Wouldn't it be great if you could wake up every morning, check your bank account via your phone or computer and see new sales reaching hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars coming in due to your creative efforts?

When money rolls in without direct and pursuant effort, you're in the act of generating wealth passively.

In a 5 year study measuring wealth generation, Best Selling Author Thomas Corley noted that most self-made millionaires generated their income from multiple sources.

• 65 percent had three streams of income
• 45 percent had four streams of income
• 29 percent had five or more streams of income

Many of the income streams listed above were passive income streams that helped these millionaires make money after proper systemization of the income stream was implemented.

Unfortunately, most people see this as an unattainable dream.

This article is designed to be a template or blueprint on how you can generate passive income in today's landscape that can help lead you to living your dream life.

However, let's get a few things straight as we begin:

• If you're of the cynical type — you should probably stop reading this article now.
• If you believe that going into business for yourself isn't something that can be achieved — you should probably stop reading this article now.
• If you don't believe in yourself and that you really can create a future where you are the designer of your professional destiny — you should probably stop reading this article now.

Because this article is written for the dreamers and more importantly, the doers.

Why?

Because like the title of this article notes, you can build a life you are not only proud of but a life that has the ability to provide for you as well as your loved ones, passively.

What do I mean by passively? According to Best Selling Author Dave Ramsey,

"Passive income is money you earn in a way that requires little to no daily effort to maintain."

Before you get all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed thinking you're going to unlock some secret that is going to solve all of your problems and help you make quick money I have another disclaimer for you:

• If you think you're not going to need to work harder on something than you've ever worked on — you should stop reading this article now.

In order to get to a place where you are making passive income, you are going to need to work extremely hard. You are going to need to build an entire infrastructure of a business that supports a passive income ecosystem. That is going to take a hell of a lot of work.

Now that all of that is out of the way, let's go over what you're going to learn in this article:

You are going to learn what the best model for creating a passive income business, how to find your niche, creating your product and creating an optimal sales page to sell the product passively.

So let us begin with gusto!

What is the best model for creating passive income?

“How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?”

— Seth Godin

You probably have many different ideas of where this article can go with generating a passive income business.

If you perform a quick online search, you may see a lot of talk about the many options for starting a business, many of which I don't recommend. They may include:

• Affiliate marketing
• Amazon FBA
• Online eCommerce stores (Shopify etc)
• Software
• Influencer Advertising

And we're not going to talk about any of these in this piece. So if you were amped up and ready to learn about one of those — you should probably stop reading this article now.

Instead, we're going to discuss the number 1 method for creating a passive income online business:

Online course creation and eLearning

Market research firm Global Industry Analysts projected eLearning would reach $107 Billion in 2015 and it did. Currently, research and markets forecasts show triple the revenue of 2015 with the expected revenue growth of the industry to reach $325 Billion by 2025.

With the costs of higher education rising 538% since 1985, people around the globe are looking to learn valuable and actionable skills through cost effective and accessible means.

Creating and selling an online course is the best option for quickly and affordably creating a product that you can sell at a good price.

And yes, there are entrepreneurs that are starting these businesses from scratch and seeing huge successes.

And you can be one of them.

If you're thinking you don't have what it takes to come up with, create and sell and online course, you probably haven't been thinking of how to blend your passion with solving a problem for a given community.

In the next section, we're going to dive into that.

How to find your passive income niche

Starting an online business can be very difficult.

Many people starting out at this crucial first step mess the whole thing up without even noticing it.

They tend to think to themselves,

"What do I want to start a business about?"

Unfortunately, as fun as that idea might sound, if you go this route you'll find yourself and your business dead to rights from the get go.

A business doesn't just happen out of thin air. A business, at its core, is the solving of a problem for an individual or community and putting a monetized value behind the product or service that solves that problem.

Many bloggers and online entrepreneurs get this part wrong in the very beginning. They think that they'll be able to grow a business through the thoughts in their head or posting pictures and articles that will generate viewership just because they're special.

I believe this is due to the influencer culture and people seeming creating viral popularity overnight.

But I'm getting off track.

In online entrepreneurship and blogging, the best way to find your niche is to identify what you're passionate about and how you can blend that with solving a need for an individual or community that shares that same passion.

