- Passive income, how to make passive income online?
How to make money in your sleep?
This is like the holy grail of YouTube content.
Everyone is obsessed with passive income,
everyone wants to know
how they can make money online in their sleep,
how they can stop trading time for money,
and the thing is it is something that can be done,
but it ain't gonna happen overnight.
Sorry, doesn't work that way.
And it's not for lazy people.
So I'm gonna tell you the truth about passive income,
I'm gonna tell you three simple ways,
three simple ways that you can start to understand
and implement passive income for yourself
because you really can make money in your sleep,
you're just not gonna do it overnight.
And so, I want you when you hear the words passive income,
to, in your brain, replace passive income
with automated income 'cause what we're gonna do
is we're gonna build a system.
We're gonna build an automation,
we're gonna build the exact type of machine,
system, robot that's coming for all of your jobs.
So let's get into the video.
Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
For the new people here, first of all, welcome,
my name is Roberto Blake,
I'm a creative entrepreneur and public speaker
and I love topics like passive income, making money online
'cause this YouTube channel is here
to help you build your brand and business online.
So if you're into that,
make sure that you're checking out
the other content on the channel.
Like and subscribe.
So there are three ways that I make passive income
that are not investing in real estate.
Now I do have investments,
I actually super into my stock portfolio
and I use a bunch of different tools and apps for that
that I can talk about later,
but I wanna focus on three ways to make passive income
that don't require you to have upfront money to invest
because real estate and stocks would require you
to already have the luxury of investing money
that many of you probably don't even have.
There's a real strong chance
that you don't have the money to be invested in stocks
and real estate right now
because only about roughly the top 20% of Americans,
there was like this article,
and 20% of Americans own 90% of the stocks right now.
That is insane and absurd!
So most of you are like completely excluded
from being able to invest
or at least you believe that you are.
I'll do another video on that.
And the reason I'm bringing this up
is because whenever I talk to anyone about passive income,
there's, "Roberto, that's not really passive,"
so that's why we're gonna call it automated income
and we're not talking about investment and real estate.
If you're a millennial, I'm an older millennial,
there is a 40-something percent chance,
like only 40% of millennials, actually this is really cool,
40% or so of millennials are homeowners.
So that excludes more than half of us
for real estate right then and there.
And then if you happen to be black or Latino,
it's down to 15% of millennials
that are black or Latino are homeowners.
So there is that.
So this is more like passive income for normal people,
asterisk, that are also kind of smart.
The three ways that normal people can make passive income
are, obviously, you can do videos on YouTube
and if you qualify, you get 1,000 subscribers,
4,000 hours of watch time
and you make non-offensive content,
you too can start earning YouTube AdSense revenue.
So if you're into that, I have a ton of videos
that help you grow a YouTube channel,
build it up from scratch, everything you need to know
right here on the channel for free.
So you can check those out.
YouTube AdSense is one way to make passive income,
I'll get into it further in the video.
Let's move on to number two: affiliate marketing.
A lot of skepticism,
a lot of people have interesting things to say
about affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is basically commission sales, guys.
Affiliate marketing means
you sell somebody else's product on their behalf
and you get a percentage of that.
Most common way for most people
is Amazon affiliate marketing.
I used to make about 1,500 a month
on Amazon affiliate marketing,
I stopped doing tech-related videos
so I don't do that as much.
I actually have a completely new channel
that I'm building around camera gear
and lighting and podcasting.
It's Creator Gear Guide.
If you guys want, you can definitely help me out
by subscribing to that channel, content is coming soon.
But it definitely will be a little bit easier
to monetize that channel if I have 1,000 subscribers,
so that helps me out.
But that channel is going to take advantage
of Amazon affiliate marketing
and I'm gonna be able to, you know,
sell camera gear like this.
Now the good news about that is I get something for it
but it's only two to 8% with Amazon affiliate marketing.
There are much more robust affiliate programs out there
that aren't gonna require me
to sell expensive camera gear and laptops.
And so, the thing that I would recommend for a lot of you
is software as a service-based affiliate marketing.
So if there's a software that you use right now,
a website that you use right now,
then you can recommend that to people
and they probably have an affiliate program
and maybe you can get 30 or 50%
of whatever that software or service is worth.
And again, the best example of this is to use myself here
and to show you some real numbers here.
There is a software that I recommend
for YouTube content creators called TubeBuddy.
Now TubeBuddy is a browser extension
that helps YouTube content creators
with their keyword research,
it helps them do bulk find/replace on links in their videos,
like their affiliate links, for example.
And it's very cool
and I've been using it for a number of years,
I've been using it for like five years,
I've been an affiliate of theirs for four years.
And in four years as a TubeBuddy affiliate,
I've made about $193,000 and right now
I average about five to $6,000 a month in passive income.
