Passive income sounds so enticing. ‘Earn six figures in your sleep.’ Who wouldn’t want a bit of that? Especially a busy teacher.

All you need to do is:

  • Create a membership at £40 a month and get 200 people onboard for a year.
  • Create a digital course at £100 and sell a thousand copies. 
  • Write an ebook and sell 10,000 copies at £10 each.

Easy peasy. 

Except it’s not. 


Why passive income often takes a lot of work.

First of all you need to hit on something that a specific group of people really want and that they can justify spending the money on. If it’s a membership, they also need to keep wanting and needing and justifying it every month. 

Secondly, you need people to trust you and your service or product enough to invest in it, which probably means a great deal of getting yourself out there providing free, quality content over a prolonged period of time. 

Thirdly, you need enough of the right people to know about you and what you offer, and to be connected to you in some way, so they hear about what’s happening. Apparently on average, about 3% of people on a mailing list will actually buy, so if you need to sell a thousand copies of your digital course, you can do the maths. 

The more positive news


Now, it’s not all quite as negative as all that. While you definitely need an audience to sell a passive income product, if you really know your audience and their needs very well, and they know you and trust you, your ‘conversion rate’ can be a lot higher than 3%.  

You can also help sales a great deal through writing excellent descriptions with just the right keywords on platforms such as Amazon or YouTube, so that the right people will find you through search. 

The more products you have for sale, especially if they’re connected in some way, like a series of books on Amazon, the easier it gets to sell them as people are recommended the next one in the series, or simply get to trust the quality of what you offer, and want more.

And you can sometimes get lucky and hit on something that almost sells itself, and spreads like wildfire through word of mouth. 

But most of the time, passive income is either pretty low, and just a nice little extra, or it requires a lot of very active effort to market it. 

As well as all the work involved in trying stuff out, market research, and really getting to know your audience inside out. 

There aren’t any short cuts, but it is true to say that you can certainly go the long way round if you don’t get the right help.

Which is where I come in, of course.  I can definitely help you identify a target market, a service or product that could work for them, and a strategy for marketing it. Put in the work, learn from what works and what doesn’t work, and you should end up making good money doing something you enjoy.. but six figures are not guaranteed.  

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If you’re an ELT freelancer/business owner you may feel a bit overwhelmed by all the business advice out there…

Should you start a podcast or a YouTube channel, a mailing list, a membership? Is it a good idea to keep things as simple as possible, or should you be looking to diversify? What does scaling even mean, anyway?!

Would you like some clear step by step advice tailored to your stage of business? 

Look no further. Click the image to answer six simple questions and I’ll send you a detailed PDF game plan for your next steps.

https://earnlearnthriveinelt.com/next-stage-business-quiz/