9 Passive Income Ideas - How I Make $27k per Week

Summary

The video discusses nine strategies for generating passive income, including investing in stocks, creating a YouTube channel, starting a podcast, affiliate marketing, selling digital products, offering online courses, establishing a paid membership community, automating a business, and developing software as a service. The creator shares personal experiences and provides a candid assessment of the effort required to start, maintain, and scale each method, emphasizing the importance of providing value and the reality that passive income often requires significant upfront work.

Takeaways

• 📈 Passive income sources require time and effort to build up, with no quick riches guaranteed.
• 💰 The speaker's nine passive income sources generate around $27,000 per week, built over eight years.
• 📚 Writing a book is an example of creating passive income through royalties.
• 🚫 Avoid get-rich-quick schemes; they are scams and do not work.
• 💼 Money is a medium for exchanging value, and providing value is the key to earning money.
• 🔄 Investing in index funds like the S&P 500 can be a relatively easy way to start earning passive income.
• 📊 The difficulty of making $100 a month from stocks depends on market performance and personal savings.
• 🎥 Starting a YouTube channel is easy, but making compelling content and gaining subscribers is challenging.
• 🎤 Podcasts can be easier to start than YouTube channels but growing an audience is harder.
• 🔗 Affiliate marketing is accessible but requires an audience or domain authority to be successful.

Q & A

What are the nine ways to generate passive income discussed in the video?

The nine ways to generate passive income discussed are: 1) Investing in stocks and shares, 2) Starting a YouTube channel, 3) Starting a podcast, 4) Becoming an affiliate marketer, 5) Selling digital products, 6) Creating an online course, 7) Creating a paid membership or community model, 8) Creating a business that sells goods or services and automating or delegating aspects of it, and 9) Building an app, website, or software product as a service.

How much passive income does the speaker generate per week?

The speaker generates around $27,000 per week from their various passive income sources.

What is the average time it took the speaker to build up their passive income sources?

It took the speaker approximately eight years to build up their passive income sources.

What is the speaker's stance on 'get rich quick' schemes?

The speaker strongly advises against 'get rich quick' schemes, stating that they are scams and do not work. They emphasize that the only way to make money is by providing value.

How does the speaker define 'passive income'?

The speaker defines 'passive income' as money that is not directly tied to one's time, such as royalties from a book or returns from investments.

What is the recommended strategy for beginners in stock investing according to the speaker?

The speaker recommends that beginners invest in index funds, specifically mentioning the S&P 500, as it allows for diversified investment across the top 500 US companies.

How many subscribers and watch hours are required for YouTube monetization?

To be eligible for monetization on YouTube, a channel needs 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time.

What is the average revenue per thousand views on YouTube?

On average, the revenue per thousand views on YouTube is around $2.

How much does the speaker make from their YouTube channel in passive income per month?

The speaker's YouTube channel generates around $12,000 per month in passive income from YouTube AdSense.

What is the speaker's advice for starting an online course?

The speaker advises that starting an online course is relatively easy but making it good and getting people to pay for it is the challenge. They recommend using platforms like Skillshare, which do not require direct charging of the end-user.

How does the speaker describe the difficulty of starting a membership program?

The speaker describes starting a membership program as very easy, giving it a one-star rating. However, making $100 a month from it is quite hard, earning a four-star rating due to the need to provide significant value.

Outlines

00:00

📈 Introduction to Passive Income

The speaker introduces the concept of passive income, explaining it as money earned without direct time investment. They share their own experience with generating passive income through various sources, emphasizing that it takes time and effort to build up. The speaker warns against quick-rich schemes and stresses the importance of providing value to earn money. They also mention their new Skillshare class on productivity for creators.

05:01

💰 Stock Investing as Passive Income

The speaker discusses investing in stocks and shares as a way to generate passive income. They explain that investing in index funds like the S&P 500 can be a good start for beginners. The speaker provides a detailed analysis of the potential earnings, the difficulty of getting started, and the ease of maintaining this income stream. They share their personal experience with stock investments and their current passive income from this source.

10:02

🎥 Starting a YouTube Channel

The speaker talks about creating a YouTube channel as a method for passive income. They explain the ease of starting a channel but highlight the challenges of growing an audience and producing compelling content. The speaker provides a step-by-step guide on how to monetize a YouTube channel, including the requirements for monetization and the average revenue per thousand views. They also share their personal journey and current earnings from their YouTube channel.

15:02

🎙️ Podcasting for Passive Income

The speaker explores the idea of starting a podcast as a passive income source. They note that while starting a podcast is easy, growing it is more challenging than YouTube. The speaker discusses the potential earnings from podcasting, which typically come from brand deals rather than a direct equivalent to YouTube AdSense. They share the average earnings per ad and the number of downloads needed to reach a $100 monthly income. The speaker also mentions their own podcast and its earnings.

20:04

🔗 Affiliate Marketing

The speaker explains affiliate marketing as a way to earn passive income by promoting other people's products and earning a commission. They discuss the ease of getting started with affiliate programs like Amazon Associates and Skillshare. The speaker provides a detailed analysis of the difficulty of making $100 a month through affiliate marketing, emphasizing the need for an audience and evergreen content. They share their own affiliate income from Skillshare and Amazon.

