Making $1,666 while on holiday
I took a week off recently. To my surprise I still made money in the form of passive income. I made $1,666 from a couple of hours of work! Here's how.
Last October I made a course, Monetize Your Newsletter. I goes really in-depth on how to make money from a newsletter with affiliate income, ads or premium content. I was getting loads of questions about how to monetize a newsletter so I figured I'd make this course.
Fast forward to July and Andrew Kamphey from Better Sheets approached me with an idea. How about we put some courses together in a sales bundle and sell it to people? This way they would save lots of money compared to if they bought the courses individually and we would hopefully get some extra revenue.
I have to give credit to Andrew for the idea and doing lots of work on this. He also got Chris Osborne involved - Chris has a course on Profitable Newsletters as well so together with the Better Letters course from Andrew and my Monetize Your Newsletter course we had a package of three courses to sell.
It was priced at $99 for all three courses which meant a saving of hundred of dollars compared to buying each course individully. Andrew was keen to make it a week-only deal which I think was really smart.
Unfortunately though this coincided with me taking some much needed time off work! I knew I wouldn't be able to promote it while I was taking leave so instead I wrote a blog post in advance and scheduled it to go out at the start of the week. I also used Buffer to schedule a tweet each day promoting the sale and I shared it in some communities I'm a part of. And that was it really!
I probably spent 2 hours on this sales promotion and the sales bundle made $5,000. So my share of that was $1,666. This is the power of making something once and then selling it multiple times. You can make an ebook, a course or whatever one time. And as it's an electronic good and it's online, it doesn't cost anything more to reproduce it. You can sell thousands of copies with just the time and effort you made once at the start. That's why people making money online have such an advantage.
If I wanted to make money with a cafe I would only make money each time I sold a coffee. Making money online is the equivalent of brewing one cup of coffee and selling that repeatedly to the whole neighbourhood!
So here's my recommendation
a) make some kind of online product like an ebook, course or a premium newsletter
b) group together with other entrepreneurs you trust and combine your products together into a bundle
c) price the bundle so that you can offer customers a genuinely great deal!
The sales bundle may be over but you can still grab a copy of Monetize Your Newsletter for $49. I've got all 5 star reviews which you can check out on Gumroad.