- Passive income is one
of the most important things you can do
if you want to be able
to have a much more secure financial future
because I think with the Great Resignation,
everything else we see going on around us
we've all woken up to the idea that there's no such thing
as job security.
At the same time,
I do know that there are a lot of things out there
there are misinformation.
And so what I wanna do is I want to tell you how
you can start earning passive income even a little bit
at a time, maybe even just an extra 500 to $1,000 a month
without any get rich quick schemes
or shady multi-level marketing
or any of that nonsense, because the truth
and the fact is is that when we say passive income,
we are talking about automated income.
Automation is currently displacing a lot
of work as it is right now.
And there are people who profit and benefit
from how automation allows a customer to put money in
and get value out.
It's kind of a vending machine based model
of exchange instead of trading time for money
which let's just be honest,
hasn't exactly been working out for a lot of people.
The most important thing to understand
about this and why passive income
particularly the type that I'm going to get
into is not a get rich quick scheme is number one:
well, it didn't work out quickly for me.
That's a big part of it.
But the other part
of it is just understanding that we're talking
about exchanging value.
That's a big qualifier and nobody ever actually made money
in their sleep overnight.
It was a process
and it requires specific skill sets and information.
And so that's what I wanna get it
into really with today's video.
And we're gonna approach this, and I'm gonna talk to you
about three specific ways
how you can start making thousand dollars a month
in passive income.
And I'm gonna start with one that might be obvious to a lot
of you.
The funny thing about the concept of there being
no such thing as "passive income"
is that every single YouTuber
that you've ever heard say that nonsense
which according to the IRS, actually, isn't true by the way.
The IRS says there's passive income.
They tax it.
That's a thing.
So it does exist.
But the funny notion about influencers and people
on social media, on YouTube and TikTok who say this nonsense
is well, they're all making passive income.
They're making passive income as content creators
'cause again, we're talking about automation.
We're talking about a mechanism
where they're generating money
without actively trading time for their money.
They're getting paid residual income from content
that they may have created weeks, months or even years ago.
And I know this from personal experience here
on YouTube, there's content I've made on YouTube in terms
of tutorials that still,
four years after the fact continue to pay me hundreds
if not thousands of dollars a year for work
that I did a very long time ago.
Yes, some people would argue
that that's not passive income 'cause,
"Oh, you you did actual work at some point."
But that's not how you define passive income.
It's not making money without doing any work.
It's making money without doing work today
and still making money today.
It is getting paid today even
without having to actively exchange time for wages.
That's all we're really talking about.
We're talking about an exchange
of value where you're not having
to do work right this moment,
you are benefiting
from work you've previously done
or value that you are still creating without being involved.
And there's a lot
of ways that this is done for content creators.
And this has actually been true for a long very long time.
If you were a musician, for example
let's just say, you weren't even a YouTuber.
If you were a musician, you could be making money
off of licensing your music and still getting music sales.
You also could be getting royalties from streaming services
like Apple and Spotify and Amazon, right this moment.
Book sales in terms of the licensing
of your books and the publishing of that,
multiple languages or the eBooks and audiobooks.
You could be making money, royalties
in perpetuity for all of that.
Or if you made a deal where you invented something
and you sold the licensing rights
to your invention or your patents,
you can be making money on royalties in perpetuity.
And royalties is a form
of taxable income that is under the classification
of passive income that is acknowledged
by the IRS here in America.
In fact, YouTube changed its terms
of service to classify this income
that we make as content creators
on the YouTube platform as royalty based income
because of the different negotiations
and treaties we have with other countries involving taxes.
And so, to say that there's no such thing as passive income
especially if you're doing it
on a platform like YouTube is actually kind of ridiculous.
So by creating intellectual property
and content that can either pay
you through a platform based revenue system
or the traditional royalty model that we see
with music and television, movies, licensing photographs
things of that nature.
That is a form of legitimate passive income.
Now the way that a lot of people earn as much
as a thousand dollars a month from passive income
if you're a YouTube content creator,
it's by making consistent content
and by generating ad revenue around that,
if you have a large library
of what's called evergreen content
then you could basically stack your ability
to continue to make revenue
even when you're not uploading videos
for mental health reasons and things during the pandemic,
there have been times where I've taken more than a month off
from YouTube or even two months off from YouTube
and still made thousands of dollars in ad revenue alone.
That's not something you can do
with a traditional wage based income model.
And that is one of the reasons that people pursue this type
of thing because it allows them more time
and freedom and yes, it's variable income.
And a lot of people go, "Well, what if YouTube goes away?"
Well, we probably over the last couple
of years have seen that
that thing called job security is largely a myth.
It's more likely that that goes away.
Then you lose YouTube
in some way it's much more likely.
With that being said,
YouTube's not the only way to make passive income.