25:05

📚 Selling Digital Products

The speaker talks about creating and selling digital products, such as ebooks or apps, as a source of passive income. They discuss the low difficulty of starting this venture but highlight the challenge of creating valuable products that people are willing to pay for. The speaker provides a rating for the difficulty of making $100 a month from digital products and shares examples of successful digital product creators. They also mention their own experience with digital products.

🎓 Creating Online Courses

The speaker explores the potential of creating online courses for passive income. They discuss the ease of creating a course and the importance of its quality for attracting students. The speaker provides a detailed explanation of how to make $100 a month through online courses, either by charging for them or by using a platform like Skillshare. They share their own success with online courses on Skillshare and the passive income they generate from them.

🤝 Paid Memberships and Communities

The speaker discusses the concept of creating paid memberships or community models for passive income. They emphasize the importance of having an existing audience and providing a compelling value proposition. The speaker provides a rating for the difficulty of starting a membership program and making $100 a month. They share examples of successful membership communities and their own experience with a membership community for the Part-Timer YouTuber Academy.

🏢 Automating a Business

The speaker talks about creating a business that sells goods or services and then automating or delegating aspects of it to generate passive income. They reference Tim Ferriss's "The 4-Hour Workweek" and provide examples of businesses that have successfully implemented this model. The speaker discusses the difficulty of starting such a business and the potential for passive income. They also share their own experience with a friend's Shopify store and an Instagram and Facebook ads marketing agency.

🛠️ Building Software for Passive Income

The speaker explores the idea of building an app, website, or software product as a source of passive income, particularly in the form of a subscription service. They discuss the high difficulty of starting this venture due to the technical skills required and the effort needed to build a compelling product. The speaker provides a rating for the difficulty of making $100 a month from software as a service (SaaS) and shares their personal experience with creating a medical test preparation website.

Keywords

💡Passive Income

Passive income refers to earnings that are generated with minimal ongoing effort required from the individual. In the video, it is explained that while there is no such thing as truly 'passive' income, it is possible to create income streams that are not directly tied to one's time. For example, writing a book and earning royalties from its sales is a form of passive income.

💡Index Funds

Index funds are a type of mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) with a portfolio constructed to match or track the components of a financial market index, such as the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500). Investing in index funds is presented as a relatively easy way to generate passive income through the stock market.

💡YouTube Channel

A YouTube channel is a platform where individuals can upload, share, and monetize video content. The video discusses the ease of starting a channel and the challenges of growing an audience and generating revenue through ad revenue and brand deals.

💡Podcast

A podcast is a digital audio or video series available on the Internet for download to a computer or mobile device. The video highlights that starting a podcast is easy, but growing an audience and securing brand deals for passive income is more challenging.

💡Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves promoting products or services of other businesses and earning a commission for each sale made through a unique referral link. The video explains that while starting is easy, making a significant income requires building an audience or domain authority.

💡Digital Products

Digital products are items that can be delivered electronically, such as ebooks, apps, or online courses. The video emphasizes that creating digital products requires providing value and solving a problem for the audience.

💡Online Courses

Online courses are educational content delivered through the internet, often in video format. The video suggests that creating an online course can be a source of passive income if the course is valuable and meets the needs of the target audience.

💡Membership Community

A membership community is a group where individuals pay a fee to access exclusive content, services, or interactions. The video discusses the importance of having an existing audience and providing compelling value to succeed in a membership model.

💡Automated Business

An automated business is one where processes are set up to run with minimal human intervention, allowing for passive income. The video mentions that while starting such a business is challenging, once established, it can provide a steady income stream.

💡Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS refers to a software delivery model in which software is hosted by a third-party provider and made available to customers over the internet. The video highlights the potential for passive income through SaaS, but acknowledges the high initial effort required to build and market the software.

Highlights

The video discusses nine different ways to generate passive income and their associated difficulties.

Passive income is money not directly tied to one's time, such as royalties from a book.

The speaker's nine passive income sources generate around $27,000 per week.

There is no such thing as truly passive income; it always requires some initial effort.

Investing in stocks and shares is the easiest way to start earning passive income.

Index funds, like the S&P 500, are recommended for beginners in stock investing.

Starting a YouTube channel is easy, but making compelling content and gaining subscribers is challenging.

To make $100 a month on YouTube, one might need around 50,000 views.

Starting a podcast is straightforward, but growing an audience is more difficult than with YouTube.

Affiliate marketing can be profitable, but it requires an audience or high domain authority.

Selling digital products can be highly profitable if they solve a specific problem.

Creating an online course can be a good source of passive income if the course is valuable.

Skillshare is mentioned as a platform for teaching without directly charging students.

Paid memberships or community models can be successful if there is an existing audience.

Creating a business that sells goods or services can generate passive income with automation or delegation.

Building an app or software product can be a high-difficulty venture but can yield significant passive income.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of providing value as the key to making money.

The video serves as a guide for those starting their financial independence journey.

The speaker warns against get-rich-quick schemes, emphasizing the long-term approach to building passive income.

The video includes a sponsored segment about Skillshare, highlighting its benefits for creators and learners.

Transcripts

- Hey friends welcome back to the channel.

In this video, we're gonna talk about

nine different ways that you can make passive income.

And for each of those, I'm gonna talk

about how hard it is to get started,

how hard it is to make $100 a month from it

and how hard it is to maintain

once you've created the thing in the first place.

For me in my business, these nine different sources

generate around $27,000 per week

these days with varying degrees of passiveness.

And obviously, this has taken me

like eight years to build up.

