Perhaps one of the most overused and over-hyped terms in all of internet marketing and online business is the concept of “Passive Income”.
I’m not one for getting into philosophical debates about marketing terms, really too busy building businesses in the land of “reality” for that…but I do understand for someone just starting out the need to come to terms with these concepts.
The promise of an online business that you can somehow start and let run on autopilot (either entirely or partially) while you somehow collect passive profit is really non-existent.
That said, there are some very REAL concepts that you should (I would argue MUST) build into your business model in order to grow, scale and profit at a much faster pace than as a micro-preneur or solopreneur.
As you can guess from my lead-up, I’m not a big fan of the term “Passive Income”, let me instead talk about some very real and powerful concepts that I think fall into the same camp:
LEVERAGED INCOME
Leveraged Income means that you look for ways to get many times more return for the work you put into a given task or project. It’s worth noting as well that the work you put in is also going to involve a certain degree of perception, if you love what you do then the work doesn’t SEEM like work…if you hate what you do then every minute can be dreadful and the work seems much more than what it actually is.
Here are 4 examples of how we use leverage to generate income in our online businesses:
- Create products once and sell many times
- Sign up affiliates so they can sell our products over and over again
- Develop systems for everything we do so I can outsource and hire to scale up
- Leverage content – create once and re-purpose for dozens of platforms to get maximum reach, etc…
In each of these cases, up-front work is leveraged to get many times more return from that effort AND to make it less dependent on me as time goes on so I can scale and exit the business (giving it more external value)
BUSINESS CONTROL: GO-TO-MARKET, PRODUCT AND DISTRIBUTION
The principle of primary control in business is critical.
I have watched WAY too many people build mini-empires using systems, products and go-to-market methods they do NOT control only to have their entire business pulled out from underneath them by someone else. Whether it be an over-reliance on one traffic source, a dependence on someone else’s products or even total buy-in to certain business opportunities or platforms will ALL eventually lead to challenges in the end.
Despite the fact that starting with someone else’s products, process or system may “seem” less risky in the beginning, in the end it ends up to be much higher risk than taking the extra time to control your destiny.
control is critical to any notion of passive or leveraged income
LIFESTYLE – BUSINESS ALIGNMENT
Look, it makes no sense spending 12-14-hour days for months on end working in a market you do not like, with a product you do like spending the majority of your time doing work you don’t like.
The more aligned you can make your business with your lifestyle desires — the better it will do and the more fulfilling your life will be.
Don’t get me wrong, there will be stuff you won’t want to do, there will be headaches, there will be nasty customers, etc…but overall if you are steering the ship in a direction that aligns with your lifestyle goals – you will maximize both your chances of business success and lifestyle happiness.
