In this post, I will share with you some passive income tips and strategies that you can try for 2018.
But before that, for those of you who are new to the site, here’s a little bit about me. I’m just your average everyday guy. I work a 9 to 5 job in an IT company. I do a lot of web stuff, tech support and Cloud infrastructure support. That’s my background, but one thing that I’ve really been passionate about over the past 5 years is branding.
This background and passion has allowed me to experiment with different models of earning income online. Now, what sort of models and strategies have I tried, and you can try too, to earn some passive income online?
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Earn passive income through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
One passive income strategy that I got started with was Kindle Publishing. I started it maybe 4 years ago. It was fairly new, and so was I when it comes to starting an online business. I didn’t know anything about marketing or selling products/services online.
With Kindle Publishing, I had to learn how to create digital text content or ebooks, promote them, and sell them on the Amazon Kindle platform. It’s a great experience to learn the nuances of what it takes to create a digital product and sell it, especially if you’re new to marketing.
The great thing about the Kindle platform is that it’s a marketplace. You don’t have to do a whole lot of your own promotion because Amazon does most of the legwork for you. Since their platform is a search engine, your products can come up in people’s search results for books even without you doing any sort of marketing or promotion. There are strategies to rank your book accordingly, but it’s a great place to get started for someone who wants to get their feet wet in earning passive income online.
There are several ways on how to do Kindle publishing. One of these is what they call niche publishing.
Niche publishing means that you have ghostwriters write in a niche that you are in or would like to pursue. In the early years of Kindle publishing, a lot of people did niche publishing. You can just think of a topic in your niche, outsource the writing and book cover design, put it together, and then publish it and earn income.
However, there are some challenges to publishing on the Kindle platform.
The challenges of Kindle Publishing
One challenge is, and I’m being completely transparent when I say this, the KDP sphere is pretty saturated.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed. It just means that you have to think differently on how you approach it. There are people who are selling course on how to create a hundred books to make a full-time living. That doesn’t really fly in my book. I don’t see that as being sustainable because everybody is trying to do the same thing.
Back in the early days, I was making several thousand dollars a month from KDP. There were even a couple of months where I exceeded my day job income, which is a big task given that I’m in tech. To be able to do that was phenomenal, but it wasn’t sustainable.
How can you overcome the challenges of Kindle publishing?
The best way to stand out in today’s marketplace is by building a personal brand.
Put yourself out there, demonstrate your expertise, and build that relationship with your potential audience. Whether they’re reading your ebook or watching your video, you’re building a relationship and positioning yourself as an expert. If you do this, later on down the line when you have a product or service to offer, then you’ll be seen as a qualified authority on that subject matter.
The challenge with that is that it takes time, and a lot of people don’t want to take the time to build that relationship and their brand.
But, if you want to succeed in 2018, you have to build a brand. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to build a personal brand or a company brand. You still have to build a brand. It just doesn’t apply in 2018. That’s just in general. That’s what I’ve learned – it doesn’t matter what year it is. It’s the same concept over and over, if you want to build a successful business.
Earn passive income through Udemy Course Creation
Another passive income strategy that you can try is Udemy course creation. If you’ve never tried the marketing route and you want to get into creating online courses, Udemy is the way to go, especially if you’re just about to launch your first course.
A lot of people will tell you, “No, no, no, you can do it yourself. You can learn all the marketing and just invest in click funnels or expensive software. You can do it without any experience.” That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
The perks of Udemy Course Creation
If you’re just getting started and you don’t want to feel like it’s impossible, use a marketplace. Udemy is a marketplace just like the Kindle platform. You can publish your course and they help do most of the promotion.
I’ve published 2 courses this year, and so far, I’ve made about $200 with zero promotion. With my first course, I sent one email to my email list. My email list is pretty small, only about 150 people on it. So, the majority of my sales are actually from people who are not even on my list.
You can get started with online courses if you have something that you want to teach and share. My latest course is on WordPress. It’s called WordPress Made Easy: Plan, Build and Launch Your 1st WordPress Website for Your Personal Brand in 1 Hour. You can just create courses on topics you have experience with. Maybe, you’re awesome at Microsoft Excel. A lot of people brand themselves as Excel experts, and there are courses and programs on that. There are so many different things that you probably have in your life right now that you can teach and earn a little bit of money from. If you slowly do this and let the snowball accumulate over time, you may have a substantial income to have the freedom to do other things in your career and in your life.
The challenges of Udemy Course Creation
I wanted to share all these with you as this is where we’re headed as far as the internet goes. It’s not just about text and audio anymore. It’s about video. If you are not creating videos, you need to start creating videos because that’s where it’s at. Whether it’s Facebook Live or YouTube, everybody is using and promoting videos now to get in front of their potential audience. Getting started with video now is only going to help you.
There are a lot of people who don’t want to do videos because they’re uncomfortable in front of the camera. It seems better to just hire someone to do write books for them, and I admit that I was the same way. But, I’ve seen a huge benefit in being able to get in front of the camera and talk to people about the benefits of creating online courses. Being able to create videos to use in your online courses and to promote them also has huge advantages in getting more eyes to it and connecting with your audience.
Anyway, I hope this has helped you think about the top 2 passive income strategy models for 2018 and how to tie those in building your personal brand.
If you have any questions or thoughts to share, leave them in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!
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