So, don't expect to be hitting those sorts

of numbers when you first get started.

But this is the video that I wish I would have had

when I started my financial independence journey

many, many years ago, let's go for it.

All right, so, when I say passive income,

I always air quote it

because there is really no such thing as passive income.

There is no way to make money without doing anything at all.

But when I say passive income,

what I mean is that its money

that is not directly tied to our time.

So, let's say you were to write a book.

If you write a book, you publish a book

that book is now on bookshelves.

You've done the work, kind of once,

to write and publish the book.

But now anytime the book sells,

you make money from royalties, that is passive income.

You could literally be making money while you sleep

because you've created this thing,

which is out in the world,

which is generating income for you.

The other thing with passive income is

that it always takes a very long time to get going.

So, if you see any ads before this video

talking about how you can get rich quick by whatever scheme,

or if you see people in the comments

pretending to be me (screenshot pops)

saying, "Oh my God, here's how you can get rich quick

with crypto, WhatsApp this number."

That is all a scam, it's not gonna work.

There is no way to get rich quick.

It is not a thing.

So, if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme,

those things just don't exist.

So, you might as well not even try.

And the way I think of this,

is that ultimately money is just a medium

for exchanging value.

The only way to make money is to provide value.

And the only way to make passive income, passive money,

is to provide value in a way

that is not directly tied to your time.

So please, please, please, do not try

and join and get-rich-quick scheme, they don't exist.

I've had lots of messages over the years

from people who have tried signing up

to a get-rich-quick crypto scheme or a gambling scheme

or a, "Hey, here's how you kind of play poker online."

None of these things ever work.

People always end up losing money.

The only way to make money is by providing value.

And so, let's talk about

the nine different ways (icons pop)

that you could provide value if you wanted to.

Just before we dive in, I wanna tell you

that I've just launched my brand new Skillshare class,

about Productivity for Creators,

how to start a successful side hustle.

That's linked in the video description.

Skillshare is sponsoring this video.

I will tell you more about Skillshare later on,

but I wanna plug my own class

because I think it's genuinely really good,

and people really like it and it'll help you get tips

on how you can start side hustles in your spare time.

Anyway, let's get into the video.

All right, so, let's kick things off

with investing in stocks and shares.

And in this context, the way that we provide value

is by offering up our money.

Providing money and investing in a service

is in a way giving a form of value.

And so, when we give our money to a company

in the form of buying their stocks,

it makes sense that we would get some kind of return

for that investment.

And we're starting with this

because investing in stocks is the easiest way

to make any kind of passive income.

If you have any sorts of savings

and they're sitting in a savings account,

earning 0.01% interest,

they're not really doing very much for you.

Whereas if you had those stay savings and put them

in stocks, you could potentially be earning passive income

from the money that's otherwise just sitting there.

Now, I've got a whole video

called "The Ultimate Guide to Investing

in Stocks and Shares for Beginners",

which is gonna be linked over there somewhere.

So that is a solid half hour-long introduction

to stocks and exactly how they work.

But the thing that I recommend

for most beginners as a non-financial advisor,

and this is not financial advice,

purely for entertainment purposes only,

or so people say, or at least the thing that I do

is that basically all my money

that's in stocks and shares is invested in index funds.

Now an index fund is something like the S&P 500.

And when you invest, let's say $1,000 in the S&P 500,

that basically means that your $1,000 is distributed

amongst the top 500 biggest companies in the US.

So, weighted by how big they are.

So like, 2% of it would be an Apple,

2% in Facebook, 2% in Google, 2% in Microsoft.

And then you probably won't have heard

of the 500th company on the list,

but basically, all the big US companies you've heard of

you end up investing in all of them a little bit at a time.

So, if you wanna get started with that,

all you need to do is sign up to a stockbroker.

If you're in the US you can use a Webull,

I think I've got a link in the description.

If you're in the UK, you can use Freetrade or Vanguard.

Basically, whatever country you're in

just Google the phrase, best stock broker platform,

your country name

and you'll find something that works for you.

And then it's very easy to be able

to invest in an index fund.

So, within our famous side hustle assessment matrix,

we're gonna give the difficulty of starting,

a one-star rating, one out of five.

It's very, very easy to get started with stocks.

How hard is it to make $100 a month

by investing in stocks and shares?

Well, this kind of depends, because it depends

on the performance of the stock market overall.

So, in the last 12 months, from 2020 to 2021,

the S&P 500, has actually increased by about 50%.

That is a lot, it's like gone up

by a solid 50% despite COVID and everything going on.

So if in April 2020,

you had invested $2,400 in the S&P 500,

the fact that it's gone up by 50%,

means you would've made $100 a month.

But obviously, this is not the way to look at it

because things can go up and down,

and the stock market has different levels

of performance depending on

what time period you're looking at.

But if we average out the last 30 to 50 years,

the S&P 500 has had

a roughly 10 point something percent return.

Which means every year, on average, over the longterm,

it goes up by around 10%.

This is not inflation-adjusted for any economists among us.

And so if we do some back of the envelope calculations,

if we wanna earn $100 a month, passively,

through stocks and shares, we would need

around about $12,000 invested in the S&P 500,

to make that 10%, $1,200 a year, which is $100 a month.

But as I talk about in that video about stocks,

overtime, we have compounding,

and so, if you put in $7,500 in the S&P 500

and you left it there for five years,

then five years later

you would be making roughly $100 a month,

if we go by this very average figure of 10% a year.

