If you want more money the most obvious thing to do is get a job. But the vast majority of jobs involve trading time for money. If we do not enjoy the jobs we do, if they are not a calling for us, then the trade of time for money is more than just a trade, it is a sacrifice and a sacrifice that the vast majority of people make because they think that there is no choice. But in today’s modern world there are several ways in which you can generate income without making such a sizeable sacrifice of your time.

#1. Start Your Own Online Store

The mail order business model is the easiest to impliment if your aim is liberate your time but not reduce your income. Richly documented and fairly obvious now, a website remains open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and never has to close. Orders can be placed while you are at the cinema, eating  at a restaurant or – my favourite – sleeping! There is nothing like waking up to find that somebody put money in your bank account during the night. It has happened to me many many times and that feeling is never any less satisfying.

While I actually enjoy running my online stores, the point is that there is time flexibility and it never gets in the way of the rest of my life.

Today, in contrast to five years ago, starting an online store is fairly cheap. There are quite a few open source shopping cart softwares you can use for free. I use PrestaShop to power all of my online stores.

But it is not as easy to do this as many people selling workshops, ebooks and how-to courses will tell you. If you haven’t done it before there is a steep learning curve. As it happens, I also run another website, PrestaShopPro.com, which teaches you everything you need to know about setting up and running an online store.

#2. Investing

Stock Marketing Investing & Share Dealing

Buying shares in other companies entitles you to a fraction of that company’s profits at the end of an accounting period called dividends. And dividends are the easiest and simplest way to make money from share dealing. You buy the shares and keep them long enough for the dividends to pay out a sum greater than the price you paid for the shares.

Share Dealing is more complicated. It involves buying shares that you think are going  to rise in value, holding on to them while they rise and then selling them for a high price than you bought them for. This requires knowledge of the markets and the factors affecting share prices. But it doesn’t have to be as complicated as some people make it. There are easy buys you can make by thinking about what will happen tomorrow due to changes in the world. For example, when the Met Office tells us that winter is going to be especailly cold this year, we can buy shares in gas and energy companies. If the temperature drops, people have to use more energy. The company is bound to do better and the share price is almost certainly going to rise.

If you can invest in the right places and make reasonable dividends, you can join The Naked Trader, Robbie Burns as somebody who makes their living by investing in the stock market.

Private Equity Investing

If you have disposable income in the bank – especially in this econominc climate – unless you are getting at least 7% interest on it, you are losing out because the current rate of inflation is causing your money to devalue, that is, it may still be £1000, but it can’t buy now what it could have bought 2 years ago, so the value is less than it was 2 years back.

A great thing to do with that money, then, is to invest it into private companies.

#3. Blogging

Blogging is not the obvious choice to somebody wanting to make big money, although it has been done. Nonetheless, there are ways to monetize your blog that can add income to a nest egg that is being generated elseware. It is possible to make hundreds of pounds a month out of a blog, although such a task is quite demanding and will require a range of skills including writing, search engine optimization and publishing. You’ll need to consistently create top quality content of a calibre that will keep visitors coming back for more. Only when you have a several thousand hits to your blog every month will you be able to leverage that and convince people to advertise on your blog. Of course, once you reach the stage, the more visitors your blog is able to command, the higher the advertising fees you can charge.

#4. Content Marketing

Another online only business model, which, if you can become good at it will mean lots of money for no work, is the content publishing market. Better known as Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter. These services allow you do display clickable ads on your content rich websites and reap small monetary rewards each time somebody clicks them – Pay Per Click.

I have made substantial sums of money out of this. It requires large amounts of web traffic and as with all the methods mentioned in this post, there is a skill to it.

For best advice on how to make this work for you, check out The Adsense Code by Joel Comm.

#5. Property

While you’ll need quite a lot of money for this one, investing in property is – despite the recent property price slump – always one of the best places to invest money. But it isn’t about big money fast (although it has been done). Property investment is more of  a long term strategy that you should start as soon as you have enough money.

Conclusion

And I will conclude this article by getting to the core of the matter. The central concept that all of these income generation schemes have in common is that they are all non-linear. If you don’t know what that means, let me explain: a linear income generation scheme – like a day job – is linear because you get a fixed rate of pay per hour. Therefore to make more money, you need to spend more hours doing the job. On the other hand, a blog, for example, could get a million hits in a day and that has nothing to do with how many hours you spend publishing it. Many non linear business ideas take a considerable amount of time to setup and require massive action on the part of the entrepreneur, but once they are up and running the maintainance time is low. And they continue to kick out money for years.