While writing eBooks and marketing affiliate products are my
two favorite methods of earning passive income, they are certainly not the only
methods to use. In this chapter, I will cover several other methods that you may
want to consider, and give you an overview of each. I recommend that you read
through the chapter and see which ideas appeal to you the most. You can then
move forward with your chosen ideas and work toward setting them up so they
generate passive income.
How to Create and Market a Mobile
App
It used to be that creating an app to sell was considered
overly risky. For marketers who lacked programming experience, it meant hiring a
programmer to design and create the app, and that usually translated to
prohibitive up-front costs. However, that’s changed now – and if you do it
right, creating and selling an app can be a good way to earn passive income.
Creating an App Concept
If you already have a great idea for an app and you have the
wherewithal to create it, then I encourage you to do it. It’s always going to be
a bit of a crapshoot, but if you take the time to market it on your blog or on
social media, you might be able to sell enough copies to earn a steady stream of
income. You probably already know that places like the Apple Store and the
Google Store sell apps, and you can now buy apps on the Amazon App Store as
well.
What can you do if you don’t have an idea for an app? One
solution that I like to suggest is piggybacking on an existing app. What I mean
is that you can look at popular apps in your niche and figure out a way to put a
twist on them. Let’s look at an example of an app that found a way to offer
something new in an overcrowded niche. The weight loss app Lose It offers some
features that make it stand out from the other weight loss apps that are
available. It allows users to use their smart phones to scan bar codes to get
calorie counts of packaged foods. It saves every item you scan, as well as
individual meals so you can find them easily. It also allows simple look-up of
meals at popular restaurants, including fast food and sit-down options.
If you can find a way to take a popular app and put a new
spin on it by adding additional features or approaching things from a new angle,
you might be able to earn a nice stream of passive income by marketing your
app.
Creating Your App
The next step is to create your app. If you have extensive
programming experience, you can certainly create and program the app yourself.
However, as a rule I do not recommend trying to create the app yourself. You can
hire a programmer on many of the same sites that I mentioned earlier, including
places like Freelancer and Upwork. Of course you will have to pay out
some money up front, but once you do you can hand over the work to a programmer.
You’ll need to explain exactly what you want the app to do. I recommend making a
complete list of the functionalities you want included. Give some thought to
whether you want to allow in-app purchases and things of that nature. A good
programmer should have a list of questions that will help you narrow down what
you want.
You also have the option of using online resources to create
the app yourself if that is your preference. Here are two that I like:
AppyPie – a website that provides the tools to
help you create your own mobile app
Zapporoo – another mobile app creation
resource
Marketing Your App
Once you have a completed app that’s tested and ready to
sell, you can sell it on the places I mentioned earlier, including the Apple
Store, the Google Store, and the Amazon App Store. However, you should also do
some marketing of your own. I strongly recommend that you set up a WordPress
site to sell your app directly to consumers, using the same tips that I listed
in the last chapter about affiliate marketing.
You should also consider setting up social media sites to
market your app. You can include screen shots that show people what the app can
do. As you collect testimonials, you can add them to your WordPress page and
list them on your social media pages too.
Creating a mobile app isn’t for everybody, but if you have a
great idea and the willingness to pay somebody to program the app for you, it
can be a good way to set up a passive income stream.
How to Create and Monetize a YouTube
Channel
Sometimes, new marketers get scared off by the thought of
making videos. I know that filming your own videos can seem intimidating, and
you might imagine that it would be prohibitively expensive as well. However, the
opposite is actually true. You need very little in the way of technical
expertise to film a video, and if you’re comfortable talking off the cuff you
don’t even need to write a formal script.
With that in mind, let’s talk about how making videos and
posting them on your own YouTube channel can help
earn you money. Videos are one of the most popular forms of online content. In
fact, most people would prefer to watch a short (two or three minute) video to
reading a couple of short blog posts, even though the time invested would be
approximately the same.
Videos tend to be shared on social media far more frequently
than other forms of content – in fact, they’re more popular than written content
and photographs combined. That means that once you create a video, it can spread
with very little effort required on your part.