Or if you invested $5,000 in the S&P 500,

then 10 years later you'd be making $100 a month

in purely passive income.

Again, assuming the 10% average.

So overall how hard is it really

to make $100 a month in passive income

from stocks and shares?

Well, it kinda just depends on how hard is it

for you to make 5,000, 7,500, or $12,000 in savings

and put them into a stock market index fund?

And crucially this is money that you shouldn't need to touch

in the next five to 10 years, at least.

So basically how easy is it for you to make

that sort of money?

Obviously varies massively

depending on which country you're in (laughs)

and what your circumstances are and what your job is.

But if you're in the UK or the US

where the median kind of average salary's,

roundabout $50,000, something like that,

then again depending on your circumstances

it's not that hard to get $10,000 in savings.

Obviously, if you're supporting a family

of 15 people on $50,000, it's different.

If you're a single person, again, it's different

but I'm gonna give this roughly

a three out of five-star rating for difficulty

of getting $100 a month.

Obviously, if you live in a country like India

where the average salary is $3,600 a year,

it's very very difficult to make $10,000 in savings overall.

And finally, the third category

in our side hustle assessment matrix

is how hard is it to maintain this income

once you've set it up in the first place?

And we're gonna give this a one star out of five

because once you've got the money in you just like set it

and forget it and it's not that hard to maintain.

There are other sources of passive income

that require higher degrees of maintenance over time.

But stocks and shares is a very very easy way

to make passive income and to use my personal example

these days my stocks and shares portfolio,

which I've been investing in since 2015

is now worth a roundabout of $350,000.

And the vast majority of that is in the S&P 500 index fund.

Now, I can't be bothered

to work out the actual inflation-adjusted returns for that.

But again, if we assume a very very rough average

of 10% a year, then that averages out

to around $682 per week in purely passive income.

All right, idea number two for generating passive income

is to start a YouTube channel.

This is something I well specialize in

because I'm here on YouTube and I actually teach a course

called the Part-Time YouTuber Academy,

linked in the video description

where I teach people how to do this sort of thing.

So let's use a side hustle assessment matrix

and we'll talk about this.

How hard is it to start a YouTube channel?

Well, I'm gonna give this one out of five stars

because it's actually very very easy

to start a YouTube channel.

You just go on youtube.com.

You click to create a channel and you can upload videos

by just filming with your phone and uploading it.

In reality, it's a lot harder to make good videos,

and making good videos is how you grow on YouTube.

But getting started on YouTube

is very, very, very straightforward.

The real question is how hard is it to actually

make real money from YouTube?

So again, let's say we wanna make $100 a month

in passive income.

What does that look like?

Well, firstly, to be eligible for monetization

on YouTube, you need a thousand subscribers

and 4,000 hours of watch time.

It took me six months and 52 videos

to get my first 1,000 subscribers.

And if we look at the averages,

it actually takes on average 90 something videos

to get to 1,000 subscribers.

So that's quite hard if you're thinking

you're gonna start a YouTube channel

and start making money from day one

your, you know, that's basically not going to happen.

It took me 52 videos, six months to get there.

So if people message me being like,

"Hey, I wanna start a YouTube..."

I was like, "Look, you have to be able to put in the effort

and do this for a very long period of time

at least once a week."

I say for at least two years

before you can expect anything in return.

But let's say you've hit your thousand subscribers

and your 4,000 hours of watch time.

How hard is it to actually make $100 a month?

Well, on average, the kind of revenue per thousand views

on YouTube is roundabout $2.

So this varies massively, but let's say on average

about $2 per thousand views.

Therefore if you want to make $100 a month

you need 50,000 views on YouTube to make $100 a month.

Let's say you make one video per week

and let's assume you're not getting any traffic

on your older videos.

That means every video you make needs to get

around about 12,500 views.

And very roughly the average YouTube channel

can expect a roundabout 20% of their subscribers

to equal the average view count for each video.

So on YouTube, if you had 62,000 subscribers,

very roughly, very average lead,

you can expect 20% of them i.e. 12,500 views on each video.

And assuming you have no evergreen content of the longterm

you would need to run about 60,000 subscribers

to be making $100 a month.

In reality, you make $100 a month a lot

before 60,000 subscribers.

I think I was making $100 a month

when I had like 10,000 something subscribers,

like it was fairly early on.

But when it comes to assessing how hard is this to do

I'm gonna give this a four out of five stars.

It's actually very hard to make compelling YouTube videos

and it's very easy to get started, but it's hard to do well.

It's totally worth it, it's a great skill set,

it's really fun.

You get to meet people across the internet.

You get to learn how to talk to a camera

and how to film and video edit.

And it's really great but it's very hard

to actually make money from YouTube.

Finally, in terms of effort to maintain.

Like actually getting that first thousand subscribers

is a lot harder than keeping it growing.

'Cause once you've got a thousand subscribers

and once your channel is growing

it means you've landed on a formula that works.

And so maintaining it then becomes easier

then starting from scratch.

And so in our side hustle assessment matrix

we're gonna give maintenance

of a YouTube channel passive income stream

to be round about two out of five stars.

To use my example, I made 70 videos

before I started making any money from YouTube AdSense.

And these days the YouTube channel

makes a roundabout $12,000 a month

in passive income from YouTube AdSense.

