But many business owners are proving that to be untrue – adding passive income streams can be a very successful model to earn money and make your startup a success without working yourself to the ground!

Despite what you might have seen online, passive income isn’t a quick rich scheme. Instead, the premise is to earn money from sources that require minimal time or effort once you’ve laid the groundwork and have initially created them. For example, using your knowledge to design a course you can sell online – once the content is created it requires minimal input and will generate the revenue for you consistently.

Passive income is proving appealing for many reasons. Avoiding burnout, finding a work-life balance and spending more time with your family and loved ones are on many people’s wish lists. These reasons were exactly why as a mum of twins, I originally turned to passive and semi-passive income streams. I now work around 30 hours a month and generate millions of pounds from this. Here’s how you can do it too.

Create your niche

Create a clear niche for your offerings. Be different rather than battling to be the best. When thinking of your clients, it is much better to niche down because then you’ll get your people in. I teach a lot of people who run memberships that are very niche – some of them are so niche that you would think that can’t possibly be drawing in enough people, but there are millions of people in the world! There will always be people to fill anything that you want to do, so speak to them!

Profit follows passion

Profit follows passion always. So, if you start doing things you’re not passionate about, the money slows down. I’ve done things in the past that I haven’t loved doing, but when you hit obstacles, it’s the passion that gets you through and keeps you going.

 Use the CASSH system

This is my proven system to help people create passive income.

C is a client. Before you even know if you want to do a membership or a group programme or workshop or whatever, know who you want to help. Who do you want to serve?

A is the audience. You need to grow and nurture an audience to make passive income for your startup, so let’s focus on building it.

S is about systems and structures and knowing where you want to do it, how you want to do it. There’s so many brilliant places where you can host courses and memberships; some are standalone, some are just plugins on your website. Don’t let the tech scare you.

The next S is about selling, which is all about launching your passive income offering. The biggest problem I see is people having an audience and jumping straight to selling.  A launch strategy is as important as the strategy for your overall business. It should take six to 12 weeks to launch something, and you should do it properly.

Finally, we have H which is all about retention, i.e. making people happy. It’s about retention with passive income. If you have membership, you want to keep the people in there happy to keep them around. If you have a course or workshop you want to re-market it and have a waiting list, so you’ll need customer testimonials and recommendations through word of mouth.

Create solutions to problems

The key to a great passive income product that will earn you money is one that will solve a problem. When the same issue comes up over and over again, I know it’s the right time to create a solution through a new offering! For instance, when my audience was struggling with how to build their own audiences in an authentic way, I created a course on exactly how to do that.

Write your course after you’ve sold it

You don’t need to spend months creating your passive income offering. Here’s my biggest tip: don’t write a word of your course until you’ve actually sold it. I see so many entrepreneurs spending months creating a great course and filming amazing videos that they haven’t market-tested on their audience, and as a result, nobody buys! Spend time audience building and launching, then create your product as you deliver it.