Friends. Welcome back to the channel. In this video, we're gonna talk about 9 different ways that you can make passive income. And for each of those, I'm gonna talk about how hard it is to get started, how hard it is to make a $100 a month from it, and how hard it is to maintain once you've created the thing in the first place. For me and my business, these 9 different sources generate around $27, 000 per week these days with varying degrees of passiveness. And obviously, this has taken me like 8 years to build up. So don't expect to be hitting those sorts of numbers when you first get started. But this is the video that I wish I would have had when I started my financial independence journey many, many years ago.

Let's go for it. Alright, so when I say passive income, I always air quote it because there is really no such thing as passive income. There is no way to make money without doing anything at all. But when I say passive income, what I mean is that it's it's money that is not directly tied to our time. So let's say you were to write a book. If you write a book, you publish a book, that book is now on bookshelves. You've done the work kind of once to write and publish the book. But now, anytime the book sells, you make money from royalties.

That is passive income. You could literally be making money while you sleep because you've created this thing which is out in the world which is generating income for you. The other thing with passive income is that it always takes a very long time to get going. So if you see any ads before this video talking about how you can get rich quick by whatever scheme, or if you see people in the comments pretending to be me saying, oh my god, here's how you can get rich quick with crypto, WhatsApp this number. That is all a scam. It's not gonna work. There is no way to get rich quick. It is not a thing.

So if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, those things just don't exist. So you might as well not even try. And the way I think of this is that ultimately money is just a medium for exchanging value. The only way to make money is to provide value. And the only way to make passive income, passive money, is to provide value in a way that is not directly tied to your time. So please, please, please do not try and join a get rich quick scheme. They don't exist. I've had lots of messages over the years from people who have tried signing up to a get rich quick crypto scheme or a gambling scheme or a, hey, here is how you kind of play poker online.

None of these things ever work, people always end up losing money. The only way to make money is by providing value. And so let's talk about the 9 different ways that you could provide value if you wanted to. Just before we dive in, I wanna tell you that I've just launched my brand new Skillshare class about productivity for creators, how to start a successful side hustle. That's linked in the video description. Skillshare is sponsoring this video. I'll tell you more about Skillshare later on. But I wanna plug my own class because I think it's genuinely really good, and people really like it, and it'll help you get tips on how you can start side hustles in your spare time.

Anyway, let's get into the video. Alright. So let's kick things off with investing in stocks and shares. And in this context, the way that we provide value is by offering up our money. Providing money and investing in a service is in a way giving a form of value. And so when we give our money to a company in the form of buying their stocks, it makes sense that we would get some kind of return for that investment. And we're starting with this because investing in stocks is the easiest way to make any kind of passive income. If you have any sort of savings and they're sitting in a savings account earning 0.01% interest, they're not really doing very much for you.

Whereas if you had those days savings and put them in stocks, you could potentially be earning passive income from the money that's otherwise just sitting there. Now I've got a whole video called the ultimate guide to investing in stocks and shares for beginners, which is gonna be linked over there somewhere. So that is a solid half an hour long introduction to stocks and exactly how they work. But the thing that I recommend for most beginners as a non financial adviser, and this is not financial advice purely for entertainment purposes only, or so people say, Or at least the thing that I do is that basically all my money that's in stocks and shares is invested in index funds. Now an index fund is something like the S and P 500. And when you invest, let's say, $1, 000 in the S and P 500, that basically means that your $1, 000 is distributed amongst the top 500 biggest companies in the US. So, you know, weighted by how big they are. So like, you know, 2% of it would be in Apple, 2% in Facebook, 2% in Google, 2% in Microsoft.

