In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Ty Cohen emerged from living in one of the roughest housing projects in Bridgeport, Connecticut, riddled with high crime and drug infestation. His father worked regular and part-time jobs as a taxicab driver and security guard before being robbed, shot, and paralyzed. Ongoing complications from the incident led to his death years later. Cohen, however, was determined to choose a different trajectory in life. Entrepreneurship was booming back in 2008, as his company was producing about a million dollars in revenue. Then a bigger boom came—the recession—and wiped out over 70% of revenue, which continued to decline.
The recession forced Cohen to quickly awaken to the power of passive income—not being dependent on a business model based on one-time customer purchases but creating a cycle of repeat customers. This is when he plunged into the world of publishing digital content via books. According to the marketing guru, when someone reads a good book, they generally refer it to someone else. This is how customers can become your evangelists and brand ambassadors. And the beauty is, anyone can turn these books into courses, coaching, services, and live events, generating multiple streams of income.
So why consider digital publishing? Because we’re no longer competing with the next person in our neighborhood, town, or city. With Amazon publishing, the marketplace becomes global. If you own a dry cleaner, car wash, or vegan food truck, book publishing now becomes your calling card. You can publish a book on how to franchise a dry cleaner, optimize your car wash experience, or how to market your food truck.
Cohen became engrossed in digital publishing, generating monthly checks for $9,000 from the comfort of his home. Now, for over a decade, Cohen has taught and trained thousands of individuals on how to effectively market, promote, and sell their products and services online. Through education and empowerment, he serves as a catalyst for creating digital ecosystems and income streams.
Cohen recommends that entrepreneurs should have digital content creation in their wealth portfolio just as they would real estate, stocks, mutual funds, and bonds. Out of them all, digital content publishing nets the most profit in his household. One primary reason is because overhead is super inexpensive. He started with a $600 investment and has reaped cash flow for over 10 years.
Today, you can publish a book for as little as $150. You don’t even have to know how to write a book thanks to outsourcing. There are plenty out there who love writing and are passionate about it. For comparison, let’s say you purchased four units of real estate property for $500,000 with a deposit of 25% down or $150K versus paying $150 to get one book published, which could potentially net at $1,000 of monthly passive income.
“Passive income is being able to wake up and seeing that you’ve made money overnight and continue to get paid over and over again for the same effort,” says Cohen.
During an interview with BLACK ENTERPRISE, the accomplished internet marketer, international speaker, best-selling author, creator of Kindle Cash Flow, and curator of mass digital content, shared simple strategies on how to cash in with digital publishing as a platform:
1. FIND THE MARKET
Before you write a fiction or non-fiction book, make sure you have a market that’s willing to buy. For instance, you may discover that millennials have a strong interest in romance novels or personal development. When you’re researching, you want it to be a wide market, not niched or granular that only a small population has an interest in. The more people, the better. For example, the pet care industry, a multibillion-dollar industry. There are books out there on how to care for your puppy, how to care for your aging dog, how to properly feed your puppy, or specifically how to raise a pit-bull, how to raise a poodle, and the variations go on. This can be applied in the markets of beauty care to meditation methods.
You can also publish fiction books with cliffhangers so that the reader will stay on edge to purchase the next release in the series. Find those markets where your prospects will continually want more, and then supply the demand. You keep supplying great published content, making them a repeat customer.
2. CREATE YOUR CONTENT
There are two essential ways to get this done. Of course, you can write it yourself. However, if you have no interest or desire in writing, no worries, you can opt to outsource the book project on such platforms as freelancer.com, upwork.com, or guru.com. There is no shortage of talent available, and you’ll be able to properly vet before making a selection. You’ll be amazed when you often find global freelance writers clamoring in the bidding process to pick up your project. However, it’s critically important to ensure your content is of high quality—whether self-authored or outsourced. At the end of the day, you want word-of-mouth, repeat buyers and good karma on what you’re releasing into the world. Content is still king, and it’s all about quality.
3. PUBLISH YOUR CONTENT
You would simply go to Amazon’s platform—Kindle Direct Publishing at amazon.com and create a free account. When Amazon was birthed over 20 years ago, it aimed to become the largest bookstore on the planet. They developed the Kindle reader and later launched the Kindle app. Opening the Kindle platform and making it available to the global masses was the ultimate game changer! Gone are the days of being rejected from publishing houses. Now, anyone has the capability to self-publish with exposure to buying customers with over 500 hundred million active credit cards on file. There are over 38 countries that you can publish content to Amazon. You can sell books from $2.99 to $9.99 where Amazon keeps 30% and you get 70%. They made it easy, free, profitable, and rewarding with handsome royalties and placing you in front of a buying (paying) audience.