How to Create a YouTube Channel
Creating a YouTube channel is very easy. If you have a Gmail
or Google+ account, you can use your ID to log in to YouTube. Once you are
logged in, you can simply click your profile picture at the top right-hand
corner of the screen and choose the “Create Channel” option to create your
channel.
When you create your channel, you should make sure to do all
of the following;
■ Create a channel name that reflects your niche and the kind of content you will be posting
■ Choose a profile picture or logo that is unique and memorable. If you are using your name, then it’s a good idea to use the same photograph you use on your social media accounts to give some continuity to your online presence
■ Write a keyword-rich description of your channel that includes a link back to your website and gives viewers an accurate idea of what they can expect to find on your channel
Because YouTube is owned by Google, there are some great SEO
benefits to using YouTube. I’ll talk a bit more about those in a minute.
Tips for Creating Memorable
Videos
As I mentioned before, you don’t need a ton of technical
expertise to create video content. Your goal should be to create videos that
provide both entertainment and value to your target audience. Here are some
potential ideas for marketing videos:
■ Tell a short story that highlights a key topic in your niche or explains a product you are marketing
■ Create a whiteboard or animated video that helps to explain a complicated concept relevant to your niche
■ Make an entertaining product demo or product unboxing video that highlights one or your affiliate products
■ Do a viewer Q & A where you solicit questions from your social media followers or in the comments section of your YouTube videos
Just as you did with your eBook, you can hire a professional
writer to come up with a video script if you are not comfortable speaking off
the cuff.
Ways to Monetize Your Videos
Now let’s talk about how your videos earn money on YouTube.
The easiest way to do it is to opt-in to the AdSense option. AdSense runs ads
before your video, giving users an opportunity to click to buy a product. The
benefit of using AdSense here is that, if you do a video on a particular
technical topic, the ad that pops up will likely be something relevant to your
niche. Users are very likely to click on relevant ads if they feel your video
has been helpful, and you will earn a commission every time they do.
Keep in mind that AdSense is not going to make you rich.
However, using YouTube can be a very good way to create a new passive income
stream without having to spend a lot of money or time.
Another option is to create a video series and require users
to pay to watch it. Since most videos on YouTube are free, you will have to be
fairly confident that people will be willing to pay for your content. We’ll talk
about online courses in a minute, but creating a webinar or video course is
certainly an option for YouTube.
How to Promote Your Videos
It is important to keep in mind that YouTube is one of the
world’s most-trafficked websites. In fact, it’s also the world’s second-largest
search engine after Google. It is far easier to get a YouTube video to rank for
search for a particular keyword than it is to get your blog or website to rank.
Google seems to favor YouTube videos in search results – probably because users
favor them too. You can get a lot more attention with video than you can with
other content. When you name your video and write a description for it, make
sure to use your chosen keywords and take full advantage of tags, too. That will
ensure that your video ranks high on Google.
I also recommend embedding your videos on your website, and
sharing them with your social media contacts. Video is highly shareable and very
popular, so sharing it on social media makes a lot of sense. For example, if you
have a Facebook page for your affiliate products and your video is relevant to
that niche, you can share it there and encourage your followers to share, it
too. You can also boost the post, thus ensuring that your video will get out in
front of a whole new group of fans.
How to Create an Online Course
Is there a topic that you know inside out? If you’ve spent
years working in a particular industry or studying a particular topic, then it
might be worthwhile to spend the time and energy setting up an online
course.
I want to be honest about this: setting up an online course
is a ton of work. You’re going to have to write content, create course
materials, and possibly film videos, too. It can easily take five times as long
as it takes to create an eBook if you do it right – and that’s a big time
investment, no question.
The reason I think it’s worth it is that you can earn back
all of that time on the back end. It might take five times as long to set up an
online course as an eBook, but you can also realistically charge five or ten
times as much for it. If you charge $9.99 for your eBook, you might be able to
sell a course for as much as $149.00 – a huge mark-up that allows you to rake in
high income in perpetuity.
