Author: Joelene

Mindset Time: Stop Trading Hours for Dollars

Passive Income Challenge Day 11.
Stop Trading Hours for Dollars

Before we get started, let me say there is nothing wrong with performing services for income. The service economy is what keeps the world going. But, you must look into the future a little bit and imagine what you will do next. What is your end game? When do you plan to retire? If you only perform services and never diversify your income with passive options, you may never be able to stop working or take a vacation. This is not a good business plan. In fact, to sustain a business long term, you really need both active and passive income.

Reasons You Need Passive Income

The truth is, time is much more valuable than money. When you produce passive income, you do the work once and make money on it multiple times, maybe even forever. The stock market, insurance sales, rental income, affiliate marketing, and advertising are all forms of passive income that can really pay off.

But, they don’t pay off on day one, which can sometimes make them feel not passive at all when you need the money right now. But, instead of thinking only of today, let’s think of reasons you need to invest in passive income opportunities today for your future success.

Time Freedom

If you invest in passive income today, in a year’s time it will be paying off and that will give you more time to invest in other aspects of your life like going to the beach, going skiing, or playing with your kids. You won’t have to take on more clients than you want, and you can be pickier because now you have time freedom.

Stop trading hours for dollars passive income challenge mindset

Ends Money Stress

You know it’s true. If you’re a service provider and trading hours for dollars and you need extra money, it can add a lot of stress taking on yet another project when you have already stretched your time to the limit. Because be honest, a service provider does not have 40 hours a week to provide services. You’re lucky to be able to get 30 hours a week because you still need to work in your business, do your bookkeeping, marketing, and networking.

Allows You to Grow

When you perform services, you only have so many hours in the day. If you spend some of that time building up passive income, you will get to grow your business without spending more time on your business. Yes, it takes time, but it’s the best way to grow your income without adding to your time load.

You Can Live Anywhere

If your service-based business requires you to be at a certain place, once your passive income outpaces your hourly income, you can let that go and move if you want to. You can travel, you can take time off, you can gain freedom from time and place that you cannot even imagine right now.

Now, this is not to say that providing services is a bad thing to do. No, you should do both as you’re building your income. Plus, you may always want to do both. But, what if you started today building your passive income so that you have choices tomorrow?

stop trading hours for dollars

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stop trading hours for dollars

stop trading hours for dollars

Reviews and Tutorials Work Well as Passive Income Generators

Passive Income Challenge Day 10.
Reviews and Tutorials

One fun and lucrative way to add passive income to your business is to do product reviews, even film reviews, and tutorials. You can write them, take pictures, screenshots, and even do a demo with a video on some products. Then link to every product you used to make that demo. So, if you demonstrated a blender, you’d link to the blender – but you can also link to the ingredients in the recipe you used. (using affiliate links, of course!)

When you write any type of review, it’s best to follow certain guidelines to ensure that you rank well for good keywords, encourage sharing by viewers, and make the affiliate links less noticeable by creating pretty links and linking to them within the content that you want to monetize. The possibilities with reviews and tutorials are endless.

Understand What You’re Reviewing

You can’t review anything if you’ve not used it for yourself for a while. Your lack of knowledge will become apparent in your review if you do that. Instead, use the product, watch the movie, use the service and then when you really understand it, the good and the bad, then you’re ready to start creating your review.

Know What the Audience Searches

When you decide to write the review, you need to know what the audience is searching for. They may not be searing for the name of the product. They may be searching for the results of the product. For example, with a movie review, they may know the title and want to see what you think, but they also might be looking up “Best Scary Movies” instead. You need to know the audience enough to get this right.

Take Notes During Your Use

When you’re using the product, especially if you know you’re going to want to do a review of it, take notes. When an issue comes up, write it down. When something really pleases you, write it down. Did you have to contact customer service? Did you have to look up some extra information to understand the movie? All of that is important information for your review.

woman at her desk doing the 30 day passive income challenge day 11 reviews and tutorials

Get Out Your Camera

Now, you can’t take a picture of the movie or show if that is what you are reviewing. But if it’s a product or service, there may be ways to take pictures of it that help you explain your review better. You may need to do a screenshot for a digital product, and for a physical product, you may want to take pictures and video. This is going to make your review much better. Even for a movie, you could take a picture of yourself and your friends in front of the movie sign to make it more personal.

Determine the Story You’ll Tell

Everyone loves stories and writing a review doesn’t have to be a boring ‘this, then, that’ event. It can be a story. It can involve you explaining why you wanted to try it, why you like it, (or don’t like it), what could be better, and so forth while relating it to your life and your business, if relevant. Tell the story in a new way instead of being too technical about it so that people want to read it – but cover the techie details too.

