This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Let's talk today about passive income. Specifically, which passive income model might suit a consultant? If you wanna escape a billable hour treadmill, if you are a consultant or a freelancer, or if you have been exploring service businesses, service ideas where you're getting paid, you're trading your time for money, well, that can be a fast way to cash, but then you wake up every Monday or every first day of the month or whatever it is, and your revenue is once again at zero. And so you gotta start sprinting again. We've got a caller here, his name is Jonathan.
He's thinking about, well, his dream actually is to create a body of work that pays him even when he's out hiking. I believe he's from Washington state or otherwise doing something else. And as I said, that is the dream. But the good news is plenty of solo creators have replaced or at least been able to buffer their freelancing/consulting income with assets that earn on autopilot. Just a couple of days ago, in fact, we were talking about how can you create more of a steady paycheck with freelance income?
This is a variation here. Let's unpack what these assets might look like and try to pick a roadmap that suits this listener's strengths. And of course, not just this listener, but hopefully somebody else out there as we come to the end of a month, episode 3195, I'll do my best to give a helpful answer. Stay tuned. [Music]
- Hello team, it's Jonathan here from Tacoma, Washington.
I stumbled onto Side Hustle School after Spotify recommended one of your episodes and I've been hooked since. Right now, my income is pure time for money consulting and I keep hearing about earning while you sleep. What does it actually look like to build a portfolio, a body of work that keeps generating revenue after the initial effort, whether it's digital products, evergreen content or something else. I love practical guidance on creating assets that stack up over the years instead of restarting at zero every month. [Music]
All right, Jonathan, what does it look like to build a portfolio or a body of work that continues to generate income?
So a couple of different models here and I'm gonna give you some examples of friends of mine who've done this. I'm gonna talk about Jill Coleman and Pat Flynn specifically. So option number one, we can call it the flagship plus flywheel course. Basically you want to build once, sell forever, outline a deep dive course in your consulting specialty, lots of video modules and worksheets and then launch live, then sell at evergreen. Maybe you have a cohort on Zoom where you refine the content, record the sessions, capture testimonials.
After version one, you shift to an evergreen model with automated email funnels. If you set it up right, this can be a few hours a month of answering questions, updating examples, maybe updating the marketing, but it doesn't have to take a lot of work on an ongoing basis. My friend Jill Coleman, Jill Fit on Instagram, she started with live fitness programs, then turned them into evergreen courses that now bring in six figure passive revenue each year. In fact, her whole business is seven figure, but just with these courses, she's doing well on their own. Next model is compound content.
All right, I'm gonna talk about Pat Flynn. Pat Flynn's smart passive income site. He's still getting paid, I don't know the exact numbers, but five plus figures monthly from articles and affiliate recommendations that he wrote years ago. I think it's for web hosting and some other courses and such. Basically, he has an evergreen blog and YouTube channel.
He published tutorials that solve timeless problems and monetized a few different ways with display ads, with those affiliate links mentioned, and then I think with some low cost digital products as well. This creates like a snowball effect over time because people continue to consume this content and then click those links and he's doing really well. Maybe one final model is like a micro asset portfolio. Just think smaller, think smaller, but plural. Instead of one big course, create a stack of bite sized assets.
You don't actually eat them. I just called it bite size 'cause they're small. So this could be like a template pack, one page notion dashboard, a paid newsletter for $10 a month on Substack or somewhere else. And when you do this, you're spreading your risk, basically, because if one micro asset fizzles, others continue to provide revenue and lots of people do that as well. How do you choose which one?
Well, most likely based on your personality, based on your time, based on what your long-term goals are, it's gonna be kind of obvious. Like if you like teaching deep dives, for example, you wanna lean toward a flagship course. If you prefer quick wins, you don't wanna like take the time to build a big launch, then think about a micro asset portfolio. If you're gonna wanna split the difference, well, that's what compound content is. Whatever you choose, I hope that within a year, if not sooner, you'll have at least one product or a library of many products, let's say, that kind of helps out those slow consulting months and eventually lets you transition to where you can kind of say no to what you don't want to do, which I think is the goal for a lot of us, right?
We wanna spend our time on things that we enjoy and find meaningful. And it's my hope for every "Side Hustle School" listener that you're able to build a life that way. And of course, it's a process, it's a journey. We're all trying to improve, myself included, of course. Listeners, let me know what you think.
New episodes coming out seven days a week as we go into a new month. This was episode 3195. I'm so glad to be able to make this show for you. Thank you. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
