Lessons - Passive Income Doesn’t Exist | Luke Van Der Veer - SEO Expert & Entrepreneur

In this lessons episode, we dive into the reality behind popular side hustles. Examining why so many are marketed as passive income but require constant attention, listeners will learn about transforming SEO skills into a more sustainable, passive revenue model and gain insights on building valuable online assets that generate leads without the grind. So all the different things you'd try, these are all like the typical side hustles, right? So you spoke about building an agency, dropshipping, MLM, whatever it is, is a very typical side hustle. And these can all be valid businesses. I think that there were points in time when some of these worked better than others because you know, you're at first mover advantage or you're one of the first people to try the thing, the dropshipping, you're running a Facebook ad agency, but now saturated marketplace because everyone in their mother has tried these side hustle businesses. But they all kind of work to a degree, but what I have an issue with with all of these types of side hustles, it's for some reason they're marketed as passive income. They're all marketed as passive. I don't know actually now that I'm thinking about it, when the concept of entrepreneurship and passive ever was aligned and in sync, because from my experience, entrepreneurship is like, okay, we'll get ready for 80 hours a week. That's what you're going to be doing. And I think it's right this, you know, you look on Instagram and you see people that promote these types of things. And I think to get people to buy into their concept, they show this beautiful lifestyle where it's like working for more ever, I have a laptop in front of a pool and I run a dropshipping business and I don't have to do any basically nothing and I'm making millions of dollars. But these are very, these are not easy businesses. Perhaps people optimize them and they remove some of the problems and logistics that a traditional business would require, but it's still a business. If you're building it, if you're building a dropshipping site, you're still spinning up a website, you're still finding product, you're basically doing a gamut of marketing activities all the time. You still have to make sure they're fulfillment, customer service. I mean, ad agency is, you're finding new customers, you're running ads for them. Maybe there's some parts that can be automated or outsourced, but it's like, you still have a business. It's still a bit, which is fine. But it's hard and entrepreneurship is very hard and people build themselves jobs, right? Hey, I've done it multiple times. So I'm aware. So you've gone through all these and like when you go through them all, like you make money, but you're not free because when people build businesses, they have to spend more time in the business. They don't have time for their family. It's like almost like worse than working a nine to five in terms of time and freedom. It is. It is. It started with MLM. That was kind of the first one. I spent three and a half years on that. That was the first one that I kind of hit. And it makes sense because in the beginning, you didn't have as much money. Well, I didn't. So it, you know, four hundred bucks, get in, start your MLM company. So I'm in there. And how many of you learn things from it? I guess it helps me become a little bit more focused on self-education. I was really self-conscious speaking in front of people. So I never would have done this a million years. But you know, you keep screwing things up and I was worried about being judged. But the people who are making all the money said you have to just push through that. Don't worry about it and just get good at this. So I just kept trying to practice presentations or whatever. I'm talking in front of people. We're doing presentations at people's houses. I'm always wearing black. Just in case I sweat like crazy. And I actually know them. I'm thinking about I'm still wearing black because it's ingrained in me now. But just like putting all those reps in like made me good at that. But I'm listening to the people on stage that are talking and they're saying, yeah, you know, if you get up to this big team, you did have your team working and then you don't have to work. You could just sit back and relax. And I was like, all right, cool. So I learned how to do it. I listed them at all this training. I recruited a ton of people. And I had my big team now. So as a guy, I'm going to try to do this. And I just stopped working. Everybody else stopped working too. And then I realized, I'm supposed to be leading by example. So of course, if I stop, they're going to too. So it was a lie. It's like, it's not really passive. At no point can I walk away and just have them continue it because they're looking to me. So that business model's flawed. So I'm like, okay, that one's done. So we try something else. So I try eBay. And I'm like, this might be a good one self-stuff on Amazon and eBay. And with my partner and I, we built this up. We're selling liquidation products. We get it up to like 35 grand a month. But we're pulling, we're pulling 15 hour days, 70s a week. We have no lives. So that was another terrible thing. It's like, I don't care about 35 grand a month when you have to pay taxes, split it with him, eBay fees, and just all of our time disappears. But it did teach me that I didn't have any leverage. So that was something I now have to look for. So it's like program after program. I learned all the things that I was missing