And then you probably won't have heard of the 500th company on the list, but basically all the big US companies you've heard of, you end up investing in all of them a little bit at a time. So if you wanna get started with that, all you need to do is sign up to a stockbroker. If you're in the US, you can use Webull, I think. I've got a link in the description. If you're in the UK, you can use Freetrade or Vanguard. Basically, whatever country you're in, just Google the phrase best stockbroker platform, your country name, and you'll find something that works for you. And then it's very easy to be able to invest in an index fund. So within our famous side hustle assessment matrix, we're gonna give the difficulty of starting a 1 star rating, 1 out of 5.

It's very, very easy to get started with stocks. How hard is it to make $100 a month by investing in stocks and shares? Well, this kinda depends, because it depends on the performance of the stock market overall. So in the last 12 months, from 2020 to 2021, the S and P 500 has actually increased by about 50%. That is that is a lot. It's like gone up by a solid 50% despite COVID and everything going on. So if in April 2020, you had invested $2, 400 in the S and P 500, the fact that it's gone up by 50% means you would have made a $100 a month. But obviously, this is not the way to look at it because, you know, things can go up and down, and the stock market has different level of performance depending on what time period you're looking at. But if we average out the last 30 to 50 years, the S and P 500 has had a roughly 10 point something percent return, which means every year, on average, over the long term, it goes up by around 10%.

This is not inflation adjusted for any economists among us. And so if we do some back of the envelope calculations, if we wanna earn $100 a month passively through stocks and shares, we would need around about $12, 000 invested in the S and P 500 to make that 10%, $1200 a year, which is $100 a month. But as I talk about in that video about stocks, over time, we have compounding. And so if you put in $7, 500 in the S and P 500 and you left it there for 5 years, then 5 years later, you would be making roughly $100 a month, if we go by this very average figure of 10% a year. Or if you invested $5, 000 in the S and P 500, then 10 years later, you'd be making $100 a month in purely passive income, again, assuming the 10% average. So overall, how hard is it really to make $100 a month in passive income from stocks and shares? Well, it kinda just depends on how hard is it for you to make 5, 000, $7, 500, or $12, 000 in savings and put them into a stock market index fund. And crucially, this is money that you shouldn't need to touch in the next 5 to 10 years at least. So basically, how easy is it for you to make that sort of money? Obviously, it varies massively depending on which country you're in, and what your circumstances are, and what your job is.

But if you're in the UK or the US where the median kind of average salary is around about $50, 000 something like that, then again, depending on your circumstances, it's not that hard to get $10, 000 in savings. Obviously, if you're supporting a family of 15 people on $50, 000, it's different. If you're a single person, again, it's different. But I'm gonna give this roughly a 3 out of 5 star rating for difficulty of getting $100 a month. Obviously, if you live in a country like India where the average salary is $3, 600 a year, it's very, very difficult to make $10, 000 in savings overall. And finally, the 3rd category in our side hustle assessment matrix is how hard is it to maintain this income once you've set it up in the first place. And we're gonna give this a 1 star out of 5 because once you've got the money in, you just like set it and forget it, and it's not that hard to maintain. There are other sources of passive income that require higher degrees of maintenance over time.

But stocks and shares is a very, very easy way to make passive income. And to use my personal example, these days, my stocks and shares portfolio, which I've been investing in since 2015, is now worth around about $350, 000 And the vast majority of that is in the S and P 500 index fund. Now I can't be bothered to work out the actual inflation adjusted returns for that. But again, if we assume a very, very rough average of 10% a year, then that averages out to around $6.82 per week in purely passive income. Alright, idea number 2 for generating passive linked in the video linked in the video description, where I teach people how to do this sort of thing. So let's use our side hustle assessment matrix and we'll talk about this. How hard is it to start a YouTube channel? Well, I'm gonna give this 1 out of 5 stars because it's very, very easy to start a YouTube channel. You just go on youtube.com, you click create a channel, and you can upload videos by just filming with your phone and uploading it.

