DFHW: Living the 4-Hour Work Week

A lot of us 4HWW’ers are searching for muses that are Passive Income Generators (PIGs) and also require little investment upfront or continued maintenance (to allow them to be true 4 hour a week exercises). Maybe it’s a panacea, since if there was truly something that can return income with little or no time investment, everyone would be doing it, which would then eliminate any of the financial benefit. Economic markets are efficient, right?

Or maybe there are such sorts of businesses, but they can never truly replace income by themselves. Perhaps the key to a good PIG-type muse is to have a collection of small businesses, each of which contribute a modest amount, but togethr contrbute a significant amount.

In that vein, I’m getting a few of my muses together. The first muse is this blog. But a blog isn’t truly a PIG. Indeed, a blog is really an Active Income Generator (AIG) because it requires continuous work on the blogger to allow it to derive value. Well, maybe not entirely… some blogs automatically parrot information available elsewhere. Those blogs then can truly be PIG-type muses. But it’s the one where new and fresh content is the draw that makes blogs AIGs.

Note: I really need better acronyms, since we like PIGs and the AIG acronym sounds too close to an existing, failing business entity. Anyone have any ideas that convey the same meaning but have better acronyms?

An e-Commerce site as a PIG

So, one of those modestly-contributing PIGs I am considering is an ecommerce site selling a specific niche of items. There is some set-up time involved in an ecommerce site, especially around the website development and selection of products. Also, there is the issue of dealing with customer support and shipping / packaging. But I have a feeling that e-Commerce has evolved so that it can be completely turnkey without requiring the user to do anything but generate traffic.

Here’s where I’m stuck. I need help here — has anyone recently put together an e-Commerce site with a minimal of money and time investment and managed to keep operations humming with little continuous money and time investment? If so, I want to hear about it! What tools did you use? What companies are you working with? Send me your advice, and we’ll keep it posted here.

See you around the 4HWW world!