Want to generate passive income? Do these things first

Are you interested in learning how to generate passive income products? Make money while you sleep? Sounds appealing doesn’t it? When I started blogging over 4 years ago, I had absolutely no idea that bloggers could create products that would be sold 24/7 on autopilot. Now 4 years onto my journey I have 3 courses, a membership site (although that’s not passive!) and numerous smaller info products like ebooks and spreadsheets in my portfolio all which generate passive income every day.

There are many ways to monetise a blog and I’ve spoken about some of them before. Working with brands is a very popular option, as are affiliate schemes. However, there are potential downsides with both of these examples. When we are talking about working with brands, you’re trading time for money. You only have so many hours in the day to produce this bespoke brand content and so even if you had endless offers of work you can’t scale in terms of number of jobs. You can only scale in terms of the fees you command per collaboration. The second point related to that is, that although you can pitch, you’re at the mercy of a brand’s decision to work with you or not. 

Next up is Affiliate income and while this is a perfectly good option, it can rely on the amount of traffic you get to your site and typically the percentage made per sale is quite low. This means the traffic needs to be significant, to give you more chance of getting sales. 

So is there another option? There sure is you can create you own products and sell those to your audience, just as I have. These passive income products do take time and effort to create, but then they can be sold over and over again without any additional time or effort. 

However, before you get too excited at the possibility of earning money while you sleep. The ability to generate passive income from products you create depends on your ability to nail a few things first. Do these things well and you will be setting yourself up for success when you start to generate passive income.

Nail these so you can generate passive income

Develop and communicate your credibility

People buy from people they know, like and trust. FACT. This is why it is so important to build up great relationships with your audience and develop a community around your blog. Share great FREE information that gets your readers results and they will begin to trust you. Show up regularly and be reliable in the content you create and they will being to know you and share your true self and if they are your people they will start to like you.  

Make sure your readers can get to know you, create an engaging About Me page, share your tone in your copy and make sure you know who your ideal reader is so that you can focus your content perfectly for that person. Does you profile picture represent who you are, is your bio engaging? Share yourself and give your audience something to connect with. These are all considerations and aspects to nail before you crack on building your first passive income product. 

Content upgrades/Opt-in freebies/Lead magnet

Content upgrades/Opt-ins/Lead magnets can take various forms, but they are all the same thing. Essentially they are free digital gifts that you send to people in return for their email address. They can range from e-books, video series, checklists, cheat sheets, worksheets to courses and challenges. Growing your email list should be one of your top priorities, as you own and can control your email list. You do not own your social media followers and as such are at the mercy of the various algorithms. 

Offering these additional, valuable pieces of content can be an amazing way to grow your email list. Make sure your ‘freebie’ is congruent to the post you attach it to. For example, if you write a post about growing your own veg, the opt-in freebie needs to be something related to this and not a video showing people how to do the best eye liner flicks. Ideally these opt-ins should be the thing your audience will want when they finish reading your post. So if you post a recipe plan for a three course meal – the opt-in could be a printable shopping list for the while menu, so they can just opt-in, print it and go. 

Email Service Provider

Now you have your opt-in freebies you need a way to get them onto your blog and a mechanism for collecting and storing the resulting emails. This is where an email service provider comes in. There are various ones out there, but I use Convertkit. There are also many additional plugins which you can add to your blog and link to your ESP that can give more sophistication and a better design aesthetic to the basic Convertkit forms and landing pages. Rapidology is a great free one or if you’re looking for a paid for version the Convertplug has great features too.   You might place these opt-ins in your footer, hello bar, side bar or on a pop up. You can also add them at the bottom of a post or inline (within the copy of the post). 

Traffic

In order to get people to sign up for your opt-in freebies you need people… traffic. So you need to focus on where would be your best source of traffic? Which platform is your biggest referrer? Is it Twitter, if so get over there and make sure your opt-ins are well represented in your tweets. Ask friends to retweet a tweet about your latest opt-in, pin the tweet, do whatever you can to capitalise on your best traffic sources. 

Is there something topical that has gone viral or at least done well on another Facebook page? If so why not share it on your page? Invite those extra likers and hopefully they will come over to your blog for a nosy. The keep working round all your traffic sources making sure you are pimping out your opt-ins on these platforms.

Keep an eye on your analytics

Google analytics can give you so much information, information that can help you make decisions and shape your blog going forward. Google Analytics will show you where your traffic is coming from, so you can maximise these top referring sources. Do more in these areas so you can attract even more traffic. Look at your Google Analytics to find which topics your audience loves the most and which topics don’t seem to resonate with them.

These areas should be your main areas of focus if you want to generate passive income. You need to make sure you have a solid foundation on which you can build this new facet of your business. 

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If you want to learn more about the type of passive income products, how you pick which product could work for you and your audience, how you create it and how you sell it, then you need to check out this Facebook Live I did all about this exact thing. You’re welcome!