In reality, it's a lot harder to make good videos, and making good videos is how you grow on YouTube. But getting started on YouTube is very, very, very straightforward. The real question is, how hard is it to actually make real money from YouTube? So again, let's say we wanna make $100 a month in passive income. What does that look like? Well, firstly, to be eligible for monetization on YouTube, you need 1, 000 subscribers and 4, 000 hours of watch time. It took me 6 months 52 videos to get my first 1, 000 subscribers. And if we look at the averages, it actually takes on average 90 something videos to get to a 1000 subscribers. So that's quite hard. If you're thinking you're gonna start a YouTube channel and start making money from day 1, you know, that's basically not gonna happen.

It took me 52 videos, 6 months to get there. So if people messaged me and be like, hey, I wanna start a YouTube channel, I was like, look, you you have to be able to put in the effort and do this for a very long period of time, at least once a week. I say for at least 2 years before you can expect anything in return. But let's say you've hit your 1, 000 subscribers and your 4 1000 hours of watch time. How hard is it to actually make $100 a month? Well, on average, the kind of revenue per 1, 000 views on YouTube is around about $2 So this varies massively, but let's say on average about $2 per 1, 000 views. Therefore, if you wanna make $100 a month, you need 50, 000 views on YouTube to make $100 a month. Let's say you make 1 video per week, and let's assume you're not getting any traffic on your older videos. That means every video you make needs to get around about 12, 500 views.

And very roughly, the average YouTube channel can expect around about 20% of their subscribers to equal the average view count for each video. So on YouTube, if you had 62, 000 subscribers, very roughly, very averagely, you can expect 20% of them, I. E. 12, 500 views on each video. And assuming you have no evergreen content over the long term, you would need around about 60, 000 subscribers to be making $100 a month. In reality, you make a $100 a month a lot before 60, 000 subscribers. I think I was making a $100 a month when I had, like, 10, 000 something subscribers. Like, it was it it was fairly early on.

But when it comes to assessing how hard is this to do, I'm gonna give this a 4 out of 5 stars. It's actually very hard to make compelling YouTube videos. And it's very easy to get started, but it's hard to do well. It's totally worth it. It's a great skill set. It's really fun. You get to meet people across the Internet. You get to learn how to talk to a camera and how to film and video edit.

And it's really great, but it's very hard to actually make money from YouTube. Finally, in terms of effort to maintain, like actually getting that first 1, 000 subscribers is a lot harder than keeping it growing. Because once you've got 1, 000 subscribers, and once your channel is growing, it means you've landed on a formula that works. And so maintaining it then becomes easier than starting from scratch. And so in our side hustle assessment matrix, we're gonna give maintenance of a YouTube channel passive income stream to be around about 2 out of 5 stars. To use my example, I made 70 videos before I started making any money from YouTube AdSense. And these days, the YouTube channel makes around about $12, 000 a month in passive income from YouTube AdSense. Now, again, this is not entirely passive because I keep on uploading new videos.

But actually, the bulk of the amount of money that we generate from ads is from older videos rather than videos that were uploaded month passive income is around about $3, 000 a week, thanks to this YouTube channel. And thanks to you guys for supporting it and all that stuff. There are other ways of monetizing YouTube, like brand deals and like selling merch and this all, other sort of stuff, but it doesn't really count as passive income through YouTube, which is why I'm not including this in this side hustle assessment matrix. Idea number 3 for making passive income is to start a podcast. This is generally easier than starting a YouTube channel. Although growing a podcast is a lot harder than growing a YouTube channel because because podcasts themselves don't really have a algorithm that's helping them grow. In fact, a lot of podcasts grow by having a YouTube channel, which is kind of weird. Right, so how hard is it to start a podcast? Well, again, 1 out of 5 stars.

It's very, very easy to start a podcast. Go on anchor. Fm, and you can literally use your phone. And you can pass your phone around between you and your friends, and you can start a podcast. You can use a website called riverside. Fm that I've recently invested in as an angel investor. Riverside makes it very easy to record remote podcast interviews. It's very, very easy to start a podcast.