Tips for Creating a Course
The key to offering an online course is to pick a niche in
which you are comfortable, one that has enough traffic to warrant the time and
effort you are going to spend creating the course. One good way to do that is to
do keyword research using Google AdWords or SemRush to identify long-tail keywords with a
high-enough search volume to make setting up a class worthwhile.
Keep in mind that you do have the option, again, of
outsourcing certain elements of your course creation. You can hire a writer to
write video scripts for you, as well as to write or edit course materials. If
you plan on using video, it may be worthwhile to hire a professional
videographer to ensure that your videos look polished. Many online teachers
charge a great deal of money for courses. If you want to be able to do the same
you must make sure that your students feel they are getting what they paid
for.
Tips for Marketing Your Online
Course
The first thing to consider is where you will make your
course available. Sites like Udemy and Teachable are good options because they are
well known sources of online education. You will have to pay a small percentage
of your sales price in return for listing your course there. I think it’s worth
the expense. People are far more likely to search for an online course on those
sites than they are to head to Google.
You may also want to consider the following methods of
publicizing your course:
■ Setting up a WordPress site and sales funnel to direct people to your course
■ Creating social media ads to send people to your pages on Udemy, or to your WordPress site
■ Setting up a Facebook page to promote your course – you can share tidbits from the class and even post excerpts from some of your course videos if you want to
■ Send previews of your course to key influencers in your niche and ask them to review or recommend the course to their followers.
Another thing to consider when it comes to setting up an
online course is whether you can leverage it into a source of recurring income.
One way to do that is to set up a website with a private discussion forum. After
people take the class, you can offer them a membership plan with the promise
that you will provide them with things such as:
■ Updates on the course materials
■ New resources related to your niche
■ Access to members-only forums and exclusive information
■ Mentoring with you
■ Exclusive Q & A sessions with you and other experts
The benefit of spinning your course into a membership site is
that if you keep your members happy, you can end up earning recurring income
from them for months or even years. You’ll have some attrition, as every
membership site does, but the benefits far outweigh the risks.
Setting Up Review or Comparison
Sites
The overwhelming majority of people who buy products online
read product reviews and comparisons before making a purchase. In fact, research
shows that 80% of all consumers won’t make a purchase without reading reviews,
and that they give as much credence to reviews from strangers as they would to
those from people whom they know personally.
That statistic points the way to a strong money-making
opportunity that can provide a legitimate service to people by giving them
honest reviews of products in a particular niche. Here’s how you do it:
1. Set up a website for a particular niche, and take the time to create some useful content, including blog posts, how-to videos, tutorials, and more.
2. Research some of the various products in the niche, and sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program.
3. Set up a page that offers side-by-side comparisons of products, or reviews of products. You can set up various options. For example, a website that focused on laptop computers might do reviews of the top five laptops in different categories, including business options, gaming computers, and 2-in-1 computers (laptops that convert to tablets.) Next to each review or comparison, you would include a “Buy” button that would lead to your affiliate link on Amazon.
The benefit of a site like this is that it offers people an
easy way to make side-by-side comparisons – something that’s hard to do on
Amazon because users would have to switch between pages to try to get an idea of
the differences and similarities between products. If you take the time to list
features and give honest feedback about the pros and cons of each product, and
pair it with a strong call to action at the end encouraging people to make a
choice and click to buy, you can earn a nice income this way.
The key to setting up a comparison or review page is that the
reviews you list must be real. It is not going to be enough to simply reiterate
the product features as they are listed on Amazon. You need to give your
customers a real look at how the product works. In an ideal world, you would try
all of the products yourself. In the event that you are marketing relatively
inexpensive products, like teeth-whitening products or kitchen gadgets, you may
be able to do exactly that. However, if you are comparing laptops, trying all of
them may prove to be tricky.
If you cannot try the products yourself, you must research
them thoroughly and try to include as much information as possible about the
experience of using the product in question. Reading consumer reports and Amazon
reviews, as well as reviews in niche publications, is a good way to start.
