Creating Multiple Passive Income Streams Beyond Real Estate

James Burchill
 
Sarah: Next up is James Burchill, co-founder and CTO of Chatbot Forge Inc. He's authored multiple bestselling businesses and marketing books created dozens of bestselling courses teaching over 31,000 students globally. As a recovering member of Mensa and also ran their technology segment for many years, he wrote the book literally on becoming a course, passive publishing profits. And I'm really excited to have James on today. He's going to teach us about passive income and how to create multiple streams of income. Welcome James, how are you?

James: Good, and thank you so much for having me. I'm just checking to make sure you can see me and you can hear me.

Sarah: Yeah, everything is good.

James: We're good. Awesome. I really wanted to talk to everybody a little bit this evening. It's a little different. My particular focus is virtual real estate, digital real estate. It's not bricks and mortar and physical things I can pick up because a long time ago I got my first exposure to passive income. If you will, through the thing called royalties in the late 1970s, I was bitten by the bug writing software. I was nine years old when I sold my first piece of software. And it was an apple, one of the very first apple computers. I like to go out to play around with the apple two E and the Eastwood for Euro plus, which means color by the way.

But for those of you that don't care. What it means though, is that there was an opening market for software. And I sold this pretty straightforward game and I started getting royalty checks when I was a small kid. I didn't really get pocket money. So, getting money coming out of nowhere was earth shattering for me and it altered everything.

I saw the ability to turn thoughts into money as quite literally alerts chattering. So, I started writing stuff, I became a paid author actually, by the time I was 13, I got my first, I think newspaper syndicated newspaper column. I was living in Africa at the time, but the whole idea of being able to create ideas and software and then take things out of my head.

One of the things that really pivoted for me was when I started to see people having problems, especially when I was always writing software. So, this thing that really tweaked me. Everywhere I went, I didn't really want to write, okay. I started off wanting to write horror and science fiction. But I'm no Stephen King, but I do love researching and I love solving problems and I think I'm pretty good at it. I'm mostly pretty good at systemizing. What I've learned. I hate repeating myself. So, It was a struggle being a consultant for so many years. So, I would take what I learned, write it into books and into courses, and then I would sell it over and over.

That was done. One and done. That was my whole thing. And it was really exciting for me. And the basic business model is this I'm always looking for, I'm always looking for problems. My target market is technology and time because I'm always trying to help people use the technology. So, they get more time and I'm always trying to show people how they can take their time and get more of it and leverage it up. But of course, books are one thing and they're great, you don't typically pay more than $20 or $30 for a book, but here's a stunning revelation. If you take the exact same information and you turn it into a video course, you can charge 10 to 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 times as much money for exactly the same information.

Now, let that one sync in for a sec. A $19 or $20 ebook can be sold for 500 to a thousand or $2,000 and only got to do. Turn it into a video and stick yourself on camera. Okay. There's a bit more to it than that, but not much. All right. So, there's an instant value upsell. So, I really got hooked on courses anyway, my community, if you will, or the problem solving individuals on the internet, there are everywhere.

I simply look for people who are hunting for problems, and I create courses. If you think creating courses is difficult, you're not reading the right information. You can create a course, one to two hours because I'm not talking war and peace. I'm all about creating courses that have about the same impact on your butt.

As a movie, does I call it my Gluteus Maximus rule? Bushiest Maximus is that big muscle you sit on. If your butt can tolerate it, this is what they teach you. When you were a teacher. Basically, if you can kick a student to sit still for 45 minutes to an hour to 90 minutes, they'll tolerate the information. So, I like to create short courses. What I'll tell you now is that the average video, before you start to lose people in the training courses, peaks around seven minutes. So, if you think that you can create, say 10 lessons, maybe 12, you're looking at an hour to two hours tops.