But how hard is it to make $100 a month in passive income from a podcast? Well, again, this is not quite passive income because the way podcasters make money is by relying on brand deals. There is no YouTube AdSense for podcasts. And so you need a sponsorship or a brand deal to make any money for your podcast, generally speaking. And apparently, you can expect to make around $18 for a 30 second ad in a podcast 60 second ad. So if you wanna make a $100 a month and assuming you have a stream of sponsorships who are giving you that level of sponsorship deal based on your download numbers, you would need around a 1000 downloads per episode if you have a weekly podcast. So you would have 4, 000 downloads a month. And if you're putting a 60 second ad in there for $25 per 1, 000 views, that would make you around about $100 a month by having 1, 000 downloads per episode and 4 episodes per month. This begs the question, how hard is it to get a 1, 000 downloads per month? Well, it's a lot harder to get a 1, 000 podcast downloads per month than than it is to get a 1, 000 YouTube views per month.

Because, again, YouTube has so much distribution built in. It's different to podcasts. Also, loads more people are on YouTube than on podcasts. But if we look at the stats, then it's the top 20% of podcasts in the world that get on average more than a 1000 downloads per episode. To use a friend of mine as an example, my housemate, Sheen, started her own podcast around 5 months ago. There will be a link to that in the description if you wanna check it out. And on average, her podcast gets round about 400 to 5 100 downloads per episode. This is not bad at all, especially considering she started 5 months ago and had 0 audience when she started.

So she didn't have the unfair advantage that I did when starting my own podcast, for example. And because she's just launched season 2 of her podcast and has just started posting videos about it on YouTube, that will really help the podcast grow. And I'm pretty sure that in the next 6 months, she'll be she'll be getting to a point where she can quite easily make a $100 a month from her podcast. So going back to our side hustle assessment matrix, starting a podcast, 1 out of 5 stars. Making a $100 a month, I'm gonna give that a 3 out of 5 stars because it's hard, but not as hard as maybe monetizing on YouTube where you have this minimum threshold. And finally, maintenance, well, it's not really passive income because you do have to keep on making podcast episodes because the brand deals are associated with that. But again, once you've stumbled on a formula that works, once you know how to be a podcaster, it's easier to continue going once you've already gotten started, as is the case with most things. And so in terms of maintenance of the podcast, I'm gonna give that 2 stars.

To use me as an example, so me and my brother have a podcast called Not Overthinking, link in the video description if you wanna check it out. But we make around about $6.25 per week from the podcast overall from brand deals and from our membership. All right, so idea number 4 for generating passive income is to become an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing means that you are selling other people's products, but you're getting a percentage of the sales from those products. Now apparently, 48% of affiliate marketers globally earn $20, 000 a year, which is $1, 676 a month, which is actually not bad at all. Like people are doing very well with affiliate marketing overall. So how hard is it to get started with affiliate marketing? Well, I'm gonna give this a 2 out of 5 stars. Basically, you can just sign up to an affiliate program like Amazon Associates.

So Amazon have their own affiliate program, which I think is probably the biggest in the world. And then once you have your little special links, you can post those on your website or on Twitter or on social media or whatever. And if people buy the product through your link, or in fact, buy any product on Amazon through your link, you'll get like some tiny percentage of the sales. So pretty easy to get started with affiliate marketing. But how hard is it to make $100 a month? Well, this is actually kind of hard. So let's say you had a product that was $50 that you were trying to sell, and you were getting 5% commission on it. That would be pretty good. Amazon doesn't offer nearly as much as 5%.

It offers like 2 or 3%, something like that. And let's say your average conversion rate, I. E. People visiting the thing versus people actually buying the product after visiting the thing, let's say that's 1%, which is pretty reasonable for a conversion rate, you would need 8, 000 visits to your website or whatever to make $100 a month. It's actually quite hard get 8, 000 visits per month to your website, to a specific product page. And generally, doing well in affiliate marketing requires lots of upfront effort in terms of either building an audience or building such domain authority in whatever space you're in, that you're sort of organically getting traffic. Now other than Amazon, there are a few other affiliate programmes that I'm part of. 1 of them is Skillshare, who are kindly sponsoring this video.

