A small but important part of your coaching income should include passive products — ones that make money for you while you’re off giving a keynote address at a live event, or putting together your next webinar, or filling your schedule with one-on-one clients.
There are multiple passive income strategies that fit in well with the coaching model.
Let’s take a look at four of my favorites…
PASSIVE INCOME #1 – CREATE A SIGNATURE BOOK
This is a “must” for any coach. If writing comes naturally to you and you’ve been working on a book that represents what you offer and passionately believe in for years, by all means go the traditional route and offer it to a traditional publisher.
Yes! Even though you haven’t finished it yet. Here’s how traditional publishing works:
Find a publishing company specializing in exactly the sort of book you are planning to write (or are in the middle of writing).
Find out the name of the correct editor for that category
Send that editor a query letter, preferably not more than one page long. Include any relevant credentials or achievements, but keep this paragraph focused and brief.
Send out other query letters. Wait for a favorable response (while still working on your book) and submit your manuscript, if you get a nibble.
Expect a minimum of one-and-a-half to two years before you see your book in print
Yes, there is still enormous cachet in getting your book accepted by a mainstream publisher. And if you do, it’s a good indicator that your book is going to sell. But there is an easier way to do it…Upload your book to Amazon’s Kindle publishing marketplace
Invest in the services of a proven editor first and have it professionally edited.
Have it professionally formatted for Kindle too, as well as investing in a top-quality, custom cover graphic.
There are two other advantages to putting your book on Kindle:
If you enroll in the KDP Select program (no charge to you), you make your book free to paid KDP library members for ninety days — but you can still sell it from the catalog to others, you will gather priceless reviews from your free readers — and you will have five free days during your ninety-day period that you can use to offer your book for free to your own forums, members and social media followers for promotional purposes.
The down side is that you can’t market your book anywhere else during that period (even on your own website): But this is offset by the advantages in promotion, review-gathering and buzz creation. (You can even let your affiliates know the book is free on certain days, so they can use it to help promote you to their subscribers.)
And yes: You can break those days up and place them anywhere within the ninety days you like, to coordinate with your sales funnel and campaigns.
PASSIVE INCOME #2 – CREATE A SERIES
It’s true: Amazon loves series. The other great part about creating your signature Amazon Kindle book—no matter how much or how little help you have creating it — is that you will feel like a seasoned pro by the time you write your second book. So why not make your second book the first part of a series?
Creating a series — a signature series, if you like, as well as a signature book — will help you make the most of your keywords and your branding. It is much easier to rise in Amazon with a series than a single book.
Brand your series with a catchy series name; then for each book, add specific keywords to the individual title to increase your searchability.
Here’s how it works:
Just imagine you were the one that came up with the generic phrase “The ultimate guide to…” and all those specific books were yours. That is what you are aiming for, with a series—for ALL your books to be instantly presented when:
People are searching for your generic and specific topic
People pull up or specifically search for even one of your books
They will not just see that specific book as they’re typing in the title: They’ll see all the rest in your series.
That increases sales!
PASSIVE INCOME #3 – SELL PRODUCTS FROM YOUR WEBSITE
If visitors get help from a specific blog post or internal search on your website, they will often check out your other products—providing you have them.
Your job is to anticipate which products they will look for next… and provide them.
It is as simple as putting a “Products” or “Store” section in your main menu …
Check out an example of my store here > https://aleasemichelle.selz.com/
If you are going to sell multiple products, as I have done, you can further categorize them to help your visitors quickly and easily make the right selection.
And do remember: The more useful, top-quality products you have, the easier it will be for your affiliates to promote you.
You can offer:
Physical products
Digital products
DIY kits
Training courses
CDs and DVDs
Books
Tools you’ve created
Apps you’ve created
Templates
Forms
Workbooks/worksheets
Self-assessment tools
And any other relevant product you can think of!
PASSIVE INCOME #4 – AFFILIATE MARKETING
We would be neglecting a major opportunity if we didn’t mention affiliate marketing.
You can involve yourself in affiliate marketing in two simple ways:
Letting your affiliates market your events, products and services
Becoming an affiliate yourself and promoting related products created by others
For example, if you were a Brand Coach, you might want to provide an affiliate link for your favorite website design platform with an affiliate program.
If you do this, just remember to put a disclaimer page on your blog, stating that you might make a commission from recommending certain products –
For example … “This site contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.”
If you run an affiliate program yourself, make sure it is a very active one, with frequent and regular engagement with your affiliates. Provide a well-stocked Affiliate Resource section (as well as FAQs that would be helpful—compile these from affiliate questions).
Run competitions, provide generous commissions (to attract experienced affiliates: the ones who are most effective promoting your products) and have fun with your affiliates.
LEVERAGING YOUR PASSIVE INCOME PRODUCTS
These four suggestions give you a good place to start, when it comes to creating passive income… but do keep your eyes open so you won’t miss any opportunity to leverage your products and increase passive income sales even further.
Leveraging is all about earning more and working less. Setting up an affiliate program is your most powerful way to leverage your existing products. But you can also jump on other strategies, including:
Co-author a book with a complementary expert — There’s an old Scottish song, “Two Heids are Better than One,” and that principle can certainly be proven when two top experts with complementary skills (i.e. you and a peer) co-author a book together, each of you adding value to the other’s contribution.
Plus you get to instantly promote your book to two lists and two sets of affiliates.
Joint Venture partnerships – Co-authoring is just one example of joint venture partnering, but there are many other ways to do this. You can have a fellow expert simply allow you to add a product to your own sales pack find valuable. Or you can do the same for your JV partner. (In fact, you can “swap” products to enhance each other’s offer)
Re-purpose products – The phrase “why re-invent the wheel” might be a cliché, but it certainly holds true when it comes to product creation. If you are offering a book as a digital download only, consider adding a hard – copy version of that book to reader options by using a service or on-demand, product-fulfillment company, such as Create Space.
Or sweeten your offer by adding things like .PDF transcripts to on-demand webinars; or creating video versions of audio files (and vice versa); or adding recordings to a paid webinar; or breaking an eBook down into a module-by-module work-through course.
In fact, you can really allow yourself to be creative, when it comes to all the different ways you can re-purpose content you’ve already created.
License your coaching model – If you have a unique way of coaching, consider licensing your method. Create training modules once — and make money from the licensing while building your own status as the originator of the method
Add a membership site and Facebook Group – not only will this help build your community and enhance your status and leadership role, you can glean product ideas from members’ needs and questions, help your audience directly, provide your fans with a venue where they can help each other, pick up tips… in fact the value is so great on so many levels, it is a waste not to create one or the other (or both).
Creating passive products is just the beginning. Adding an affiliate program and getting into the habit of looking for other ways to leverage your existing products will propel passive income to worthwhile, lucrative levels.
Start right now by planning products to add to your sales funnel by downloading your free resource inside the Coach’s Business & Marketing Toolkit
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