9 Different ideas of making passive income


Hey friends welcome back to my new blog.

In this Blog, we're gonna talk about
nine different ways that you can make passive income.
And for each of those, I'm gonna talk
about how hard it is to get started,
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 nine different sources
generate around $27,000 per week
these 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 had
when 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 it
because 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 its 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 video
talking 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 quick
with 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 way
that 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 messages 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 wanna tell you
that I've just launched my brand new Skillshare class,
about Productivity for Creators,
how to start a successful side hustle.
That's linked in the video description.
Skillshare is sponsoring this video.
I will tell you more about Skillshare later on,
but I wanna 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.
Anyway, let's get into the video.
All right, so, let's kick things off
with investing in stocks and shares.
And in this context, the way that we provide value
is by offering up our money.
Providing money and investing in a service
is in a way giving a form of value.
And so, when we give our money to a company
in 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 this
because 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 them
in stocks, you could potentially be earning passive income
from the money that's otherwise just sitting there.
Now, I've got a whole video
called "The Ultimate Guide to Investing
in Stocks and Shares for Beginners",
which is gonna be linked over there somewhere.
So that is a solid half hour-long introduction
to stocks and exactly how they work.
But the thing that I recommend
for most beginners as a non-financial advisor,
and this is not financial advice,
purely for entertainment purposes only,
or so people say, or at least the thing that I do
is that basically all my money
that's in stocks and shares is invested in index funds.
Now an index fund is something like the S&P 500.
And when you invest, let's say $1,000 in the S&P 500,
that basically means that your $1,000 is distributed
amongst the top 500 biggest companies in the US.
So, weighted by how big they are.
So like, 2% of it would be an Apple,
2% in Facebook, 2% in Google, 2% in Microsoft.
And then you probably won't have heard
of the 500th company on the list,
but basically, all the big US companies you've heard of
you end up investing in all of them a little bit at a time.
So, if you wanna get started with that,
all you need to do is sign up to a stockbroker.
If you're in the US you can use a Webull,
I think I've got a link in the description.
If you're in the UK, you can use Freetrade or Vanguard.
Basically, whatever country you're in
just Google the phrase, best stock broker platform,
your country name
and you'll find something that works for you.
And then it's very easy to be able
to invest in an index fund.
So, within our famous side hustle assessment matrix,
we're gonna give the difficulty of starting,
a one-star rating, one out of five.
It's very, very easy to get started with stocks.
How hard is it to make $100 a month
by investing in stocks and shares?
Well, this kind of depends, because it depends
on the performance of the stock market overall.
So, in the last 12 months, from 2020 to 2021,
the S&P 500, has actually increased by about 50%.
That is a lot, it's like gone up
by a solid 50% despite COVID and everything going on.
So if in April 2020,
you had invested $2,400 in the S&P 500,
the fact that it's gone up by 50%,
means you would've made $100 a month.
But obviously, this is not the way to look at it
because things can go up and down,
and the stock market has different levels
of performance depending on
what time period you're looking at.
But if we average out the last 30 to 50 years,
the S&P 500 has had
a roughly 10 point something percent return.
Which means every year, on average, over the longterm,
it goes up by around 10%.
This is not inflation-adjusted for any economists among us.
And so if we do some back of the envelope calculations,
if we wanna earn $100 a month, passively,
through stocks and shares, we would need
around about $12,000 invested in the S&P 500,
to make that 10%, $1,200 a year, which is $100 a month.
But as I talk about in that video about stocks,
overtime, we have compounding,
and so, if you put in $7,500 in the S&P 500
and you left it there for five years,
then five years later
you would be making roughly $100 a month,
if we go by this very average figure of 10% a year.
Or if you invested $5,000 in the S&P 500,
then 10 years later you'd be making $100 a month
in purely passive income.
Again, assuming the 10% average.
So overall how hard is it really
to make $100 a month in passive income
from stocks and shares?
Well, it kinda just depends on how hard is it
for you to make 5,000, 7,500, or $12,000 in savings
and put them into a stock market index fund?
