Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

My company sold a record number of DVDs and books last month. While we’re certainly no where near Blockbuster territory this type of news is always good news. I’ve been focusing much of my non-dissertation writing time over the past month on setting up passive streams of income as I see this as a good base of stable income that has the potential to at least partially replace my former “real” job’s salary. Also, it kinda fits with what I can do right now since I haven’t opened a facility to train people yet.

Right now, I’m bringing in a little under 20% of my old salary position’s monthly paycheck through sales of my books and DVDs. While that’s certainly not a sustainable income by itself, it definitely helps and it supplements what I’m making with speaking engagements, paid research, independent consultation work and private coaching.

The fact that last month saw the highest sales of books and DVDs is great because it means my increased attempts at marketing and opening new streams of passive income worked. In addition to the DVDs and book sales, I’ve also been more proactive about increasing ad and other revenue from ELITETRACK. While the revenue generated by this is still a paltry 3% of my previous salaried income, the brightspot is that it more than doubled in one month thanks to some efforts I’ve made on the site.

So far my experiments at building passive income has worked. Here’s what I did, some things have worked some things have yet to pan out:

1. I created a new website, AthleticLab, to sell our products. In it’s first month we haven’t made a sale but it hasn’t cost anything other than the time to set the site up. My aim is to make this site product oriented and HPC be service oriented.
2. I placed our DVDs on Amazon.com for sale and ensured that I was offering for the lowest price. So far we’ve made 1 sale.
3. I did a 2 week ad campaign for ELITETRACK, HPCsport, and AthleticLab on Google Adsense in an attempt to garner more visitors. It’s tough to track how much this increased sales but through Google analytics I was able to tell that it increased traffic to the sites slightly. I stopped this after 2 weeks but I’ll likely start it back up again after some research in to using keywords effectively.
4. I added Amazon associate sales items on to ELITETRACK…so far this has only generated a couple bucks.
5. I made some major changes to ELITETRACK to improve the user experience. This was a fairly large time investment but hopefully it will pay dividends.
6. I increased both the quantity and quality of my participation on ELITETRACK. While this is something I’d do anyhow now that I have the time, I can now legitimately tell my wife that I’m not just wasting time by doing it….I’m working! The time I spend on the site increases exposure for the company, increases traffic to all three sites (which has the possibility of boosting ad revenue on ELITETRACK and sales on the other 2 sites), and defining myself as an expert in the field. It also gives me an opportunity to give back to a sport that has given me so much.
7. Finished the first draft of a book I’m writing. It is now ready to go to the editors and I’m hoping this will be another item to add to my passive income stream.

So that’s it. I’m not making anywhere near what I was at my previous salaried position but it’s working out ok because I’ve drastically reduced my cost of living by making a temporary move to Southeastern Ohio from NY and making some lifestyle changes. The brightspot, and the thing I’m hoping to continue, is the upward trend in passive income as it means my efforts are working.

The thing I want to wrap up with is that what you can probably see is that passive income really isn’t all that passive. At least not right off the bat. I’ve learned you have to make a concerted effort to expose your product, define your ‘brand’, and create as many avenues as possible for revenue to come in (since even the smallest amounts add up over time).

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As I’m forced to remind myself from time to time, my current focus is on finishing my doctoral dissertation. When I left LSU several years ago I was done with what seemed to be ‘the hard part’ at the time but little did I know that the real ‘hard part’ would be in getting myself to focus on it long enough to finish it. I was busy taking on new things (like another job at West Point), managing my growing company, and trying to stay active with my websites and media production (books, dvds, and articles). Long story short…my ADD got the best of me and in the 3 years since I left LSU I did little to move forward from when I left. Since I resigned at West Point though some things have changed. At least I’ve tried to make them change.

The most important thing I’ve done is take a new mindset on how to tackle seemingly monumental tasks. Normally, I’m GREAT at taking on a million things and juggling them with a high level of proficiency. On the flip side though, I SUCK at completing the jobs that I start. On top of that, I tend to take on anything that is offered or thrown at me and often find myself wasting time trying to get things PERFECT rather than just finishing it. The combination of these traits means I’m often baking a lot of really great cakes but all the while having a hard time putting the icing on the cake so to speak. This was especially true with my dissertation. Since I started rethinking my approach, things have been more productive though. Instead of looking at the remaining chapter of my dissertation that I have to write and thinking “where do I start,” or “I can just do it tomorrow,” now I approach it with the following two points in mind:

1. I give myself a fairly low minimum level of expectation for daily work on a given task. For example, on my dissertation writing, I now tell myself that I have to write a paragraph a day. That’s it. Just a paragraph. Sometimes I write 2 or 3 in a day but I’ve pretty much been just writing 1. I know it doesn’t sound like much but I’m actually finding that when stringed together over time, these little bits of progress will add up to the completion of my seemingly monumental task.  It’s kinda like the lifetime prisoner who chips away a fraction of his prison wall each day. Before he knows it, he’s broken free from what was holding him back.
2. The second thing that I’ve done is tried to put my OCD perfectionism at bay. I fight the urge to stay on something until it’s perfect and instead just plow through whether the work is good or not. On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a good idea but I’ve found that because of how I operate, it’s better for me to “Just Do It” because if it isn’t perfect the first time around I’ll fix it later. With writing, this approach makes it easier to just sit down and wright and is a nice way of busting through periods of writer’s block.

If you find yourself in a position like I’ve described and have the same disposition as I do, try out these tips and let me know if they work for you.

Since I’ve left West Point, 90% of the people I train are trained by correspondence. In other words, we live in 2 separate places and they receive their workouts and other necessary information via email, phone, IM, or text. In fact, every one on the HPC Elite team was trained this way for most of last year. This isn’t new to me though. I’ve been training people like this for almost 7 years now. And while it isn’t ideal, it can work. Here’s some tips from things I’ve learned on how to make correspondence training the best possible experience for your athlete. A lot of these are the result of mistakes I made early on that were valuable learning experiences to me.

1. Communicate often
2. Make sure you and the athlete recognize that the plan is a road map
3. Don’t plan too far in advance
4. Use video reviews for technical activities
5. Do some pre-testing with new athletes
6. Be flexible
7. Individualize the training plan and don’t be afraid to tweak it when necessary

I’ll expand on some of these if there’s an interest. If you’re interested post to comments.