Now, again, this is not entirely passive

because I keep on uploading new videos,

but actually the bulk of the amount of money

that we generate from ads is from older videos

rather than videos that were uploaded this month.

So with that caveat, $12,000 a month passive income

is roundabout $3,000 a week

thanks to this YouTube channel

and thanks to you guys for supporting it and all that stuff.

There are other ways of monetizing YouTube,

like brand deals and like selling merch

and just all other sorts of stuff.

But it doesn't really count as passive income

through YouTube, which is why I'm not including this

in this side hustle assessment matrix.

Idea number three for making passive income

is to start a podcast.

This is generally easier than starting a YouTube channel.

Although growing a podcast is a lot harder

then growing a YouTube channel

because podcasts themselves don't really have an algorithm

that's helping them grow.

In fact, a lot of podcasts grow by having a YouTube channel,

which is kind of weird.

Right, so how hard is it to start a podcast?

Well, again, one out of five stars,

it's very very easy to start a podcast.

Go on anchor.fm and you can literally use your phone

and you could pass your phone around

between you and your friends and you can start a podcast.

You can use a website called riverside.fm

that I've recently invested in as an angel investor.

Riverside makes it very easy

to record remote podcast interviews.

It's very, very easy to start a podcast

but how hard is it to make $100 a month

in passive income from a podcast?

Well, again, this is not quite passive income

because the way podcasters make money

is by relying on brand deals.

There is no YouTube AdSense for podcasts.

And so you need sponsorship or a brand deal

to make any money for your podcast, generally speaking.

And apparently, you can expect to make

around $18 for a 30-second ad in a podcast

and $25 per thousand views or a thousand listens

for a 60 second ad.

So if you wanna make $100 a month

and assuming you have a stream of sponsorships

who are giving you that level of a sponsorship deal

based on your download numbers,

you would need around 1,000 downloads per episode,

if you have a weekly podcast.

So you'd have 4,000 downloads a month.

And if you're putting a 60-second ad in there

for $25 per thousand views,

that would make you round about $100 a month.

By having a thousand downloads per episode

and four episodes per month.

This begs the question how hard is it

to get a thousand downloads per month?

Well, it's a lot harder

to get a thousand podcast downloads per month

than it is to get a thousand YouTube views per month.

Because again, YouTube has so much distribution built in

it's different to podcasts.

Also loads more people are on YouTube than on podcasts.

But if we look at the stats then it's the top 20%

of podcasts in the world that get on average

more than a thousand downloads per episode.

To use a friend of mine as an example,

my housemate Sheen started her own podcast

around five months ago, there'll be a link to that

in the description, if you want to check it out,

and on average, her podcast gets roundabout

400 to 500 downloads per episode.

This is not bad at all, specially considering

she started five months ago

and had zero audience when she started.

So she didn't have the unfair advantage

that I did when starting my own podcast, for example.

And because she's just launched season two of her podcasts

and has just started posting videos about it on YouTube

that will really help the podcast grow.

And I'm pretty sure that in the next six months

she'll be getting to a point where she can quite easily

make $100 a month from her podcast.

So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix.

Starting a podcast one out of five stars,

making $100 a month I'm gonna give that

a three out of five stars because it's hard,

but not as hard as maybe monetizing on YouTube

where you have this minimum threshold.

And finally maintenance.

Well, it's not really passive income

because you do have to keep on making podcast episodes

because the brand deals are associated with that.

But again, once you've stumbled on a formula that works,

once you know how to be a podcaster it's easier

to continue going once you've already gotten started,

as is the case with most things.

And so in terms of maintenance of the podcast

I'm gonna give that two stars.

To use me as an example, so me and my brother have a podcast

called Not Overthinking, link in the video description

if you wanna check it out,

but we make around about $625 per week

from the podcast overall from brand deals

and from our membership.

All right, so idea number four for generating passive income

is to become an affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing means

that you are selling other people's products

but you're getting a percentage of the sales

from those products.

Now, apparently 48% of affiliate marketers globally

earn $20,000 a year which is $1,660 a month.

Which is actually not bad at all.

Like people are doing very well

with affiliate marketing overall.

So how hard is it to get started with affiliate marketing?

Well, I'm gonna give this a two out of five stars.

Basically, you can just sign up to an affiliate program

like Amazon Associates.

So Amazon have their own affiliate program

which I think is probably the biggest in the world.

And then once you have your little special links

you can post those on your website

or on Twitter or on social media or whatever.

And if people buy the product through your link

or in fact buy any product on Amazon through your link

you'll get like some tiny percentage of the sales.

So pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing,

but how hard is it to make $100 a month?

Well, this is actually kinda hard.

So let's say you had a product that was $50

that you were trying to sell

and you were getting 5% commission on it.

That'd be pretty good.

Amazon doesn't offer nearly as much

as 5% it offers like two or 3%, something like that.

And let's say your average conversion rate

i.e. people visiting the thing versus people actually

buying the product after visiting the thing,

let's say that's 1% which is pretty reasonable

for conversion rate.

You would need 8,000 visits to your website

or whatever to make $100 a month.

It's actually quite hard to get 8,000 visits per month

to your website, to a specific product page.

And generally doing well in affiliate marketing

requires lots of upfront effort in terms

of either building an audience

or building such domain authority

in whatever space you're in,

that you're sort of organically getting traffic.

Now, other than Amazon there are a few other

affiliate programs that I'm part of.

