episode with Emily, which is number 560.
We had Becky Beach on last year talking about how she would prompt chat GPT for digital product ideas in her niche and then continue to use the tool to help build it out, adding in her own input and insight along the way and accelerate the content creation process. I've built a few online courses over the years, plus some digital workbooks that make pretty consistent sales.
Actually one of my first successes in selling digital products was putting a couple of ebooks for sale on Fiverr before the platform made the full transition to being a freelance marketplace. That was a fun way to get started. In the case of spreadsheets or workbooks, you may already have the foundation for that product on your hard drive. Maybe you're using for work, maybe it's something that you're using in your personal life, maybe you could polish it up and put it out there for sale.
Probably not on Fiverr anymore, but definitely Etsy. Maybe teachers pay teachers. Maybe it turns into a course for you to me. That's a different option and one rule to keep in mind is like Emily said, think of their customer transformation. How are they going to be or feel different after buying your product? Hey, order my XYZ spreadsheet template, sew that, fill in the blank.
I know that is something I can probably do a better job of communicating for my own products, but something to keep in mind. So that was number six digital products. Number seven is royalties. Royalties, another common income stream among millionaires. And look, you don't have to be Taylor Swift to earn them. How this income generating asset works is you earn a small amount every time your work is used or purchased.
For example, I have self published several books now and earn author royalties every month from Amazon over $80,000 in total since 2011. Definitely adds up. Create something once, get paid for it over and over again. I remember still my first royalty direct deposit from $42.47 or something back in 2011. And just having this moment of, this is the coolest thing in the world. Like I put my thing up for sale on the world's largest store and somebody bought it.
Like this moment of being like a professional author, obviously not enough to live on, but it was something and it has continued to pay royalties or quote unquote dividends ever since. So I'm really excited about that one of my favorite side hustles. Now another way to earn royalties is through product licensing. In this model, you sell your product idea to a larger company in exchange for a percentage of future sales.
For example, Nate Dallas and his brother licensed this card game inspired by Pictionary to Mattel. And the duo, they didn't have to design it. They didn't have to produce it. They didn't have to sell it. But they found somebody else who could Mattel in this case in the split and eventual $300,000 in royalties over the course of 10 years. And here's Stephen Key from Invent Write explaining the basics. It doesn't require any capital.
You don't have to set up a company and there's so many companies out there that need us to create a people. So they're looking for ideas. And every year there's just more and more opportunity for us to submit ideas to companies and let them pay us royalties for everyone they sell.
So that's the basic business model is saying, hey, I am the idea guy who we just had on the show and I'm going to turn around and essentially sell that intellectual property to some company who can turn that into a product to make money off it. Absolutely. You're basically renting your idea to a company. And they're going to pay you when everyone they sell. So you don't have to start a company. You don't have to worry about manufacturing or raising money or do any of those things.
And what's really great about it, Nick, is really speed to market today. If you start a company, raise capital, all those types of things that you need to do to be successful. It takes a lot of time and effort. When you license an idea, you find that perfect partner that has relationships, distribution, money, they can put your product on a shelf extremely quick. Steven went on to explain that 5% of gross sales is a pretty typical product licensing agreement, which may not seem like a lot.
But if you think about the distribution and economies of scale that some of these larger brands have, it can really add up, especially for something with super low startup costs. I mean, you're basically taking something for free from your brain and getting paid for it. And Steven had some great tips on how to approach companies with your ideas. But one thing that was surprising to me is that a lot of companies already have a process for this.
They're really open to crowdsourcing product ideas from people like you and me and paying us for them. I was curious, like, well, what's to stop them from just taking your idea and cutting you out? It's like, no, no, no, no. This is a well-defined process that people have been doing for generations. For example, if you look up Hasbro submit ideas, you'll find a structured program called Hasbro Spark that lays out how it all works and how to submit your proposal to the company.
So be sure to check out that full episode with Steven for more on how it all works, which I'll link up in the show notes. And of course, books and product ideas aren't the only things. You can license, you can license pictures and photography. You can license music like we had Kathy Heller on the show years ago. She's like, hey, I moved to LA. I wanted to be a rock star. I found some commercial success in almost reverse engineering. What songs people wanted to hear?
Oh, they want something bouncy and upbeat. I think it was dude, I can create that kind of jingle and did really well with that. You can get licensed or you earn royalties for voiceover work where not only can you get paid up front as like almost a freelance basis, but you can also earn licensing rights when your work is used. And you can even buy future royalties on sites like royalty exchange. I've got more income producing assets, including some super, super easy ones right after this.
