How to Retire in 12 Months

My thinking…

To create a passive income I needed to find something that was:

• valuable
• scalable
• easy to distribute

For my own personal reasons it also needed to be:

• a positive contribution to my customers
• something I am passionate about

What is something I could create once and distribute over and over without massive costs?

INFORMATION… in particular - information that helps people solve certain problems.

What I did…

Being a business coach I have a ready supply of problems thrown at me. So I asked myself what is one of the most common problems that my clients face and voila! I had an idea for a product that could be valuable to people in the same position as my clients.

Next I created a plan for how it would be structured and there was so much information that I broke it into 10 topics and started to write topic 1. I enlisted the help of an old colleague to co-write the product as she had complementary knowledge that would make the product twice as useful.

So for the last few months we have been writing whenever we get the opportunity. It has taken shape beautifully and I am really quite proud of what we have created.

If I made an estimate on the amount of time we have spent collectively writing and editing topic 1 I would say approx 130 hours solid. And I expect this to drop for future topics because of what we have learned from writing topic 1.

We sent the product to groups of people for testing and feedback 3 times and we adjusted it after each round based on the feedback.

One thing I noticed was the amount of knowledge that we had in this area and how we needed to cut back the content for people who were new to the topic.

What I learned…

What has worked well is that we both have a lot of experience in the area that we are writing on and we are both passionate about it. We also added everything that we thought would benefit the customer and it was confronting to create a document from years of experience that could be consumed in a few hours! But once we got over that we were proud to be able to create something that we both consider of great value to our target customers.

What I would do differently for the next topic is create a clear structure for the construction of the document, especially when both of us are working on the same content. Also we were able to write this topic just from our experiences in coaching people. Some of the future topics will require a lot more research and in those cases I would want to survey people before commencing writing.

I have decided now to post most of my blogs in this format:

My thinking

What I did

What I Learned

What do you think? Does it work?

: )