One of them is Skillshare

who are kindly sponsoring this video.

I'll tell you about the sponsor segment later

but Skillshare has an interesting affiliate program

where if you refer someone to sign up

to a free trial of Skillshare,

you can get $7 in affiliate commission just for that thing.

So if you wanted to make $100 a month from affiliates,

you would need 15 people every month to sign up

for Skillshare with your affiliate link thing.

How hard is it to get 15 people a month

to sign up with your affiliate link?

Well, it's not that hard if you have an audience

and it's not that hard if you have your own classes

on Skillshare, like I do, I have like nine of them.

And so if I wanna make money through Skillshare affiliates,

I can just tell people, "Hey guys,"

like I can tell you that, "Guys I've just released

my latest Skillshare class Productivity for Creators,

how to start a successful side hustle,

so there'll be a link in the video description

if you wanna check that out."

Like that would be hopefully some of you will see that,

will click on that link in the description,

and then that will be me getting some affiliate income

from Skillshare for this video.

So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix

how hard is it to make $100 a month?

I'm gonna give this a 3.5-star rating,

because again you need an audience.

And as we always talk about on this channel

the way you build an audience is by creating useful content,

putting it for free on the internet once a week

and doing this for at least two years.

If you just follow those three steps I guarantee

you'll have an audience and you'll be able to make

some kind of money through this passive income stuff.

But that's quite hard to do no one sticks to it

for at least two years.

So we'll give that a 3.5-star rating.

But the good news is once you've created it.

And once you started making money from affiliates

it's actually quite easy to maintain

because especially if you have evergreen content,

the sort that isn't relying on, like current affairs

or the latest news, the sought that people

might search for over a long period of time,

this becomes like relatively reasonable passive income.

Now, if we look at me and my business,

these days from Skillshare we make a roundabout

$11,000 per month in affiliate income

which approximates to around $2,750 per week.

And from Amazon on average,

like it's around about $450 a month

from the Amazon UK store

and a little bit more from the US and Canada.

All right, method number five of making passive income

is by selling digital products.

Now these are products that you create once, like an ebook

or a download or an app or something like that.

So you create it once and then you can sell it

multiple times because selling digital products

doesn't usually have any costs associated with it.

One really good example is this guy called Traf,

who I follow on Twitter, who made an iOS 14 icon set

and sold it for like $30 a pop, a few months ago

and ended up making, I think like $300,000 in the course

of like a few weeks,

just because loads of people around the world

wanted to buy his icon pack.

So he put the work into creating the pack

and now he's selling it for lots of money.

Another example is my YouTuber friend Oliur,

who has made, as he says $700,000 from selling his

website Tumblr themes since 2014.

So he made the website themes for Tumblr,

he sells them and he makes $700,000 on average.

Well, overall, since 2014, that's pretty cool.

So how hard is it to get started making digital products?

I mean, anyone can write an ebook

an ebook counts as a digital product.

So I'm gonna give this a two-star rating,

two out of five stars,

but obviously like again money is an exchange of value.

So the thing that you're selling you have to be

providing enough value to compensate,

to make up for the price that you're selling it for.

And that's often quite hard,

especially if you don't have any experience

in this sort of field

and how hard is it to make $100 a month?

Well, you know, it's very easy to create an ebook

but it's a whole different ballgame trying to get people

to actually buy your ebook or buy your icon set

or buy your app or buy your website themes.

And because the market around this stuff is so competitive

like you have to be genuinely really good

to get people to buy your stuff.

And the way you get people to pay you money

for something is that you identify a problem that they have,

you solve that problem, and then you charge money for it.

And if you can do those three things, then it's, you know

I wouldn't say it's easy to make $100 a month

but it's very doable to make $100 a month.

You just genuinely have to have something

that solves a pain point

that other people are willing to pay for.

So we're gonna give this a three out of five stars

to make $100 a month from selling digital products.

And finally, in terms of maintenance, we're gonna give this

a two out of five stars, because usually,

you do have to maintain your product a little bit

but it's often easier to do

like it's much easier to maintain a product

then creating a product in the first place.

Idea number six for passive income generation

is to create an online course.

Now online course's sort of like a digital product

but generally online courses are in video format.

In fact, this whole video is so long,

it could basically have been an entire online course.

Maybe I'll do one about this very topic.

And in terms of getting started,

we're gonna give the starting difficulty

a two out of five stars, 'cause it's not that hard

to make an online course

but generally, you do need to know how to do video.

So, you know, you actually could film an online course

on your iPhone or phone, whatever phone you're using,

if you're one of those Android heathens.

Stick your phone on the side,

talk to the phone, teach something.

So it's not hard creating one,

but in terms of making $100 a month, again,

at that point, your course needs to actually be good.

And the only reason people will pay for it

is if the course is actually good.

Now you can avoid having to charge for your online courses

by using a website like Skillshare,

who are very kindly sponsoring this video.

I have tons of classes on Skillshare.

I think we've got nine on them in total.

I've been teaching on Skillshare since September 2019

and I've actually just released my new online class

called Productivity for Creators,

how to start a successful side hustle.

Where I teach you the ins and outs

on how you can well, create your own side hustle

in your spare time without quitting your job.

If you wanna check this out

then the first of thousand people to click the link

in the video description will get

30% off the annual Skillshare premium membership.

This is actually a really good deal.