And crucially this is money that you shouldn't need to touch
in the next five to 10 years, at least.
So basically how easy is it for you to make
that sort of money?
Obviously varies massively
depending on which country you're in (laughs)
and what your circumstances are and what your job is.
But if you're in the UK or the US
where the median kind of average salary's,
roundabout $50,000, something like that,
then again depending on your circumstances
it's not that hard to get $10,000 in savings.
Obviously, if you're supporting a family
of 15 people on $50,000, it's different.
If you're a single person, again, it's different
but I'm gonna give this roughly
a three out of five-star rating for difficulty
of getting $100 a month.
Obviously, if you live in a country like India
where the average salary is $3,600 a year,
it's very very difficult to make $10,000 in savings overall.
And finally, the third category
in our side hustle assessment matrix
is how hard is it to maintain this income
once you've set it up in the first place?
And we're gonna give this a one star out of five
because once you've got the money in you just like set it
and forget it and it's not that hard to maintain.
There are other sources of passive income
that require higher degrees of maintenance over time.
But stocks and shares is a very very easy way
to make passive income and to use my personal example
these days my stocks and shares portfolio,
which I've been investing in since 2015
is now worth a roundabout of $350,000.
And the vast majority of that is in the S&P 500 index fund.
Now, I can't be bothered
to work out the actual inflation-adjusted returns for that.
But again, if we assume a very very rough average
of 10% a year, then that averages out
to around $682 per week in purely passive income.
All right, idea number two for generating passive income
is to start a YouTube channel.
This is something I well specialize in
because I'm here on YouTube and I actually teach a course
called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy,
linked in the video description
where I teach people how to do this sort of thing.
So let's use a side hustle assessment matrix
and we'll talk about this.
How hard is it to start a YouTube channel?
Well, I'm gonna give this one out of five stars
because it's actually very very easy
to start a YouTube channel.
You just go on youtube.com.
You click to create a channel and you can upload videos
by just filming with your phone and uploading it.
In reality, it's a lot harder to make good videos,
and making good videos is how you grow on YouTube.
But getting started on YouTube
is very, very, very straightforward.
The real question is how hard is it to actually
make real money from YouTube?
So again, let's say we wanna make $100 a month
in passive income.
What does that look like?
Well, firstly, to be eligible for monetization
on YouTube, you need a thousand subscribers
and 4,000 hours of watch time.
It took me six months and 52 videos
to get my first 1,000 subscribers.
And if we look at the averages,
it actually takes on average 90 something videos
to get to 1,000 subscribers.
So that's quite hard if you're thinking
you're gonna start a YouTube channel
and start making money from day one
your, you know, that's basically not going to happen.
It took me 52 videos, six months to get there.
So if people message me being like,
"Hey, I wanna start a YouTube..."
I was like, "Look, you have to be able to put in the effort
and do this for a very long period of time
at least once a week."
I say for at least two years
before you can expect anything in return.
But let's say you've hit your thousand subscribers
and your 4,000 hours of watch time.
How hard is it to actually make $100 a month?
Well, on average, the kind of revenue per thousand views
on YouTube is roundabout $2.
So this varies massively, but let's say on average
about $2 per thousand views.
Therefore if you want to make $100 a month
you need 50,000 views on YouTube to make $100 a month.
Let's say you make one video per week
and let's assume you're not getting any traffic
on your older videos.
That means every video you make needs to get
around about 12,500 views.
And very roughly the average YouTube channel
can expect a roundabout 20% of their subscribers
to equal the average view count for each video.
So on YouTube, if you had 62,000 subscribers,
very roughly, very average lead,
you can expect 20% of them i.e. 12,500 views on each video.
And assuming you have no evergreen content of the longterm
you would need to run about 60,000 subscribers
to be making $100 a month.
In reality, you make $100 a month a lot
before 60,000 subscribers.
I think I was making $100 a month
when I had like 10,000 something subscribers,
like it was fairly early on.
