Generating Passive Income Using What You Already Know: Part 1
This is my first post in a several part series detailing my own personal journey to develop passive income streams using knowledge I already had.
Currently, I’m a network engineer. A network engineer is someone who works on routers, switches, firewalls, it’s an IT professional who works on the equipment that let’s computers talk to each other.
In the professional IT world, a lot of career progression can be found through studying and earning of professional certifications. I’ve created 4 video courses on various entry-level networking certifications, and market them through various channels. This now earns me consistently over $20k per year, more than a minimum wage full-time job in many areas, entirely passively. That’s not to say that I’m not working continuously to try and increase that number, as I am. I’m now putting most of my effort into my website, CiscoLessons , to help others progress in their networking careers. However, I can take months off from this side works and still enjoy an extra ~$2k per month of extra income due to the passive nature of it.
First, to give a little more context as to how I got to this point, let’s rewind 3 years from today. At the time, I was an IT professional working on a helpdesk and had only recently decided to specialize in network engineering. I was studying for the professional certifications that network engineers typically go for, and found on Udemy that many of the listings were for practice tests.
I never purchased any of these practice tests, as I usually studied and made flash cards for myself. However, I saw that many of them had many reviews, indicating many people had purchased them.
I decided to take my flash cards and turn them into practice questions and create my own practice test to sell on Udemy. This was my first dip into the course creation passive income stream. That practice test made $20-$50 per month. Enough to where I could see the viability of the model.
Something I found, though, is the practice tests often received negative reviews from people who didn’t realize they weren’t buying a full course (although it was clearly labeled, but few of us read what we’re buying anyway and only look at the image :) ). I didn’t feel great about tricking people, and I didn’t want my instructor rating to plummet, so I unpublished the practice tests after it had grossed ~$500 in total.
In my studies, I had watched many professional instructional courses on networking certifications and felt that I could somewhat easily create a course myself.
Often times, these courses are simply powerpoint-like slides with voiceover. Some fancier presenters use drawing pads to draw on the slides to illustrate points during the presentation. Occasionally they will also record their screen as they demonstrate some concept in the user interface of the devices. This can mostly be done with free software and a microphone!
This leads into my first foray of course creation. I created a video course that is 8.5 hours long, on the now retired Cisco Certified Design Associate certification exam. This course has currently grossed $2700 in the ~2.5yrs that it’s been on sale and still makes ~$70 per month.
See, professional certification exam courses are actually quite easy to make. The reason why is the course outlines are already created for you! The certification exam publishers always provide candidates with the exam topics that should be studied to adequately perform on the exam. This list of exam topics is your blueprint and outline for the course, all neatly put together for you already. This saves a huge amount of time in the course creation process and allows for instant momentum. This is why I highly recommend course creation for an existing certification or process.
This post is only intended to give some context into how I started on this journey. In the next post, I’ll dive into detail the considerations that were taken into account when choosing the particular certification the first course was made on, and how I created the course.
