The first thing you are going to do to begin the process of adding passive revenue to your business is look for marketing funnel gaps. Before we get into the marketing funnel gaps however, let us first discuss what the marketing funnel is.

The marketing funnel is the way in which potential customers flow through your various business offerings. The idea is that you create a low barrier to entry (usually a free giveaway of some sort), provide them with on-going valuable information (usually done via a newsletter) and then you gently upsell them into your next offering and the next one and the next one, each offering getting a bit more expensive.

Often times, a business doesn't have multiple offerings so what happens is that a potential customer comes in via the newsletter opt-in or the free giveaway opt-in and then they are bombarded with "buy me" e-mails in which they are being asked to commit to large programs and expensive services. Unfortunately, consumerism doesn't work that way.

In Michael Port's "Book Yourself Solid", he references the know, like and trust factor as one of the key takeaways of his book. Essentially, the idea boils down to this: make sure that people have the time to get to know you, decide whether or not they like you and whether or not they trust you enough to give you their hard-earned money. Think about that for a moment because it's truly powerful stuff. If you stumbled across a website on the Internet, knowing nothing about the person behind the other screen, would you willingly dish out thousands of dollars in cash? Not likely. Your potential customers won't either.

So, before you start creating passive revenue, take stock of your marketing funnel and figure out what it is you need and where you have the biggest gaps in your business. If you are missing a great freebie, start there. If you don't have a moderately priced next option, create that. Whatever it is, start with the low barrier to entry items as they will give your customers the ability to get to know you, like you and trust you before committing to the bigger ticket items.