The Truth About Passive Income

Passive income is highly emphasized in the online marketing space. You see so many e-courses, blogs, and podcasts dedicated to passive income strategies. Messages like “Make money in your sleep!” or “Earn six figures while sitting on the beach!” constantly plague our social media feeds and our inboxes.

But here’s the truth about passive income: it’s not really passive.

Sure, I earn money from my books and e-courses while I’m sleeping or on vacation, but those sales the result of hours of work. Those sales come in, because I put the energy into marketing those products, setting up sales funnels, testing my marketing copy, and networking with potential clients and customers.

The sale may have happened while I was sleeping, but in order to generate that sale, I needed to be wide awake and working. In today’s episode, I’m sharing the truth about passive income and what you need to make it work for you.

You can’t generate passive income without a reliable and dynamic email service provider. That’s why I use ActiveCampaign, so that I can grow my list, segment new leads, and deliver personalized, valuable content…on auto-pilot. I use ActiveCampaign not only to deliver my bi-weekly newsletter, but to also deliver my email courses like the 7-Day Personal Brand Challenge, or to follow up with workshop attendees after the event. Click here to learn more and to start your free trial.

Have you seen online entrepreneurs and social influencers, boasting about making millions of dollars while sitting on the beach?

I know I have. And it’s easy to feel like a failure because here you are, slaving away at the computer, working at all hours, trying to make your business work.

But what those influencers aren’t showing you, is that a few years ago, they were doing the same thing. They were hustling to grow their audience, build out their systems, and fine-tune their products and services. And even though they’re sitting on the beach enjoying their life of luxury, I’d wager a guess that they have a team of people behind them that are making sure their business keeps running.

Creating passive revenue streams is important if you want to stop trading time for dollars. For more on that, check out the episode, 10 Ways to Monetize Your Skills. But in order to have successful passive revenue streams, you have to put in the work to grow your audience, test your product and marketing strategies, and then promote your products to that audience.

I know that many of you listening are authors, so I’ll use books as an example. Books are passive revenue streams; you put in the time to write the book, but selling more books doesn’t mean you’re required to work more hours.

But what would happen if you wrote the book, had it published and available for sale…and then did nothing. How many books do you think you would sell? Enough to make a decent living? Probably not. You have to grow your audience and market your product in order to make those sales.

Pat Flynn of The Smart Passive Income podcast always says passive income is about working hard now so you can sit back and reap the benefits later, and I mostly agree with that. I put a lot of work into creating and launching a YouTube channel last year, and I’m only NOW starting to generate leads and revenue from it. I don’t actively promote or market my publicity services because we receive so many new clients from referrals, but it took years to create and nurture those referral streams.

So, if your goal is passive income, what do you need to do RIGHT NOW to make that happen?

1. Create a leveraged product or service
2. Create an automated sales funnel
3. Test that funnel and tweak as necessary
4. Create a plan for getting new people into the funnel
5. Test out different tactics to see what works best
6. Once you find the winning process, attempt to scale
7. Evaluate what’s working and pivot