The good news about this
is that the lifetime of those accounts,
I get commissions on,
which means that I already am getting paid
for all the accounts that I've already sold
as long as people like the service
and they continue to use it,
I continue to get revenue from those accounts.
Normal affiliates get 30%, I'm a super affiliate at 50%.
So that means that as long as people are using TubeBuddy
and I'm an affiliate,
that I'm going to have $5,000 a month
come in pretty regularly
whether I get up and hustle and make YouTube videos or not
because people have already bought the accounts.
And the other good news is because of my YouTube channel
and search-friendly content,
there are videos and tutorials I've done about TubeBuddy
that will always bring in new clicks, new traffic,
new people that convert to TubeBuddy
and will ultimately result
in me getting more affiliate revenue.
So over a period of time, if people leave,
there will be new people to replace them
and I'll continue to get an income from this.
This is one of many recurring affiliate models
that I take advantage of.
By the way, if you're a YouTube content creator,
the good news is also that you can sign up
and you can get TubeBuddy for yourself
to help grow your YouTube channel,
so you can get the free version with my affiliate link
or you can go ahead and get the paid version
and use my discount code Roberto's Buddy and get 20% off.
You see what I did just now?
That's a primary example of what I'm talking about.
Upfront value and for no extra cost,
people get value, I also benefit.
And in this case, I combine YouTube and affiliate marketing.
And again, there are other affiliate programs out there.
Maybe you're not a YouTuber so you can't sell TubeBuddy.
There are email marketing programs like ConvertKit
or if you want to do the third thing
which is sell digital products.
Well, selling digital products is a great way
in order to make money online passively,
stop trading some of your time for money.
You have to put in upfront work
but the system largely takes care of itself.
It's a vending machine transaction,
people put money in, they get value and results out.
And you as a human don't have to be part of that process,
that's why I call this automated income.
So the way that I make automated income
with digital products is I sell something
called the YouTube Starter Kit
which is a thumbnail template system for YouTubers,
I also sell one or two courses.
We have one course out
and another one that's about to release.
So you know, one of my main courses right now
is called the "Formula for Awesome Videos" course,
and this is for people who want to make online videos.
There are two big problems,
they either don't have great on-camera presence
and performance, they're always nervous,
they can't get past that to just hit Record,
and then they also want to improve
the visual and audio quality and all the aspects
that make their videos look and sound good,
so we put together an entry-level course for $149
that helps them address those key problems,
what to buy and what they need
to actually make quality videos
and giving them a process that they can use,
and so I'll link that down below if you're interested in it.
You don't have to buy it, there's no pressure there,
but it is there for anybody who wants it.
But yeah, by selling digital products
whether it's an online course,
whether it's a template system.
Look, for those of you who don't do online courses,
Peter McKinnon is making a lot of good money
by selling Lightroom Presets
and also by selling sound effects.
He's using something called Sellfy to do it,
I'm gonna link to that below for you guys.
Sellfy and Gumroad are places
where you can put up your own digital products
like sound effects or Lightroom Presets,
Premiere Pro, or After Effects Presets for video editors.
These are things that you can sell for like 20 and $35
that people happily buy.
You just need to push traffic to them.
You can do that with ads or you could do it with content.
So again, you can stack these things
and make passive income on all of them which is what I do.
When you use your content as a traffic source,
you're making money off the ad revenue of the content,
you can link out to affiliate links,
but you can also promote
your own products and services as well
and all these things can work for you.
And if the content is evergreen,
if you're not chasing trending topics,
I know that that's the sexier thing to do,
if you do evergreen how-to content,
then it wouldn't help sell
some of these products and services,
and so you can get affiliate commissions
from the people who care about those things
if they click on the links,
or people who want to support you directly
and want the value that you offer,
they can click on those links
and it could be videos you made six months ago
and because YouTube is a search engine
and it also is just finding videos
that people are interested in watching
because of their own previous watch history,
and their own user preferences or whatever,
your content will get views in perpetuity.
And every one of those views
is an opportunity for somebody to buy from you
and if they don't buy from you,
it still goes towards you getting ad revenue on YouTube.
So again, when you combine these three things,
you have a really, really nice robust system.
Now the issue and the problem that a lot of people have
is that whether it's YouTube or TikTok,
Instagram, whatever it is,
that platform is the gatekeeper on access to an audience.
So for a lot of people,
what they'll do is they'll use that initially,
and this is something I do, and then they'll get people
to join their email list or newsletter.
So for me,
I link to the Awesome Squad Newsletter
in all of my videos more recently
because I want to really grow my email list.
I did it a while ago and then I stopped
and I was focused on other things
and now I really wanna get my email list up again
because I know that people are worried about things
like getting shadow banned, or de-platformed,
or losing their account 'cause if you lose your traffic,
if you lose the social media account,
yes, you lose access to your audience
which means you lose access to your pipeline of customers.
