Passive Income is like Non-Alcoholic Beer & Some Amazon Merch Updates

Odd title for a video right, yeah I know. Let me start off by giving you some insight into where this title comes from.

So I was watching an episode of Glen and Yongs Podcast Merch Minds yesterday and in the podcast they were debating whether Amazon Merch was truly Passive Income, as well as the topic of passive income in general.

Yong seemed to say that if something requires any work it's not passive income. And I suppose to passive income purists that may be true.

That said there's very few things that would qualify as truly passive income. The only examples I can think of are getting a royalty or earning interest. Even investing in divident stocks requires you to keep an eye on your portfolio and rebalance it from time to time so does that make it not passive?

My point being few things like life are black and white or cut and dry. The same way that non-alcoholic beer has a little bit of alcohol, I feel something can require a little bit of work and still be counted as passive income.

To me passive income means something that seperates your time from your money. If your working as a bus boy in a restaurant your only being paid for time your on the clock, and there's only so many hours in a day you can work so in that sense your income has a cap.

Passive income is seperating your time from money so for example if you start a Youtube Channel you upload a video one time and even after you stopped doing the work, your still potentially earning ad money everytime that video is viewed.

In the case of eCommerce you setup an eBay listing or Amazon listing or Shopify listing and yes while you will have to ship that item out and handle customer service requests and returns, those items you listed can sell while your sleeping or while your at a day job and not working so that's a step in the right direction in terms of seperating your time from your money.

Amazon Merch in my opinion is as close to passive income as it gets. You create a design and upload it and at that point it's pretty much hands free. Sure you can promote your Amazon Merch shirts off of Amazon and it's not a bad idea to do, however at the end of the day no promotion you do could possibly come anywhere close to the power of being on the Amazon platform and available in Amazon searches.

Another reason I feel Amazon Merch is so passive is this. So later this month I'm heading to Mexico for a week. If I had eBay listings up I would either need to pull my listings, or I would need to enlist a friend or family member to ship my items out for me. That business cannot run without me being present.

On the flip side however with my Amazon Merch business I can go to Mexico for a week and while I"m sitting on the beach drinking Victorias and eating guacamole my shirts are still selling, Amazon is handling the payments, the customer service and shipping my orders out for me.

Amazon Merch is the type of business that compounds so the more shirts you get up the more you'll sell and the more your business will grow. However hypothetically I could spend a month or two getting say 500 shirts live on Amazon Merch and I could take a step back and never login to Merch again, and despite me treating it completely passively I would still likely have a few hundred bucks per month comming in.

That's why I would consider Amazon Merch to be passive income as well as be one of the best legitimate forms of passive income out there. By that I mean you can actually make money doing it fairly easily and it's not some pie in the sky method that doesn't work but that's being pitched in a $500 course about how to make money doing nothing.

Lastly, in this video I also briefly talk about some changes and updates and news to the Amazon Merch Program. Standard tees have changed to Port & Company as opposed to Anvil. Our base prices has been raised about $1.46 or there abouts so were getting less money per shirt. I also recently have heard some complaints from merch sellers that their designs are appearing lower on the Port & Company shirts than they did on the Anvil shirts, we discuss what to do about that.

And lastly, Yong had an interesting announcement about a software he saw debuted right in front of his eyes. The software purportedly allows you with one click to upload like 50 designs at a time not only to Amazon Merch but additionally to three other platforms.

That is huge. Think about how much time it takes to upload a shirt to Merch. You have to upload the shirt and then wait for Amazon to clock for a minute to show the design before you can go to the next screen. You then have to put in title, tags and description, and again go to next screen. Then select price and colors, etc, etc, etc you get the point but it's tedious and time consuming. With this software with one click and in less than 3 minutes you can upload upwards of 50 designs to not only Amazon Merch but several other platforms. That would be truly awesome.