When you think of it this way, you are thinking as a business person or marketer (solving a specific need and exchanging the solution for monetary value) and an artist (being able to use a passion of yours as the catalyst for creation).

For many, finding a niche can be hard. Not because they don't know what they're passionate about (though for some that can be hard) but they second guess themselves that their passion can blend with solving a need within a given community.

It's important in this step to look inward:

• What issues have you dealt with in this niche?
• What do you and your friends complain was better in this space?
• Where do people in this niche go to talk about their issues (forums, meeting halls, social media etc)

It's very important to take inventory of what is being said in these niches because all of this information is going to guide you towards some of the later steps which include product creation and sales.

Testing the product ideas for your niche

Any savvy entrepreneur (and yes you can start calling yourself that) knows that in order to succeed in business, you need to be constantly testing your ideas and products with your audience.

In order to do this, it's important to shift your mindset into a Customer-centric approach.

A Customer-centric is a method to conducting business that focuses on providing an exceptional customer experience both at the point of sale and after the sale in order to drive profit and gain competitive advantage.

You want to get in the minds of your customers and think the way they would.

They don't care what you want.

• They don't want a flashy UX, they want ease and simplicity
• They don't want French style cuisine, they want a big plate of beef and potatoes
• They don't want an exceptional pour over coffee, they want a fast cup o' Joe
• They don't want an indigestible textbook of how to get 6-pack abs, they want a quick video module with a few performable exercises that will help them feel more confident.

Your aim here is to create content or get feedback from your audience and see what it is they are looking for.

(If you don't have an audience yet and need actionable advice to help you start building one, check out my other resource here that goes over building your audience for your blog).

Be testing new article ideas that offer a solution to a problem. When you start building an email list, send them out surveys or questions addressing their problems and how they would like them solved.

There is a three-pronged survey approach you can use to getting specific and actionable feedback from your audience:

Product Creation: Working backwards from the result

During your questions, interviews and research, and article generation there are three key questions that must be addressed:

1. What is the biggest problem stopping you from achieving [GOAL DESIRED]?
2. What would have to happen to make that problem go away?
3. How would your life be different if that problem went away?

Let's address each question briefly and what you should be looking for.

1. What is the biggest problem stopping you from achieving [GOAL DESIRED]?

This question will show you what they believe the problem is. The motivating factors here might include societal pressures or internal belief within the person.

This is all very important data.

These people want to be relieved of their problem — and your product can be a source of relieving it.

2. What would have to happen to make that problem go away?

Notice how the question isn't, “What would solve your problem?”. People don't always know how to answer that so specifically.

Instead, this question invites them to think about the specific problems that are getting in the way.

Let’s say you’re in the productivity space. Your potential customer answers the first question with “I’m getting too distracted and should be doing 100% more work each week”. They’ve identified that the problem is themselves.

But then for question number 2 they answer, “What would need to happen to make the problem go away? I’d need to have better self-discipline and the skills to manage my own time”.

You might be able to see now where we're going with this…

3. How would your life be different if that problem went away?

This question allows for your potential customer to own the thought of an ideal future within themselves and try on what their world will look like going forward.

Imagine if the world understood and knew the expertise that you contain? I'm sure you can envision it right now and they world would be better if everyone could share it.

Let your ideal customer see it through that lens here as well.

Now you are still positioning your product as the means of achieving this ideal future.

Now that you have done your due diligence in building your audience, getting feedback from that audience in what ideal future they are looking for and what products they need in order to achieve it, it's time to start creating products that are going to be sold passively through your blog and online business.

It's going to start getting good…

How to create your passive income product

“Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.”
– Jeff Bezos

There are many ways to create passive income. Some of the most notable are:

• Real estate and leasing property
• Investment in the stock market
• Cash back rewards on credit cards (low and risky if you don't have self control on spending)
• Affiliate marketing on other business's products

And sure, these are all viable routes you can take. However, we're not going to cover any of these in this piece.

Why?

Well the biggest reason is I cannot offer any expertise in these subjects. Hopefully, there are experts out there that will link the resources in the comments.

Alas, like alluded to above, we're going to be focusing on eLearning and the creation of learning modules that you can sell to your audience.

Now many people are going to point out that the creation of a product isn't passive in nature. Sure, I'll give you that.

