As an entrepreneur, you are always thinking about expanding your income. You may be motivated by the desire to give yourself more flexibility or to have enough money to give yourself or your family the life you dream of. You can achieve this dream by creating passive income streams.  

Don’t worry! This doesn’t have to be a complicated process. You can easily start with one product and then introduce another and another. Before you know it, you’ll have multiple sources of passive income. 

Let’s look at how this works. 

Creating a product sales funnel

A sales funnel is no more than a map of the journey a customer takes to pursue a goal or solve a problem. Why is it important to think about it this way? By looking at this path (what do they learn first, what comes second, etc.), you can create products that logically help them along the way, based on where they are in the learning process. This avoids haphazard product development and ensures that your product portfolio makes sense to your client. 

When you create a sales funnel, you can also achieve higher conversion rates. Why? Because you develop a relationship with your client. They feel like they know you and trust you because they continue to get results with your products and services. As a consequence of that trust, they happily take advantage of your other offerings to continue their learning.

With their journey in mind, it’s up to you to develop – over time – a suite of products linked to that sales funnel or customer journey. Here are some ways you can think about starting, or adding, passive income products to your business.

Start with a free or inexpensive product

You don’t need to wait until you have a dozen products to start selling them! You can create one product and start marketing it as you develop the next one, gradually building your portfolio. 

The first stage of the sales funnel is designed to make a very wide audience aware of your brand. At this point, you may want to offer something free or low-priced. You want a large number of people to take advantage of the product so that they can get to know you and what you can offer them.

What kind of products am I talking about? You could consider things like mini-courses, small e-books, checklists, videos or resource lists. The crucial thing in designing this product is that you are solving a very specific problem for the consumer and that it accomplishes that purpose really well. While your potential customers are enjoying and using your free or inexpensive content, you can start working on creating your next course, workshop or digital book. 

Once people are familiar with your brand and quality through the small product, you can introduce them to the next one you are selling. For example, when you’ve drawn your target customers in with your YouTube channel or mini-course, you can tell them about your paid course, e-book or workshop.  

Since they’ve gotten a taste of your first product-and loved it – they will be happy to pay you to learn more. You can continue to offer up-sells (more expensive products) or cross-sells (related products) with each step your client takes.

sell the product before you create it

Another way of adding products to your business is by selling before development. It may sound like a huge leap of faith, but it works really well. Crowd-sourcing is popular for a reason.

Why would you do this?

Fund Product Development

You can actually fund the development of a product by selling it before you create it. This protects you from the risk of running any financial losses. This is exactly the idea behind crowd-sourcing. You may not need a physical prototype, but you’ll need some digital tools and your time and energy to create your products.

Confirm Interest

When you sell a product in advance, you are absolutely certain there is an audience for it. Sometimes, you can invest a lot in creating a product only to find no traction for it. But selling in advance ensures that people have interest in what you are offering.

Targeted Development

If you develop a product while people are actually using it, you can make adjustments during the development process. For example, if you have a 4-part series planned, you can adjust part 4 based on the feedback you get from part 2. This practically guarantees that you are perfectly meeting the needs of your customers.

Motivation to Finish

Once you’ve sold the product, you absolutely must create it. There won’t be any room for procrastination – you’ve got people depending on you! It might be the extra push you need to get the job done.

Create a Buzz

Have you ever seen a celebrity talk up their book before they even write it? Or seen pre-sales for launches days or even months in advance? You can create a real connection with your audience by sharing your product development journey, which makes it very valuable from a marketing perspective.

If any of these elements are appealing for you, you should consider selling your product before you create it.

Link your products

You can get a client to buy more of your products (one after the other) by linking them together. 

You can use the first product to give them a taste of what they achieve and  then encourage them to buy successive products where they will find more solutions and go further on their learning journey.  

Let’s say, for example, you wrote a book on business management. Your book provides general information on how to manage a business better.

At the end of the book, tell your audience that you’ve expanded the ideas in the book into a course and recommend it to them. Your course takes the ideas of your book and goes into greater detail on each one, further enhancing their ability to manage their business. Fans of your book will be glad to continue learning and sign up for the course.  

At the end of the course, you can offer VIP consulting to discuss how they can take their specific business to the next level. Some customers will jump on the offer because this product will be tailored to their business and they will significantly benefit from your direct guidance. 

As you see, there are many different ways you can add passive income products to your business, step by step. There’s no reason to wait, you can get started today.

are you ready?

If you’ve been thinking about adding passive income streams to your business and improving your brand awareness, but don’t know how to go about it, worry no more. You don’t have to move from stage 1 to stage 10 in one day. You can add products one at a time, each one building your business further.