Passive income for Virtual Assistants? Yep, it’s a thing! If you’ve been a service based professional for a while – you might be wondering: When is the right time to incorporate passive income or products for my Virtual Assistant business? Because trust me, there is definitely a RIGHT time, and a WRONG time. Ready to dig into this topic? There’s a lot to unpack!
What is passive income?
For online service-based professionals, passive offers often generate income that requires little time from you. They work “behind the scenes” to create income streams to supplement your service work. Passive income for virtual assistants often look like: digital courses or mini-courses, e-books, pre-recorded masterclasses, and affiliate marketing. Sounds great, right? Who doesn’t want to make money while they sleep?
Most people decide to create a passive offer for two (not so great) reasons.
Before I reveal them, it’s important to remember that you need to be brutally honest with yourself about why you’re considering a passive offer. If it’s for one of these reasons – throw up a stop sign, and reevaluate.
- Your business isn’t growing as fast or as well as you’d like, or
- It feels like it would be easier to make money this way and avoid the discomfort of marketing and building a service-based business.
Yikes, I know that last one stung a little, so let me digress for a moment. Building ANY business is hard, but a service-based business depends on constantly putting yourself out there and marketing your business in ways that may feel intensely uncomfortable. It’s natural to start trying to find shortcuts or an easier path to financial success. I’m all about shortcuts and easier paths if they are actually shortcuts. But if that’s the reason you’re creating a passive offer, you’ll usually find that instead of a shortcut, you took an extended detour. Bummer, right?
I’m here to make sure that when you jump into creating a passive offer – you and your audience are ready for it! How can we know that? There are FIVE questions I want you to ask yourself before you jump into the passive income ocean. Once again, that honesty is going to be necessary to evaluate your motives and objectively assess where your business stands today.
Number One: Why do you want to create this offer?
Is it to make extra money? Do you have an idea that you’re passionate about? Is your audience begging you for it? If you don’t know why you’re creating this – or you’re just doing it for the money, that might not be a good enough reason.
Number Two: Do you have time to create the offer?
Is the creation of this passive income offer going to take you away from the things that tick the needle in your current business? If you don’t have time to devote to the business you’re already growing, it’s NOT a good idea to take more time away from that business to devote to something else. It becomes a distraction.
Here’s how you know if you have time: Consider your current client load and the business you are working on growing. Have you MET your income goals? Or are you still guessing where your next client is coming from? Do you have a marketing plan in place? If you’re nodding your head, yes, yes, and yes – Congrats! NOW we can talk about passive offers. The passive offers that are the most successful come AFTER success in your actual business, not before.
Number Three: How am I selling this product?
Here comes the most important part of this blog. Because let’s be real, it doesn’t matter how amazing, valuable, and unique your product is. There is one thing you HAVE to have to launch a successful passive product, and that is people to buy it. The most direct path to success with a passive product is to wait to launch it until you have a built in audience that needs this product.
This isn’t about a specific number of followers on social media. It’s about a loyal following who already likes, knows, and trusts you. I won’t lie, there is a lot of competition out there. Sometimes it’s not about a better product, it’s about who’s more visible and who has the best marketing strategy for their product or offer. This is why building a brand on social media is so important for all service providers, even if you already have a full roster.
Bottom line, you need an audience that you are already consistently nurturing and serving. If you know that you eventually want to have a passive product, you have to start NOW. This looks like a consistent social media presence or a strong email marketing strategy that will eventually become the customers or clients for your passive or supplemental offer.
Something else to consider…
If you already have a solid social media audience, here’s a follow-up question for you: Are they the RIGHT audience for this product? If you’ve done something successfully and you want to teach it – great! But does your audience want this? If you have an audience that is primarily following you because you are a done-for-you service provider, a product to help them “do it themselves” might work. But there is still MORE to consider. Do they want to do it themselves? It’s possible you have built an audience of people who want help and aren’t interested in self-help solutions.
It may be necessary to build a new audience OR pivot in your messaging towards people who want this help vs. want it done for them. After evaluating the wants and needs of your audience, you might find that you’re better off creating a new brand with a different platform where your messaging speaks to the people who would want to purchase this passive offer.
If you only remember one thing from this blog, remember this:
Just because you can create something doesn’t mean you should, or that now is the right time for it.
Let’s circle back to that “honesty” thing that we talked about earlier. Because if you want one final question to help you narrow in on if it’s time for a passive offer, it’s this one:
Is creating a passive offer a distraction to avoid what I’m really supposed to be doing? If you’re using this as a way to try to get where you want to go faster, you will likely be disappointed. If you’re using this to avoid doing the hard work of building your DFY business, you’re going to find it’s just a distraction, and not a shortcut. It would be more beneficial for you to build a solid brand and social media presence in your service-based business FIRST.
Passive income for Virtual Assistants and service providers isn’t a pipe dream. There are women doing both and doing both well. Someday you won’t always need to trade time for dollars, but when you are building a business, that’s how it usually starts.
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