If you could spend more time with your kids and still make a living, you would do that, wouldn’t you? Today our LMScast podcast with Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett is about generating passive income for stay at home moms and dads. By creating online courses and charging fees for people to take them, you could earn part – or possibly all – of your living income this way. And it’s easier than you think.
Your first thought might be that you’re not a teacher, and you don’t know enough about anything to teach a course. But we’re here to tell you that you have more shareable knowledge than you realize. Just being a good parent makes you an expert in lots of subject areas that other people want and need to know more about.
But maybe you’re not a computer genius and don’t know the first thing about software, web design, or teaching online. Well, you don’t have to be. If you are here right now watching this podcast, then you already have the technical skills you need to build an online course and start generating passive income.
All you really need to do is decide what you want to teach and start building your course with a simple, intuitive learning management software platform like LifterLMS, which also handles marketing and fees for you once you set it up. Are you a great cook? Do a course about it. Know about camping? Do a camping course. Do you have a special needs child? Offer a course around vital skills you’ve learned that other parents in the same situation can benefit from. Are you traveling? Do a course about traveling with children. And you can decide how passive or involved you want to be with your students.
Flexibility is another significant benefit of having an online source of income. Stay-at-home parents can be defined in many ways, from a family living in a neighborhood, to homesteading off-grid, to traveling the world with your children. Home is wherever you are, and with passive online income you can live anywhere, or everywhere. Imagine the experiences you can give your children with those kinds of opportunities.
Online courses are also a great option for parents of older children who want or need to be home while their kids are at school. Or if you need some space away from the kids, use your online course as a diversion. If you have been keeping a blog, a lot of what you have been writing about for free could be the basis for a fee-based course.
Take a moment to sit down and list your strengths and subjects you know about. Once you start writing this down, you will be amazed at how much you have to work with. Start out with something small and specific that you feel comfortable managing. You can always add material or create more advanced courses.
Establishing passive income for stay at home moms with online courses is not difficult, especially with a course development platform like our LifterLMS WordPress learning management system plugin. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you.
Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter at LMScast.com for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us.
And if you’re an already successful expert, teacher or entrepreneur looking to grow, check out the LifterLMS team’s signature service called Boost. It’s a complete done for you set up service where your learning platform goes live in just 5 days.
Episode Transcript
Joshua Millage: Hello, Everyone. We’re back with another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage, and I’m joined with Christopher Badgett, and today we’re talking about passive income strategies for stay-at-home moms.
Chris, you got to help me out with this one, man. I’m not even married. I don’t have kids, so I don’t know where to start.
Chris Badgett: Right on. Let’s just start with the why. One of the reasons that I do web design … If any of you know my story, I’ve probably spent more of my adult life sleeping outside and camping than most people. I’ve spent eight summers on a glacier in Alaska, run sled dogs a lot, and have spent a lot of time on the back of a sled dog. I’m actually kind of a minimalist when it comes to technology.
How did Chris get involved in web design and WordPress plugins and all that thing? That’s a whole other story.
One of the driving things for me of how I got into online courses, how I got into WordPress, why I love having a web design and custom web development business is that I get to work at home, and be around my kids, and set my own schedule, which is a huge thing for parents. We said stay-at-home moms, but we’ll shout out to the stay-at-home dads out there, too.
Yeah. You get to be by your kids, and then the holy grail of working from home is actually creating passive income so that it can just keep going while you’re sleeping, or teach while you sleep, in the case of using a WordPress LMS system to generate revenue.
Joshua Millage: That’s awesome. I love it, because you do a lot of things that are I would say slightly alternative, which I appreciate, and being around your kids, being able to live this lifestyle and have this business has allowed you to do some really cool things from an education perspective for your children, which I … Just to rep you up a little bit, I think Zoey and Hazel are probably the two smartest little girls I’ve ever met in my life. Yeah. If you walk outside with them, they can identify pretty much every tree in wherever you’re at, Whitefish, Montana.
It’s cool. It’s cool to see what happens with the flexibility that this business can give you and how that plays down into your children’s lives, because of the education flexibility. You can take them all over the world. You took them to Costa Rica, right, about a year ago or so?
Chris Badgett: Yeah. This is a great little story in terms of a journey with, first, the stay-at-home family, stay-at-home moms, stay-at-home dads, and passive income through online courses.
It almost feels surreal to me when I think back about it, but we traveled to Costa Rica, and I just continued to work doing web design and that kind of thing, web development, but one of the main reasons we went there is to film a gardening course with a world famous permaculture expert, that we would then sell over and over again. I can tell a little more of the story about that.
Joshua Millage: Yeah.
Chris Badgett: We went to Costa Rica for three months. We rented a house that was cheaper than the place we were renting in the US, so we actually did a little geo-arbitrage there on currency. I would work during the day, and I had meetings through Skype and the internet, like I always do, but I was also there to build my passive income online course.
Now, I took the publisher mindset. My wife’s a gardener and an expert in her own right in gardening, but we went straight to the top, so we partnered … My marketing experience, business, web development experience, and my wife’s interest in gardening in connection with the way she can connect with leaders in this space, and we made a deal, we struck a deal with this expert.
Then the really interesting thing happened, which is we started to realize there’s something called a permaculture design course. It’s known as the PDC in the gardening community, but they’re intense. They’re like ten days programs. We realized we can’t … It’s going to be really hard for us to go there and film all that and manage the kids at the same time.
