How To Work Out Your Passive Income Idea

Many people I have worked with previously struggled to generate a passive income idea for their existing businesses. Once you have got an idea you can run with, you can do things quite quickly, especially if you know who you want to help and what you want to help them with.

It’s worth remembering that a lot of people want to make life easier for themselves. There lies the idea of creating something that will help. One of the easiest ways to make this idea come to life is through starting courses, memberships, group programmes, workshops, and things that are the ‘one-to-many’ model. 

For many business owners, you will tend to focus on what the strength of your business niche is with your clients. This tends to be on a one-to-one basis. But you can monetise those strengths by taking what you already know and offering it to more people.

Take that niche and use that, do a course in it, have a membership about it or do a workshop on a particular aspect that your business is always asked about.

Satisfy your original audience

The first thing to consider is if your business already has an audience there. If you do then you’re skipping half of the bit that most people find hard, which is growing an audience of people that want the same thing that you are going to do as your big idea.

Why do you have that audience? Is it because they know you are a leader in their particular field of interest? Maybe it’s because you are offering a service to them that they can’t afford from you if they had to pay you on a one-to-one basis. How can you make it affordable for them?

For example, you are a branding designer, website designer or interior designer, something that you do for people, people come to you, they pay you money and it takes your time because you are doing the thing that I’m paying you for. Is there a way that you can teach people to do that thing for themselves? By putting into a course format, a group programme type format, where you teach them how to do what you normally do for them for themselves. And you can do that over several modules. You can even do it in a workshop.

Coaching the competition

The next way is to think can I teach somebody to be my competitor? So for instance, if you are a branding designer, could you teach other people to become branding designers? And that might not be everything to do with becoming a brand designer, it might be just one aspect that you’re good at. 

Could it be that you teach people how to use social media to get clients as a branding designer?

Could it be that you teach people how to set up their business as a branding designer?

Could it be that you teach people how to use one particular piece of software?

Could it be that you teach them how to sell well and get clients as a branding designer? 

There are several ways that you can teach your competition because you have already done it. You have already been there. They know you have got the clients and so you can teach people who aren’t exactly where you are yet. Don’t worry about creating competition amongst the people you are teaching because you are unique in who you are. It doesn’t matter how many times you teach them, they will never be you. They will never be able to do it how you do it. But also there is a hierarchy where if you are teaching other people to be your competition, you are seen as the best, and you are seen as worth more in payment terms. 

What if you don’t want to teach something within your business? In fact maybe you don’t have a business but you have other strengths in different areas. For example, what else have you done in previous jobs that you might be able to help people with now? Maybe you excelled at creating a wonderful customer experience or maybe you were in the top percentage of employees that could retain customers. 

Monetise your passion 

Do you have a passion for something or a hobby that you could make a passive income stream out of? This is where my clients have done things like Caribbean cooking memberships, dating memberships, photography memberships and a membership based around teaching kids confidence. It doesn’t have to be business related. 

Even if you just have a little bit of knowledge that somebody else doesn’t have, you can make passive and semi-passive income out of it. It doesn’t matter what that knowledge is. If there’s someone else that wants to know it and it saves them time finding it for free on the internet, you will make money from it. And that’s an amazing thing.

Avoid the self-doubt

But I’m not an expert

The first reason to create doubt amongst those trying to come up with passive income ideas is that they believe there are others out there better than them. That’s because we are online all the time now and we see these experts; people we think of as experts because they have told themselves that and they put it out there by selling themselves as that. An expert isn’t what we think it is. It’s changed. An expert doesn’t have to be the biggest guru on the internet, the one that is shouting the loudest. An expert is a person that knows the most about a particular subject in an average room. There will be something that you know the most about in an average room. You have to make yourself the expert. You have to declare yourself the expert because nobody is going to do that for you. 

I can’t do it because somebody else is doing it

The second thing that people say is that they can’t do it because somebody else is doing it. I can’t tell you how many times a day I hear that sentence. Does it matter if somebody else is already doing it? When we have offline businesses, we would never think to ourselves well I can’t be a hairdresser because there already is one. Nobody thinks that because it doesn’t matter that there is already one. You’re not going to worry that there are a million other hairdressers in town. 

It is the same with online businesses. You will explain things differently to others who do the same thing as you as your personality differs from others. 

The best way to start thinking of ideas is to get a sheet of paper and start brainstorming. Work out in your head what it is that you can sell. Don’t let these things or self-doubt put you off. Always remember your knowledge is not common knowledge. 

My course One To Many teaches all about passive income – find out more about the opportunity to earn passive income here