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Hey, it's no secret. Having a business can feel really hard and growing a business even harder. How are you going to reach more customers? How can you do it when budgets are tight? And how can you maintain the quality of your products and services as you scale? Well, there's a great podcast that can help out with all of that. It's called This Is Small Business. This is Small Business is full of practical insights that you can apply to your business right now.
And it answers so many of those kinds of questions that all entrepreneurs have, like how to build your marketing strategy. How to use email lists to increase revenue, tips to accelerate small business growth, and tons more. A couple recent episodes I think you might like are episode 61 on marketing, networking and audience building, and episode 63 on how to build your business with a small budget.
Both of those are filled with practical, actionable tips to move your side hustle forward so you can reach your goals. So go ahead and follow This Is Small Business, an original podcast from Amazon, wherever you listen to podcasts. Marketing and producing asset number eight is a vending machines, definitely a hot sign hustle topic these days. Now you're going to pay upfront for the machine and the inventory, but they can make sales 24 seven without you even being around.
If you find a good location, they can easily generate $500 plus in profit per month. And the other cool thing about the vending machine business is it's low risk, right? If one location isn't working, just pick up your pack up your machine and try somewhere else, something that would be much more expensive if it were a brick and mortar store. Now, here's my chat. I'm here's part of my chat with Mike Hoffman from episode 599 on how he got started as a vending preneur.
So you get your first yes from this apartment building, this athlete or student apartment building, and then you start looking around, well, how am I going to get a machine and walk me through what happens after that? I literally Google vending machines. You kind of got two routes here. You got to go down the used path, look on places like Marketplace and Craigslist and even local refurbished type places like appliance type places and then you got these new places.
And the best analogy I would use is a new vending machine manufacturer is very similar to a car dealership. So I called them up. They're like, all right, Mike, the machine you want is going to be about $5,500. Do you want to pay for it up front or do you want to finance it with zero money down? And I was like, okay, tell me about your financing options. Like, oh, we can do it over 60 months. You can use profits to pay them off early.
And every single one now I've financed with zero money down and I typically haven't paid off in the first year just with profits. Okay. And that's like the real estate mindset of lever doing other people's capital versus the good coming up with a hundred percent down payment. Yeah. And this is back to the like, when I bought that 100 grand house, I had to put 20 percent down and that just wasn't sustainable every single rental. So this is where we're with vending.
I just bought 18 grand worth of vending machines. I think in October and I didn't put a dollar down in a benefit there is you got something brand new because I'm on Facebook marketplace. Of course, like, well, she's what's available there? Yeah. From the $500 to $1,000 range, it looks like for some drink machines. Okay, a little bit more than that for like the combo machines or the snack machines. I don't know how old they are. I don't know if they have card readers, but there's options.
If you want to minimize the up front sticker price of these things too, there's definitely options I've got my first machine used and then I broke after six months. I was like, I never want to do that again. I don't want to be a machine mechanic. None of that stuff. I just want the singer on it. I never have an issue because minor under warranty. I just face time when I'm at the machine. They do their little troubleshooting thing. If there's any issues, they just overnight me apart.
And like I said, I don't want to be the mechanic. Yeah, that becomes a little bit less passive at that point. Yeah, exactly. So walk me through the math here. So new machine, 5,500, you're financing that over a period of several years. What's the typical payment? Typical payment is right now with interest rates around $170 a month. Your first payment isn't due until 90 days after it's installed on site. So you're going to do 90 days of revenue before your first $170 payments do.
And then it's $170 a month, typically. And that's just based on today's rates of let's just say 8 to 9%. I don't know. I have one share share. Yeah, four years ago that my payments are $112. So they're definitely a little variable there. And then, yeah, you can just use profits to pay those off. Of those machines, I just used as an example that are 170 bucks a month. I mean, we had one in January that just did over $1,500. Okay, $50 a revenue minus your cost of product.
Aim for like a 3X markup, like stuff in many machines. It's not cheap. Exactly. Exactly. So typically will be around 35, 40%. So let's just shoot high on expenses. Let's say 40% of $1,500. So what's that $650, $700 in cost of goods? Okay. So call it 800 in profit on that $1,500 a month. Yep. Okay. Yeah, minus your 170 in payment. And you're still in the black pretty healthily. And you pay it off faster if you don't like an interest. And you can parlay that into the next machine, next location.
Okay. So try to see how this can work out. And you have so far minimized your overhead. Definitely recommend it. Check it out that full episode. If you missed it, episode 599, that is income producing asset number eight, vending machines. Yeah, you got to restock the machines. But if you do, that just means you're making sales. Income producing asset number nine is small businesses. So we've already covered how you can buy a share of a profitable business through dividend investing.