It is a very practical way, but if you have a podcast,
a blog or some other form
of social media or a way to generate traffic
another method of passive income is eCommerce
and directly selling to an audience
instead of taking revenue from a platform,
you can obviously do both.
And that would be a really good way to start
to earn passive income.
The most obvious way for a lot
of people is print on demand products,
such as t-shirts, hats, even posters
and things of that nature.
Now the margins on these actually in many cases end up being
about the same as if you wrote a book and sold it
but it's a lot easier to design a cool t-shirt
or a hoodie based on a meme or a slogan or an affirmation,
you probably won't make a lot of money selling your logo
unless you're like a famous person
but you could actually just lean into a culture
and something that's really interesting
or just really dope artwork.
And you could probably make the same kind
of money as if you had book sales.
And it's probably easier to sell this
than to sell a book because it's something
that doesn't require a huge commitment.
Typically you will make somewhere between five
and $8 on most print on demand products after cost.
If you use platforms like Spreadshirt,
there's something that you get to use even here on YouTube,
if you get to 10,000 subscribers,
they actually put an integrated merch shelf
below your YouTube videos to help you easily promote it
to your audience.
There's things like that.
Well, you don't pay money up front
but the money is directly taken out of the profits
you would otherwise make.
And that's how the print on demand services work.
So again, you typically make somewhere between five, eight,
$12 per sale, depending on what it is.
Which means if you wanted
to make a thousand dollars in passive income
from shirt sales, merchandise, that sort of thing,
if that's your product system, then let's look at that.
You would probably have to make somewhere
around between 150, 200 sales.
If you have enough traffic
then that's actually not gonna be that difficult.
You might need to have some kind
of traffic sourced where you're having
a hundred thousand visitors
on your platform to kind of translate
to those buying customers.
And so that is considerable amount of traffic
but if you're making quality content,
it's actually not that bad.
That's also about what a lot of people tend
to need somewhere between a hundred thousand
to a million views
on YouTube to earn a thousand dollars depending
on what niche you're in.
In my particular niche, if I get a hundred thousand views
on YouTube, I make about $1,500 for every 100,000 views.
So as you can see, it really depends on your niche,
the type of audience you have,
what kind of commitment they can make
and how affluent they might be
but they don't need a large sum
of disposable income for you to start making decent money.
There are other types of e-commerce as well,
you don't necessarily have to sell physical print
on demand products, but for those of you who are skeptical,
you're gonna be more comfortable with physical products
because you're getting the exchange of value there
where it's something people can hold
in their hands, but digital projects that you do
in terms of templates, downloads and things of that nature,
this could be for web design, graphic design,
any number of things.
Well, those kind of assets tend to be something
that one: you can charge a little bit more for
but you actually keep more
of the profits, your profit margin on this
if you have a, let's say, a $30 product
you're probably gonna keep $25 of that $30
when transaction fees and all of that is said and done.
So keeping more than 90%
of the revenue probably is going to be very nice compared
to making 20 or 30% margins on physical products.
And a lot of people do go into digital core sales with this.
I have nothing against digital core sellers, to be honest.
I know a lot of people like to complain about it
but I feel like if someone is qualified in what they do
I don't see a problem with that.
And it can be extremely lucrative.
If you want to go
into digital courses, the same way for print on demand,
I recommended Spreadshirt for you
which you can sign up for $0.
I do have a free trial link,
if you wanna try out a platform called Kajabi,
I use it for my membership website.
Membership is not passive,
if you do it the way I do where you're doing live
in person, like, well, not in person, virtual live training
in real time, then that's not passive.
It it's a more active or hybrid business model.
But if you sell a do-it-yourself course
that someone can learn at their own pace on their own time.
You can use something like Kajabi
and that would allow you to sell it directly,
host it with unlimited uploads
and make passive income that way.
I'm gonna link to that down below
if you want check out a free trial
that is my affiliate link, which actually is a good segue
to another way that you can make passive income.
Another way you can make passive income
is affiliate marketing and affiliate sales.
Again, this is something
I know people get really sketched out about
and wanna say it is a scam, but it it's not.
I want you to imagine
for a minute that you were getting 10%, 20%,
30% of every sale that you've ever made
for your current employer
or your previous employer, that you got to keep 30%,
let's say, of every dollar that you ever made that company.
Well, wouldn't that be great?
The problem is if you were gonna get that, they'd be like,
"Well. then you're commission only
and we're not gonna pay you a salary."
Most people are not in a position to take that risk
in terms of a full-time income.
However, as a side hustle, as extra money,
well, now you're talking.
And so the way that affiliate marketing works
is it is commission sales.
So you might get either a fixed rate called a bounty
for when you refer somebody,
the easiest way a lot of people get into this is Amazon.
I think the best way to start is Audible
because it is a $5 flat fee on a free trial of Audible,
recommending a book, an audio book, people can listen to
they get to keep it for free forever.