I pay for Skillshare,

I've been paying you for it for years

even after I started teaching on it

because it's genuinely a fantastic place to learn stuff.

They've got thousands of classes

on all sorts of other topics,

but you should definitely check out mine,

like the nine that I've got.

There are three around productivity now,

like the fundamentals of productivity,

the sort of productivity equation,

which is how I think of productivity

and Productivity for Creators.

I have two on how you can study for exams.

If you're in school, if you've got exams to prepare for

those apparently are really good,

they've got very high ratings.

And if you've already had a free trial of Skillshare

then you can still use that offer

that if you're one of the first of thousand people

to hit the link in the video description,

you will get 30% of the premium membership

and you can check out my class

which I have to say is pretty good.

Anyway, thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video

but genuinely Skillshare is a great place to teach stuff

because you can teach things on Skillshare

without directly having to charge for them.

Which is why I love putting my courses on Skillshare.

It's kinda like having something on Netflix

in that the end-user does not have to

pay directly for the product.

And the other nice thing about Skillshare is that it's like,

it's sort of like YouTube in that anyone

can upload a class to Skillshare,

provided it meets certain quality requirements.

And so it's a lot easier

then having to make your own website

and create your own courses platform

and all that kind of stuff.

So, pretty easy to start.

We're gonna give this a two out of five

but how hard is it to make $100 a month

from teaching online courses?

Now, this kind of depends.

If you're going down the Skillshare route

then to make $100 a month in Skillshare

you need roundabout 1,700 minutes of watch time

which is 28 hours of watch time.

So if you have a one hour class on Skillshare

you need 28 students to take that class every month

and watch it with a premium membership

roughly very broadly speaking.

And that will give you roundabout $100 a month.

At least those are based on my figures

over the last like two years of being on Skillshare.

Now, how hard is it to get 28 people a month

watching your class?

Well, if your class is actually pretty good,

it shouldn't be too hard

to get 28 people a month watching it.

If you have an existing audience

it's very easy to get 28 people a month watching it

because people already know, like, and trust you hopefully.

And so they'll watch your stuff and give you a shot

because you've already built that goodwill with them.

But again, the nice thing about Skillshare as a platform

is that they have like their own algorithm.

So the good stuff rises to the top.

So if you genuinely have a really, really, really good class

and you put it on Skillshare,

then even if you don't have an audience,

there is still a high chance

that if the class is actually good

and people watch it a lot and people recommend it

and give it high ratings, it will rise to the top.

And it will start getting recommended to people

who find it on the Skillshare homepage

or who searched for it specifically.

The other way of making $100 a month from a course

is to just charge $100 for a course.

And then if you do that, you just need one sale every month.

So how hard is it to get one person a month

to buy your course?

Well, again, if it's good, you know, the world

of online education is exploding so much every year more

and more money's being spent on online education

especially with the whole pandemic stuff.

So if you have a valuable skill that you can teach

I think courses are one of the best and easiest,

or one of the best ways of making passive income

because it's fun to create a course, you can teach stuff,

you don't need that many technical skills,

like making a website or anything like that.

Just shove it on Skillshare.

And then people can take your course

and learn on the internet.

And like, you know, it's just cool overall.

And the nice thing is that once you've made the course,

and once you're making $100 a month from it,

maintaining that level is actually quite easy.

We're gonna give that a two out of five stars

because generally, you don't need to

update the course that often.

And you can do that once in a while

and you just need to make sure

you're getting a reasonable amount of traffic to it.

And hopefully, that traffic will grow over time.

These days, the vast majority of my online courses,

at least the very passive ones are hosted on Skillshare

and it's kind of ridiculous.

But these days they make roundabout 60,000

to $65,000 per month in purely passive income.

Like I literally do nothing for my Skillshare classes

once I've made them other than a reply to comments

and other than occasionally plug them in videos.

And that's like $60,000 a month in passive income.

That means this is a roundabout of $15,000 per week.

And this makes up the bulk of the $27,000 a week

that this business currently generates

in purely passive income.

Idea number seven for passive income

is by creating some call it some kind of paid membership

or community model.

Now, again, this is generally a bad idea

unless you have an existing audience,

which we keep coming back to.

Like everything becomes easier

when you have an existing audience by creating content

that has been valuable over a long period of time,

very consistently.

That audience knows likes and trusts you

and so when you say, "Hey guys, sign up to my Patreon",

then some people are likely to do that thing.

The other way of doing a membership

is by creating a value proposition that is so compelling

that people would be willing to pay

for a community-like service for this.

If we use Patreon as an example my friend Hannah Witton,

who's a YouTuber, she's got roundabout

600,000 subscribers on YouTube.

And I think she has around 600 Patreons,

626 last time I checked, which means if we look

at our Patreon stats, which are public,

she's making somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 pounds

or like 3,000 and $7,000 per month

in passive income from this audience.

But it's like 600 people out of an audience of 600,000.

So one in a thousand of her subscribers

have signed up to her Patreon.

So clearly, you know, if those stats

are true across the board and they kind of are

if you look at Matt D'Avella Patreon on as well

you need a big audience

to make a significant amount of money for Patreon.

Again, this sort of depends on

how much you're charging for them

and exactly what value you're providing.

Another example of a paid membership community

is my friend Anne-Laure who runs a website called Ness Labs

and they have a paid membership community

which is $5 a month.

And she started this when was it, in the summer of 2019.

