Side-Hustle

How To Make $700/Month Passive Income With Zero Investment

How you can make $700 a month in Passive income with zero investment as a side-hustle?

Writing online could change your life. It could bring more opportunities than you think of. Someone asked; “Is Writing or Blogging going to die?”, I answered him; “Did you search something on Google in the last 24 hours?” He said; “Yes” Then Blogging or writing online isn’t going to die. I have the very same thought that one of my blogs get a huge hit and I was making over $1.4K in a month from that blog. Eventually, I failed later, this is the lessons you learned while doing blogging through hard ways.

I started Blogging during my college days, I didn’t know that will have such a huge impact on my life. I failed many times before I was making $1K a month from the blog through AdSense and then It all goes down. It thought me some lessons. During the course when I was making $300 to $400 a month from that Blog — My prediction was that it will go to zero in few months, I discovered Medium and thus, I thought this is the platform for writing and sharing my content.

Medium literally leveled the playing field for everyone. You could write about a topic of your Interest and could reach thousands of readers. You are getting readers from any country, everyone is paying the same $5 a month. I started my own Medium publication called “Menlo Blogging” where I tend to write about Blogging and different writing platforms.

Making Money And Living in a 3rd world country:

The good thing about making money online living in a 3rd world country is that you could make less than $200 but that amount could help you live a very comfortable life in any 3rd world country. The minimum threshold any employer should pay in my country ‘Pakistan’ is $110.

Everything here is so cheap. I have bought a laptop last year through my online earnings. Installed Solar panels in my home to make clean and green energy and helping my parents cover some home costs and paying for my education and other expenses.

I am proud of myself for taking this decision to be a content creator online.

Revenue source#1: Writing on Medium:

Medium is one of my favorite writing platforms. I love this platform as a writer. The aesthetics of writing is so great that once I started writing, I usually end up writing an article. I enrolled In the Medium partner program during the first month of 2020 and made over $4.4. My brother thought of eating something good and we spend all the money on eating some Biryani with a cold drink.

Fast forward to 2021, In the first month of 2021, I made over $330 from writing on Medium.

When you write one article on Medium and then second, third and fourth, things add up. Your earnings increase as you started publishing more articles. The more you publish, the more compounding shows its power and you end up doing better on monthly basis.

Some learning while writing on Medium:

You gotta write every single day. The cornerstone of Medium is publishing. The more you publish, the better you get. The community on Medium is very helpful so even if you are making any mistake, they will encourage you.
Take Medium seriously. In the first four months of writing on Medium, I wasn’t a Medium member but then I discovered that *not being a Medium member* is a mistake, so I enrolled in Medium membership. I miss so many great opportunities to read amazing articles on Medium.
Some other learnings; make your own publication, publish content every single day or at least 5 times a week. Take Medium a social media site for writers and engage with other writers.

Revenue source#2: Writing on Vocal Media:

Vocal Media is one of the best Medium alternatives. The good thing about writing on Vocal Media is that every read counts. I joined Vocal Media but don’t see any results. Later, I have published one article on Vocal and it gets ranked on Google and got over 20K reads. This article makes me write regularly on Vocal. Now, I publish over 30 to 40 stories a month on Vocal and planning to invest more of my time in writing original stories on Vocal.

Last month, I made over $262 from reads + $8 from Tips making $270.

Now, Vocal and Medium are two of my favorite writing platforms where I publish content every single day or at least trying to be a better writer. I am writing on Vocal for the past months and It has changed my mindset about writing content online.

Some lessons I have learned and things I will do:

Publish stories with the intent of targeting a platform. In my case, most of my stories are ranked on Google. The traffic is mainly coming from search engines.
Share whatever you know about. I have articles on Vocal about Engineering, Business, Blogging, Writing and almost any topic. If you know about anything, share your experience on Vocal.
It is a long-run. In some cases, it takes time to build a list of articles or stories that drive traffic to your stories. I have over 160 articles on Vocal and planning to put 30+ articles a month.
Publish original content on Vocal. Don’t publish your already published articles on Vocal. Vocal Media doesn’t have in-built traffic, in order to get paid, you have to bring readers to your articles. When you publish original content, Search engines crawl your article and rank it based on how quality the article is and some other factors.

Revenue source#3: My YouTube Channel earnings:

YouTube was the very first platform I started my earning. Later, I have to delete that Channel and started a new one in 2017. I have talked about my YouTube earnings in one of the articles; How much I earned as a Small YouTuber with 5, 170 Subscribers?

Last month, I have made over $118.

I love YouTube. You know about something and record yourself doing or speaking about it and Boom!, you make money. My channel is monetized so for every monetized view, I get paid some cents. YouTube isn’t just about money but it is a good platform for branding purposes too.

I made videos about articles I published on Medium or other writing platforms. Your article is like scriptwriting. When you have an article, it is a ready-made script for a video. You aren’t going to repeat every word but this gives you the structure and the content for creating a video.

Some learnings about making money on YouTube:

Target search engines. YouTube is the second most used search engine after Google so learn some Video SEO could help you too.
Create more videos. The more videos you make, the higher the chances that you will make money. This is what I have experienced during my journey of making money online.
Promote your videos on different platforms. I have a blog where I write an article about the latest topic of my video.

Revenue source#4: Investing in the stock market:

I also invest money into the stock market. One thing I am proud of myself is that I never lost money in the stock market. I have invested over $1000 in the stock market and even though I am holding the line, the company that I have invested in is doing pretty good.

In the future, I am going to invest more as the more you wait not to sell your stocks, the stock market by default goes up.

Future Revenue sources:

The Substack newsletter: I have a newsletter for Medium writers. I have one paying subscribers which makes it $5 MRR.
My Blog: I also write on my blog and currently it is generating few cents a day so I am trying to publish more content.

My total earnings: $330 From Medium + $270 From Vocal Media + $118 From YouTube Videos + $10 from other sources = $728

That’s was my little journey.

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