The idea of passive income is a myth.
Passive income is not passive—not truly and completely. (Except for the dividends and interest from your money making money for you.)
Real estate is not passive. You have to buy it; you have tenants; someone else has to manage your properties. If people don’t pay their rent, you have all sorts of issues.
Courses are not passive income. Even if you sell a course, it has to be maintained and updated. People are forever losing their log-ins and passwords. There’s never not going to be work involved.
There’s a lot of maintenance that goes with things positioned as passive income.
BUT. There is an exception. There is one form of passive income that I absolutely love. I uncovered this secret years ago, and I made a commitment to it for life.
Writing books.
Books can be an unbelievably powerful and profitable source of passive income.
But this truth comes with a caveat.
You have to make sure that, if you want to build a book library as passive income, you keep one very important thing in mind.
It is a long game. An extremely long game.
A lot of people have set out to write a book. Most people never get it written. And most people don’t really understand how to build a brand so they can get to the point where having a book actually matters.
I started writing books as part of my brand in 2015. When I saw the power of my first book and how much it elevated my brand, I recognized the unbelievable brand-building power of books that is unmatched by anything else.
People who read your book will want to work with you and want to join your program. You build a really unique relationship through that reader experience. And, once your books are finished, they really truly are passive income. You can build up a book library where, as your brand grows, people still buy your books. You can get to the point where you’re living off of your book sales. Your books pay the bills.
But, let me repeat, building passive income from book sales is an extremely long game. I want to be honest and direct about this, even if I have to say it over and over again. I don’t want to mislead anyone. This is not easy or simple.
But it’s an opportunity to do something really special—if you’re willing to put in the work.
If you don’t work like the 1%, you’re not going to be in the 1% of successful entrepreneurs. You can actually make massive amounts of book sales if you do the work. But you have to market; you have to lean in; you have to build your brand constantly.
Book sales are a byproduct of building your brand.
You can’t just write a book and expect to make big money off of it. If you’re just playing around with the idea of a business or a book, but you’re not doing the work to build a brand right now, would I recommend writing a book? No. Your book will just sit there. It won’t sell itself.
My goal and vision for my company is to make a global impact and keep scaling the business online. Writing books fits with my goal. My commitment to myself going forward is that I will write and produce a book every year for the rest of my career.
If you’re focused on making a global impact and building an international brand, if you want to become peerless and recognized in your space, would I recommend writing a book to scale your business?
100% YES.
You can write a cookbook, a journal, a self-help book, a how-to book, or anything else associated with your brand. As long as you’re building a brand, and you’re committed to that, you will, as a byproduct, build a snowball of book sales that will grow and grow.
Here’s another really cool thing: books can be a part of both your frontend and backend business strategies.
How?
On the front end, your book can be used to scale up your flagship offer faster, easier, and cheaper than any other strategy.
On the back end, sending your book to the key people for your top-tier offering is a good strategy for adding extreme value in a really credible way that will move people through your ascension ladder.
You give away digital copies for free, and you’ll get leads for a fraction of the price you’ll get at any other time. The leads you get opting in for a free digital copy of your book will be way cheaper to begin with, because it’s so valuable and people are so motivated to read the book.
Most people’s ability to scale is blocked by the fact that they can’t afford to invest enough upfront to produce the backend sales at the level they want to. When you use the digital download of your book as the front end of your launch, it will drop your cost per lead acquisition down to a quarter of what it would have been, which opens the floodgates for you to scale at a rate you never would have been able to before.
The power of a book from a credibility and authority standpoint is endless, if you use it the right way. We send out our books constantly to our leads, especially people we want in our Legacy Leaders program. Books are incredible lead generation tools.
I get feedback every day from people who are in my community because they found my book on Amazon or on my website, or friends sent it to them, and now they’re some of our best clients and our biggest success stories.
If you are working really hard to build a legitimate company and a global brand, if you’re willing to play the long game, you should strongly consider writing a book to create passive income.
As we launch my third book, The Live Launch Method, we are hosting a unique opportunity to anyone who orders 5 copies of the book. On June 5th, I will be hosting a half-day workshop where I walk you step by step through the process of writing your book and using it to sell your offers. You can’t buy access to this workshop. The only way to get in is by pre-ordering a book bundle. This workshop will literally walk you through the exact process I use with my own books. To join, purchase your book bundle, click here!
