A few cool ways to make Passive Income
If you're like me, you'd probably really enjoy a scenario where you're sitting back watching TV and you get a notification on your phone that you just had a deposit to your bank account for some work that you did months ago.
That's passive income, and it sounds like a dream right?
Well, there are a lot of videos here on YouTube telling you all types of scammy unrealistic things to do to get a little bit of extra money.
But today, I'm gonna put y'all on some free game and tell you exactly what has put over a thousand dollars into my bank account passively. And it only took a little bit of upfront work that I did in one weekend.
It's something that I know anyone can do.
So when I first started researching how to make passive income online, I came across a lot of scammy stuff, unrealistic stuff, and things that were very time consuming.
Maybe you've run across similar things, surveys that you can take, or videos that you can watch but they only end up paying out a couple of cents.
Those random YouTube guys who tell you to spam your friends and family on Facebook and try to get them to buy some random product.
I've even seen ads to do random jobs like transcribe people's YouTube videos or podcasts into text, and I'm not saying those things can’t make you a little bit of money, but they're not that appealing to me.
One, it's a very small amount of money and two, it's very time consuming work that you are usually going to have to do over and over again if you want to keep earning. And to me, that's the opposite of passive.
But I don't want to spend too much time on what not to do. Instead, I want to give you guys just a complete deep dive rundown on what exactly to do.
So here it is: you're going to spend one weekend making a couple of YouTube videos and then setting up a system to use those videos to make you passive income every month.
I know it might seem impossible, but you're probably thinking about YouTube monetization the wrong way.
But just stick with me. I promise I'm gonna completely break it down for you and the best part is you really don't even need a single subscriber to get started.
Typically, YouTube requires a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours before they will put ads on your videos and monetize your channel.
But that is not what we're talking about today. I was just able to reach that threshold for this channel, and while it's nice it did take months and dozens of videos to get there.
And I've discovered that YouTube ad revenue is actually one of the smaller income streams that YouTubers have. The real money is made through sponsorships and affiliate marketing, both of which you can start way before you ever get to a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watch hours.
Now sponsorships are difficult to get if you don't already have a large following, so we're not going to talk about that today but what we are going to talk about is exactly how you can set up a passive income machine using affiliate marketing.
So by the end of this post, you're gonna see how you can use whatever device you're watching on right now to make a couple of videos in just one weekend, set everything up, and have those videos earning you passive income without ever doing any more work or making any more videos.
So the very first step is to break the entire process up into two parts. The first part is deciding what types of videos to make and how they're actually gonna make you money, and the second part is making sure that people can find those videos even if you have zero subscribers. So, I think the best place to start from here is how do you make the money.
What I've done, and what I recommend you do is you make a couple of how-to or review videos for products or services that have an affiliate program?
So, the type of video is super important and you want to make a how-to or instructional or review video because people are already searching for those. YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, and it's owned by Google, the world's biggest search engine.
When you're making searchable content that answers a question people are asking using the YouTube platform, you don't have to have a super big audience that you can sell flat tummy tea to.
Or, you don't have to go out and scam your Facebook friends to buy certain products. People are actually gonna find your videos because they're already looking for them, and part of what we're gonna talk about in this video is how you make sure that your videos show up in search results.
I've been on YouTube for about 10 months now, and from day one where I had literally zero subscribers until now my number one way of people watching my content and finding my videos has been because I've showed up in YouTube search.
And the method that I'm using to make sure that I show up in search has meant that I've gotten over 29,000 views just from people searching for things and my videos showing up.
So we know that the type of videos we want to make are ones that answer questions that people are asking through YouTube search, but now we need to talk about what the actual content of those videos are.
And this is all going to depend on what types of affiliate programs you decide to join.
An affiliate program is when you promote someone else's service or product and for every person that you get to sign up, you get paid a certain amount.
And the beautiful thing about affiliate programs is that they're free to join, you get your own personal signup link, and all of the tracking is already set up.
So whenever somebody uses your link and makes a purchase, the program knows that you sent them there and they know to give a certain percentage of that sale to you.
One of the most well-known affiliate programs is Amazon Associates, but it's super hard to make good money on Amazon unless you already have a huge following because they pay literally like a quarter of a penny for every sale.
And so you're really not gonna make that much money unless you've got hundreds or maybe even thousands of people buying the things you recommend.
But there is some real money to be made for the little guys by using affiliate programs that have a recurring monthly payment, or that pay a really high referral fee.
Here's what that means. Imagine that there's a company called “The Magic Coffee Box,” and every month they send out a subscription box to their customers that gives them a couple of different types of coffee.
And we'll say that this subscription box costs $25 a month. Now let's say that you sign up for their affiliate program, and every person who buys a subscription using your link is gonna make you $20 of their purchase, or five bucks.
The beautiful thing about these recurring monthly fees is that unlike Amazon, where somebody buys something and you get paid once, with this model, every time somebody pays their $25 subscription, five dollars of that is going to come to you.
You can also imagine another scenario that, rather than five dollars a month, the company might pay you $15 for everybody that you sign up.
So you really want to look for the affiliate programs that have either a monthly recurring fee or they have a high referral fee.
Now, you might be thinking that you don't already have an audience that you could just tell to go buy some coffee subscription box and they would listen to you, but stick with me. Because you don't need that once we decide what types of videos to make.