Use a Lot of Detail

A product review is a time that you can use all those flowery words your English teacher told you not to use. You want your audience to feel as if they’re experiencing the product with you. Explain the fine details to them. Compare and contrast to other products, services, movies, songs, etc.… this is going to help your audience understand what it’s like to view or use this one. Always use complete sentences using a lot of descriptive words in your reviews so that the words flow.

If possible after the review, offer your audience a discount, a bonus, or something special if they order or use this product. Link to the product within the text of the review but also link to it under the review so that they have ample opportunity to get the product and use it.

 Reviews and Tutorials

Reviews and Tutorials

Creating Auto-Responder Series as a Source of Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 9.
Creating Auto-Responder Series

In every niche, there are products and services that you can recommend that pretty much stay solid for years to come. If you can identify those products and services, then you can create evergreen content around those products and services so that you can promote them on a schedule via autoresponder to each subscriber based on when they subscribed.

When you set up an autoresponder you can set it up in a way that delivers messages on a schedule based on when the person signed up. Using tags, you can also set everything up so that it delivers certain messages to your subscriber on various days. For example, after they get the welcome information, you can schedule that every day a single email goes out in the series to your subscriber.

A subscriber who signed up 30 days ago will be on a different schedule than someone who signed up a week ago. The messages are evergreen, so it doesn’t matter what time of year they are sent out. These messages may last for several years and still seem fresh if you word them right.

If you choose the right content and products, you shouldn’t have to update it that much. If a product goes out of popularity and isn’t working anymore, you can change and edit the emails that promote that product. That way the content and information is still good, you just change the product you recommend.

Here are some examples of evergreen content:

Niche: Life Coach
Email Series Topic: 365 Days of Positive Affirmations

Niche: Keto Diet Support
Email Series Topic: 365 Keto Lunch Recipes

Niche: Money Mindset
Email Series Topic: 365 Days to Retraining Your Money Mindset

Niche: Getting Through Divorce
Email Series Topic: 365 Days to Moving On

Each email doesn’t have to be lengthy. It can be 250 words of solid information that helps your subscriber solve their problems and promote a product or service to them at the same time.

creating auto-responder series passive income challenge

Remember that for the most part, you can break up content to make it fit a year-long series. For example, if you have a lot of content that has several points per article, you can break down those points to one point per email to spread out the information and to make it last longer. You can also break down a book into more than one email too. Use your imagination and think outside the box to create your 365-day evergreen email series. Find five to ten products to promote and spread them out through the emails to monetize your effort.

 

Your List is a Great Source of Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 8.
Your list is a great source.

Hopefully, as your business has grown, so has your email list. Today, building an email list is an essential part of owning a business, no matter what industry you are in. Everyone is always claiming that the next new thing will replace email marketing, but it never does. No social platform has ever been able to provide the type of return on investment that an email list can if you plan it right. Which is what you are about to learn how to do.

Tell Your List What to Expect

When people sign up for your email list, you need to tell them what to expect. Set up an autoresponder series that welcomes them to the list, teaches them about your business, gives them an overview of what to expect from being on your list, and invites them to your social media platforms. You want to build a relationship with them, let them know that.

Make it Easy

Whenever you create a new product or want to promote a new product, create an email series for your autoresponder and schedule it right away. You can create schedules as short as 7 days, and as long as an entire year’s worth of emails. Don’t wait to do it, just do it.

Create Calls to Action

Every email should have a CTA. Your email messages should lead to something your audience can purchase, download that encourages them to purchase, or moves them to a new segment that also encourages them to purchase. Each and every time.

Build Your List

Always keep building your list. You can build your list by adding content upgrades to your content on your blog. For example, if you have a blog post about 3 Ways to Make Extra Money, you can link to a content upgrade about 101 Ways to Make Extra Money. This will move them to your list about making money which you can promote to them paid ways to make money.

Your List Passive Income Challenge Day 8. your list is a great source of passive income

Use Evergreen Content

One way to give your list members information that can also translate to added income is to put a lot of evergreen content into your schedule. The reason is that keeping your audience informed will train them to open emails from you, as well as trust your calls to action. Evergreen content is content that stays fresh for a long time, and in some niches that can be almost forever.

Add content to your autoresponder for every blog post you publish, every product you sell, every event you want to attend, and more. The more you add content into your autoresponder that is useful to your audience and promotes what you want to tell them about, the better. You will train them to get used to getting quality content from you, and that you only promote quality, useful products and services.

