Every three months I detail all the passive income profit my online business has earned. Passive income is money you can earn in your sleep. Or, to put it another way, money you earn from a business asset – for example, the selling of a digital product. If you sell more of the product, you therefore make more money without having to work more.
I know my passive income reports have proved useful to other entrepreneurs and business owners and I’m delighted for that. However, the last report showed a profit drop which has caused me to re-evaluate my business – more of that later.
Passive income is money you earn in your sleep because you have built (or own) an asset Share on XMy passive income
As I say, passive income is income you can earn in your sleep. My various passive income streams include: the sales of digital products (such as e-books and video courses), affiliate commissions and advertising revenue.
Last quarter I made $13,578.49 passive income profit. The target for this quarter is $25,000. Let’s see how I got on.
Udemy
Udemy is an online learning platform that I’ve been on for over two years. It’s been a great ride although, as you’ll see below, it’s been plateauing at a lower level than I’d enjoyed before.
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2014 Q4 | $15,473.59 |
| 2015 Q1 | $15,659.30 |
| 2015 Q2 | $11,381.66 |
| 2015 Q3 | $11,646.15 |
I had been averaging over $5000 per month. This quarter, again, we only got only $11,646.15 – less than the $15+k quarters of a few months back. And I released a new course in this quarter.
I’m looking forward to the last quarter of the year (which includes the best month – November) to see how we get on.
Skillfeed
Big news: Skillfeed, another online learning platform, decided to shut up shop on September 30th 2015. The income was around $400 a month. Nice while it lasted. But there will be no more from Skillfeed. 🙁
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2014 Q4 | $1,177.43 |
| 2015 Q1 | $1,190.05 |
| 2015 Q2 | $1,201.46 |
| 2015 Q3 | $811.79 |
Skillshare
Skillshare is hopefully going to “replace” the earnings I’ll lose from Skillfeed. I do seem to be gaining traction on this platform.
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2015 Q1 | $531.16 |
| 2015 Q2 | $852.27 |
| 2015 Q3 | $921.05 |
Other online learning platforms and deals sites
There are many more places where you can put courses. I’m sure there is more money to be made out there. For example, Stone River eLearning made me: $146.90 this quarter. And, Dealfuel, which is a “Deals” site, I made $116.39 in revenue from them in the last three months.
Here’s an article I wrote about alternatives to Udemy.
Amazon Kindle
Kindle publishing is great for a personal brand like mine. Having multiple Amazon bestselling books certainly sounds good but I’m not sure if the meagre revenue is a great return for the amount of time I’ve put in to writing, publishing and publicising the following seven books:
- Running A Web Design Business From Home: How To Find and Keep Good Clients and Make Money with Your Home Business
- How To Sell Video Courses Online: How I make $2000+ passive income every month
- From Freelancer to Entrepreneur: Escaping work and finding happiness
- Build a Brand, Create Products and Earn Passive Income
- Create the Website You Want with WordPress
- Free Your Thoughts: How I Re-programmed Myself For Happiness And How You Can Too
- Free Yourself, Leave Your Job and Be Your Own Boss: A Guide for Entrepreneurs
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2014 Q4 | $2410.45 |
| 2015 Q1 | $1694.01 |
| 2015 Q2 | $1301.56 |
| 2015 Q3 | $1393.91 |
Again this is plateauing at a lower level than before despite having more books.
The red line above constitutes book sales. The three peaks are from promos – either from an email promo to my newsletter subscribers or from Buck Books.
The blue line above are the amount of pages read by the people who’ve “borrowed” or downloaded my book through the Kindle Unlimited program. I have been making less money since Amazon changed the commission structure for Kindle Unlimited.
| Period | Number of books sold |
|---|---|
| 2014 Q4 | 1662 |
| 2015 Q1 | 494 |
| 2015 Q2 | 1119 |
| 2015 Q3 | 1126 |
So, I have revised my Kindle strategy. I won’t be writing any new books in the foreseeable future but, instead, I’ll be updating old titles and re-promoting them. I’ll tell you more about this in subsequent blog posts.
