Are you actively pursuing passive income?

We've all heard the saying "passive income" but what exactly does it mean?

To put it simply, passive income really comes down to selling your ideas, not just your time.

For example, speaking, doing workshops, consulting and coaching are active sources of revenue - meaning you have to be physically present "doing" something.

Examples of sources of passive income are selling products, affiliate marketing, some membership programs and product/program licensing. You create something once (like a book or home-study course) and you can keep selling it over and over.

To free up your time, have the lifestyle you want, work less hours and be highly profitable, you want to eventually have most of your income coming from passive sources.

So what steps can you take to make this happen?

1. Learn passive income strategies and skills

Educate yourself via reading, workshops, other people - how to turn what's in your head into information products and services. Learn the many different ways of packaging your knowledge and information and use the internet to sell it passively online. Get educated on how to leverage the content you already have from your workshops, presentations, articles and blog.

2. Do a marketing plan for creating passive income

Spend some time figuring out how to move people through the marketing process and towards purchasing your passive income products and services. Everyone comes in as a prospect and it's up to you to figure out what strategies to use to move them through your marketing funnel/pyramid/process so that they spend their money on your passive income sources such as ebooks, workbooks, audio courses and so on.

3. Create systems

To leverage your expertise, time and resources, you need systems. The idea is to do something once, create an ongoing system for it and it can be done with less effort, time and money in the future - freeing up your time to create more passive income streams. You can create systems in your business for collecting testimonials, getting referrals, sending out your ezine or newsletter, following up with people via email and many other ways.

4. Automate

Automating tasks is an important part of creating passive income. You can automate the marketing and purchase of your income products using autoresponder messages, online shopping cart systems, electronic download and automatic shipping fulfillment via an outside company. Automation means that you can sleep or be on a holiday and your passive income systems will continue to bring you in orders, clients and revenue.

The whole world of doing business has changed - especially with the advent of the internet. We are now in what is called the "information economy". You want to make sure that you're taking advantage of it to increase your business and profits with passive revenue streams.