- Liz Wilcox successfully ran her email marketing business while competing on 'Survivor.'
- Her income is as passive as it gets, but it took years to set up her business that way.
- One of her top strategies is a subscription model. It's "the ticket for passive income," she says.
When Liz Wilcox committed to competing on "Survivor," it meant stepping away from her business for more than a month.
"They take away your phone the second you go to LAX," said Wilcox, who was a contestant on Season 46, which premiered in early 2024. "For five weeks, I didn't have a phone, a laptop, no connection to the outside world. And it was like, 'Well, if the business burns down, I'm gone. It burns down.' But it didn't burn down. Everything went just fine, and it feels amazing as a business owner to say, I walked away for five full weeks."
The 36-year-old single mom runs an email marketing business.
In layman's terms, "I help companies and small businesses get average people to open their emails," she told Business Insider.
Her main revenue driver is subscriptions — she charges $9 a month for her coaching service — but she also earns money from affiliate marketing, live workshops, and partnerships. She brings in $40,000 a month on average and up to six figures during particularly lucrative months like November when she does a Black Friday sale. BI confirmed her monthly sales by looking at screenshots of her ThriveCart dashboard.
Wilcox's income is as passive as it gets. During the three months around the filming of Survivor in 2023 — including the five weeks when she was completely out of pocket — she brought in $99,000.
At the time of the interview with BI in June 2024, she estimated that she worked "10 hours in the last 30 days." But it took years of work to set up the business that way.
Here's how Wilcox created passive income in three steps.
1. She built a business around her expertise
Wilcox, who has a master's degree in educational leadership, started her career as a teacher. In 2016, she pivoted to blogging and started an RV travel blog. That's when she discovered she had a knack for getting people to open their emails.
"I knew that I was really good at email marketing. That was where I was making the majority of my cash," said Wilcox, who built an email list and monetized it by including affiliate links and selling digital products like an ebook. "So I started that business teaching people how to do that."
Creating content and templates for her subscribers required upfront work, but being an expert on the topic accelerated the process. It also helped that she enjoyed it, she added: "I love email marketing. I always say, no one is more passionate than me about electronic mail."
2. She leaned into a subscription model
A membership or subscription model that allows you to create recurring revenue is "the ticket for passive income," said Wilcox. Creating a course or content requires a lot of energy on the front end, but once it's done, you could theoretically distribute and make money from your digital product for the rest of your life.
To stand out from her competition, Wilcox catered toward beginners and offered a low price.
When she launched in 2021, "it was in the age of the pandemic when online businesses really soared," she said. As a result, demand for her expertise also soared, resulting in "a lot of high-ticket, big online courses — 10 or 20 modules, 22 hours of content."
She decided to provide the opposite: "I said, I'm only going to give you so much content every single week, you don't need any of the other stuff — and I'm going to charge $9."
Her subscription includes things like newsletter templates, live Q&As, and a library of trainings. Besides the monthly Q&As, most of the content she provides has already been created and just requires periodic maintenance.
Wilcox's low pricing model and strategy of offering "bite-sized chunks" of content also contribute to her business's passivity.
"Everyone talks about passive income, but they keep growing. They say, 'I'll add this, and I'll raise the price. I'll do this, and I'll raise the price.' But to me, I never want to raise the price," she said. "It's a very low-responsibility type of membership, which lends itself to be able to be passive."
3. She made choices that would benefit the business in the future, not just the present
The transition from active to passive income took time and focus, and Wilcox approached the challenge with a long-term view.
"I did this very intentionally. I worked hard to get away from client work — when I first started this email marketing business, I would write people's emails for them — and grow the membership," she said.
One of her strategies was doing "evergreen marketing," like going on podcasts, she said. "A podcast lasts forever. We might have recorded today, but someone might listen a year from now and sign up for the membership."
That sometimes meant sacrificing short-term income, she noted: "It would have been easy to say, 'Well, this person's offering me $5,000. Maybe I won't schedule those podcasts because I need the $5,000 right now.' But I knew in a few years' time, the podcast interviews would be worth more than that $5,000. I didn't stray from what I knew would be long-term gain."
Earning passive income doesn't happen overnight.
"Don't give up until it works," encouraged Wilcox. "Most people grow really impatient and think, 'Oh, it's not working. I only have 10 customers and it's been a year.'
"Instead of trying to figure out, how can I find 100 in the next year? They say, 'Let me just create something else.' But it's really about being patient and willing to put in the work."
