We’ve all read stories about people making it big with passive income and too good to be true side hustles. I want to start this by saying that online courses are not a passive income revenue stream, but rather, they’re extremely leveraged and highly scalable.
In traditional business, it took me nine years with 35 physical locations and 120 staff through my franchise to build a business over $1 million a year. With digital courses, it took 19 months and myself with the help of a few contractors. The online course world has been one of the biggest revelations of my life.
Through business, I love a good win-win scenario. In online courses, it’s literally your job to solve someone’s problem. They’re opening the internet and typing in the problem that they’re having. Then, they find you, the human who has acquired their own unique expertise that you can share and solve the problem. In return, you get financially rewarded for that. Win-win.
1. Trade money for value instead of time
Most businesses trade time or a tangible product for money. The cost of doing business is usually directly proportionate to the amount of time you are exchanging or the product you’ve purchased at wholesale.
With an online course, that’s getting thrown out the window. It doesn’t matter how much time it’s taken you to create, it’s about the value to the client and what they’ll pay you to solve their problem and give them their desired result. You have created a product once, and then you get to sell it over and over again without an increase in output of time for delivery.
2. Productise that knowledge in your beautiful head
You have SO much knowledge in that gorgeous brain of yours. It’s so normal to you because it’s in your own mind. But that knowledge that you’ve acquired… someone wants it! By sharing it with the world, you’re helping to pass on what you’ve learnt and shortcut someone else’s success.
3. Reach more people with less effort (bigger impact)
I know when I used to run my traditional businesses that if I wanted to reach more people and make a bigger impact, I had to hire more staff and increase locations. Yay, not anymore! Because of the scalability of online courses, you’re able to reach more people and make a massive impact, without increase your square meterage or team headcount.
4. Use technology to do more with a small team
I was saying to my right-hand woman the other day “What you do now, ten years ago took eight people to do”, such is the power of technology, systems and automation. It’s beautiful and once you’ve learnt how to optimise it, really does enable you to do so much more with fewer people. Processes that used to be manual can now be done with automation or with the click of a button. That means an easier life for you without having the human resource issues of a larger team, and more profit in your pocket.
5. Go global!
When I ran tutoring centres and we looked at global expansion, it was a big deal! There were so many things to consider and so much logistics that I didn’t even go there. With an online digital course business, there’s no barrier at all – you are open to people all over the planet. Instead of your reach being limited by a localised audience, you can serve people globally.
Instead of thinking that online courses are out of your reach, give them a go. Start small, experiment and see just how much they can supercharge your income.