I'll tell you about the sponsor segment later. But Skillshare have an interesting affiliate programme where if you refer someone to sign up to a free trial of Skillshare, you can get $7 in affiliate commission just for that thing. So if you wanted to make $100 a month from affiliates, you would need 15 people every month to sign up for Skillshare with your affiliate link thing. How hard is it to get 15 people a month to sign up with your affiliate link? Well, it's not that hard if you have an audience. And it's not that hard if you have your own classes on Skillshare like I do, I have like 9 of them. And so if I wanna make money through Skillshare affiliates, I can just tell people, hey, guys. I can tell you that, guys, I've just released my latest Skillshare class, Productivity for Creators, How to Start a Successful Side Hustle. So there'll be a link in the video description if you wanna check that out.

Like, that would be Hopefully, some some of you will see that. We'll click on that link in the description. And then that will be me getting some affiliate income from Skillshare for this video. Going back to our style hustle assessment matrix, how hard is it to make a $100 a month? I'm gonna give this a 3.5 star rating because, again, you need an audience. And as we always talk about on this channel, the way you build an audience is by creating useful content, putting it for free on the internet once a week, and doing this for at least 2 years. If you just follow those 3 steps, I guarantee you'll have an audience and you'll be able to make some kind of money through this passive income stuff. But that's quite hard to do. No 1 sticks to it for at least 2 years.

So we'll give that a 3.5 star rating. But the good news is once you've created it and once you've started making money from affiliates, it's actually quite easy to maintain because especially if you have evergreen content, the sort that isn't relying on like current affairs or the latest news, the sort that people might search for over a long period of time, this becomes like relatively reasonable passive income. Now, if we look at me and my business, these days from Skillshare, we make around about $11, 000 per month in affiliate income, which approximates to around $2, 750 per week. And from Amazon, on average, like it's around about $4.50 a month from the Amazon UK store and a little bit more from the US and Canada. All right, method number 5 of making passive income is by selling digital products. Now these are products that you create once like an ebook or a download or an app or something like that. So you create it once and then you can sell it multiple times because selling digital products doesn't usually have any cost associated with it. 1 really good example is this guy called Traf, who I follow on Twitter, who made an iOS 14 icon set and sold it for like $30 a pop a few months ago, and ended up making I think like $300, 000 in the course of like a few weeks just because loads of people around the world wanted to buy his icon pack.

So he put the work into creating the pack and now he's selling it for lots of money. Another example is my YouTuber friend, Ollier, who has made, as he says, $700, 000 from selling his website Tumblr themes since 2014. So he made the website themes for Tumblr. He sells them and he makes $700, 000 on average, overall since 2014. That's pretty cool. So how hard is it to get started making digital products? I mean, anyone can write an ebook. An ebook counts as a digital product. So I'm gonna give this a 2 star rating, 2 out of 5 stars.

But obviously, like, again, money is an exchange of value. So the thing that you're selling, you have to be providing enough value to compensate to make up for the price that you're selling it for. And that's often quite hard, especially if you don't have any experience in this sort of field. And how hard is it to make $100 a month? Well, you know, it's very easy to create an ebook, but it's a whole different ball game trying to get people to actually buy your ebook, or buy your icon set, or buy your app, or buy your website themes. And And because the market around this stuff is so competitive, like you have to be genuinely really good to get people to buy your stuff. And the way you get people to pay you money for something is that you identify a problem that they have, you solve that problem, and then you charge money for it. And if you can do those 3 things, then it's I wouldn't say it's easy to make $100 a month, but it's very doable to make $100 a month. You just genuinely have to have something that solves a pain point that other people are willing to pay for.

