In my last post, I have shared about why we need multiple income streams for a happier life. After that tweet, you may be asking yourself “How do I diversify my income?”. Now I will share some possible income sources, both passive and active, for me, as a coder and an SEOer.

Financial Investment

It could be any investment in stocks, bonds, mutual fund, REIT (real estate investment trust), CDs or savings account, coin, … A lot of things you could do to make money from your current assets. Just keep in mind one thing: please understand thoroughly before invest your money in anything. You work hard, saving hard, sacrifice many things for this money, so please don’t waste it in what you don’t understand.

If you invest in stock, please invest in the industries you understand, the company you understand. If you invest in mutual fund, please understand the management team and their historical performance. So on and so forth.

The idea is when you understand your investment thoroughly, you can choose what fit you the most, manage your risk, keep calm mentality regardless up and down of the market in short term. Keeping calm mentality is the most important thing to me because I still have my main job to do as a software developer.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing means you help other business sell their products and service through your channels (your social network, blog, email list …) to earn commission. There are a lot of affiliate marketing platforms such as Shareasale, Awin, Amazon, CJ Affiliate,… these platforms will give you access to tens of thousands of merchants and millions of products.

The important things of doing affiliate marketing are finding the right products, promoting them in right way and bring more and more traffic to your channels.

If you do it right, you can make $1,000 - 20,000/month, not bad for a secondary income source, right?

SaaS (Software as a Service)

SaaS sometimes are call web-based software, on-demand software. Basically, you provide some online service to customers through your website and server then earn fees. The customers don’t need to install any software, all they need is a device (mobile, PC, Laptop) with internet connection.

To make money by SaaS, the important things are:

• You solve your personal problem before the customers’ by your software. Only by doing that, you can feel the pain of your customers and sympathize with them.
• You can sell your products. It has no meaning if your product is so great and you can not sell it to anyone.

Accepting Guest Post on Blog

I have built several authority websites to do affiliate marketing for Amazon. I also utilize those websites to sell guest post as an additional income. Accepting guest posts wisely can bring more value to you and your blog than you thought.

• Search engines prefer websites that are regularly updated. However, it is not easy and take a lot of efforts to write high quality content on a regular basis. Therefore, accepting guest posts can save your time and money to publish high quality posts.
• Some SEOers are willing to pay money for a link from a high-quality blog.

The important thing is you should choose only high-quality content on your niche and diversify the content providers.

I have tried all these above ways of making multiple income streams. Next post, I will share how I have done them.