As you probably know, making any kind of money online is very difficult. When most people look for ways to make money online, they turn to advertising.

Unfortunately, online advertising requires an extreme amount scale for you to be able to make anything. The average CPC of a display ad on Google Adsense is less than $1.

Fortunately, there are promising alternatives out there. In this article, I’ll share with you three ways I have personally made passive income. Some of these ideas made more than others, but in each of them, I’ve had some level of success.

Along with each idea, I’ll talk about the good and bad about it, and give you step-by-step instructions on how to get started if it interests you.

Let’s dive in.

So you’re all packed and excited to come to Chiang Mai. You even booked your flights and a few days at a hotel.

Awesome!

The next step is to find long(er)-term accommodation. 

No idea where to start? Worried about finding a place to stay during high season? 

Don’t be!

Even though it wasn’t as easy as some Facebook posts might suggest, I was able to lock down an apartment in three days.

This was my timeline:

As digital nomads, we are an extremely diverse bunch: full stack web devs VPN’ing into servers from café’s in Ubud, Bali; social media managers checking in on clients using mobile hotspots in the Colorado Rockies; affiliate marketers researching new products at a co-working space in Bansko, Bulgaria.

What we all have in common, however, is remoteness.

In a real sense, we are not physically where we work. There is a space between wherever we are typing on our laptops and those we need to be in touch with.

We can’t walk down the hall to have a quick face-to-face conversation with a client or co-worker or employee.

This makes effective communication across distance, especially written communication, critical for any successful digital nomad.

It began innocently enough.

Joanna and I met in my native Los Angeles while she was on summer vacation from graduate school. We hung out together for only a couple of days before she went back home to Poland. We enjoyed meeting each other and had a great time together.

But never in a million years did we think our chance encounter would lead to an international long distance relationship that took us back and forth between LA and Poland, then to Taiwan, and back to Poland.

First, I want to tell you exactly what “multiple income streams” is all about. Basically, it’s additional streams of income coming in from other sources than your main product/business.

One of the main benefits of having additional income streams is that it’s easier to create several smaller streams of income than just one large stream of income. For example, say you created five income streams, each bringing in $1000, compared to one large stream of income of $5000. It is less work to create the smaller ones than the larger one.