I recommend using the information in the previous chapters to
set up a WordPress site for your comparison page, optimize the site using your
chosen keywords, and promote your page on social media and specialty sites in
your niche. Because your goal is to have someone make a purchase from your page,
I recommend using long-tail keywords that include words such as:
■ Compare
■ Comparison
■ Review
■ Purchase
■ Best
■ Top
These words will help you attract highly qualified traffic –
people who are very close to the point where they are ready to make a purchase.
What you are providing them is an easy to way to compare products without having
to toggle back and forth between different sites or pages. Convenience is
important, and your site can be the solution to someone’s comparison-shopping
problem.
The downside here is, of course, the time it takes to set up
the site and get it running. Once you have cleared that hurdle, the site should
require only periodic maintenance. You should continue to post to your blog and
share other information, and you will also need to update your reviews
periodically as products are discontinued and new products are added.
Create Your Own Product
We already talked about selling affiliate products, but this
idea takes that concept to the next level. A quick perusal of ClickBank reveals
that there are thousands of digital and physical products out there that you can
market as an affiliate. The thing to remember about those products is that each
one of them has a product creator on the other end, someone who is earning an
income from every product sold by every affiliate. It stands to reason that if
affiliates are earning a nice income selling those products, the product creator
is earning even more.
Imagine that you create a product – say it’s a combination of
an eBook with some videos, as well as a physical product such as weight loss
equipment or something of the kind. You set the price of your product at $99. To
begin with, you sell the product yourself using your own website. As it takes
off, you make the decision to set up an affiliate program offering 50%
commission for each product sold.
The benefit of doing that is that you have the potential to
sell many more products than you sold on your own. All you have to do is provide
your affiliates with some marketing materials. For example, you might give
them:
■ A landing page template
■ Ad copy and images to use
■ Copy to use in their email campaigns
Your affiliates have to spend their own time and money
marketing your products. Yes, you have to split the purchase price with them
50/50. However, you are now doing very little marketing. If you pick up 10
affiliates, then you could (in theory, at least) be selling ten times as many
products as you were before. Your overhead is lower because you’re not paying
for advertising. The reduced amount you make for each product you sell is more
than paid for by the increased volume of sales.
Tips for Creating a Product
The first step is to conceptualize your product. We’ve
already covered how to find a niche, and if you are going to create a product
it’s important to do so in a niche where you already have some knowledge and
authority – that’s what will make people buy from you.
One method I recommend is looking at the top products on
ClickBank and looking for gaps. What things aren’t being covered by the
available products? Is there something that reviews of the top products mention
that indicates a weakness or an opportunity? Your job is to find an opening that
will allow your product to stand out from the crowd.
Once you have conceptualized your product, you will need to
create it. As was the case with creating an online course, the work involved in
creating and manufacturing a product can be extensive. If part of your product
is an eBook, you have the option of outsourcing it to a ghostwriter if you
prefer. If you are including both a digital product and a physical product, you
will need to find someone to manufacture the product for you.
Tips for Marketing Your Product
When you first start selling your product, you will be
selling it yourself. You can create a WordPress site, promote it on your blog,
and send free samples to industry influencers to review the product. You also
need to give some thought to distribution. A purely digital product can simply
be downloaded from your “Thank You” page. However, a physical product will
likely need to be drop-shipped from the manufacturer or from a drop-ship
company. That’s a complicated topic, but you can learn more about it here.
If your product sells well, you may want to add upgrades and
improvements to it, and ultimately, consider creating an affiliate program of
your own. You will have to pay affiliates a decent commission to sell your
product, but the upside of doing so is that they can do the marketing and other
legwork for you while you relax and collect your income.
I hope you can see the benefits of taking the time to create
passive income streams. The effort you put into setting them up is relatively
minor compared to the earning potential in the long-term. Even the most
time-consuming options, such as creating a product or an online course, can pay
you back many times over if you do a good job.
Keep in mind that it is always preferable to have your income
coming from more than one place. If you create a product and the market for it
vanishes, you’ll be left scrambling to replace that income. If you have multiple
streams of income, one can dry up and you’ll still be fine. That means that
you’ll have the best possible scenario for prolonged financial freedom because
you won’t have to worry about losing your income the way you would if you worked
a nine-to-five job.
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