Passive Income: How a Single Mom Makes $40,000 a Month with Email Marketing

Her career change came shortly after her daughter was born.

“I realized that being a traditional public school teacher wasn't the path for me. I heard I could make money blogging, so I started an RV travel blog,” said Wilcox, who was living in an RV at the time.

The job earned her a living, but more importantly, it gave her a niche skill set: She was really good at getting people to open her emails, and she enjoyed the process. “I love email marketing. I always say that no one is more passionate about email than I am.”

Three and a half years later, Wilcox sold the blog for $30,000 and used the money to start up her email marketing business. “It wasn't a huge amount of money, so I tried to spend it very carefully, but it definitely helped with all the little things I needed to do, like paying for software and paying for small jobs that I needed to hire outside contractors,” she said.

Launched a subscription-based business and grew to 4,500 members

From the start, Wilcox knew his target customer was the beginner.

“I come from a background in education. I'm used to working with beginners. In fact, I love beginners and I love explaining this email thing to them,” she said.

Plus, she noticed a gap in the market at the time.

“The pandemic was the time when online businesses really boomed,” she says, and as a result, the demand for her expertise — building email lists, retaining subscribers and ultimately selling products — also skyrocketed, “leading to a lot of big, expensive online courses — 10 to 20 modules, 22 hours of content.”

She decided to do the opposite: “I said, I'm going to give you this much content every week, you don't need anything else, and I'm going to charge you $9. This was almost unheard of, but I stole that price from Netflix. Back in the day, Netflix was only $9.”

The first six to nine months of launching the coaching subscriptions were “pretty slow,” Wilcox said, and while she was confident in the product, it wasn't until 2021 — specifically, Black Friday weekend — that she saw any sales validation.

“I started what I called an 'Annual Pass,' where you pay for a year and get all kinds of perks. I sent out one email with the subject line, 'Limited to 100 for Sale,' I didn't know what to expect, but I wanted to create an incentive to buy now,” she said. She intended the sale to last 48 hours, but it sold out in two. “I made like $13,000 in two hours. That's when I thought, 'OK, this is a good thing.'”

Wilcox reopened the annual pass sales two weeks later and attracted another 225 members.

“I made more money in just two weeks than most people make in a year,” she said.

Previously, she had been working with private clients in addition to her subscription business, but after her second annual pass sale, she says, “I never took on any clients again.”

As of June 2024, Wilcox has 4,500 members. At $9 per month, subscription revenue alone brings in $40,500, or roughly $500,000 per year. She also earns from affiliate marketing, live workshops, and partnerships. BI has tracked her monthly sales, which have reached six figures during particularly strong months, such as November's Black Friday.

Build your business as passively as possible: “I worked 10 hours in the last 30 days.”

Wilcox's income is extremely passive: She estimates she worked “10 hours in the last 30 days,” and as of June, she had already created the content she needed for the rest of 2024, though it took years of hard work to get to that point.

“The first two years of my membership weren't hard, but I was never passive. Every week I was working on creating content, coming up with ideas and finding customers. Those things used to take up a lot of my time,” she said.

She also spent time up front doing “evergreen marketing,” including appearing on podcasts: “Podcasts are forever. If you record them today, someone might listen to them a year from now and sign up for a subscription.”

Taking a long-term view was key to her success, she added: “It would have been easy for me to say, 'This person is offering me $5,000. I need $5,000 now, so maybe I'm not going to schedule a podcast.' But I knew that a few years down the line, that podcast interview would be worth way more than that $5,000.”

Her low price model and strategy of providing “bite-sized” content also contribute to the passivity of her business.

“Everybody's talking about passive income, and it's growing. They say, 'If you add this, we'll raise the price. If you do this, we'll raise the price,' but I don't want to raise my prices,” she said. “It's a very low-responsibility type of membership, and it lends itself to being passive.”

Generating passive income allowed her to fulfill a lifelong dream of competing on “Survivor.”

“As soon as you get to LAX, they take your phone away,” said Wilcox, who was a contestant on Season 46 of the show. “For five weeks, I had no phone, no laptop, no connection to the outside world. I thought, 'If this business burns down, I'm gone. It's just going to burn.' But it didn't. Everything worked out great. As a business owner, it feels amazing to be away for five full weeks.”

Now that the show has ended, Wilcox has moved from retention mode — improving the membership program and keeping current customers happy — to growth mode. One of her main goals is to increase membership to 10,000 in the next 12 to 24 months, which would bring in more than $1 million in annual membership revenue.

“More than the money, what I really want to do is show people what's possible. I want to show people that you can make a million-dollar product for less than $10,000,” she said. “My definition of success isn't what car you drive or what school your daughter goes to. It's showing people what's possible.”