She had zero audiences at the time

and she just wrote a hundred blog posts

over a hundred working days and built up an audience

such that in March 2020, when she launched a membership

she had some paying members for it initially.

And I think last month she's just passed

$100,000 a year in annual recurring revenue,

which is pretty awesome from something

that started less than two years ago.

So how easy is it to start a membership program?

Well, it's actually very easy.

We can give this a one-star because it's very easy

to start one, you just make an account

on some kind of membership platform like Patreon.

But to make $100 a month,

you need to provide $100 a month worth of value.

And that's actually quite hard to do.

We're gonna give that a four out of five stars

but the nice thing is, again, once you've got that formula,

once you're making $100 a month it's actually a lot easier

to maintain it because the way the economics

of membership communities work,

it's provided you keep showing up

and providing value in some capacity,

you know, people have already signed up for the thing.

So it's not too hard to maintain that level of support

that you're offering them.

For this business, we have a membership community

for our Part-Timer YouTuber Academy for the alumni,

which is called the Part-Timer YouTuber Inner Circle

And we make roughly $2,800 a week

from this membership community.

It's not very passive.

We run like three or four events per week

along with like twice a day, coworking events on zoom

and we have lots of stuff going on.

So it takes a lot of work, but $2,800 a week

it's pretty good for a membership community.

All right, nearly there.

So idea number eight for generating passive income

is creating a business that sells goods or services

and then automating or delegating aspects of that business

so that the income that you generate

from it is reasonably passive.

This is the stuff that Tim Ferris

talks a lot about in "The 4-Hour Workweek",

where there are a lot of businesses

that you could make where you're selling a good

or selling a service

and then you can delegate, outsource, automate

and intelligent ways to make the income passive.

So again, using my friend Oliur as an example,

on his YouTube channel, he talks about

his $1 million Shopify store.

He designs manufactures and sells these really cool

vegan leather kind of desk accessories and bags

and mouse pads and that kind of stuff.

And this was loads of work in setting up

but now he's got a team of three other people

that manage the business.

And so he spends proportionally less

of his time running that business.

And so it's sort of passive income for him.

Even though these days, he still does spend around

10 hours a week, maintaining things.

Equally, if you're going down the service route,

I've got a friend who runs an Instagram

and Facebook ads marketing agency,

where he has clients who pay him some,

I think a few hundred dollars per month

to manage their Facebook and Instagram ads.

And for him, it's like a small amount of work initially

to set up the Facebook and Instagram ads

but then it's sort of automated

and he's got a team around it.

And he's used using things like Zapier

to automate aspects of that business,

so that each month he has to do a very small amount

of actual work to keep it ticking along.

So these are different ways of generating passive income

from a kind of goods or service-based business.

But it's quite hard to get started with this stuff.

To get started we're gonna give this

a four to five-star rating because again,

you need to create a business

and it's quite hard to make a business

that genuinely provides value.

Equally, we're gonna give it a four out of five-star rating

for making $100 a month in revenue.

Because again, you have to be able to provide value

and providing value is hard.

Like it's not as easy

as making an account on a stocks platform

and just putting some money in.

You actually have to give value to people

which is kind of hard.

But the nice thing is once you get started

like with anything, maintenance is a little bit easier.

So we're gonna give that a three out of five-star rating.

Finally idea number nine for generating passive income

is to build an app or a website

or some kind of software product that you can offer

either as a one-off or more likely these days,

as a subscription service.

And there's a whole category of this called SAS.

software as a service.

Now, if you look at the website, indiehackers.com

there are like literally hundreds of examples of people

who have built software businesses

that are making passive income

and they share their revenue numbers

and they tell you how they got started

and they give you their tips.

In fact, I was recently interviewed on an episode

of the Indie Hackers podcast, which is really cool

'cause I've been listening to it for years

and it's like following the website for years.

And I was interviewed around the concept of starting

an online course like the Part-Timer YouTuber Academy.

Now I've had a bit of personal experience with this.

So when I was at university I made a website

called BMAT Ninja and UCAT Ninja.

So software as a service it was a question bank

for medical applicants applying to medical school

to help them do well in the admissions tests.

And this was something that me and my brother

coded completely from scratch.

He and I both know how to code,

we learned when we were young.

And so we worked over the summer of 2015

to make these things happen.

I think in year one, we made about $10,000

and in year five last year,

it was around $25,000 from BMAT Ninja.

So, you know, it's pretty good money

but it was a lot of work to set these things up.

And so in terms of starting out

I'm gonna give this a five out of five-star rating

because to make an app it's actually quite hard.

You have to know how to code for the most part

you have to be able to offer something compelling

and you have to actually build it which takes a lot of work

and it's very hard, but it's a lot of fun.

And then once you've made it

I'm gonna give $100 a month difficulty a four-star rating.

Because again, it's easy well, easy enough. (laughs)

You can make an app, but then getting people

to pay for the app is an entirely different kettle of fish.

So we're gonna give that four stars.

But the nice thing is like with everything,

maintenance is a little bit easier

so we're gonna give that a three-star rating.

If you like this video and you wanna get started

with your own entrepreneurshippy passive incomey

generating journey on the internet.

Check out this short playlist over here

which is some of my favorite videos

that I've made around tips for entrepreneurs.

How I got started creating my businesses from scratch,

how I learned to code that sort of stuff.

That's all in the playlist over here.

Thank you so much for watching

and I'll see you in the next video, bye-bye.