However, once the product is completed, with the help of an email list and automated technology and strategy, the product can be sold passively. For purposes of this article, we're not going to go through the strategies of building an opt-in, offering a "exchange gift", and building an email list, however if you need strategy and actionable guidance on doing so, check out this resource here.

Product creation step 1: Set price first

You probably think I'm crazy for putting price setting as the first step.

Maybe I am.

But we all remember what Alice said to The Mad Hatter when seemed to be going downhill for the pair,

“You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret: All the best people are.”

― Lewis Carroll

So I'll take on being crazy for the time being.

When you set the price for your product first you do a number of things:

• You set the value expectation for your customer base
• You set expectations for yourself (are you going to deliver the least viable product or the best in the marketplace?)
• You make the enterprising nature of your blog real (with dollars attached, you're creating an actual business)

These are very important facets of product creation to understand about your audience and yourself.

Now if you're freaking out about how you should price your product, don't fear. Do a search of your blogging niche and see what other successful online entrepreneurs are charging for their products. You probably will be creating something similar to an existing product.

Don't reinvent the wheel here — build off of what is already working for others.

This brings us right into our next step in the passive product creation…

Product creation step 2: Research what is working

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

— Henry Ford

If you think you're creating a product that will revolutionize the lives of others, and more importantly, has never been created before I have news for you.

You're probably wrong.

There are probably scores, if not hundreds of similar eLearning products in the marketplace that are helping thousands of people remedy the problems in their lives. You aren't creating anything out of thin air.

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

— Pablo Picasso

Now I am not advocating the theft and repurposing of another's product. But take inventory of what is already working and how you can make it better.

There are many ways you can do this:

• Go directly to a competitor's site and do intel on their offerings (will generally be under the "courses" tab)
• Go to eLearning aggregates like: Lynda, CreativeLive, and SkillShare and search your niche of products.
• Check out Amazon and search for books within your niche: what problems do the headlines promise to solve?

A word of caution for the procrastinator: If you are a "perfectionist" or someone who tends to procrastinate, only allow yourself to do intel on perhaps 10 different sites/eLearning aggregates. This way you don't spend too much time on research and you can get back to building.

Once you have an understanding of what is working in you niche, it's time to start building…

Product creation step 3: Structuring your course

In order to deliver a high-value eLearning course you should plan to create a 3 module course with each module providing a specific outcome oriented milestone. The 3 modules would culminate into delivering on your promise of the solution to the problem.

To help the customers achieve the milestones of each module, it's advised that you weave in checkpoints throughout in order for the customer to keep track of the progress they're making.

You can think of these checkpoints as the individual selling points of your product on the sales page (that will come a little bit later). A basic formula to take into consideration would be 4 checkpoints for the 3 modules.

When you begin to think about the product formulation like this, you'll not only have a visual representation of your product:

Now this isn't a hard rule. There may be more modules that you can fit into your product or perhaps less. You may provide a different amount of checkpoints with your course structure.

This is a roadmap for you to go off, however.

Now we can move onto the outline of the course creation. This is to be done via GoogleDocs and it is essentially the above figure (Fig 3.1) but in a document and outline form.

Think of it this way: In a standard outline you're going to break up this course into headers:

H1: Will be your Goals (Module numbering)

H2: Will be your checkpoints

H3: will be your individual lessons within each Module->Checkpoint

This is an organization method I've used — again, it should be used as a launchpad for you and isn't set in stone.

Now that you have your outline created for your product, it's time to start creating, right?

Wrong.

Before we create the product, we're going to need to create our sales page first. This is very important for many reasons, especially if we're going to sell this product passively.

Product creation step 4: Creating the sales page

Why are we creating a sales page before creating the actual product?

Because the sales page helps us critically understand the value proposition of our product.

The sales page, when done correctly, gives us a marketing approach to our product. Again, it's important that we look at this through the eyes of what the customer will see — not just what we create.

Now not all sales pages are created equally.

Thankfully, there are tools already out there that will help us create the optimal sales page. ThriveThemes has a template built into the Architect creator that will help us formulate our sales page.

If you don't have ThriveArchitect, you can still use the below figure as a template and build the various sections through your page builder (BeaverBuilder, Elementor, WPBakery Page Builder etc.). The link shows other examples from successful online entrepreneurs. See Image to the side for more details.