Passive Income Ideas

How hard it is to make $100 a month from it and how hard it is to maintain once you’ve created the thing in the first place.For me in my business, these different sources generate around $27,000 per weekthese days with varying degrees of passiveness. And obviously, this has taken me like eight years to build up.

So, don’t expect to be hitting those sorts of numbers when you first get started. But this is the video that I wish I would have hadwhen I started my financial independence journey many, many years ago, let’s go for it.

All right, so, when I say passive income, I always air quote itbecause there is really no such thing as passive income. There is no way to make money without doing anything at all. But when I say passive income,what I mean is that it’s

money that is not directly tied to our time. So, let’s say you were to write a book. If you write a book, you publish a book that book is now on bookshelves. You’ve done the work, kind of once, to write and publish the book. But now anytime the book sells, you make money from royalties, that is passive income. You could literally be making money while you sleep because you’ve created this thing, which is out in the world, which is generating income for you.

The other thing with passive income is that it always takes a very long time to get going. So, if you see any ads before this videotalking about how you can get rich quick by whatever scheme,or if you see people in the comments pretending to be me (screenshot pops) saying, “Oh my God, here’s how you can get rich quickwith crypto, WhatsApp this number.”

That is all a scam, it’s not gonna work. There is no way to get rich quick. It is not a thing. So, if you’re looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, those things just don’t exist.So, you might as well not even try. And the way I think of this,is that ultimately money is just a medium for exchanging value.

The only way to make money is to provide value. And the only way to make passive income, passive money, is to provide value in a waythat is not directly tied to your time. So please, please, please, do not try and join and get-rich-quick scheme, they don’t exist. I’ve had lots of massages over the years from people who have tried signing up to a get-rich-quick crypto scheme or a gambling scheme or a, “Hey, here’s how you kind of play poker online.”

None of these things ever work. People always end up losing money. The only way to make money is by providing value.

And so, let’s talk about the nine different ways (icons pop)that you could provide value if you wanted to. Just before we dive in, I want to tell you that I’ve just launched my brand-new Skillshare class, about Productivity for Creators, how to start a successful side hustle. I will tell you more about Skillshare later on, but I want to plug my own class because I think it’s genuinely really good, and people really like it and it’ll help you get tips on how you can start side hustles in your spare time.All right, so, let’s kick things off with investing in stocks and shares.

And in this context, the way that we provide values by offering up our money.Providing money and investing in service is in a way giving a form of value. And so, when we give our money to a companyin the form of buying their stocks, it makes sense that we would get some kind of return for that investment. And we’re starting with thisbecause investing in stocks is the easiest way to make any kind of passive income.

If you have any sorts of savings and they’re sitting in a savings account, earning 0.01% interest, they’re not really doing very much for you. Whereas if you had those stay savings and put themin stocks, you could potentially be earning passive incomefrom the money that’s otherwise just sitting there. So how hard is it to get started with affiliate marketing?

Well, I’m gonna give this a two out of five stars. Basically, you can just sign up for an affiliate program like Amazon Associates.So, Amazon has its own affiliate program which I think is probably the biggest in the world.

 And then once you have your little special links you can post those on your website or on Twitter or on social media or whatever.And if people buy the product through your link or in fact buy any product on Amazon through your link you’ll get like some tiny percentage of the sales. So pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing, but how hard is it to make $100 a month?

Well, this is actually kind of hard. So, let’s say you had a product that was $50 that you were trying to selland you were getting 5% commission on it. That is pretty good.Amazon doesn’t offer nearly as much as 5% it offers like two or 3%, something like that. And let’s say your average conversion ratei.e., people visiting the thing versus people actually buying the product after visiting the thing, let’s say that’s 1% which is pretty reasonable for conversion rate. You would need 8,000 visits to your websiteor whatever to make $100 a month.

It’s actually quite hard to get 8,000 visits per month to your website, to a specific product page. And generally doing well in affiliate marketingrequires lots of upfront effort in terms of either building an audience or building such domain authority in whatever space you’re in,that you’re sort of organically getting traffic.

Now, other than Amazon there are a few other affiliate programs that I’m part of. One of them is Skillshare who is kindly sponsoring this video? I’ll tell you about the sponsored segment laterbut Skillshare has an interesting affiliate program where if you refer someone to sign up for a free trial of Skillshare you can get $7 in affiliate commission just for that thing.

So, if you wanted to make $100 a month from affiliates,you would need 15 people every month to sign up for Skillshare with your affiliate link thing. How hard is it to get 15 people a monthto sign up with your affiliate link?

Well, it’s not that hard if you have an audience and it’s not that hard if you have your own classes on Skillshare, like I do, I have like nine of them. And so, if I want to make money through Skillshare affiliates,I can just tell people, “Hey guys,” like I can tell you that, “Guys I’ve just releasedmy latest Skillshare class Productivity for Creators, how to start a successful side hustle.                                                                                                     

How hard is it to make $100 a month? I’m gonna give this a 3.5-star rating Because again you need an audience. And as we always talk about on this channel the way you build an audience is by creating useful content, putting it for free on the internet once a week, and doing this for at least two years. If you just follow those three steps, I guarantee you’ll have an audience and you’ll be able to make some kind of money through this passive income stuff.

But that’s quite hard to do no one sticks to it for at least two years.So, we’ll give that a 3.5-star rating. But the good news is once you’ve created it. And once you started making money from affiliates it’s actually quite easy to maintain because especially if you have evergreen content, the sort that isn’t relying on, like current affairs or the latest news, the sought that peoplemight search for over a long period of time, this becomes like relatively reasonable passive income.

Now, if we look at me and my business, these days from Skillshare we make a roundabout $11,000 per month in affiliate incomewhich approximates to around $2,750 per week. And from Amazon on average, it’s around about $450 a month from the Amazon UK storeand a little bit more from the US and Canada.

All right, the method of making passive income is by selling digital products.Now, these are products that you create once, like an eBook or a download of an app or something like that. So, you create it once and then you can sell itmultiple times because selling digital products doesn’t usually have any costs associated with it. One really good example is this guy called Traf,who I follow on Twitter, who made an iOS 14 icon set and sold it for like $30 a pop, a few months ago and ended up making, I think like $300,000 in the course of like a few weeks, just because loads of people around the world wanted to buy his icon pack.So, he put the work into creating the pack, and now he’s selling it for lots of money.