I'm going to show you how to make sure that those videos show up on YouTube search, people find them, watch them, and use your link to go buy whatever service that you're talking about.
So when you're looking for affiliate programs with recurring monthly payments or high referral fees, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
They're usually going to be programs or services that people use for their job, for their side hustles, for their hobbies, or things that just make someone's life easier.
I don't recommend that you go for those basic individual products where somebody buys it one time and you get paid one time.
The real recurring passive income is generated from products or services that people pay for every single month. For example, there are a few software services like this that I recommend on my channel.
One such service is PropStream. It's an online product that gives people access to all types of real estate data to use in their investing business. Customers like me pay $97 a month to get access to the service, and for every person that signed up using my link, a small percentage of that $97 gets sent to my bank account every month.
You know I feel good about this because I use PropStream in my real estate investing business every single day, and so it's not like I'm recommending a product that I don't even use, or that I don't think is quality.
And on top of that, my link gives people a free seven-day trial and it actually gives them a little bit of a discounted price over what they would get if they didn't use a referral link.
But maybe you're thinking that you don't know anything about PropStream, or real estate. You can definitely do this with any other type of affiliate program that you have some interest or knowledge in.
Let's imagine that you want to make a tutorial on how to put cool graphics or icons on YouTube videos.
You could easily sign up to become an affiliate of the online design program called Canva. And you would then make a tutorial of how you use Canva to pull up graphics or text images, download them with a transparent background, upload them to iMovie, and then you have a cool graphic overlay.
So you just taught people how to do something that they were searching for on YouTube, and once you've learned how to optimize your video to show up in search results, a percentage of the people who watch that video are going to go to the description to use your link to Canva.
And then you've got up to 36 dollars per person coming into your bank account every month.
Another example is that you can make some how-to videos for making websites using Wix or Squarespace, both of which have affiliate programs that pay you between $100 and $200 per person you get to sign up. So get creative.
YouTube has over 30 million visitors a day, and a lot of them are trying to learn something through the platform.
So if you can create videos that answer those questions, some of those viewers are gonna use your link, sign up for something that's paying monthly or paying a high referral fee, and you'll have passive income coming in every month without making any more videos.
I just spent a few seconds on YouTube typing in “how to learn blank” and one of the suggestions that popped up was “how to learn guitar” which I'm guessing we can all imagine there are thousands of people searching for every month.
You could sign up for a free Skillshare trial and watch a couple of their “how to learn to play guitar” courses and then you can make a review video telling people which one you thought was the best.
Then, everyone who signs up to go take those courses using your link would generate you up to seven dollars per person, even if they only sign up for a free trial.
I also found another program called Bluehost which lets people get a website name and they'll pay you $65 for every person that you get to sign up.
So yeah, I gave you some examples but there are a ton of affiliate programs out there.
All right, so you've made it halfway. Let's say that you decide to make three or four videos teaching people how to use Canva to make cool graphic overlays for the YouTube videos.
With their affiliate program, you're set to make up to 36 dollars for every person that you get to sign up for a paid plan.
So how do you make sure that people find your videos on YouTube?
The first thing you're going to do is you're going to sign up for Tubebuddy.
This is a free service, although you could get the paid plan, which I do think is worth it. Especially because if you have less than a thousand subscribers, you get 50% off, so it costs you four bucks and 50 cents.
But either way, whether you use the paid version or the free version, you're gonna download it to your Google Chrome browser and you're gonna open up the home page of YouTube.
From there, just type in something related to the chosen topic that you're gonna make videos about. For our example, it might be how to make graphics for YouTube videos.
On the right hand side, you're gonna see this window from Tubebuddy, and it's going to give you a score, which is basically telling you how likely your video is to show up when people search that term into YouTube.
You're going to want to use the suggested keywords to play around and find out which phrases have the best scores.
For example, the phrase “how to make intro graphics for YouTube” had an excellent score of 87, so that might be the title for one of my videos.
I then want to include 5 to 10 of the highest scoring search phrases in my description as well as in my tags. Jam pack in as many of those high scorers as you can.
Just make sure that when you do it in the description, you write them out in sentence form so that it doesn't just look like you're spamming YouTube by putting a bunch of phrases back to back. This is the number one way to make sure that your videos show up in YouTube search results so figure out what the highest scores are and put them into your title description and tags.
You're then going to actually want to go to Canva and use it yourself to make a high quality thumbnail.
Apparently, research shows that thumbnails with the human face perform better than ones without a face, so use whatever device you've got and just take a high quality picture of yourself and upload it into Canva.
Use some bright attractive colors, but most of all make sure you put easy to read big bold letters on the thumbnail.
I’d probably do something like “easy YouTube graphics” with an excited expression and a thumbs up.
And then you've got a great YouTube thumbnail. This process is exactly what I did for my PropStream tutorial video, and as you can see it barely had any views when I posted it because I barely had any subscribers.
But over time, as people were searching for things like “PropStream tutorial” or “how to use PropStream” my videos started showing up in the search results, people clicked on it, watched it, and a certain number of those people clicked my link in the description, signed up, and now I get paid a small cut of their monthly fee every month.
The last and probably most important step is to make sure that in the description of your video you put links to all of the affiliate programs that you're talking about in that video so people can find them super easily and the affiliate program will know that you're the one that generated the sale if the person who used your link decides to go and sign up.
Pretty simple right?
Until next time, thanks so much for reading.
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