But when it comes to assessing how hard is this to do
I'm gonna give this a four out of five stars.
It's actually very hard to make compelling YouTube videos
and it's very easy to get started, but it's hard to do well.
It's totally worth it, it's a great skill set,
it's really fun.
You get to meet people across the internet.
You get to learn how to talk to a camera
and how to film and video edit.
And it's really great but it's very hard
to actually make money from YouTube.
Finally, in terms of effort to maintain.
Like actually getting that first thousand subscribers
is a lot harder than keeping it growing.
'Cause once you've got a thousand subscribers
and once your channel is growing
it means you've landed on a formula that works.
And so maintaining it then becomes easier
then starting from scratch.
And so in our side hustle assessment matrix
we're gonna give maintenance
of a YouTube channel passive income stream
to be round about two out of five stars.
To use my example, I made 70 videos
before I started making any money from YouTube AdSense.
And these days the YouTube channel
makes a roundabout $12,000 a month
in passive income from YouTube AdSense.
Now, again, this is not entirely passive
because I keep on uploading new videos,
but actually the bulk of the amount of money
that we generate from ads is from older videos
rather than videos that were uploaded this month.
So with that caveat, $12,000 a month passive income
is roundabout $3,000 a week
thanks to this YouTube channel
and thanks to you guys for supporting it and all that stuff.
There are other ways of monetizing YouTube,
like brand deals and like selling merch
and just all other sorts of stuff.
But it doesn't really count as passive income
through YouTube, which is why I'm not including this
in this side hustle assessment matrix.
Idea number three for making passive income
is to start a podcast.
This is generally easier than starting a YouTube channel.
Although growing a podcast is a lot harder
then growing a YouTube channel
because podcasts themselves don't really have an algorithm
that's helping them grow.
In fact, a lot of podcasts grow by having a YouTube channel,
which is kind of weird.
Right, so how hard is it to start a podcast?
Well, again, one out of five stars,
it's very very easy to start a podcast.
Go on anchor.fm and you can literally use your phone
and you could pass your phone around
between you and your friends and you can start a podcast.
You can use a website called riverside.fm
that I've recently invested in as an angel investor.
Riverside makes it very easy
to record remote podcast interviews.
It's very, very easy to start a podcast
but how hard is it to make $100 a month
in passive income from a podcast?
Well, again, this is not quite passive income
because the way podcasters make money
is by relying on brand deals.
There is no YouTube AdSense for podcasts.
And so you need sponsorship or a brand deal
to make any money for your podcast, generally speaking.
And apparently, you can expect to make
around $18 for a 30-second ad in a podcast
and $25 per thousand views or a thousand listens
for a 60 second ad.
So if you wanna make $100 a month
and assuming you have a stream of sponsorships
who are giving you that level of a sponsorship deal
based on your download numbers,
you would need around 1,000 downloads per episode,
if you have a weekly podcast.
So you'd have 4,000 downloads a month.
And if you're putting a 60-second ad in there
for $25 per thousand views,
that would make you round about $100 a month.
By having a thousand downloads per episode
and four episodes per month.
This begs the question how hard is it
to get a thousand downloads per month?
Well, it's a lot harder
to get a thousand podcast downloads per month
than it is to get a thousand YouTube views per month.
Because again, YouTube has so much distribution built in
it's different to podcasts.
Also loads more people are on YouTube than on podcasts.
But if we look at the stats then it's the top 20%
of podcasts in the world that get on average
more than a thousand downloads per episode.
To use a friend of mine as an example,
my housemate Sheen started her own podcast
around five months ago, there'll be a link to that
in the description, if you want to check it out,
and on average, her podcast gets roundabout
400 to 500 downloads per episode.
This is not bad at all, specially considering
she started five months ago
and had zero audience when she started.
So she didn't have the unfair advantage
that I did when starting my own podcast, for example.
And because she's just launched season two of her podcasts
and has just started posting videos about it on YouTube
that will really help the podcast grow.
And I'm pretty sure that in the next six months
she'll be getting to a point where she can quite easily
make $100 a month from her podcast.