It costs them $0 and you get a $5 commission
which means to make a hundred dollars,
you recommend 20 people that spend $0
and get an audio book forever.
Okay, so that means you need 200
of those to make a thousand dollars a month.
Now this could be a little bit more challenging
because well,
you can't basically get repeatable earnings out of this,
it's a one to one, every one person you get
that's the $5 you're gonna get
off of this with the audible side.
And that's basically it, but that doesn't mean
that you can't double dip on this
with Amazon affiliate links and still benefit
from other things they might purchase
or physical books or eBooks for Kindle.
There are a lot of opportunities
within the Amazon ecosystem to earn money
and earn passive income.
Again, you could even make your own book
or ebook that wouldn't actually,
you could make a ebook for like $0
and you could actually earn all off of that as well.
I just happen to think it's harder to write a book,
something I'm currently finishing up myself.
It's harder to write a book than is to make a t-shirt
or a hoodie or a hat design by far, and it's not even close.
And at the end of the day,
you're going to make the same money per transaction.
It's just more prestigious to write a book.
With all the in mind, Amazon is how a lot
of people myself include get started in affiliate marketing.
There are higher end things that can earn you more money
in affiliate marketing.
A primary example would be cameras and camera lenses.
I use a lot of very expensive professional camera gear,
both as a photographer and as a content creator.
When I recommend professional camera gear to be people
that ask me, I make sometimes $90 commissions
on a single sale of single lens.
So if I go high end, I only need 10,
15 customers on a high end electronic
like a camera, professional camera lens, or camera body,
10, 15 of those.
I made a thousand dollars in a month.
That's it.
Now there are other categories where it is not nearly
as lucrative.
I'm giving you an example.
So this is how someone makes a thousand dollars a month
with affiliate marketing
of selling existing physical products.
You also can earn passive income
through recurring affiliate commissions.
When you sell software and services.
One of my best ones obviously is TubeBuddy
what exists for content creators,
it's a YouTube plugin for productivity, SEO, organization.
It also has tools to help you with your thumbnails
and AB testing and a lot of other cool features.
And so I'm a super affiliative of theirs
and whenever I bring someone to TubeBuddy,
I get 50% of what they spend
with TubeBuddy for the lifetime of their account.
It's been about six years and I earn about $5,000 a month
in recurring passive income from TubeBuddy
as an affiliate that I would not have to go out
and hustle for.
What happens is eventually though some people move on,
they quit YouTube,
they don't use the service anymore, things like that.
And so when that happens,
you obviously have that money start to go down.
But as new people come in, you start to earn more.
In my case, with helpful tutorials and things like that,
I'm able to have more people sign up for free
but even the people who for free,
if they decide to start paying, I earn from that as well.
So software services are great ways to make passive income
through affiliate marketing.
You could also build your own software as a service
and you could earn a lot
of income from building an app or building a software.
Most people, myself included, just don't have
have that advanced of a skillset to do that well
or the time and energy to do that,
run it, marketing, invest in the servers,
all of these different things
but you could tap into an ecosystem
of a product that you already like, that you already use
and you could recommend it to people like you.
And that is how affiliate marketing works.
And when I break it down like that, you gotta admit
there's not really anything scammy or sketchy about this.
You can make content for an audience of people
that like what you have to say and like your personality,
you can earn passive income through ad revenue from that.
You could make cool products
whether they're physical or digital,
that that audience actually likes
and enjoys and wants to have
and people can put money in and get the thing
that they want at.
And you don't have to physically be part of that process.
It's a transaction.
The same thing for referring business
to a company you already buy from, you already trust,
you're getting a cut of that transaction
without having to be an employee of the company.
That's how passive income works.
That's how people make money online.
This is how people are making money in their sleep.
This is how people make a thousand dollars or more a month
and this could be extra income
or this could provide a very good livelihood
for people either way.
And when you diversify like this with content creation,
selling your own products and affiliate marketing
this is how most people
who are social media content creators
and influencers actually diversify their income
and earn a full-time income as a content creator.
And now you know more
or less the same thing that they know
and this is how people are doing it,
myself included, like I said, passive income
not something that people do overnight.
People who make money in their sleep, don't do it overnight.
It takes time.
A lot of times, I think it takes
about maybe three to five years
to start to get a really good stable footing.
But you could start small
with your first 100 to to $1,000 a month.
And that would be something extra
for you that might be able to relieve stress,
solve some problems in your life
or allow you to start to move forward
in something you're more passionate about.
If you enjoy this video on passive income,
make sure you check out my Make Money Online Playlist.
I'm gonna link to that down below.
If you're actually curious about some ways
to make money online that I know actually work,
I'm gonna link to a video that I also think you'll enjoy.
Both of those are gonna be in the description.
As always, thank you so much for watching and don't forget:
go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.