My membership site
A bit of good news! (Well, it’s all good, but … )
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2014 Q4 | $974 |
| 2015 Q1 | $3,681 |
| 2015 Q2 | $851 |
| 2015 Q3 | $2405.01 |
Back in Q1, I did a “Jeff Walker style” launch of my course: Earn $5000+ a Month Passive Income Selling E-books and Video Courses. This involved creating 4 free videos of 15 minutes each and a lot of extra work. And in that quarter I made $3,681. But in this quarter, Q3, I did very little except mail my list about a special discount on one of my courses and I made $2405.01 in sales.
So, no more “Jeff Walker style” launches. But plenty more one-off course discounting for my subscribers.
Google advertising income
This is revenue from ads on my YouTube channel as well as a little bit of Adsense on my website.
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2014 Q4 | $357.53 |
| 2015 Q1 | $372.84 |
| 2015 Q2 | $324.89 |
| 2015 Q3 | $295.96 |
A friend of mine suggested I reduce the Adsense on my site which may account for the slight drop here.
Affiliate sales
I am an affiliate for certain products that I recommend or mention here. I get a commission if a sale is made through one of my affiliate links. The links below are affiliate links!
| Affiliate product | 2014 Q4 | 2015 Q1 | 2015 Q2 | 2015 Q3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Genesis WordPress theme | $253.53 | $777.95 | $240.28 | $298.14 |
| WPML WordPress Multi-Lingual plugin | $885 | $712 | $675 | $296 |
| Aweber email marketing and delivery | $72.90 | $77.70 | $86.40 | $104.70 |
| Others | $20 | $430.77 | $504.48 | $521.20 |
| Total: | $1230.90 | $1998.42 | $1506.16 | $1220.04 |
Others include:
GravityForms: $19.80;
WishList Member $207.03;
Dreamhost $103.84;
Buckbooks: $7;
Udemy via Linkshare: $133.26.
This article shows you how to make money with affiliate commissions by blogging.
Total revenue
So, if we add it all up. My passive income revenue in the third quarter of 2015 was: $19,027.20 that’s slightly up from $17,708.49 last quarter.
Expenses
Here are the expenses I’ve incurred for this quarter.
| What? | How much per quarter? |
|---|---|
| Outsourcing (oDesk, Elance and direct) | $1800 (est.) |
| Hosting (LiquidWeb) | $270 |
| Email marketing (Aweber) | $400 |
| Cloud storage (Dropbox) | $30 |
| Video storage (Vimeo) | $30 |
| Audio storage (Libsyn) | $30 |
| SSL (Godaddy) | $15 |
| Domain registration (NameCheap) | $25 |
| Kindle editing, formatting, and promos | $400 |
| Total | $3000 |
Remember that some of these expenses are company expenses that are incurred to support my active income. For example, web hosting is needed for my web design business which isn’t passive.
But I always like to err on the side of caution with these income reports as I’d hate to exaggerate here. So, bear in mind that these figures are always an underestimation.
This quarter’s total passive income profit
So the revenue ($19,027.20) minus the expenses ($3,000) is … $16,027.20 which is, again a slight improvement on last quarter’s $13,578.49 – but still far from my best.
This lower plateauing has caused me to re-think a lot of my business strategies. I will explain more about this in a subsequent article on this blog.
A really important point is this. Profit size isn’t important! OK. Money is important to business but so is re-investing profits. I’ve suddenly realised a really painful truth: I have been holding back from spending money because I’ve wanted to show larger profits here and that is really stupid!
I will be investing a lot more of my profits from now on in various areas. Some I will tell you about; some I won’t. As I say, stay tuned for further developments.
If your business has a surplus of cash, reinvest the profits to grow further Share on XComparison with previous quarters
| Period | Revenue |
|---|---|
| Q3 2012 | $2,447.10 |
| Q4 2012 | $2,611.03 |
| Q1 2013 | $2,036.93 |
| Q2 2013 | $3,949.05 |
| Q3 2013 | $5,191.36 |
| Q4 2013 | $4,626.56 |
| Q1 2014 | $7,215.82 |
| Q2 2014 | $10,230.49 |
| Q3 2014 | $15,435.79 |
| Q4 2014 | $21,624.45 |
| Q1 2015 | $23,118.12 |
| Q2 2015 | $13,578.49 |
| Q3 2015 | $16,027.20 |
Target for next quarter
My target for next quarter, Quarter 4 2015, is: $20,000 passive income profits.
