Passive income…the Holy Grail for most people…
And I read something about it this week that got me thinking.
Someone was talking about the kind of passive income where a digital product just sits there making money while you’re doing other things. And the comments were full of people who seemed to think it happens by accident. That someone sits down, makes a thing and money appears.
That’s not what happens.
What actually happens is much less glamorous. Someone makes something. Puts it out before they feel ready. Gets almost no response. Makes something else. Puts that out too. Learns a bit. Adjusts. Puts out another one. And over time they build enough visibility that the sales start to feel almost automatic.
Almost…Not actually.
The passive part comes later. The work comes first.
I think a lot of people stay stuck because they spend too long perfecting something nobody is looking at. They tweak, rename, redesign, decide it needs one more section…
Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, someone else puts out a simple, imperfect, genuinely useful little guide and starts learning from actual buyers instead of their own second-guessing.
The difference between those two people isn’t talent or luck. It’s just that one of them put it out there so other people could buy.
The Visibility Problem
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to…
Even when people do publish, most of what goes out just sits there. Not because it’s bad but because no-one could find it.
There’s a difference between creating content and creating visible content. Random posting is easy. Getting found by the right people takes a bit more thought…
But it’s also more practical and less glamorous than most marketing advice makes it sound.
It comes down to one question: where are the people who already want what you’re selling?
Not where you wish they were. Where they actually are. What are they searching for? What are they typing into Google, Amazon, Pinterest, YouTube at the moment they’re ready to spend money?
When you start with that question instead of “how do I get more traffic?” everything gets a bit easier.
Five Things Worth Looking At This Week
CoSchedule Headline Analyser – Still one of the quickest ways to tighten a title. Paste in your headline and it gives you an instant breakdown of whether it’s working – word balance, emotional resonance, clarity. Free, no account needed for basic use.
coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
AlsoAsked – This one I keep coming back to for good reason. Type any topic and it pulls the “People Also Ask” questions from Google and maps them as a tree so you can see exactly how buyers think about a problem with one question leading to the next. Genuinely useful for finding content angles that match search intent rather than guessing.
Glimpse – A Chrome extension that adds trend data directly to your Google search results. You can see whether a topic is growing, declining, or seasonal while you’re actually searching without having to open a separate tool. Free tier is generous.
Pexels – If you create any visual content, Pexels has become my first stop for free images and video clips that don’t look like stock photos. The video library in particular has improved enormously and the quality is well above what you’d expect for free.
Hemingway Editor – Paste any piece of writing in and it highlights sentences that are too long, passive voice, unnecessary adverbs, and readability issues. The desktop version is paid but the browser version is completely free. Worth running any sales page or email through it before you publish.
Your TED Talk This Week
Nir Eyal on what makes technology so habit-forming.
About 40% of what we do every day is purely habit and the companies that understand that build products people can’t put down. Eyal explains the psychology behind it and, more usefully, how the same principles can be applied to anything you’re building or selling.
The bit that I think is most important for you…it’s rarely about the product itself. It’s about whether the product shows up at the right moment, in the right context, when someone is already primed to use it.
About 13 minutes.
One More Thing
My new guide, It’s Not The Traffic, has just gone live.
It’s about getting your offer in front of people who are already searching for it rather than chasing random views that never turn into sales. Seven steps, a weekend, done.
If you’ve been sitting on something and waiting until it’s perfect before anyone sees it, this will get it out there and, more importantly, seen so people can buy it.
Super cheap right now as I want this to be as accessible as possible:
