Let’s talk about the term “Passive Income”. This is a term used more and more frequently. While my 16 year old thinks that you can become an overnight millionaire simply pressing a button – spoiler alert it is not true! Shocking I know! No matter what you do some effort is always involved. The term “passive income” is misleading to me.
Recently I had to give someone who already had a business advice about whether they should purchase The Roadmap or Simply Passive, to make some “passive income”.
I said neither. Full disclosure- I have never purchased either, and would never purchase. I do know people who have purchased it though. It might be right for some people but definitely not right for my client. There are heaps of courses like this available so I’m talking about these courses in general terms. Before you decide to purchase anything from an excited and impassioned stranger on TikTok evaluate the value of such courses before investing in them.
To us these courses come in 2 parts
1.Selling a method which consists of selling the method.
2. Marketing/business course. I am sure I read something somewhere that the creators themselves said the value is in the information itself about how to start and market a business. Please let me know if this is true or whether I dreamt it!
However as many of these comes with resell rights (you can resell the course and get 100% profit from it). Generally people that buy these courses are looking to “quit their 9 to 5”, “make passive income” they tend to focus on selling it to other people.
These courses are pretty hyped and have been marketed well and there are various terms and conditions. I know plenty of people have gotten lot’s of business/marketing information from it and it’s very appealing for people to have everything packaged rather than diy.
To be honest that information is readily available on the internet for free, but people are drawn to
- the people selling these courses with “no experience” “if I can do it you can too”
- seeing if the hype is real
Back to Business!
Anyway this post isn’t meant to be about these courses. Let me get back on track! After talking more to my client it became clear that they were frustrated in their own business and had seen TikTok testimonials from people with no experience making money selling these courses. It’s appealing when heaps of people are saying they are 1 week into their “digital marketing” journey (it’s often not digital marketing btw it’s selling online) and making so much money simply selling a course. It drew her attention away from her OWN business.
So as someone that sells digital downloads let me tell you there is nothing “passive” about it! Least not the way we do it! Of course that could be because we are “doing it wrong”, but I don’t care- I intend to keep going in a way that works for my clients and for us! You can read about why we decided to offer them here.
All of our digital downloads for example take a hell of a lot of time to write, refine and design. That is ongoing, as we like to update them as necessary. We also quiz our clients and the people that buy them so that we can make them better. So to us we don’t consider our digital downloads as “passive income” we put a lot of time and effort into making them and refining them and providing after sales support to the people that purchase them. You can see the whole shop here!
Where small business owners can learn for free.
Non Hyped Courses where you can learn marketing and business for free.(and you can always send us an email if you have niggling questions.
GOOGLE DIGITAL GARAGE- SKILLSHOP DIGITAL MARKETING (note they have a heap of free courses on a variety of topics)
META BLUEPRINT (mostly Facebook/Instagram related but there are certifcations too)
HUBSPOT ACADEMY (absolutely heaps of free courses here)
COPYBLOGGER (Internet Marketing course- there are others also)
MOZ ACADEMY (SEO Courses)
Don’t loose focus.
So the moral of this convoluted tale to small business owners is not to loose focus or get side tracked “passive income” claims. Instead you might need to take a step back, draw breath and work out where to put your energy into improving your existing business. (We can help too!)
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