So we're gonna give this a 3 out of 5 stars to make $100 a month from selling digital products. And finally, in terms of maintenance, we're gonna give this a 2 out of 5 stars because usually you do have to maintain your product a little bit, but it's often easier to do, like it's much easier to maintain a product than creating a product 1st place. Idea number 6 for passive income generation is to create an online course. Now online course is sort of like a digital product, but generally online courses are in video format. In fact, this whole video is so long, it could basically have been an entire online course. Maybe I'll do 1 about this very topic. And in terms of getting started, we're gonna give the starting difficulty a 2 out of 5 stars. Because it's not that hard making an online course, but generally you do need to know how to do video.

So, yeah, you actually could film an online course on your iPhone or phone, whatever phone you're using. If you're 1 of those Android heathens, stick your phone on the side, talk to the phone, teach something. So it's not hard creating 1. But in terms of making $100 a month, again, at that point, your course needs to actually be good. And the only reason people will pay for it is if the course is actually good. Now you can avoid having to charge for your online courses by using a website like Skillshare who are very kindly sponsoring this video. I have tonnes of classes in Skillshare. I think we've got 9 on them in total.

I've teaching on Skillshare since September 2019. And I've actually just released my new online class called productivity for creators, how to start a successful side hustle where I teach you the ins and outs of how you can, well, create your own side hustle in your spare time without quitting your job. If you wanna check this out, then the first 1000 people to click the link in the video description will get 30% off the annual Skillshare premium membership. This is actually a really good deal. I pay for Skillshare, I have been paying for it for it for years, even after I started teaching on it because it's genuinely a fantastic place to learn stuff. They've got thousands of classes on all sorts of other topics, but you should definitely check out mine, like the 9 that I've got. There are 3 around productivity now, like the fundamentals of productivity, the sort of productivity equation, which is how I think of productivity and productivity for creators. I have 2 on how you can study for exams if you're in school, if you've got exams to prepare for.

Those apparently are really good. They've got very high ratings. And if you've already had a free trial of Skillshare, then you can still use that that offer. That if you're 1 of the first a 1000 people to hit the link in the video description, you will get 30% off the premium membership and you can check out my class, which I have to say is pretty good. Anyway, thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video. But genuinely Skillshare is a great place to teach stuff because you can teach things on Skillshare without directly having to charge for them, which is why I love putting my courses on Skillshare. It's kinda like having something on Netflix in that the end user does not have to pay directly for the product. And the other nice thing about Skillshare is that it's like the, it's sort of like YouTube in that anyone can upload a class to Skillshare provided it meets certain quality requirements.

And so it's a lot easier than having to make your own website and create your own courses platform and all that kind of stuff. So pretty easy to start, we're gonna give this a 2 out of 5. But how hard is it to make $100 a month from teaching online courses? Now, this kind of depends. If you're going down the Skillshare route, then to make $100 a month on Skillshare, you need around about 1700 minutes of watch time, which is 28 hours of watch time. So if you have a 1 hour class on Skillshare, you need 28 students to take that class every month and watch it with a premium membership, roughly, very broadly speaking. And that will give you round about $100 a month. At least those are based on my figures over the last like 2 years of being on Skillshare. Now, how hard is it to get 28 people a month watching your class? Well, if your class is actually pretty good, it shouldn't be too hard to get 28 people a month watching it.

If you have an existing audience, it's very easy to get 28 people a month watching it because people already know, like, and trust you, hopefully. And so they'll watch your stuff and give you a shot because you've already built that goodwill with them. But the nice again, the nice thing about Skillshare as a platform is that they have like their own algorithm. So the good stuff rises to the top. So if you genuinely have a really, really, really good class and you put it on Skillshare, then even if you don't have an audience, there is still a high chance that if the class is actually good and people watch it a lot and people recommend it and give it high ratings, it will rise to the top and it will start getting recommended to people who find it on the Skillshare homepage or who search for it specifically. The other way of making $100 a month from a course is to just charge $100 for a course. And then if you do that, you just need 1 sale every month. So how hard is it to get 1 person a month to buy your course? Well, again, if it's good, you know, the the world of online education is exploding so much.