When you have enough content scheduled into your autoresponder, you can then fill it in with last-minute trending items, specials that your affiliate partners are promoting, and other content. But, if you choose to leave it for a few weeks, it’ll still be productive and producing passive income for you – even when you’re not actively working on it.

 

Writing and Publishing Books as a Source of Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 7.

Creating passive income can be challenging, yes, but it can be a fun challenge. One great way to make passive income is through publishing books and today, it’s easier than ever to start writing and publishing books yourself. Who knows, you could be the next Stephenie Meyer. Heck, if you are not a writer, you can hire someone to do it for you! (but where is the fun in that?)

Choose a Niche

This is very important when it comes to creating books for Kindle. Look at the types of books that sell the best and try to create something in that niche if you understand it and can do the research or hire someone who can. Writing and Publishing Books

Hire a Writer

If you don’t want to write, or would rather have someone else do it – then hire a writer. You just give them the idea, a brief outline of what you’d like in the book, and let them do the work. You can use your name as the author or a pen name. It’s up to you how you want to proceed in this case. Note of caution: If you hire writers, run the work through a plagiarism checker.

[Tweet ““A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” ~ Angela Carter”]

Edit the Book

Don’t have the writer edit the book, even if the writer is you. Always have someone else do the editing. You can hire an editor as easily as you can hire a writer. The editor can check for plagiarism issues, grammar, and fact check as well as improve the overall writing in the book before it’s published.

Create a Book Cover

Hire a graphic designer to create the book cover. You can also create book covers using software like Canva.com. Remember, you want the book cover to look really good and professional. When it comes to books, people really do buy by the cover, so it’s essential to get that right.

Layout the Book

A Kindle book needs to be laid out the way that Amazon wants it laid out. They have directions on their site.  It does change sometimes, so it’s best to use their guidelines when laying out a book. It can be challenging to layout a book with a lot of images, so you may need to hire a professional to do that too.

Upload it to Amazon Kindle

Once the book is finished and the cover is done, it’s time to upload the book. Again, you can hire someone to do this for you, making this mostly hands-off other than the up-front financial investment required to get started publishing when you outsource.

The great thing about Amazon is that they take care of customer service, payments, returns, and even sales taxes for you. Each month, they send you a payment directly to your bank account for your sales. With the right types of books, you can build a portfolio that earns six figures a year. You just must find the right niche that is a good seller.

Writing and Publishing BooksWoman sitting on couch writing in a book with laptop and textbook beside her, writing and publishing books

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iting and Publishing Books

Creating Info Products as a Source of Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 6.
Creating Info Products

You may not realize it, but information products, known as Info Products, have been around longer than the internet. An info product is simply a way to provide information to the customer about a specific issue, problem, or circulate information. The info product can be any type of medium, such as a book, video, membership site, podcast, the list goes on. It can also be a combination of all the above.

If your audience needs the information, then you should create it. Period. It can be something like “How to Become a Minimalist” or “Lose Weight in 30 Days” or it can be a book about your journey to success with tips for the reader to follow. It can be in a variety of forms, a combination of forms, and if it covers information that your audience wants, it can also be a source of passive income for you.

Here is how to make that happen:

Create the Content

Once you decide what you want to create as an information product then you need to decide how you’ll create it. You can create it yourself, you can get help by hiring someone else to do it for you. You can sift through all of the content you already have and piece it together into one info product. You can even combine several types of information products together, such as a podcast episode with a workbook, and create an amazing info product that everyone in your niche will want.

Get it Up for Sale

Once you’ve created and packaged the product, you’ll want to sell it. The best way to sell it is in a way that you can get affiliates to also promote it and earn a commission on it. It’s a lot cheaper to pay commissions than it is to pay for reaching people on your own via advertisements on social media. If you can attract super-affiliates, that’s going to explode your sales.

Set Up Promotions

You can set up promotions in a passive way. Once you load the information into your autoresponder, into your social media schedule, and get it up on your blog as a post and a page, all you must do is promote it and let others promote it. Then you’ll start raking in the income passively from here on out.

Provide Customer Service

Once you start selling the info product, you will need to provide customer service. You can set up some automation on this process by using a searchable helpdesk and ticketing system. But, you will only have to create that one product one time.

Once it’s set up, providing customer service will be your only role in making money on the sales. If you create a product that is more evergreen content, then it will last a long time and you can almost create an entire business off of one great information product!

creating info products, passive income challenge day 6

Affiliate Marketing as a Source of Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 5.
Affiliate Marketing

Passive income is a very important way to add income to your bottom line. It doesn’t matter what type of business you own now. You can add affiliate income. Affiliate income is a critical way to make money. It’s not a scam, and it’s not a pyramid scheme. It’s a legitimate way to earn money recommending products that you use and that you know your audience will want to use, too.