But that only works for big public companies. Another way to generate income is to buy smaller businesses near you. For example, Hannah Ingram bought the self-service car wash in Tennessee episode 571, super inspiring story. And even better than that, she negotiated a seller financing deal. So she was able to close with no money down that she paid it off with the cash flow from the business. Now after taking ownership, she set out to improve the operation.
And when we recorded it, it was earning around $5,000 a month in exchange for about 30 minutes of work a day. Now she mentioned, biz by cell, loopnet and CREXY, C-R-E-X-I, as potential places to go shopping for businesses or you just drive around your town and see what you might be able to find. And with SBA financing, if you don't do the seller financing route, you might be able to acquire the business with as little as 10% down.
Another example was John O. Santa Maria buying his laundromat in Melbourne, Australia. In his case, the business was virtually invisible online. So he applied a little bit of digital marketing savvy to get it listed in Google, drive more customers. He added credit card machines and made some other improvements and ended up tripling the revenue in the first year of ownership.
But the cool thing about the business asset class is not only did you triple the revenue, but you also triple what the business is worth if you were to turn around and sell it. So those are the kind of assets I think you want to be on the lookout for ones where there may be some quick wins to accelerate that payback period where the business, you know, it's fairly valued based on its past performance, but you're reasonably confident that you can make a few tweaks to make it much more valuable.
And potentially lower risk here because somebody else has already gone through the startup phase, the risky part, the zero to one. The business has already been validated. So you're essentially buying an income stream that already exists or in Hannah's case, inserting herself into a cash flow that was already flowing and doing it in a creative low risk way. Income producing asset number 10 is video content.
I think this is one of the most accessible ones on this list because anybody with a smartphone can begin creating videos that ultimately make money. If you've got over a thousand subscribers and meet a couple other watch time requirements on your YouTube channel, you can enable ads and you can start to get paid. And lately for me, this passive income stream has been around $400 a month and I say passive because yes, it takes time to create the videos.
But once they're uploaded, they can earn that passive income for years, like some of mine have. And I was just looking at this as my top 10 YouTube earning videos for the last month, only three of those were even uploaded in the last 12 months. So they have a long shelf life. And overall, a lot of these videos have earned hundreds of dollars individually, not life changing. It adds up, right? You're putting in the reps.
We talked about YouTube videos as examples of planting these money seeds where you create it once, you put it out into the world and it becomes this mini digital asset with potentially a long lifespan, depending on what topic it's on. Another unique video based side hustle is reviewing products as part of the Amazon influencer program. In this program, you create short video product reviews of items that are sold on Amazon. It puts your videos on the relevant product pages.
And when somebody watches your video and goes on to buy the product, Amazon says, thank you. Hey, thanks for helping us close that sale. We'll give you a small commission for that. After you upload, these videos become income-producing assets for you. It totally hands off. You don't have to drive any outside traffic. For example, John Corris and Tyler Christensen reported earning up to $2,000 a month doing this part time after just a few months of uploading videos.
You can start with what you already have in your home. The first thing I did was, of course, starting with all the products in your home. So I actually went through my entire buying history on Amazon and exported everything I bought as an Excel sheet and just cranked them out. That was about maybe 200 products or so. I thought it would be more, but I mean, 200 products at least get started with... Yeah, I mean, this still, that's the time, yeah.
I then went to close family friends and actually asked them, I came. I'm starting this business. Would you mind supporting me? I'll take it off for dinner. In fact, I can just review some products which are in your household. But that's not me scuffling through their home trying to look for everything on Amazon. They would actually just... They would actually be out and display, yeah, I mean, I could review on it. And I would just treat them out for helping me out.
And that was a good 100 products or so I was able to do. Okay. For me, so I started similar to John. I exported my shopping history and I'm a little older than you guys and have four children. So my history was like 800 products. And most of them aren't currently up on Amazon. And so I found that I was really spinning my wheels trying to find those products or find that they were still being sold on Amazon.
So it was easier for me to just go around the house and just pick a room at a time, do everything in the room. And even if you don't buy it on Amazon, if it has an Amazon listing, you can post a video for it. So if I bought it at Walmart or somewhere else, but it's listed, I would make those videos. So we just made the rounds and I don't think I'm going to run out of stuff anytime soon. I have a little over 300 videos. I think I could do another 300 without breaking a sweat.
For the Amazon influencer program, it is something you have to apply for. You do need to have some level of social media following to qualify. They don't tell you exactly how many followers that is. But you don't need millions. You don't have to be this huge influencer to get accepted. But this is exactly how I started. What Tyler's describing? Look at around the office.