Every year, more and more money is being spent on online education, especially with the whole pandemic stuff. So if you have a valuable skill that you can teach, I think courses are 1 of the best and easy or easiest, or 1 of the best ways of making passive income because it's fun to create a course, you can teach stuff, you don't need that many technical skills like making a website or anything like that, just shove it on Skillshare. And then people can take your course and learn on the internet. And like, you know, it's just cool overall. And the nice thing is that once you've made the course, and once you're making $100 a month from it, maintaining that level is actually quite easy. We're gonna give that a 2 out of 5 stars, because generally, you don't need to update the course that often. And you you can do that once in a while. And you just need to make sure you're getting a reasonable amount of traffic to it.

And hopefully, that traffic will grow over time. These days, the vast majority of my online courses, at least the very passive ones are hosted on Skillshare. And it's kind of ridiculous, but these days they make around about 60, 000 to $65, 000 per month in purely passive income. Like, I literally do nothing for my Skillshare glasses once I've made them other than reply to comments and other than occasionally plug them in videos. And that's like $60, 000 a month in passive income. That means this is around about $15, 000 per week. And this makes up the bulk of the $27, 000 a week that this business currently generates in purely passive income. Idea number 7 for passive income is by creating some kind of paid membership or community model.

Now, again, this is generally a bad idea, unless you have an existing audience, which we keep coming back to, like everything becomes easier when you have an existing audience by creating content that has been valuable over a long period of time very consistently. That audience knows, likes and trusts you. And so when you say, hey, guys, sign up to my Patreon, then some people are likely to do that thing. The other way of doing a membership is by creating a value proposition that is so compelling that people will be willing to pay for a community like service for this. If we use Patreon as an example, my friend Hannah Witton, who's a YouTuber, she's got round about 600, 000 subscribers on YouTube. And I think she has around 600 patrons, 626 last time I checked, which means if we look at her Patreon stats, which are public, she's making somewhere between £2, 005, 000 or like $3, 000 $7, 000 per month in passive income from this audience. But it's like 600 people out of an audience of 600, 000. So 1 in a 1000 of her subscribers have signed up to her Patreon.

So clearly, you know, if those stats are true across the board, and they kind of are if you look at Matt D'Vella's Patreon as well, you need a big audience to make a significant amount of money for Patreon. Again, this sort of depends on how much you're charging for them and exactly what value you're providing. Another example of a paid membership community is my friend Anne Lore, who runs a website called Nest Labs. And they have a paid membership community, which is $5 a month. And she started this, when was it, in summer of 2019. She had 0 audience at the time. And she just wrote a 100 blog posts over a 100 working days and built up an audience such that in March 2020, when she launched a membership, she had some paying members for it initially. And I think last month, she's just passed $100, 000 a year in annual recurring revenue, which is pretty awesome from something that started less than 2 years ago.

So how easy is it to start a membership program? Well, it's actually very easy. We can give this a 1 star because it's very easy to start 1. You just make an account on some kind of membership platform like Patreon. But to make a $100 a month, you need to provide a $100 a month worth of value. And that's actually quite hard to do. We're gonna give that a 4 out of 5 stars. But the nice thing is, again, once you've got that formula, once you're making $100 a month, it's actually a lot easier to maintain it because the way the economics of membership communities work is provided you keep showing up and providing value in some capacity, you know, people have already signed up for the thing. So it's not too hard to maintain that level of support that you're offering them.