that I should have known up front. But I didn't know. And I had to learn it through that experience. Until finally, I hit SEO. And that was kind of the difference maker. I started investing in programs and mentors to learn SEO and I created an agency. But once again, like you mentioned, created another job from myself. I can generate leads for anybody anywhere. But now I got all these people that are asking me for reports and hey, update this picture on my website, send me this, send me that. And it wasn't until a client called me at midnight on a Sunday complaining about his rankings, which were fantastic. Where I just snapped. And I was like, I got to find a way to get out of this. There's got to be a way to do that. So I don't have to be involved all the time. I'm just laughing at somebody complaining about the rankings on a on a on a Sunday at midnight. Well, he woke me up. I was sleeping. I was like, I have a bedtime for myself. I just woke me up out of a dead sleep. I was like confused. Like, what's going on? I saw the name. It's like not clicking them. Like, why is this person calling me right now? And he was just complaining about call volume. And like, mind you, two months before, he's unlike page five or six in Google. And like, if you've ever seen the actual statistics on this, nobody goes past page one. It makes sense, right? You're googling for something you say you want to plumber. Why am I going to go seven pages back and look at 70 different companies? I'm going to take one of the first few or a person with some good reviews. I'm not going seven pages back. I don't have time for that. That's what everybody does, right? And this guy was nowhere to be found. And I had him on page one for like 30 different terms. He's getting four, five, six, seven calls a day from nothing before. And now he's complaining about this. I was like, you on grateful. I had some choice words. And then I just fired him on the spot. I'm like, we're you're done. I'm not that's that we're done. And then it just the next day, I got up and it's like, we got to do something different. So that was kind of the transition. I just started thinking about this. And I'm like, I can, if I could do this for anybody, why don't I just do this for all the same niches? I'm already in with these clients. And I will just rent the sites to them. I own it. So I'm in control. I don't have to do reports for anybody. I don't have to change anything because it's my site. And then you follow my rules or you're done. And I'll find somebody else because if I have the leads, that's what's valuable. So I just started treating it like a rental property and finding tenants instead of going out and finding clients. And that little switch made it passive for me. Because now I got something I could just build it up, rent it out. And then I'm done. Move on to the next one. So I want to understand this process a little, I want to understand your mindset too. Because so the two things that I think of when you, so you thought, build a website, rent the whole website out to a brand. Right. When you, can you explain that? And what I mean by explaining it is a website has, has a brand attached to it. How is it used for another company? Is it just your passing over leads? Yeah. Yeah. We're just exclusively. So I get to differentiate a couple things. So first thing, a lot of business owners think I need a website. And as soon as I have one, it's automatically going to bring in leads, which is not the case yet. A website's just a business card. It's not doing anything just sitting there. You could have a $30,000 website. And it's going to sit on page 10 with everybody else until you do some search engine optimization or SEO to move it up to the point where people see it. So that's the first thing. And then once you have that asset, whether, you know, the business owner owns that or I do, whoever has got that asset, people are going to see it. Right. If I'm ranked number one for New York City, for the term New York City plumbing, when somebody needs plumbing in New York City and they type that in, they're going to see me. And because there's a ton of people in New York City and everybody searches that term, that website, whoever is getting that traffic, that's worth a crazy amount of money. So if that's a business owner, cool, he could use it for himself is that's me. I have to find a way to get that to the business owner. So I essentially just started creating generic brands. So I would create something like New York City plumbing. So if anybody just called that, they're not really going to remember it. It's not anything as a memorable name. But it's generic enough where I could send it to another plumber. And he could just be like, oh, yeah, that's one of my marketing settings. Or oh, yeah, it's just, you know, that's that's my, my DBA. And I would just send all the leads to that business owner exclusively using some call tracking, call forwarding software. And then that keeps me out of it. So now the leads are coming in from the organic rankings I've achieved. I'm no longer involved because it's basically sitting there unless I pick a super competitive market. The leads being sent from the business or from the website to the business are out of my hands because that's all automated with the systems. And the business owners just getting call volume. So now I'm just renting the exclusive rights to all the leads that come in because I'm not a plumber, but I could still make money off of if I treat it like real estate. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one. you