Previous passive income and business reports
H1 2012
Q3 2012
Q4 2012
Q1 2013
Q2 2013
Q3 2013
Q4 2013
Q1 2014
Q2 2014
Q3 2014
Q4 2014
Q1 2015
Q2 2015
You can do it
You can make this much passive income if you just follow what I’ve done. All the details can be found here in my free mini course on passive income.
I’m interested to hear what you think in the comments.
Yet more evidence that you can earn life changing passive income from great content Share on X
Hey Rob,
What are some of the task you are outsourcing on Upwork.com (ODesk) and Elance? Have you considered promoting your courses on other websites or maybe offering older courses for $1 to bring those students into your newer courses? Do you offer coaching? What about a Podcast? I know that myself and others really enjoy your work and see you as a mentor.
DJ
Hey Dennis, wow, a lot of questions! 🙂
Tasks on Upwork: writing, website development, course copying from one platform to another, video editing, etc.
Have you considered promoting your courses on other websites or maybe offering older courses for $1?: No, sorry, the price is too low even for me. I have a lower limit of $11.
Do you offer coaching? Yes, here’s my coaching request form.
What about a Podcast? I tried and I failed. I’m concentrating on webinars for the moment.
I hope this helps. I know I should do more on helping people succeed on Udemy and other places. but bear with me 🙂
Speak soon (Thursday next?)
I absolutely agree with you Rob. Profit size isn’t important! Money is important to business but so is re-investing profits.
People invest in shares, stocks and mutual funds to see a 5-15% return every year. For an entrepreneur however, we can double, triple or even get 10 times the return within a month if we invest intelligently. We own the business and we have full control.
There shouldn’t be anything to hold you back. I am sure your readers will understand when they see that you will be investing a majority of your profit to scale up.
All the best. Good luck !
Cheers!
Harsh
Hi Harsh. Exactly, profit is great and it is the ultimate validation for your business. But as long as you have enough money to pay for food and accommodation you really need to invest the profits of your business back into your business (or new ones).
Thank you for your reassurance, my next blog post will be more specifically about this very important question. See you soon!
Hello Rob.
I see that you are making at least 5000 every month. For me, that would be great. I agree that you should invest back into the business. We all want money, but all you really need is a little more than enough. Also, your expenses are not too high just yet. It’s always good to keep your eye on your expenses. Only you can really tell when your expenses are too high. Thanks for the new course and the new book. I will be looking into them. All the best my friend. Keep up the good work, while you try to make it great. As always, I wish more success.
Rene.
Exactly, Rene, we only need a little money. Just enough to feel comfortable. It’s not about the money. I don’t know why I got so protective of my profits though. Never mind!
This is so informative, thanks Rob!
Cheers,
Wassim.
Cheers, Wassim, hope it helps.
Hi Rob,
Are you also on StackSkills? Found one post that you were making some money there as well. I just got accepted over there and a friend tells me he’s been pulling in 1k+ per month. Was curious how you were doing over there?
John, I can not believe I missed that one. Obviously my network with other instructors wasn’t as strong as I thought it was. I’ve emailed them and I’m hoping to hear back soon. Thank you so much for this.
Let me know how it works out for you. I also just told John Colley about this and he emailed them as well.
I was also curious, do you do any partnerships on Udemy courses? I just published a course with Jerry Banfield and I’m always looking to do more with other Udemy instructors. I’ve got almost 20k students now and over 20 courses.
Hello John, I just did my first partnership on a Udemy course. It went very well.
I just sent an introduction email for you to my contact at StackCommerce. If you ever have any ideas for a co-partnership course I’d be happy to discuss ideas with you.
Thanks
Also, what is your email? I can make an introduction for you to the stackskills contact I have.
It’s rob @ robcubbon.com, John. Thanks, I appreciate it.