My Crazy Passive Income Experiment Part 4 – The Wash-Up

So I’ll be honest. While I wasn’t expecting to escape the cubicle and make a real passive income out of something that’s only $97, I sort of expected to sell at least “something”. I haven’t, so I’m a little disappointed.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and this experiment is no exception. I’ve learnt some things I’d like to share.

Copy and Ad writing is fun but hard. I’ve have actually had a bit of “mini” success with the art of copy writing. I experienced a click through rate over the industry standard of 1.1% so for every 100 people that saw my Ad 2 people would actually click through to my site. At this point you’re probably thinking that’s pretty crap and you’d be right, but it’s highly, HIGHLY competitive out there with professional copywriters creating killer Ad’s every day. So I reckon my CTR of 2.2% for a complete newbie is good.

Starting my first passive income mini site in the super competitive “quit smoking” niche probably wasn’t the best idea. To give you an idea of how hard I got my I got my ass kicked, I can equate it to trying to learn to drive a powerful racing car and your first race is a grand prix not a weekend club run. Just like in motor racing I managed to pay lots of money to experience disappointment.

You need to be technical. I don’t care what anyone says, you NEED to be technical to start a passive income business plain and simple! I have run into all sorts of technical problems with simple things like submitting sites to Google, setting up and linking hosting accounts, setting up domains and the list goes on. I won’t even mention the fact that you NEED to be able to code CSS and HTML. Despite what anyone says IT’S COMPLETELY INESCAPABLE.

Understanding the target market. Here is where I think I’ve really learnt the harsh reality of passive income generation, understanding the target market.

What I’ve seen in countless case studies and endless soul searching is that people usually follow a pattern when making money on the internet. They use THEIR knowledge from a previous profession which can be as diverse as carpet cleaning, to as corporate as project management and they create an information product from THEIR KNOWLEDGE. This has lots of obvious benefits but I think the number one benefit is that they are perceived as “EXPERTS” in their field. Because they know a thing or two about their market they can use their knowledge to create and promote products into that market.

Obviously being in a hurry to escape the cubicle I tried to circumvent this process by reselling other peoples products. I struggled because I don’t really know the target market.

Hold on though!

The “marketing guru’s” say that you don’t need your own product, you can resell others and be successful and of course they are right. But, and this is a big but, most of the successful people cut their teeth by selling their own products or services first then build up to reselling later on. Coming back to motorsport analogy it’s like learning to drive fast around safe weekend club tracks before lining up for a grand prix. Makes sense right…..

So what’s it all mean then for the passive income system I purchased?

Well, it means I’m unable to fully exploit it at this stage. It’s like I’ve been handed a sports car without understanding how to change gears, I’m not getting out of first but I can see the potential.

Right, what’s next then?

Well, eventually I want to create my own cubicle escape flavoured product so let the brain storm begin!

I’m thinking the Great cubicle Escape Manifesto!

If I was to create my own product about escaping the cubicle what would you guys like to read about?