For this business, we have a membership community for our part time YouTuber Academy for the alumni, which is called the part time YouTuber inner circle. And we make roughly $2, 800 a week from this membership community. It's not very passive. We run like 3 or 4 events per week, along with like twice a day co working events on Zoom, and we have lots of stuff going on. So it takes a lot of work, but $2, 800 a week is pretty good for a membership community. All right, nearly there. So idea number 8 for generating passive income is creating a business that sells goods or services, and then automating or delegating aspects of that business so that the income that you generate from it is reasonably passive. This is the stuff that Tim Ferriss talks a lot about in the 4 hour work week, where there are a lot of businesses you could make where you're selling a good or selling a service, and then you can delegate, outsource, automate and intelligent ways to make the income passive.

So again, using my friend, Oliur, as an example, on his YouTube channel, he talks about his $1, 000, 000 Shopify store. He designs, manufactures and sells these really cool vegan leather kind of desk accessories and bags and mouse pads and that kind of stuff. And this was loads of work in setting up, but now he's got a team of 3 other people that manage the business. And so he spends proportionally less of his time running that business. And so it's sort of passive income for him. Even though these days, he still does spend around 10 hours a week maintaining things. Equally, if you're going down the service route, I've got a friend who runs Instagram and Facebook ads marketing agency where he has clients who pay him some, I think a few $100 per month to manage their Facebook and Instagram ads. And for him, it's like a small amount of work initially to set up the Facebook and Instagram ads.

But then it's sort of automated, and he's got a team around it. And he's used using things like Zapier to automate aspects of that business, so that each month he has to do a very small amount of actual work to keep it ticking along. So these are different ways of generating passive income from a kind of goods or service based business. But it's quite hard to get started with this stuff. To get started, we're gonna give this a 4 out of 5 star rating. Because again, you need to create a business and it's quite hard to make a business that genuinely provides value. Equally, we're gonna give it a 4 out of 5 star rating for making $100 a month in revenue. Because again, you have to be able to provide value.

And providing value is hard. Like, it's not as easy as making an account on a stocks platform and just putting some money in. You actually have to give value to people, which is kinda hard. But the nice thing is once you get started, like with anything, maintenance is a little bit easier. So we're gonna give that a 3 out of 5 star rating. Finally, idea number 9 for generating passive income is to build an app or a website or some kind of software product that you can offer either as a 1 off or more likely these days as a subscription service. And there's a whole category of this called SaaS, software as a service. Now, if you look at the website, indiehackers.com, there are like literally hundreds of examples of people who have built software businesses that are making passive income, and they share their revenue numbers, and they tell you how they got started, and they give you their tips.

In fact, I was recently interviewed on an episode of the Indie Hackers podcast, which which is really cool because I've been listening to it for years, like following their website for years. And I was interviewed around the concept of starting an online course like the part time YouTuber Academy. Now I've had a bit of personal experience with this. So when I was at university, I made a website called BMAT Ninja and UKCAT Ninja. So software as a service, it was a question bank for medical applicants applying to medical school to help them do well in the admissions tests. And this was something that me and my brother coded completely from scratch. He and I both know how to code, we learned when we were young. And so we worked over the summer of 2015 to make these things happen.

I think in year 1, we made about $10, 000 And in year 5 last year, it was around $25, 000 from VMAT Ninja. So, you know, it's pretty good money, but it was a lot of work to set these things up. And so in terms of starting out, I'm gonna give this a 5 out of 5 star rating because to make an app, it's actually quite hard. You have to know how to code for the most part. You have to be able to offer something compelling and you have to actually build it, which takes a lot of work and is very hard, but it's a lot of fun. And then once you've made it, I'm gonna give $100 a month difficulty a 4 star rating, because again, it's easy, well, easy enough. You can make an app, but then getting people to pay for the app is an entirely different cuddle of fish. So we're gonna give that 4 stars.

But the nice thing is, like with everything, maintenance is a little bit easier, So we're gonna give that a 3 star rating. If you like this video and you wanna get started with your own entrepreneurship passive income generating journey on the internet, check out this short playlist over here, which is some of my favourite videos that I've made around tips for entrepreneurs, how I got started creating my businesses from scratch, how I learned to code, that sort of stuff. That's all in the playlist over here. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.