If you’re looking for leveraged income models that turn your active income client work into saleable products, this article shows you three leveraged business models you can use to get going right away repurposing your expert material from what you’re already doing.
If you’re working with your consulting or coaching clients on a one-to-one basis and charging for your time – whether on a daily or hourly rate or project basis – this is your “active” income.
Earnings from active income are tied directly to the amount of time you spend with each client. If you have 4 clients a month, you’ll get paid 4 times; if you go on vacation and do no work for that period – no billable client work – you’ll have zero income coming in.
While this one-to-one model can be highly lucrative and flexible with high-end clients, you’ll still reach an income ceiling because you only have so much time in any given day to devote to clients. So, if you want to break that income level and earn more while still doing one-to-one or face-to-face client work, you’ll be giving yourself some ‘me time’ back if you develop one or more “passive” streams of revenue.
Of course, it’s not entirely passive income, it’s leveraged income – you need to put in some upfront work, but you can design once, delivery many times – including recurring revenue products such as through a membership subscription.
I understand this is a journey. It’s hard to break out of the molud we’ve created for ourselves and find a new purpose or angle. It’s easy to fall into the trap of following what others are doing rather than reinventing yourself, what you do and how you do it.
Three Leveraged Income Models
Using leveraged income models in business as an adjunct or replacement for one-to-one client work actually means you can reach and impact more people. There are various ways to do that depending on how you want to operate and the kind of work you enjoy doing.
The choice is up to you. It’s always best not to bite off more than you can chew. Start off by choosing one leveraged income idea and when that is complete and you see good uptake (aka customers and sales), make the jump to the next level.
1. Write a book
Publishing a problem-solving book gives you instant credibility with the world at large and especially attractive to ideal clients in your industry and market niche.
If you learn about book publishing, along with some well-targeted promotion and PR exposure, you have a good chance to make it onto the Amazon Best Sellers list and become slightly famous.
Most of us can create a structure based on how we work with clients – our methodology or expert process – and turn this into a structure for a book. You can narrate a “stream of consciousness” into each section as a starting point – pretend you’re being interviewed or you’re explaining something to one of your clients. Plus, you probably already have a lot of material you can repurpose to provide more depth around each point.
Writing a book opens up doors to media interviews, guest blogging or podcasting, and live speaking engagements. This in turn exposes you to new and bigger audiences – leveraging other people’s networks.
You’ll make those people who can’t afford your one-to-one high-end services extremely happy because they can still learn something from you in printed form.
2. Sell your recordings
If you’re already running webinars, producing podcasts or organising business events, selling the recordings after the event is another way to generate another leveraged income stream.
It’s fairly straightforward nowadays to use audio or video editing tools – the basic functionality of many free tools is usually sufficient to create appealing playbacks.
As always, there’s work to be done getting these webinars, interviews and events organised and not everyone can attend live who would have wanted to. Offering a paid product for those who couldn’t attend live earns you some extra cash, but also endears you to those fans who will still benefit from your expert sessions.
3. Create an education product
Creating online programmes or a series of courses is a great way to delve deeper into your expertise than a published book will allow. Again nowadays, there are website plug-ins or course creation tools that make this so simple to package, promote and sell online.
Consider an educational product a way to work with clients in the comfort of their own homes (and you in yours!), but on a grander scale. You can blend in as much of your input as you need to get your clients the results they want. You can make their success pathway part of a monthly membership. Lots of possibilities….
Your digital clients can follow along in DIY fashion, with your words guiding them to their next steps, without you having to schedule each person into your already-busy schedule. Participants can work at their own pace instead of worrying about deadlines or having to attend live meetings.
Build Teams and Systems For Even Greater Leverage
In all three leveraged income models, if content creation isn’t your thing or doesn’t come easily, you can delegate some of the work to ghostwriters, copy writers, media folks. If you get a great virtual assistant, they can often do a bit of everything to take the load off you.
Outsourcing or working with associates makes your part of the upfront work even more leveraged. Once you have a process in place, you can pay those freelancers to collate, organise and produce the finished product. Consider it an investment in your business. Remember, many products once created only need updating periodically so you’ll have these “evergreen” products for years to come generating passive income for you.
In my book – Leveraged Consulting in the Digital Age – I talk about the S.C.A.L.E model that I created to show the five stages in building a scaleable business through leveraged approaches.
It’s best to see the different streams of income like cogs in a wheel, all working in perfect harmony to increase your profits and expand your brand’s reputation. Marketers may call this your front-end and back-end products, and you can build things any which way you want!
Want to Learn More On Leveraged Income Models that Leverage Your Existing Work with Clients?
There’s SO much more we could dive into – and we will, in future posts. But these 3 simple steps are a handy place to start. Yes, it means a little more work, turning raw materials into products. But if you’re going to put the time, effort & energy into doing or creating it in the first place – why wouldn’t you want it to be as reusable as it can be to leverage your work?
Excited about using your expertise in different ways and developing leveraged income models?
Click here to join the Leveraged Living Club group on FB – we’re just getting going so you’ll be doing me a favour too by participating. I share updates on my social media, so connect with me that way if this is on your ‘to-do’ list this month.