So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix.
Starting a podcast one out of five stars,
making $100 a month I'm gonna give that
a three out of five stars because it's hard,
but not as hard as maybe monetizing on YouTube
where you have this minimum threshold.
And finally maintenance.
Well, it's not really passive income
because you do have to keep on making podcast episodes
because the brand deals are associated with that.
But again, once you've stumbled on a formula that works,
once you know how to be a podcaster it's easier
to continue going once you've already gotten started,
as is the case with most things.
And so in terms of maintenance of the podcast
I'm gonna give that two stars.
To use me as an example, so me and my brother have a podcast
called Not Overthinking, link in the video description
if you wanna check it out,
but we make around about $625 per week
from the podcast overall from brand deals
and from our membership.
All right, so idea number four for generating passive income
is to become an affiliate marketer.
Affiliate marketing means
that you are selling other people's products
but you're getting a percentage of the sales
from those products.
Now, apparently 48% of affiliate marketers globally
earn $20,000 a year which is $1,660 a month.
Which is actually not bad at all.
Like people are doing very well
with affiliate marketing overall.
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 to an affiliate program
like Amazon Associates.
So Amazon have their 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 kinda hard.
So let's say you had a product that was $50
that you were trying to sell
and you were getting 5% commission on it.
That'd be 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 rate
i.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 website
or 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 marketing
requires 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 are kindly sponsoring this video.
I'll tell you about the sponsor segment later
but Skillshare has an interesting affiliate program
where if you refer someone to sign up
to 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 month
to 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 wanna make money through Skillshare affiliates,
I can just tell people, "Hey guys,"
like I can tell you that, "Guys I've just released
my latest Skillshare class Productivity for Creators,
how to start a successful side hustle,
so there'll be a link in the video description
if you wanna check that out."
Like that would be hopefully some of you will see that,
will click on that link in the description,
and then that will be me getting some affiliate income
from Skillshare for this video.
So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix
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 people
might 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 income
which approximates to around $2,750 per week.
And from Amazon on average,
like it's around about $450 a month
from the Amazon UK store
and a little bit more from the US and Canada.
All right, method number five of making passive income
is by selling digital products.
Now these are products that you create once, like an ebook
or a download or an app or something like that.
So you create it once and then you can sell it
multiple 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.
Another example is my YouTuber friend Oliur,
who has made, as he says $700,000 from selling his
website Tumblr themes since 2014.
So he made the website themes for Tumblr,
he sells them and he makes $700,000 on average.
Well, overall, since 2014, that's pretty cool.
So how hard is it to get started making digital products?
I mean, anyone can write an ebook
an ebook counts as a digital product.
So I'm gonna give this a two-star rating,
two out of five stars,
but obviously like again money is an exchange of value.
So the thing that you're selling you have to be
providing enough value to compensate,
to make up for the price that you're selling it for.
And that's often quite hard,
especially if you don't have any experience
in this sort of field
and how hard is it to make $100 a month?
Well, you know, it's very easy to create an ebook
but it's a whole different ballgame trying to get people
to actually buy your ebook or buy your icon set
or buy your app or buy your website themes.
And because the market around this stuff is so competitive
like you have to be genuinely really good
to get people to buy your stuff.
And the way you get people to pay you money
for something is that you identify a problem that they have,
you solve that problem, and then you charge money for it.
And if you can do those three things, then it's, you know
I wouldn't say it's easy to make $100 a month
but it's very doable to make $100 a month.
You just genuinely have to have something
that solves a pain point
that other people are willing to pay for.
So we're gonna give this a three out of five stars
to make $100 a month from selling digital products.
And finally, in terms of maintenance, we're gonna give this
a two out of five stars, because usually,
you do have to maintain your product a little bit
but it's often easier to do
like it's much easier to maintain a product
then creating a product in the first place.
Idea number six for passive income generation
is to create an online course.
Now online course's sort of like a digital product
but generally online courses are in video format.