Hey, I've got this microphone arm, this standing desk, the standing desk mat, the ring light and the teleprompter and the podcasting headphones, all sorts of stuff. And it's like, I'm going to go through, create these little videos one to two minutes each and start to earn some commissions. I was surprised. My first $9 came almost immediately within a few days of uploading these videos. This is like mind-blown. It's the easiest money that I've ever made online.
And I want to give some additional context here on the videos as income-generating assets argument, because I have uploaded zero videos to the Amazon influencer program so far this year and have still earned over $400 in commission so far. So imagine what might happen if you actually took it seriously and were consistent with creating content and being dedicated and diligent about creating more videos, something that I should probably go and do.
But make sure to check out our full episode on the Amazon influencer program, episode of 562 in your podcast feed to learn more about that one. That's income-generating asset number 10, the Amazon influencer program number 11 is billboards. So we just heard from Chris Brown in episode 608 earlier this month on how he was able to retire early from the cash flow from his portfolio of Bentonville, Arkansas billboards. Each one can earn up to thousands of dollars a month depending on the location.
Really interesting episode that 100% made me want to go out and find a billboard. So that's number 11. Number 12 is cash. And it might sound a little weird, but the cash in your wallet and your bank account can actually be an income-producing asset on its own. This works by putting it into a high yield savings account or a certificate of deposit and earning interest on your money. Of course interest rates fluctuate all the time, but a low risk way to generate some extra income.
Number 13 on this list is your smartphone. And I think this one is overlooked, but there are dozens of apps that pay you real money for sharing your data usage, your location, and other habits. One of my newest finds is called Caden, which I think is iOS only at the time of this recording, but it earns over $10 a month on autopilot, just by sharing some data, connecting a few accounts. Mobile expression is one that's been around forever.
It's like a market research panel that kind of runs in the background, pays you for data from your mobile phone. Probably worth 20 bucks a year. I give you a free $5 gift card after your first week. Another one is Pogo. I'll link up all of these, but you share your location. You can share your credit card transaction data with Pogo, your earn points, that you cash out to PayPal, Venmo, give cards, maybe $10, $20 a year worth of income from Pogo.
But you're thinking of your phone as not just an expense, but an income-generating asset. I'll link up a few of those apps in the show notes. If finally, number 14 on this list is your credit card. And the reason this makes a list is you pay the same price. Most places, whether you pay with cash or a credit card, so you might as well get 1 to 5% cash back in the form of credit card rewards, according to Yahoo Finance, the average American spends over $1,500 a month on their credit card.
So even if you're just getting 1% cash back, that's worth an extra $180 a year just for spending like you normally would. And that doesn't even take into consideration your opportunity to open 1 to 2 new accounts a year and claim $152,000 plus in credit card sign-up. So I will link up the best cash back cards available today in the show notes for this episode.
Hopefully this list got your gears turning on different income-producing assets that you get billed or buy to start a new revenue stream to start to erase some of your expenses with time-leveraged income. To recap, we talked about real estate, dividend stocks, bonds, websites monetized with advertising, affiliate relationships, your own products and services. We talked about equipment and vehicles with the example of Lenny Tim and his mobility scooter rental.
We talked about digital products, whether that was online courses, whether that was spreadsheet templates, whether that was printable products. We talked about earning royalties. In my case, over $80,000 from self-published book royalties over the course of more than a decade at this point. We talked about vending machines with Mike Hoffman, really interesting side hustle right now.
We talked about buying small businesses, inserting yourself into a cash flow that's already flowing, just stepping in front of something, having let somebody else do the risky part, the zero to one startup phase. I'm going to come in and hopefully operate this a little bit better, smarter, faster, cheaper, applying, whatever expertise that you have on there to improve the payback period on that. We talked about video content, both in the form of YouTube and the Amazon influencer program.
A couple passive income streams for me on the video side. We talked about billboards, really interesting recent episode, which we'll link up. Finally, we talked about cash, your smartphone, and then your credit card in your wallet, earn some cash back and cash back bonuses in the form of new card openings or new card to sign up bonuses. We've got to think, why is this stuff important?
It's important because once income from assets you control exceeds your monthly expenses, you're financially free. If you ever play the cash flow board game, this is what you have escaped the rat race. It's a really, really powerful moment, really, really important stuff. Hopefully, you can use one or more of these income-producing assets to help get you there. Lots of archive episodes mentioned in this one. Make sure to check those out if you missed them.
As always, I'll have all the resources mentioned. Linked up in the show notes for you, all you got to do is follow the link in the episode description and you'll get right over there. That's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Let them know they should check out this episode.
Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of The Side Houseful Show. That's all I want.