Many freelancers repeat the same mistake: You deliver the work, gain results, the client leaves a testimonial, you get paid once, and then you forget all about it and move on to finding and working with the next client.
This approach is not only unsustainable, it’s exhausting. Between each client, you’re marketing as hard as possible to try and find the next person to repeat the same process with all over again. At the same time, all the hours that you’re spending working with one client drains your energy and takes away from your calendar’s freedom.
This approach sets you up for a feast-or-famine cycle and leaves you burnt out and broke in between clients. But what you may not realize is that just one client project, if done right, can yield you a whole year or more of passive income if you approach it the right way. Instead of trading your time for money, you can regain control of your schedule and make more money while working less hours.
Here’s exactly how to stretch one project into twelve months or more of sustainable passive income, step by step:
1. Build A Product From Your Service
Productize your delivery. After finishing a client project, review the assets and deliverables you created, the toolkits you used, and your exact process/roadmap. Then, turn them into one or more digital products. This could be a mini-course, templates pack, or system. It could even be an app if you’re feeling a bit daring.
As an example, if you built an email marketing sequence for a life coach, you could package this into an email marketing course, or a done-for-you email marketing campaign kit for life coaches. Created once, sold forever.
2. Use Your Successful Client As Marketing
If you’ve delivered exceptional results for your client, use them as a case study (with permission of course, especially if specific, personal or potentially private information is included) and showcase this on your LinkedIn profile and in all your marketing and outreach as proof that your digital product works. This increases credibility and drives traffic your way because people will trust you more when you have results to show for it.
3. Turn Your Service Into A Monthly Subscription
In addition to repurposing your service into a digital product that sells on its own, you could also repackage it into a monthly subscription. This retainer method works well because it enables you to have more predictable income which gives you greater peace of mind from month to month (one of the biggest fears of freelance professionals is not knowing when or where their next pay will come from).
Instead of doing the heavy lifting every month, you’re essentially offering maintenance as a service, i.e., in the case of the email marketing example used above, it could be a month’s worth of email marketing sequences tailored to the client’s industry and specific business, delivered at the beginning of each month.
How To Build An Entire Year Of Passive Income
For a practical breakdown of how this could look over the next 12 months, let’s follow a hypothetical freelance digital marketing manager and walk through what would be done and potentially achieved each month, step by step:
- Month 1: Deliver your client project and document everything, including your process and ask for reviews/testimonials. Keep a record of these and screenshot before/after outcomes and metrics of how traffic and engagement increased on your client’s social media channels and website.
- Month 2: Ask yourself, what did I do last month that can be repeated over and over with minimal effort? Turn your process, system, etc. into a digital asset. For instance, create a seven-step framework for increasing LinkedIn engagement, design it on Canva, and sell it on Podia, Gumroad, etc.
- Month 3: Create a micro course or masterclass walking through the exact steps you used to help your client, and sell this to your audience. Use this to expand from your framework product, and include behind-the-scenes, information not available in the guide, and mistakes to avoid.
- Month 4: Double down on marketing both digital assets.
- Month 5: Now that you’ve attracted more leads, you can go back to your original client(s) and those who purchased the digital products, and offer them a monthly subscription, for website/social media content calendar tailored to their industry every month, or analytics reporting every month.
- Month 6: Build authority by guest-blogging and jumping on podcasts to share snippets of your process and talk about your digital products as well as the monthly subscription service
- Month 7: Turn your loyal clients into advocates and ambassadors for your business by offering them affiliate partnerships. Set up an affiliate program and offer them a healthy commission for referrals.
- Months 8-12: Refine your products, analyze what’s working and what could be done better, and strengthen your marketing before preparing to scale and add more products.
This process proves that you don’t need more 1-2-1 clients. All you need is a reliable system that repeats itself and runs on its own, over and over. Systems thinking enables you to experience real financial freedom, without being tied to the hours it takes to deliver a bespoke service, working all hours of the day and night just to put pennies on the table.
Just one client can become:
- A PDF guide
- A lead magnet
- A mini-course
- A masterclass
- A tools bundle
- A subscription package
All from a project you’ve already completed. That one client will make you more money than you ever realized.