A passive income of £10,000 a month. Here’s how I did it and you can too.
I love Not Just Numbers. Debbie is an amazing accountant. We recently discussed recurring passive income and that lit a blue touch paper … read on to find out what happened.
During the pandemic I decided to explore creating passive revenue by building an online store that today generates over £10,000 a month in revenue and has had more than 80,000 views in the first six months. What started as a side hustle and a challenge to myself to fill the time, has turned into something that now generates more revenue than my consultancy work. And what truly is amazing is that it wasn’t that hard and that you can too!
NICHE NICHE NICHE
The Internet is a weird and wonderful place. It won’t surprise you to realise that if you look hard enough there is a niche for everything. It can be tempting when presenting ourselves out to the world to tell the world that we can do everything within our domain. We don’t want to shut down any avenues to potential revenue. We fill our website with every variation of product and service, and we tell the world their ideal customer is ‘everyone’. But here’s the trick. Find your niche. What is it that you have but no one else has, or the few people that do the same, can do as good as you?
For me I have been working in cyber security for over 20 years. Cyber security is a massive broad church. It has so many different angles, services, products and disciplines that it can be confusing. I can do most of them. Too broad right? My first niche was to concentrate on one product and service, and to be seen as an expert within that. For me that was ISO 27001. Can you get more niche?
But that wasn’t niche enough. When it comes to passive revenue how can you sell time and / or consultancy that fundamentally relies on you. A 1 to 1 relationship between your time and the money you earn.
So, the next step for me was to look at what I had that no-one else had. That was the tools of my trade. I have created my tools of trade over 20 years. These are things, documents and processes that I use to get the job done. I have received incredible feedback from auditors and professionals alike that led me to think that others would benefit from those as well. Bingo. Light bulb moment. No-one is selling the tools of our trade that they rely on to make them consulting money. That would be madness. Allowing people to do it themselves. How will we make money?
So, what if I sell the ISO 27001 tools and templates that I use with guides videos and tutorials on how people can do it themselves. Disrupt the market, but also decouple my revenue from my time. That’s what I did.
I had spent the first 15 months of lockdown writing them. Now I was going to try to sell them.
Here are my tips to you:
Let’s digitise you
Turn the tools that you use day-in-day-out and create your templates, tutorials, guides, and videos. Make it generic, taking the best of the best of all your client engagements and make that your hero product set. Consider selling each individual document and template to create your store. Then consider creating customer focussed bundles. I have over 50 documents on my ISO 27001 store that sell individually, but I also have bundles aimed at the small business and even people who do what I do for a living. I would say over 80% of my sales are to people that do what I do.
Get social, get YouTube
Set up your social media accounts and get yourself a YouTube channel dedicated to your niche. On your YouTube channel give away your knowledge for free. Trust me. It works. Ensure you optimise your YouTube posts with links back to your site and you will start to reap the rewards. My YouTube Channel on ISO 27001 does just that. Jam packed full of how-to’s. Would it surprise you to learn that Google owned YouTube is Google search engine friendly? Or that a vast number of searches take place directly in YouTube?
Create your website and webstore
I did this myself. I would put this at average level difficulty, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of money getting someone to do it for me. I have learnt a lot. I can share this with you on another post or a call, but what you end up with is a fast website, that is Google friendly and ranks you page 1 for your key terms.
Create a content strategy that ranks you page 1
I did a recent blog with Shoo Social Media that covers the simple approach to content strategy that will see you rank page 1. You can read that here.
Fast Track
Have I considered hosting other templates and bundles? I have. That is the long-term plan. Maybe there is an opportunity to help sell the digital you. But, that is for another day.
What was my first 6 months experience?
Aside from the revenue and the website visits I found that it became self-fulfilling. It has also led to an increase in consultancy as a by product and I couldn’t be busier. My final step would be to stop consulting. I am just not quite there yet either emotionally, professionally, or from an ego standpoint. Let’s face it, I just love consulting.
Conclusion
Creating a passive revenue stream is one of the most liberating things that you can do. And you can do it! You are special, you are unique, you are amazing at what you do. All you have do is take the leap of faith and share the knowledge you have.
Stuart Barker is an ISO 27001 practitioner at High Table. He has been in information security for over 20 years. Today he is making information security templates available to business.