After seeing how a lot of people are currently struggling with living costs – around A THIRD of American households failed to make their housing payments last month (and that number is comparative in the UK too) – I thought it was time that I talked more about creating that all-important… or should I say ‘vital’ second income.

I am a big believer that employed people should find a second way to generate at least the same amount of money they are earning as a wage.

So for example, if you are earning $2,000 a month through your job, you should also find a way to make an extra $2,000… or more.

I believe that is vitally important that a person earns at least double the amount they can comfortably live with. It makes life a little more protected and gives huge peace of mind.

Put it this way… if more people had found another way to generate that second income, many people wouldn’t have missed their rent or mortgage payments last month and risked losing their homes.

I know that might sound hard to the average person.

After all, they have worked hard all month, 160 hours of hard graft to earn the first $2,000, so how are they going to earn a further $2,000 when they have little or no time spare?

Well, firstly, people need to get rid of the idea that they need to work hard to earn the same amount of money.

Just because they get paid $2,000 for 160 hours worth of work, it doesn’t mean that it is the only way to earn money and that they need to do it again.

There are many ways to make money. Money is not something that is just exchanged for work done over a specific time period; it is also exchanged for goods and services.

You can earn $2,000 working 160 hours… but you can also earn $2,000 selling 200 products priced at $10.

You can also earn $2,000 for showing one person how to do something specific. That could be for a week, a day, or even just an hour doing a face-to-face call over Zoom.

Money is not just used to pay employees.

Money is a tool that is used to buy anything and everything.

That is what people need to realize and remember.

Just before sitting down to write this article, I read a comment online by an author who writes ‘erotic fiction’ – not something I know much about personally – but she said that as well as making sales through her eBooks, she earns between $500 and $800 a month publishing short stories to the free-to-use Medium platform.

She has amassed a following of 3,000 followers on Medium and every time she publishes a new short story, an email is sent to those followers.

When people read her stories on Medium or buy a subscription to Medium through her affiliate link, she earns money which she then uses to have covers made for her books which she sells online.

I can’t say how long it takes for her to write those stories, how easy they are to write, or how many she publishes each month, as I say I don’t know her personally; I just saw her commenting on a conversation online…

But what I do know from my quick research is that she has a membership on the Payhip platform where people pay her up to $10 to access all of her stories, she sells her eBooks via Payhip and on other platforms like Amazon, and she makes between $500 and $800 each month publishing her stories to Medium.

This woman is making money by writing and publishing stories. Publishing stories to Medium – which costs her nothing to do – is paying to publish her books which earns her more money.

Writing itself costs nothing to get started with.

This is something other people can do in their spare time.

Because she is writing fiction, she can only really charge $2.99 for each short story, or $5.99 for a bundle of stories… but there are other digital products that you can create that you can sell for a lot more.

If the content you create does more than titillate and entertain people, you can charge a lot more for it.

$2,000 can soon be made when you are selling a portfolio of products priced between $97 and $1,997.

$2,000 can be made even more quickly if you are selling your personal help for a $1,997 fee… albeit a few dollars short.

I won’t focus too much on writing services as a way to make money, but I have a good friend who virtually DOUBLES his monthly income by writing articles and emails for one client.

After he has finished working for the day, he opens up Word and starts to write articles and emails.

The money he earns from that is both pocket money and protection money.

I know that he has used some of it to buy a couple of educational courses to expand his knowledge and skills, but the rest is growing nicely into a protection fund.

Should the worst happen, his living expenses are covered for the whole year at least.

Now that is peace of mind!

There are people who are making a second income selling pre-loved items on eBay and other selling platforms such as Vinted which they have sourced on the cheap from thrift stores and markets.

Obviously, you don’t want to be working every hour of the day, that’s no life at all.

You want a way to make money that also allows you to enjoy your life, which is why I will always advocate that you go down the publishing digital information products route.

It may not put cash into the palm of your hands right away, but it will deliver a bigger haul for less work in the long run.

Previously, I mentioned a guy called John who was working on his own digital product, this evening he told me that while we were chatting, he had 14 people reading his sales page and throughout the day he had an average of 20 people reading the sales page at one time.

That is a constant figure.

Every time he took a look at the traffic stats, it could be an hour or two apart, there were always around 20 people reading the sales page.

That is because he has teamed up to do a joint venture – a fast way to make a lot of money online – with a company that can send a lot of people his way.

At a $377 product price, he and the company are set to make a nice profit for the day.

They only need to sell 54 copies of the product to make $20,000 which will give them a nice $10,000 each.

54 is not a lot of sales.

They may not make those 54 sales today, but as the product is both digitally delivered and evergreen (unlikely to go out of date in the near future) they will sell 54 copies over time.

Over the next couple of years, they may sell a lot more than 54 copies giving them both a nice passive income.

John will probably double his monthly income with the sales of that one product alone.

He is currently working on another.

The great thing about these digital products is that once they are finished and online, nothing more is needed other than sending people to the sales pages.

John doesn’t need to do anything now, I don’t know how much he earns through his day job, but I imagine that if there are 12 or more sales of his product each month, he has doubled his income… or is close to doubling it.

The point is… by selling digital products online, you can earn a second income passively, freeing you from the need to work every hour of the day.

I seriously recommend that you consider creating and selling your own digital products because the money they generate will not only help you out when you need it, it can change your life for good.

If you like the sound of that, then make sure you grab your free copy of Six Figures A Year In Information Publishing now and start out on your Digital Publishing adventure today.