In fact, this whole video is so long,
it could basically have been an entire online course.
Maybe I'll do one about this very topic.
And in terms of getting started,
we're gonna give the starting difficulty
a two out of five stars, 'cause it's not that hard
to make an online course
but generally, you do need to know how to do video.
So, you know, you actually could film an online course
on your iPhone or phone, whatever phone you're using,
if you're one of those Android heathens.
Stick your phone on the side,
talk to the phone, teach something.
So it's not hard creating one,
but in terms of making $100 a month, again,
at that point, your course needs to actually be good.
And the only reason people will pay for it
is if the course is actually good.
Now you can avoid having to charge for your online courses
by using a website like Skillshare,
who are very kindly sponsoring this video.
I have tons of classes on Skillshare.
I think we've got nine on them in total.
I've been teaching on Skillshare since September 2019
and I've actually just released my new online class
called Productivity for Creators,
how to start a successful side hustle.
Where I teach you the ins and outs
on how you can well, create your own side hustle
in your spare time without quitting your job.
If you wanna check this out
then the first of thousand people to click the link
in the video description will get
30% off the annual Skillshare premium membership.
This is actually a really good deal.
I pay for Skillshare,
I've been paying you for it for years
even after I started teaching on it
because it's genuinely a fantastic place to learn stuff.
They've got thousands of classes
on all sorts of other topics,
but you should definitely check out mine,
like the nine that I've got.
There are three around productivity now,
like the fundamentals of productivity,
the sort of productivity equation,
which is how I think of productivity
and Productivity for Creators.
I have two on how you can study for exams.
If you're in school, if you've got exams to prepare for
those apparently are really good,
they've got very high ratings.
And if you've already had a free trial of Skillshare
then you can still use that offer
that if you're one of the first of thousand people
to hit the link in the video description,
you will get 30% of the premium membership
and you can check out my class
which I have to say is pretty good.
Anyway, thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video
but genuinely Skillshare is a great place to teach stuff
because you can teach things on Skillshare
without directly having to charge for them.
Which is why I love putting my courses on Skillshare.
It's kinda like having something on Netflix
in that the end-user does not have to
pay directly for the product.
And the other nice thing about Skillshare is that it's like,
it's sort of like YouTube in that anyone
can upload a class to Skillshare,
provided it meets certain quality requirements.
And so it's a lot easier
then having to make your own website
and create your own courses platform
and all that kind of stuff.
So, pretty easy to start.
We're gonna give this a two out of five
but how hard is it to make $100 a month
from teaching online courses?
Now, this kind of depends.
If you're going down the Skillshare route
then to make $100 a month in Skillshare
you need roundabout 1,700 minutes of watch time
which is 28 hours of watch time.
So if you have a one hour class on Skillshare
you need 28 students to take that class every month
and watch it with a premium membership
roughly very broadly speaking.
And that will give you roundabout $100 a month.
At least those are based on my figures
over the last like two years of being on Skillshare.
Now, how hard is it to get 28 people a month
watching your class?
Well, if your class is actually pretty good,
it shouldn't be too hard
to get 28 people a month watching it.
If you have an existing audience
it's very easy to get 28 people a month watching it
because people already know, like, and trust you hopefully.
And so they'll watch your stuff and give you a shot
because you've already built that goodwill with them.
But again, the nice thing about Skillshare as a platform
is that they have like their own algorithm.
So the good stuff rises to the top.
So if you genuinely have a really, really, really good class
and you put it on Skillshare,
then even if you don't have an audience,
there is still a high chance
that if the class is actually good
and people watch it a lot and people recommend it
and give it high ratings, it will rise to the top.
And it will start getting recommended to people
who find it on the Skillshare homepage
or who searched for it specifically.
The other way of making $100 a month from a course
is to just charge $100 for a course.
And then if you do that, you just need one sale every month.
So how hard is it to get one person a month
to buy your course?
Well, again, if it's good, you know, the world
of online education is exploding so much every year more
and more money's being spent on online education
especially with the whole pandemic stuff.