Affiliate income is also a very lucrative way to earn money. Business owners can add unlimited income to their books by using affiliate programs, so they can earn for recommending. It consists of recommending products, services, and opportunities to an audience using a special link.

The special link tracks who provided the link, who clicked on the link, and what happened after the click. If someone clicks the affiliate link you provide and then they make a purchase, you will get a percentage of that sale – called a commission.

Usually, the commission is paid via your PayPal account or via Stripe to your bank account depending upon the business or platform you’re working with. You’ll be responsible for paying taxes on the income you earn via affiliate marketing so keep track of it.

Affiliate marketing is a very lucrative career opportunity. If you can recommend enough products, services, and opportunities to the right audience, you can make more than a full-time job doing it. It can add a new income stream to your income-producing activities, regardless of what you do for your main source of income right now.

passive income challenge day 5, Affiliate Marketing

To become an affiliate, you simply need to find the product websites and look for terms such as referral program, affiliate program, or partner program. If you cannot find that on their website, try doing a search for “product name affiliate program” and you may find it that way. If you still cannot find it, email them to ask them if they have an affiliate or referral program and if so, how do you sign up.

To promote the affiliate products, you will want to email your audience about the product, giving information about why they need it. You will want to write a blog post about it, add it to your recommended resources page, and promote the products on social media when allowed. You can also add the affiliate link anytime you mention the product or the type of product in other posts and content too.

The reason affiliate marketing is considered passive income is that you do the work once, and you can get paid multiple times. You write a blog post once, send an email once, and promote them both on social media multiple times, people click the link six months from now and buy and you’ll make money. In fact, if 100 people buy from that blog post, you’ll keep earning money. That’s why affiliate programs are so lucrative – if you can find the right ones that your audience needs, wants, and will buy.

affiliate marketing for passive income challenge day 5Affiliate Marketing

 

Do You Have a Recommended Resources Page?

Passive Income Challenge Day 4

Having more content on your website is better than having less. But, you want the content to be important to the audience and provide what they need. One piece of content you must have on your website, no matter what type of business you have, is a recommended resources page. This page is useful for your audience and it can be a profit center for you. Let’s talk about what it is, how to make one, and what you should recommend on that page.

Resources You Use, Stand by, & Recommend

The page should only include a list of resources and a description of each that you use, stand by, and would recommend happily to others. If you’ve not tried it and can’t stand by it, it’s best if you don’t include it on the list.

Make a New Page

To create a recommended resource page, it’s just a new page on your site. If you use WordPress this is super easy to do. Just click “add page” and give it a title that makes sense such as “Resources I Recommend” or something that resonates with your audience.

You can see the Studio Resources Page here: Studio Resources

Recommended Resources Pagepassive income challenge, Recommended Resources Page

Use Affiliate Links

There may be some resources that you use that don’t have an affiliate program, or it’s a program you cannot get into for some reason. That’s okay. You can still recommend a few resources like that, but you want most of the things you recommend on this page to have an affiliate link so that you can earn extra income from the recommendation.

Blog Posts

One thing that you can do is create a blog post about each of the resources you recommend. That will provide additional content for your blog, but you can then link to the blog post as you create them within the description of each resource on your resource page.

Recommended Resource PageRecommended Resource Page, passive income challenge day 4

Create One Now

Go ahead and create one now if you don’t have one. If you do have one, start creating blog posts for each of the recommended resources. The blog post can be about the resource directly, or it can be about the task the resource helps with and the resource can be something you recommend within the post.

Remember to update and change your resource page as you change your own business practices and tools you use in your business. When you find a new product or service that you love, you can add to the page easily. If something falls out of your favour, you can always go back and remove it.

The point is, the resource page will give you some added passive income, but also give your audience something they really want from you. They want to know what you do, how you do it, and what you use to get it done. Win-Win!

P.S. Sharing is caring! So be sure to share this with your network and help fellow female entrepreneurs kick 2021 in the arse!

In case you missed previous and posts, here they are:

Day 1: Why You Shouldn’t Put all the Eggs into One Basket
Day 2: What exactly is Passive Income?
Day 3: Any Online Business Can Benefit from Passive Income 

Recommended Resources Page

Any Online Business Can Benefit from Passive Income

Passive Income Challenge Day 3
Online Business Can Benefit from Passive Income

It doesn’t matter what you’re doing right now as your main source of income. You can add passive income sources to it. Having multiple passive income sources will give you some freedom to go on vacation, be sick, and be choosier about the work that you do and who you do it with. Let’s look at a few different examples of small online businesses and how they may benefit from adding passive income to their business model.