At this point we had moved out of the house in the mountains of Costa Rica and moved to one on a beach in an area called Nosara. What we did is we actually put an ad on Craigslist. Hired somebody from New England. We paid to fly that professional videographer without kids. It was like a dream come true. I just knocked on his door and was like, “Hey, can I fly you to Costa Rica for a permaculture design course?” and this is a person who was also really into permaculture and a videographer looking for work.
Joshua Millage: It was just meant to be, Man.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. “Hey, we need some help. We’ll fly you down here. We’ll pay you this X amount of money to film it, but we need you to capture all this stuff.”
Joshua Millage: Yeah, totally.
Chris Badgett: That person flew down. We actually didn’t attend the event. I was on the beach with my kids playing in the tide pools, while our videographer was filming and capturing the event.
Now, what we did do is we rented a car, and we drove to the event for the very end of it to make the human connection with our videographer and the subject matter expert and the community who is the class … There’s like twenty people there.
Joshua Millage: That’s rad, Dude.
Chris Badgett: That was awesome. We camped out, and everything was great. Just to complete that story, it’s not easy.
We had to invest up front. We realized our limitations, so we brought in an expert.
We’ve even been having trouble editing all that video footage. Ten days of video is a lot, and we got bottlenecked. We actually now hired a guy who is from Ireland, and he was actually living in Taiwan, to actually edit the content, to edit the video, and this is a professional video editor, and we just got that hard drive in the mail literally this week. This whole process has taken a year, and if I did it again I would do it much, much faster, but this is a big course, a high value course.
Joshua Millage: You guys can make a significant amount of passive income.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Joshua Millage: I mean are you willing to share what you’d sell a course like that for, and the nitty gritty details?
Chris Badgett: I’m not comfortable sharing … I can share it, but without some specifics, and here’s why. I would totally share but …
Joshua Millage: You have someone else involved, right?
Chris Badgett: I have other partners involved, so I just want to be respectful of that arrangement, but in terms of how much is a course worth, it varies greatly. There’s an article on the Udemy blog that I think it’s ten dollars for every twenty minutes or something like that, is one mindset about it.
Really big courses on the internet, like if you look at a high end membership site, they usually sell for around two thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars.
This course that we’re making is going to be a passive course, meaning the instructor is not going to be taking questions. There’s not going to be conversation. It’s just going to be totally passive, which means if it’s all passive, you can’t charge as much as if there is live interaction or assignments and things like that, but we’re actually going for the passive model. That’s how we designed it for this case. It’s not worth as much as something that also includes other stuff and so on.
That’s that, and that’s kind of an extreme example. Yes, we’re stay-at-home, but we were traveling the world doing that. You can also just do it from home.
Joshua Millage: We’re all over the place on this, but that is such a good example. Let’s bring it to the end here for the moms who are listening. Who are going, “Yeah, okay, Chris. That sounds great. What about me?”
Chris Badgett: Yeah. That’s where we ended up.
Joshua Millage: Can I tell you a little caveat? I think that what you told me earlier is … Or I think Jon, when we were talking to our head of growth, Jon Beck, who just a wild thinker. He’s like, there’s a lot of moms who have had kids living in their house for twenty years, and it’s like bing, bing, bing, like all over the place. Managing all these schedules, all this stuff. Making food, doing this, doing that, and then the kids leave for school, or maybe they have two kids and one of them is out to school. They have a little bit more time, and they’re like, “What do I do with all this time?”
They’ve got some good knowledge. Maybe it’s around crafts. Maybe it’s around cooking. Maybe it’s around a specific type of cooking, because their child had some sort of dietary restriction. Like course, course, course, because there’s going to be someone else in the world who is in that situation or something similar, where they can take that knowledge and share it with them for free or paid. It’s up to them.
I think that moms don’t give themselves enough credit for what they know. My mom’s a genius, Man. I think she should make a bunch of courses. I’m pushing her, because her gift is teaching kids how to read. We all know that literacy is a worldwide issue. It’s 2015, and I think my mom could be creating some amazing courses on how to teach kids how to read better, to bring in a little Zoolander quote.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. I would say what’s the first step if you just want to test the waters and try out this idea, as a stay-at-home parent, is to, like you said, take an inventory of your strengths. It’s no surprise that the stay-at-home mom community in the blogosphere and blogging is huge. It’s massive. It’s these parents who are home. Maybe they’re a little isolated, so they get … It’s one way to network, and comments, and also have a life outside of kids, because kids can be a little intense. Sometimes you want to blog and do your own thing in some specialty that you care about.
I think stay-at-home moms are really using blogging as an outlet for that, but why not monetize it, and instead of just writing free articles, create courses?
Start small and start with something really specific. Like you mentioned, parents have lots of skills, and they’ve overcome certain things, and it doesn’t mean you have to make a course about parenting, but I guarantee, there’s all kinds of things that you’ve discovered during that time as a parent, where you learned how to teach, and you’ve solved some kind of problem or helped somebody move closer to some kind of desired outcome. The sky is the limit for what you can make a course about.
I would just encourage you to be really specific, start small, and niche down.
Joshua Millage: I love it. Awesome. I think that’s going to cap off this episode. I bet a lot of people have questions. I hope you find us either at our LMScast, you can go LMScast.com, find this episode, and leave us a comment, or if you want to hit us up on Twitter, I am @jmillage. Chris, you are?
Chris Badgett: @chrisbadgett.
Joshua Millage: Or you can hit up our official LifterLMS Twitter feed for questions about LifterLMS, and I would encourage you to follow LifterLMS just because we’re putting a lot of awesome content out on that channel.
Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a great week.