So if you have a valuable skill that you can teach
I think courses are one of the best and easiest,
or one of the best ways of making passive income
because it's fun to create a course, you can teach stuff,
you don't need that many technical skills,
like making a website or anything like that.
Just shove it on Skillshare.
And then people can take your course
and learn on the internet.
And like, you know, it's just cool overall.
And the nice thing is that once you've made the course,
and once you're making $100 a month from it,
maintaining that level is actually quite easy.
We're gonna give that a two out of five stars
because generally, you don't need to
update the course that often.
And you can do that once in a while
and you just need to make sure
you're getting a reasonable amount of traffic to it.
And hopefully, that traffic will grow over time.
These days, the vast majority of my online courses,
at least the very passive ones are hosted on Skillshare
and it's kind of ridiculous.
But these days they make roundabout 60,000
to $65,000 per month in purely passive income.
Like I literally do nothing for my Skillshare classes
once I've made them other than a reply to comments
and other than occasionally plug them in videos.
And that's like $60,000 a month in passive income.
That means this is a roundabout of $15,000 per week.
And this makes up the bulk of the $27,000 a week
that this business currently generates
in purely passive income.
Idea number seven for passive income
is by creating some call it some kind of paid membership
or community model.
Now, again, this is generally a bad idea
unless you have an existing audience,
which we keep coming back to.
Like everything becomes easier
when you have an existing audience by creating content
that has been valuable over a long period of time,
very consistently.
That audience knows likes and trusts you
and so when you say, "Hey guys, sign up to my Patreon",
then some people are likely to do that thing.
The other way of doing a membership
is by creating a value proposition that is so compelling
that people would be willing to pay
for a community-like service for this.
If we use Patreon as an example my friend Hannah Witton,
who's a YouTuber, she's got roundabout
600,000 subscribers on YouTube.
And I think she has around 600 Patreons,
626 last time I checked, which means if we look
at our Patreon stats, which are public,
she's making somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 pounds
or like 3,000 and $7,000 per month
in passive income from this audience.
But it's like 600 people out of an audience of 600,000.
So one in a thousand of her subscribers
have signed up to her Patreon.
So clearly, you know, if those stats
are true across the board and they kind of are
if you look at Matt D'Avella Patreon on as well
you need a big audience
to make a significant amount of money for Patreon.
Again, this sort of depends on
how much you're charging for them
and exactly what value you're providing.
Another example of a paid membership community
is my friend Anne-Laure who runs a website called Ness Labs
and they have a paid membership community
which is $5 a month.
And she started this when was it, in the summer of 2019.
She had zero audiences at the time
and she just wrote a hundred blog posts
over a hundred working days and built up an audience
such that in March 2020, when she launched a membership
she had some paying members for it initially.
And I think last month she's just passed
$100,000 a year in annual recurring revenue,
which is pretty awesome from something
that started less than two years ago.
So how easy is it to start a membership program?
Well, it's actually very easy.
We can give this a one-star because it's very easy
to start one, you just make an account
on some kind of membership platform like Patreon.
But to make $100 a month,
you need to provide $100 a month worth of value.
And that's actually quite hard to do.
We're gonna give that a four out of five stars
but the nice thing is, again, once you've got that formula,
once you're making $100 a month it's actually a lot easier
to maintain it because the way the economics
of membership communities work,
it's provided you keep showing up
and providing value in some capacity,
you know, people have already signed up for the thing.
So it's not too hard to maintain that level of support
that you're offering them.
For this business, we have a membership community
for our Part-Timer YouTuber Academy for the alumni,
which is called the Part-Timer YouTuber Inner Circle
And we make roughly $2,800 a week
from this membership community.
It's not very passive.
We run like three or four events per week
along with like twice a day, coworking events on zoom
and we have lots of stuff going on.
So it takes a lot of work, but $2,800 a week
it's pretty good for a membership community.
All right, nearly there.
So idea number eight for generating passive income
is creating a business that sells goods or services
and then automating or delegating aspects of that business
so that the income that you generate
from it is reasonably passive.