Website Designer – While designing websites may be your main source of income, there are things you can add that will boost your income. For example, you can create a recommended tools and services page that lists everything you love with affiliate links and make sure you give that to people on a regular basis. You can also recommend directly to clients with your affiliate links different services such as hosting, domain name purchasing, autoresponder services, and whatever else they need.

Virtual Assistant – As a VA, you provide some form of service in a particular niche to your clients. There are likely products and services that you know work well for most of them. You should become an affiliate for those products and services and, again, make it a habit of recommending them to all your clients.

Writer – If you write content as a ghostwriter, then there are many opportunities to expand your income with passive income. You can recommend services, platforms, and more to your clients. You will get ideas from them based on the types of software and services they use.

Coach – A coach, depending on their niche, has wide latitude in choosing different software, services, and products to recommend to their clients and community. For example, if you’re a health coach, any products that you believe are good for your clients can be promoted as an affiliate.

Niche Blogger – Whatever niche you blog about, there are products and services that you can join their affiliate program and promote to your audience. Promote them in the content, on a special recommended products page, and within autoresponder email.

YouTube Star – Again, whatever niche the YouTube star is in will inform what types of products and services are promoted. If the audience needs it, then you should find a way to promote it. Get people to join your email list so you can promote more there.

Adding passive income can benefit any type of online business in many ways. Making money in six months based on something you did today is a great feeling and can provide the security that you need in the online business world.

Any online business can benefit from passive incomeBenefit from passive income.

P.S. Sharing is caring! So be sure to share this with your network and help fellow female entrepreneurs kick 2021 in the arse!

In case you missed previous and posts, here they are:

Day 1: Why You Shouldn’t Put all the Eggs into One Basket
Day 2: What exactly is Passive Income?

Passive Income Challenge Day 3
Benefit from Passive Income

What Exactly is Passive Income?

Passive Income Challenge Day 2

What exactly is Passive income? The term itself is probably a horrible term to use. Passive income isn’t really all that passive. What really defines it is that you do the work once, and you keep earning from that work repeatedly. Whereas with non-passive income, you are trading hours for dollars and do the work once and get paid once. Let’s look at some examples of passive income ideas.

What Exactly is Passive Income?

Investing in Stocks – This is one that everyone is familiar with. When you take a certain amount of money and invest it each month, the interest you earn on that money is a form of passive income. You simply invest the money, and if all goes well, you will get a return on your investment in the form of interest payments.

Buy & Invest in Rental Property – This is another form of passive income. You buy the property, hire a property manager, and collect rent. The real estate agent finds the property, the property manager does all the labour, and you just invest and collect your rent every single month while also building equity in the property. That’s income today and income tomorrow. passive income challenge day 2

Publishing Books – This is a great form of passive income. You write a book, publish it, and then collect residuals from sales for as long as the book makes sales. You really don’t even have to write the book. You can pay people to do that. A classic example is the Chicken Soup for The Soul franchise. They have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, earning over $100 million per year.

passive income challenge, what exactly is passive income

Affiliate Marketing – This involves promoting someone else’s products or services and when someone buys, you get a percentage of the sale. You can find opportunities within your community, on affiliate platforms like Clickbank.com, Amazon, or if you like a certain product, go to their website to find out if they have a program.

Develop a Digital Product – Any digital product that you sell over and over again, such as an app, or courses, you can earn passive income doing that. You create a digital product, then your job is to promote it and sell it. You can even get affiliate marketers to help you.

Woman smiling and spinning her hair, passive income challenge day 2, what exactly is passive income

YouTube Star – This type of income doesn’t seem very passive at first. You must produce a lot of content on a regular basis that your audience likes and will watch. You make money via advertisements, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing options as a YouTube Star. You don’t even really have to be a star to get started. What makes it passive is that you will earn money on the videos year after year, not just once.

Blogger – Most bloggers would not say their job is passive, but since you do the work once and can get paid repeatedly, it’s still considered passive income. Usually, you pick a niche in which to blog. You can do product reviews, how-to posts, and more. You earn money by placing ads and affiliate product links in the posts.

As you see, there are many ways to add to your income streams. The best course of action is to start with one thing, and then build onto it as you go. Work on it, promote and wait until you’re earning something on one idea before moving on to the next.