We live in a time when the opportunity to do is open to many. You no longer need to be able to write code to build a website, or even apps and other interactive applications. These things are no longer 5 years of study away, they are click and drop.
People are no longer limited to their specialist skills and nor are they confined to the place they were born and live. We can all easily create things that we used to think were pretty close to magic, and we can disseminate the word of what we've done globally, in an instant.
We're no longer living in a world where it is those who can and those who can't. Now we all can, and it's about who can get noticed.
But while the number of people who have access to making cool things has gone exponential, the number of people able to effectively communicate this to the world (Or target audience) has remained linear. There would have been a little bump when "Make friends and influence people" was released. Pretty big bump when blogging, Youtube and ebooks came along but in the main this will have been people who would have tried and failed before just having more access to resources to encourage them and help them improve. But juxtaposed against the growth of what people can do, the number of people who can tell the right audience about it in the right way the growth of sales and marketing's curve is close to flat.
Everyday people create incredible things that they'll never work out how to tell you about.
As a population we have a general attitude of disdain towards sales and marketing. So most people do not make a real effort to get good at these things. Of those who do, most find it hard. Sales and rejection go hand in hand and few people handle rejection well, and at times you get harsh rejection which can be much rougher. So most people don't want to do it, and then most that do can not do it. This creates an interesting barrier to entry. Although we all have access to the things we need to do, most of the population will not start or drop out within 18 months. If you're willing to just keep trying you're ahead of the average by a long way.
Sales and marketing is a publicly available elitist skill.
The opportunities here are many. Especially when you come to understand one thing that many just never get, selling is a system. There are some unicorn sales people who have personalities that can not be duplicated but most sales are done by a script. Qualify, transition, pitch, try close. Handle objections Try close. Handle more objections, try close. Once it's been done enough times the questions and objections that will come are routine and well practiced answers readily available. Selling through video, audio or the written word is an even more obvious system. You do not have to be a glowing sales personality to make sales with a capture page and follow up system. You just have to really focus on getting it right once.
Systematic selling is something in theory anyone can do and in practice very few people are doing.
Outside of selling things for yourself, once you understand sales is a system. Learn about the system used for different types of sales (And all you have to do is stop skipping the adverts and look for the patterns recurring in the pitches) and how to build your own sales systems, you can then start to teach others how to duplicate your system. How they can sell for themselves, and you benefit from it. You provide them with all the things they need and would never know about to enable them to succeed and they provide you with the working hours by proxy (Passive income!).
Here's some examples of how you could build substantial passive incomes using different types of online business models if you were able to have an effective selling system and found people who'd take advantage of the opportunity that creates.
Affiliate programs. A lot of affiliate programs pay over 2 levels (Or more). If the person selling the thing gets 15% the person who signed up the seller as an affiliate in the first place might get 5%, just for an example. Let's say you've worked out a good way to generate leads with a hard grind of cold calling and a good sales script (Obviously you can do more efficient things like building email lists). When you're working 8 hours a day you're making $2,000 a month. But if you can get others to duplicate this, something wonderful happens. Let's just say for the sake of a nice example everyone can be exactly as efficient as you (Never happens) if you have 8 people who'd work one hour a day you've got a third of your income, if they'll work 3 hours a day you've replaced your income.
Once you have a system to sell the affiliate product, all you have to do is market the opportunity of this and build up a big base of people using your system. You can get 100s of people for this.
Drop shipping. To do drop shipping is really easy, in principle. I could teach my Mum how to drop ship. To tell you something about my dear Mum to help you get perspective; I have to remind my Mum she does not have "Her phone email" and her "Laptop email", she has "Gmail" and can use any device you want. We'll get there. To drop ship all you have to do is go and find something on a bulk seller site that sells there for $500 and then go and find someone who will give you $1,500 for it. Then tell the other guy to send them it. It's very simple, apart from that pesky little part of collecting in $1,500 (Sales and marketing).
If you can find products you can get this sort of return on (And you can), can create a system to sell higher ticket items (Better to go for things you buy at a cost of $100s or $1,000s since even a small percentage profit is good. The joy of drop shipping is you have no capital outlay anyway) you can then hire people to do the work in this for you. A great way is to do some sort of telesales. Something where you use capture pages to collect leads and phone numbers and then you give these numbers to your sales team to call. This gets you the jobs staffed but it's not trivial to cut you out, the people who can sell it do not know where to get the numbers even if they work out where to get the product.
Let's say instead of $1,000 profit you were making $500 on each sale. You can pay the sales people $200 for a sale. You've got $300 left. Pay someone $50 to process the order and handle any mishaps. This is an easy job but if you pay well and get someone good for it they'll do you proud in the times there would otherwise be complaints and disruptions. $250 left. Let's say it costs you $100 for a sale. Maybe in the form of $1 a lead and out 100 leads you close 1. $150 left. $50 for misc and unexpected. $100 left.
Now let's say over a year you bring in one person a week to do this for you. In a year you have 52 people. Sales are hard, so about 75% drop off. At some point you'll have about 10 but these 10 will be motivated and driven people. Willing to work and acquiring a honed skill set in closing deals. Think about that ... What does life look like if you have 10 driven and skilled people working 5 days a week to make you $100 a pop? Looks like legit passive income!
The biggest opportunity for passive income is giving opportunity of income to others.
You do not have to be a master marketer. Since most people suck if you can be just good enough to sell some stuff, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. You can be about average in terms of people who do marketing and still way ahead of the average person. Meaning you can then create opportunities for that average person. Empower them with your system and some fundamental tips and encouragement and build a workforce for yourself.
You can make a "Drag and drop" marketing system, but first you have to go and collect all the little blocks. Learn about systems like email marketing, capture pages and SEO. Read books that tell you how people think. Go and cold pitch 100 people and have 98 of them ignore you or use four letter words. Get to know what that feels like and how to deal with it. Because if you can, you can then enable others to do it and you don't have to do the grind.
If you found this post useful, you can find more of my posts on Reddit at Earn passive income through various online sources. (reddit.com)
