Passive income sounds so enticing, doesn’t it? ‘Earn six figures in your sleep.’ Who wouldn’t want a bit of that? Especially a busy freelance language teacher who’s already spending most of their waking hours preparing and delivering lessons.
And the numbers can look quite convincing.
Create a membership at £40 a month and get 200 people to join for a year. That’s £96,000.
Create a digital course at £100 and sell a thousand copies. There’s your £100,000.
Write an ebook and sell 10,000 copies at £10 each. Another £100,000 in sales (though not necessarily in your pocket).
Easy peasy.
Except, of course, it isn’t.
Why passive income often takes a LOT of work
First of all, you need to come up with something that a specific group of people really want, and that they can justify spending money on.
And this is where I see a lot of freelance language professionals going wrong. They have an idea for a digital course, spend months developing it, and then start wondering where they’re going to find people to buy it.
But how do they know anyone actually wants what they’ve created? Or that people are willing to pay the price they have in mind?
This is exactly the same issue that comes up when developing any kind of offer. You need to understand your potential clients, what they want to achieve and what they’re already doing to solve the problem. And you need to have a good reason to believe that they’ll be willing to invest in what you’re creating.
The fact that you’re making something once and hoping to sell it repeatedly doesn’t make any of that less important.
And while AI has made it considerably easier to produce digital products, it’s also made it easier for everyone else to do exactly the same thing. Creating another ebook or online course isn’t necessarily going to give you a viable business.
Then you need people to buy it
The second challenge is actually getting people to know about your wonderful new product.
You could have created the best digital course in the world, but if nobody knows it exists, you won’t make any money from it.
For most freelance language professionals, this means spending a considerable amount of time getting visible, building an audience and developing relationships with people who might eventually want to buy.
And that probably involves creating a lot of free content, whether that’s blog posts, videos, newsletters or social media posts. You need to demonstrate your expertise and give people reasons to trust you.
Of course, you can also attract buyers through search. If you’ve created something that people are actively looking for, and you know how to position it so they can find it on Google or Amazon, that can work very well.
But there’s still a fair amount of work involved in understanding what people are searching for, creating something that meets those needs and making sure it stands out from all the other options.
I’ve seen people spend an enormous amount of time creating digital products, apparently believing that the difficult part is producing the content. Often, that’s actually the easy bit.
And even once you’ve started making sales, you need to keep reaching new potential buyers. There’s no magic percentage of your mailing list that’s guaranteed to buy whatever you offer.
Memberships are even less passive!
I think memberships deserve a special mention here, because they’re sometimes promoted as a wonderful way of generating recurring income.
Get a few hundred people paying a relatively small amount every month, and the money just keeps rolling in.
Lovely.
Except people need a good reason to keep paying that subscription. They need to feel that they’re getting enough value to justify the cost, month after month.
That might mean creating new content, organising live sessions, managing a community, answering questions or helping people stay engaged. And you’ll need to keep attracting new members to replace those who leave.
I’ve run a membership myself, and eventually decided to close it, so I know that there’s a lot more involved than simply collecting monthly payments.
Memberships can be an excellent business model, particularly when there’s a real need for ongoing support or community. But I’d be very wary of choosing one because you think it’s going to provide an easy, passive income.
You could end up creating a whole new set of commitments for yourself, which rather defeats the point if your original aim was to work less.
But it isn’t all bad news
Now, I don’t want to put you off the idea of developing digital products or other income streams that aren’t directly tied to your teaching hours.
There are some very real advantages.
Once you’ve created a good digital course, for example, you may be able to sell it repeatedly without having to deliver the same training live each time. You can also potentially reach people who wouldn’t be able to work with you individually, whether because of their location, budget or availability.
And if you understand your audience really well, have an established reputation and a group of people who are already interested in what you offer, you may find that you can make sales without having to do an enormous amount of additional marketing every time.
Having several related products can help too. Someone who buys one of your resources and finds it useful may be interested in others, particularly if there’s a logical progression between them.
Occasionally, something really does take off through recommendations or search and continues to sell with relatively little intervention.
But I wouldn’t build my entire business plan around the hope that this will happen!
It’s also worth remembering that sales revenue isn’t the same as profit. You may have platform fees, software subscriptions, advertising costs, payment processing charges and other expenses to consider, not to mention the value of all the time you’ve invested in creating and marketing the product.
An ebook bringing in £100 a month might be a nice little extra. But if you’ve spent months developing it and are still devoting hours to promoting it, it’s worth being realistic about what you’re actually earning.
So, should you bother trying to create passive income?
I think it depends on what you’re hoping to achieve and what kind of business you want to run.
If you enjoy creating resources, have a good understanding of a particular audience and can see a genuine opportunity to develop something people want to buy, it could be an excellent addition to your business.
But if you’re already working ridiculous hours, struggling to attract enough clients and hoping that creating a digital course will somehow solve all your problems, I’d be rather more cautious.
You may find that your time would be better spent improving your existing offer, putting your prices up or attracting better-paying clients.
Or perhaps a small group programme, where you can work with several clients at once, would be more profitable and enjoyable than spending months creating a self-study course.
There’s no single business model that’s right for everyone, and I think we need to stop assuming that passive income is necessarily the holy grail for freelance language professionals.
What matters is finding a way of using your skills and expertise that helps your clients achieve what they want, earns you a decent living and gives you the kind of working life you’re looking for.
And if some of that income eventually arrives while you’re asleep, so much the better!
Wondering which business model would work best for you?
If you’re thinking about moving beyond selling individual teaching hours, there are quite a few possibilities worth exploring.
I’ve created a free Business Models Guide to help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of one-to-one services, group programmes, memberships and digital courses, and consider which approach might be right for you and your clients.
Get your free Business Models Guide
