Sticking to my diet has been hard of late, especially when friends and family birthday celebrations can nudge you to fall off the wagon. Recently my weight has fluctuated like a heart rate monitor, but I press on regardless and still fully intend to make my two-stone target by May.

And it’s just as hard when trying to stick to a regime of earning some extra cash during the coming year.

It’s one thing earning a one-off amount of cash, possibly by doing some extra work or buying something to resell for a profit, but it’s much harder should you want to keep the additional flow of income coming in on a regular basis.

To achieve this we have to invest much more of our precious time, by going through the same motions over and over again… and that can be mentally and physically tiring.

I have found the very best way to bring in regular amounts of money is to automate the whole process, and this dovetails neatly with a question which I have often been asked:

What would you do if you had to start earning money all over again from scratch? What action would you take? What would be your winning formula?

This is my recommended course of action for anyone wanting to make consistent earnings online:

It took me ages for the penny to finally drop, but I now know that the very best way to earn regular income online is to create your ‘own’ digital product, and then sell it.

And on the face of it this sounds difficult, so you could be forgiven for backing away at this point, as I did for so many years… but it’s the truth.

Think for a moment about all the people that you regularly see within the Internet Marketing world, and I’ll bet my bottom dollar that they all have, somewhere in their arsenal, one or more digital products for sale. These products generate a reliable flow of passive income which gives their life stability.

There is nothing wrong with earning money from buying and selling products (I also do this, as part of my overall sales mix, to give me a balanced portfolio) or by becoming an affiliate and selling other people’s products, except for the fact that you have to keep investing your time in order to repeat the sales process.

But with a digital product it’s different. In a nutshell, you do have to do some work at the outset to create your product, and then set up a sales process, but after that you have an asset that keeps on selling for you, night and day. And an asset which you don’t have to keep replacing every time a copy is sold.

‘Ah’, I hear you cry, ‘but it’s not that simple… don’t you have to drive traffic to your product?’ Everyone conveniently forgets about that, don’t they?

‘And what about creating the product in the first place? Surely that’s easier said than done?’

…Okay, two very valid points, I accept, and by way of response, I would like to recommend two excellent websites, each of which go a long way to solving both objections:

• Amazon’s Kindle platform – For digital ebooks.

• Udemy.com – Founded in 2010, ‘Udemy.com is a platform or marketplace for online learning. Unlike academic MOOC programs driven by traditional collegiate coursework, Udemy provides a platform for experts of any kind to create courses.’ (Wikipedia)

I use both these platforms and cannot recommend them highly enough, as they both provide the perfect stable platform to host digital products. They also offer great advice with regard to product creation, as well as help you get all the customer visibility you need. They are ‘traffic magnets’ in their own right.

Traffic

Kindle, on the back of Amazon, is currently a global superstar, with truly a worldwide reach in terms of potential customers. One could say that they have single-handedly changed the way the world reads books.

Udemy, although relatively new, has experienced massive worldwide growth since its inception in 2010, with a huge database of customers for you to tap into.

Hosting your product on either or both of these platforms will give you global exposure which you could never have hoped to achieve with a self-hosted personal website.

Product creation

Neither Kindle nor Udemy will create your product for you, but they do offer you plenty of advice as to how to set about the task of product creation.

Suffice to say that it’s not possible for me to give product creation training in this space-limited newsletter. But I would however like to offer one tip; one which I have personally found to work exceptionally well:

Find one urgent problem, that many people might encounter at some point in their lives… define it, describe the pain of its presence and the joy of its absence, and then offer a quick and sure-fire solution – without fluff or padding.

This is a powerful paragraph, which is easy to skip over, so let’s take a closer look:

• One problem – not many problems, just zero-in on one urgent problem. It does not have to be a large problem but must be urgent… one that really cannot wait to be addressed some other day, e.g. how to stop a dog barking.

• Many people – it should be a common problem, one often encountered by many people. This will ensure a large potential customer market.

• Describe the pain of its presence and the joy of its absence – this agitates the problem, bringing it to life in the mind of the reader, quickly followed by a rosy picture of their life restored to the way they would like it – by adopting your solution.

• Your solution – will come from researching and becoming a mini-expert on one simple topic.

• Keep it Short – avoid fluff or filler: it’s not needed or required. People will pay for an effective solution which does the job, no matter how short.

Last year I earned in excess of £20,000 by using Kindle and Udemy to host my digital products. And the beauty of this income was that it required very little work on my part in order for the money to keep rolling in.

Yes, I did have to do some work two or three years ago to set up my original digital products, but after that the income becomes ‘almost’ passive, although I do keep adding a few new products each year just to keep up the momentum.

So to re-iterate, if I were to start off from scratch, my recommendation would be to create digital products and to host them on sites like Udemy and Kindle.

Oh, and one last objection worth overcoming: that being the thought, ‘I’ve left it too late to start that sort of thing…’ No you haven’t. In my humble opinion, it’s never too late to start.

Until next week.

Richard