And so, for passive income automating come to work,
you need a traffic source, you need a way to get eyeballs
and then convert those eyeballs
into customers that pay cash.
One of the things I recommend that people look at
and you just have to check the Terms of Service
with your affiliate marketing is you know
you could do something where you buy ads
and then drive that to the affiliate links
and you could make money that way, a lot of people do it.
The way that I prefer to do it
is to make a standalone piece of content,
something on my website like a training,
or a blog post, or a master class,
or a free download that people can get.
Especially if it goes to my email list,
and then I'd rather drive traffic to like the free download
or the free resource, get people to sign up their email,
now I have a way to reach them and to know who they are
and then they can buy from there
or I can convert them later in an email sequence.
So that's one way to approach it.
Another way to approach it
is if you are selling your own products
and this is the way I do it.
I have a platform that I use for my online coaching,
my courses and my digital download templates,
I use Kajabi, right.
Kajabi is a little bit more expensive than Sellfy.
If you're just gonna make templates,
and sound effects, and presets, use something like Sellfy.
I'll link to both of these in the description down below
and those will be affiliate links.
But with Kajabi, I am able to sell my membership,
my coaching, my courses, all of it under one umbrella
and I have my own website for that.
So what I do is I will buy ads
and I will drive people like the YouTube Starter Kit
because getting like 100 digital templates for $99
is not something you have to care
about who Roberto Blake is in order to buy.
And this is the mistake that people make.
See, to truly make passive income.
to truly be able to build something scalable,
I think that you need to think
about whether or not people have to know who you are
and like you in order to buy from you.
I think the value of what you offer has to be so good
that they don't have to know you
in order to see it and want to buy it.
And I think that that is the mistake
that a lot of people make
and I don't think most people who talk about,
at least a lot of the people that I've seen,
when they talk about passive income,
whether it's selling your own product,
whether it's selling courses,
whether it's affiliate marketing, whether it's any of it,
they don't consider why would I buy this
if I don't know who you are?
I think that that value has to be so undeniable,
so clear upfront, that anybody can buy from you
in order to have a really scalable
passive income automated business.
So again, I say that as long
as you can build something so valuable
that it doesn't have to always be reputation-based,
then you don't have to completely rely
on the pipeline of organic content
and organic reach from Facebook,
Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever it is,
and you won't be cut off
if the algorithm isn't favoring you.
I believe that you should consider
a combination of using cold traffic and ads
to grow your email list,
market against the people on that email list,
use your organic content to build that email list,
and do affiliate links, and sell your own products;
and again, just build this robust system.
I also think you should have your own website,
your own blog, and I think that's making a comeback
because people are realizing
they can't trust social media anymore, finally.
And they're realizing that you need to own your traffic.
If you don't own the traffic, you don't own the business.
And so, again, if you want to make that passive income,
if you want to build that system,
I think you need to own as much of the resource as possible
which means your own website,
and your own email list, and your own digital products.
I love passive income,
I love that we can finally do what corporations do;
we can make money in our sleep using automation.
And so, if you learn to do this,
you don't have to worry about the great displacement
that's coming from automation.
You don't have to worry about the robots taking your jobs
because you are now subsidizing
and utilizing the robots for your benefit
just like I've been doing.
So yeah, I'm sitting here rooting for Skynet and the T-800
so that I could make as much money as possible
for our robot overlords
decide that we're not worth the trouble.
So question of the day for you guys.
What other videos about making money and finance
do you want me to cover here on the channel?
Do you want me to make more videos about passive income?
I have a video, 20 Ways to Make Passive Income in 2020,
it is coming soon, so be excited for that.
Make sure you subscribe.
But I wonder what content
do you want me to make on the channel?
'Cause I know we talked about passive income
without investing,
I wanna do a whole other video specifically with that title
and I also do wanna make videos about how I'm investing
and how I make passive income from those investments.
There are a lot of apps that I use
to actually do my investing.
In fact, two really good apps that I recommend are Acorns,
if you use my link, we both get $5,
so you can check that out, it's free
and it's a really good way to get into using a robo-advisor.
If you want to potentially buy individual stocks
or you want to do index funds the way that I do,
you can use the Robinhood app.
If you do and you sign up with my link,
we both get a free stock, so that's my referral link there,
it cost you $0 and we'll both get a free stock,
so you can check that out, or not, no pressure.
But I really wanna know what videos
you want me to make in the future
around money-making topics.
So you know what to do, comment down below,
I'll reply to everybody that I can.
Like this video if you like it, don't forget to subscribe,
check out the other awesome stuff on the channel,
definitely helps me out.
As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching
and don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today.
Take care.
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