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If I am remembering correctly, the last day I worked was September 13th.
I remember because we woke up to two inches of snow on the ground and filmed a tour of our Leisure Van outside in the snow. It was picturesque and FREEZING and I’m pretty sure after that I ended up replying to emails from my twin bed in the Leisure Van under a pile of blankets.
And since then, nothing.
I’ve checked email a few times a week and posted on Facebook a couple times in the past two months, but other than that, nothing.
I had no intentions of taking so much time off, but in British Columbia I started getting sick. Like, Heath calling my sister and saying “I’m putting her on a plane back to America—pick her up from the airport and take her straight to a doctor” sick. (To which I said absolutely not because flying alone from Vancouver to Dallas as sick as I was would’ve probably made everything worse. Plus we learned that our Liberty Healthshare would cover our medical expenses in Canada, which made finding care easier.)
Enough time has passed since those first couple weeks that I can almost share the details without getting sick all over again. Not that you want to hear any of that anyway.
But to sum it up, we had to cut our trip in Canada short and get back America.
Now we are back in Texas, I’m almost back to 100% and I’ve been trying to slowly get back to blogging, working on videos for Youtube, and working on the next course in our RV Entrepreneur School.
We’ve received a TON of emails and messages and comments from people wondering if we were okay and where we had disappeared to. Which was both a good reminder that people care about what we post and also a frustration that people were expecting content from us, but I physically couldn’t deliver.
These past two months have been rough for both of us, but this time would’ve been about a thousand times worse if it had happened a year ago—before we launched my book, grew our passive income, and made sure our business could keep going even if we took time off.
Before when I thought about passive income, I thought of it selfishly. If I have passive income, I can go on more hikes. I can travel to more remote places. I can work less and still make money. My sole focus for developing passive income was that if we had enough passive income, we could start RVing more abroad where time differences and connectivity would make actively managing a business more difficult. Have passive income, will travel. That was my dream!
But I had never thought about how necessary passive income would be if we ever found ourselves unable to work.
If Heath and I hadn’t put so much energy over the past few years into developing strategies that would create lasting passive income, we would be struggling big time right now. I couldn’t work on our client projects—which fortunately Heath could pick up the slack for. I couldn’t actively work. I had no way to earn money except passively.
Now I can say without a doubt that the best thing we’ve ever done is build a business with passive income. Something that can make us money while we sleep—or while we’re waiting for two hours in a doctor’s office.
So I wanted to dedicate today’s blog to sharing all the best resources to build passive income that we’ve learned from (or written) in the past few years.
- How Much We Made Blogging in 2017 Our numbers and strategies for building revenue with products, affiliates, and sponsors.
- How to Monetize Your Blog with Affiliate Marketing Making Sense of Cents course that taught us everything we know about affiliate marketing
- Writing and Publishing Your First Book Our 30+ lesson course on how to successfully publish on Amazon
- The Quickest Way to Monetize a Travel Blog Podcast interview with Bryanna Royal
- Creating Sponsorships and Partnership Opportunities Podcast interview with Cees & Madison Hofman
- How to Launch an Online Course Podcast episode with Heath
- How and When to Monetize Your Youtube Channel Podcast interview with Less Junk, More Journey
Or if you’re just starting out and overwhelmed, we have a free course on how to start and your grow your first blog.
I’ve learned this year that while passive income is cool and trendy, it’s also the most vital part of our business right now. Our passive income streams are a mixture of all the above links. Affiliates, products, sponsorships, online courses, and Youtube ad revenue. For those of you who aren’t sure where to start, my book makes the most of any of our passive income streams, but affiliates are the easiest place to start. (And Youtube takes the most time, but is the most fun!)
Happy business building! 🙂
