RE: The Truth About Online Passive Income And Internet "Gurus"
Why does @jerrybanfield spring to mind? I'm also sure this sort of thing doesn't go down very well on steem, JP seemed to me to be the 'loneliest person at SF3'.
Nice to state it like it is... that's exactly what they do.
As someone who actually does make money online, in a passive-ish way, it does take work once you've got the resources written, but no where near as much as working full time for the man. You're right that you have to put out a lot of content for free for marketing, although I'm finding three posts a week shared to FB and twitter is now sufficient to maintain my traffic to push the resource sales.
The thing is in finding a niche. For me it's A-level sociology revision (hence the name on here, but I don't publicise it on steem) - and there's sufficient demand to earn me around £10K a year just from resource sales, now I've just added revision webinars - I took £2K last month for those on top of resource sales - and I'm only offering 1 hour a week for the next 12 weeks!
Assuming everything stays stable (which it almost certainly won't) I could maintain a £25-30K a year income from 2-3 days 'work' a week - and my work days tend to be fairly slack.
I've got a few other plans to expand, and expand I must - the trick is going to be staying ahead of the game. Thankfully the exam boards and publishing companies seem to be stuck in the 20th century.
I'm thinking there's all sorts of potential for a subscription service for both teachers and pupils, teacher training events, gamified learning etc.
NB another problem with income from ads is how fickle the income is - this time last year I was earning $800 from ads, now my traffic has increased and i'm earning $150. Thankfully other things have compensated.
One final point - you need serious traffic to earn a living wage, which I do - but only off the back of 600K views a month, so google trends can be anxiety inducing on a slow morning.
I'm gradually shifting my investment to steem anyway, it's a much more fun way to make money!
WOW, thanks for this input. Your name suddenly makes sense on here now.
You've got the perfect niche there - Education. There's a clear and well defined need and you can provide a solution to it. The value proposition is so clear.. unlike some other genres out there.
Yes, I think people don't realise the amount of traffic you need to make the income viable. Yes you can earn income almost immediately if you know what you're doing.. but you need to grind to make it viable.
Momentum also counts for something. I liken it to driving.. the car works harder to start, and move up the gears.. but once you're on the high road, you can go up to 5-6th gear and cruise... unless there's an incident :)
Good luck with your venture.
I think being a qualified teacher helps with the kudos too, that also explains why JP makes me cringe.
Nice analogy with the car.
I quit full time teaching in August on the back of my resource sales/ ad revenue, took about 4 years to get there. Then the ad revenue collapse, thankfully my revision webinar back up plan (and a second job doing teacher training I hadn't anticipated) have more than made up the short fall).
What I really want to do however is just find a field somewhere, put up a yurt and do Permaculture, however, there's an example of where EVERYBODY who does that is trying to make money out of teaching everyone else how to do it, so there's no real money it. And I'm sure you know just how difficult it is to do that sort of thing in England.