This is the stuff that Tim Ferris
talks a lot about in "The 4-Hour Workweek",
where there are a lot of businesses
that you could make where you're selling a good
or selling a service
and then you can delegate, outsource, automate
and intelligent ways to make the income passive.
So again, using my friend Oliur as an example,
on his YouTube channel, he talks about
his $1 million Shopify store.
He designs manufactures and sells these really cool
vegan leather kind of desk accessories and bags
and mouse pads and that kind of stuff.
And this was loads of work in setting up
but now he's got a team of three other people
that manage the business.
And so he spends proportionally less
of his time running that business.
And so it's sort of passive income for him.
Even though these days, he still does spend around
10 hours a week, maintaining things.
Equally, if you're going down the service route,
I've got a friend who runs an Instagram
and Facebook ads marketing agency,
where he has clients who pay him some,
I think a few hundred dollars per month
to manage their Facebook and Instagram ads.
And for him, it's like a small amount of work initially
to set up the Facebook and Instagram ads
but then it's sort of automated
and he's got a team around it.
And he's used using things like Zapier
to automate aspects of that business,
so that each month he has to do a very small amount
of actual work to keep it ticking along.
So these are different ways of generating passive income
from a kind of goods or service-based business.
But it's quite hard to get started with this stuff.
To get started we're gonna give this
a four to five-star rating because again,
you need to create a business
and it's quite hard to make a business
that genuinely provides value.
Equally, we're gonna give it a four out of five-star rating
for making $100 a month in revenue.
Because again, you have to be able to provide value
and providing value is hard.
Like it's not as easy
as making an account on a stocks platform
and just putting some money in.
You actually have to give value to people
which is kind of hard.
But the nice thing is once you get started
like with anything, maintenance is a little bit easier.
So we're gonna give that a three out of five-star rating.
Finally idea number nine for generating passive income
is to build an app or a website
or some kind of software product that you can offer
either as a one-off or more likely these days,
as a subscription service.
And there's a whole category of this called SAS.
software as a service.
Now, if you look at the website, indiehackers.com
there are like literally hundreds of examples of people
who have built software businesses
that are making passive income
and they share their revenue numbers
and they tell you how they got started
and they give you their tips.
In fact, I was recently interviewed on an episode
of the Indie Hackers podcast, which is really cool
'cause I've been listening to it for years
and it's like following the website for years.
And I was interviewed around the concept of starting
an online course like the Part-Timer YouTuber Academy.
Now I've had a bit of personal experience with this.
So when I was at university I made a website
called BMAT Ninja and UCAT Ninja.
So software as a service it was a question bank
for medical applicants applying to medical school
to help them do well in the admissions tests.
And this was something that me and my brother
coded completely from scratch.
He and I both know how to code,
we learned when we were young.
And so we worked over the summer of 2015
to make these things happen.
I think in year one, we made about $10,000
and in year five last year,
it was around $25,000 from BMAT Ninja.
So, you know, it's pretty good money
but it was a lot of work to set these things up.
And so in terms of starting out
I'm gonna give this a five out of five-star rating
because to make an app it's actually quite hard.
You have to know how to code for the most part
you have to be able to offer something compelling
and you have to actually build it which takes a lot of work
and it's very hard, but it's a lot of fun.
And then once you've made it
I'm gonna give $100 a month difficulty a four-star rating.
Because again, it's easy well, easy enough. (laughs)
You can make an app, but then getting people
to pay for the app is an entirely different kettle of fish.
So we're gonna give that four stars.
But the nice thing is like with everything,
maintenance is a little bit easier
so we're gonna give that a three-star rating.
If you like this video and you wanna get started
with your own entrepreneurshippy passive incomey
generating journey on the internet.
Check out this short playlist over here
which is some of my favorite videos
that I've made around tips for entrepreneurs.
How I got started creating my businesses from scratch,
how I learned to code that sort of stuff.
That's all in the playlist over here.
Thank you so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video, bye-bye.

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