What you can do is you can take the information that you've all learned. This is another revenue stream for you and you can turn it very quickly and very easily into a course. You can use it for two things. You can use it for lead generation and it sets you apart. You all throw a book, everyone thinks you're brilliant and that's great. And that differentiates you. But if you will throw a corresponding course with that book and you really set yourself. And the other thing is you can do that for lead generation, which is indirect revenue, or you can sell it as a course. Maybe you sell your secrets. Maybe you've come up with a really neat way of raising money.

You were flipping houses or doing something. More about this than I do, then you can use it to make money straight out of the gate. And the other thing I'd want you to know is that truly you can create courses in about a weekend. Honestly, it takes a little longer to actually plan it, but it actually takes about one to two hours to shoot it because you're not creating a 5, 6, 7, 8 hour course.

If you've got a smart phone and a decent, a little decent microphone, you can sit down. I tell people, knock out your frequently asked questions, put that together as a course, and you will actually have people either give you their email address and generate leads or they'll pay you for it. So, a couple of takeaways from all this I'm going to stick around for a little while and answer questions.

I also don't want to suck up too much time because I know you guys really are here to learn about real estate and although I'm excited about your digital real estate it is a different thing. So, you can create courses in a few hours. Basically you can use courses for lead generation and revenue generation, either indirect or direct. And thirdly, they establish you as an expert. Trust me, if you walk into a room and somebody says to you, you have to choose between two people and you've got a book or you've got a course and the other one doesn't win. It really is that simple, it's not fair, but it is that simple.

I like to say, if you can digitize it, if you can explore your experience and it doesn't have to be big, it can be very small, then you can correlate. I guess one of the things I was asked when I was preparing for this sort of brief talk was I was asked if I had a favorite quote and I do, and my quote is this, "there are two most important days in your life". And the reason I love this quote so much as it resonates with me, the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you figure out why.

And for me, it was figuring out how to take everybody's information and expertise and show them how to turn it into something that they can digitize and then distribute and get paid over and over again. Hopefully you find that at least marginally interesting and inspirational. So, there you go.

Sarah: Thank you so much, james. And this is important because if we want to build wealth, we have to have more than just one or two sources of income. They say the average millionaire has five to seven, I see you showing me 10 different sources of income, but it's just something else, right? You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket when it's that basket, something happens. You don't want to be completely out of that ongoing income. I think it's great. It's something different to think about.

And there's definitely different ways that you can apply it. It doesn't have to be just because we want to coach, how could you do it, potentially with rent to own. I'm sure Alfonso's head is spinning a little bit. Could he do a course to tenant buyers as an example, and like how to buy a house with rent to own? There could be so many different things that you could do to bring that real estate back into the course piece.

James: Made over seven figures in software and information products in my career, I typically make a healthy six figure income off this every year as a rule there are flows a bit. It depends on how many things I'm building. I'm always creating. It's not something I stop because it's who I am. But somebody once said to me, hey, that's pretty cool. And they sat down and he did something for me. I'd never really thought to do it, but I'm sure many of you do this all the time.

You annuitize things, you take a look and you go, this is what it's worth. And this is how much it throws off. Somebody said, we'll assume it's throwing off a hundred thousand dollars a year. How much would that have to be if that was money in the bank, or if that was invested? And they turned around and they told me what the number was and it was extraordinarily impressive. And when I realized I have zero risk with what I've got, I have no money outlaid. All thoughts turn into cash. It's fun.

Sarah: It makes sense. And I will say, I think I've known you for a couple years now. This is the first year that you're not somewhere in the warmth, but usually you're traveling, you're able to work and bring your laptop or wherever and enjoy those retirement months.

James: Usually end of January all through February. Me and my other half buzz off somewhere warm. Usually, I'll take a laptop, but actually last year we got back just before COVID knocked us all down and was coming back from Mexico. I decided to test the theory. I didn't take a laptop. I actually took just a smartphone and I was able to actually operate everything with just an iPhone actually. It was actually pretty exciting and terrifying all at once.

Sarah: Amazing. Thank you so much.