To make money online, you generally need 3 things:
There will always be exceptions to this rule, like the YouTube celebrities who don’t have their own site, but most of the successful entrepreneurs online (myself included) have figured out those 3 things.
An online business is a great asset; you can work from anywhere and serve people worldwide. Depending on how you have it set up, you can even earn money while you sleep. Ahh that elusive “passive income!”
The location-independent business models you’ll find here include blogging, podcasting, self-publishing, teaching online courses, and more.
If you’re not sure where to start, let me recommend this “Greatest Hits” collection:
In March I participated in my first online bundle sale.
It was hosted by Alexis Grant and the team over at The Write Life and featured 9 different products and resources for writers at a steep discount. ($1076 worth of stuff for just $99.)
I think coordinating bundle sales is a side hustle opportunity for bloggers — with or without an established audience.
This week, I’m joined by fellow online entrepreneur and freedom-seeker, Natalie Sisson.
Natalie is a masterful marketer, blogger, podcaster, and speaker, and on this call she breaks down how a blog post idea became a major turning point in her business, and was eventually re-purposed and repackaged more than a half-dozen ways — all ringing the cash register in some unique fashion.
The breakthrough moment was going from $0 to $15,000 in one month, with what I thought was a pretty savvy strategy.
Tim Johnson is a man of many hustles. In fact, when he applied for my Inner Circle Mastermind last year, I had a hard time keeping them all straight.
Between his day job as a product engineer, his awesome self-publishing business, his Amazon FBA activities, and an upcoming brick-and-mortar project — and twin 2 year old boys — there’s no doubt he’s keeping busy!
On this call, we focus on his book business, which has earned a consistent $1000-1500 a month in author royalties.
In January, I had a chance to sit down with Nick Stephenson, a top-selling Kindle author in both fiction and nonfiction. We recorded a podcast session on building an email list from Amazon.
The “hook” was Nick built a massive list of 15,000 email subscribers in just a few short months, using one pillar strategy: giving his books away for free.
The first was with his fiction work, a crime thriller series where he decided to make the first title in the series “permafree.” Later, he pulled the same trick in non-fiction with a giveaway (very meta) called Reader Magnets.
Which is why I was nervous about publishing this post. Would my readers be confused or turned off by this sort of content?
To my surprise and delight, my first-ever income report was well received. Even readers who have zero interest in the business of blogging liked the post.
They enjoyed the opportunity to look “behind the curtain” and appreciated my transparency.
One podcast I’ve been following for a really long time is the Empire Flippers show with Justin Cooke and Joe Magnotti. It’s been fun to watch their evolution from building tiny Adsense sites, running an outsourcing company in the Philippines, selling WordPress themes, and now really focusing in on their website brokerage business.
Consider this: it’s MUCH easier to buy an existing cash flow than to create one entirely from scratch.
In this episode we get into the business model of investing in sites, where to look for these “digital real estate” opportunities, some pitfalls to avoid, and even some creative financing options.
Ankur Nagpal is the founder of Fedora, an online course-hosting platform with more than 4000 instructors. From his unique vantage-point, he’s got some insight into what separates top-selling courses from the rest of the pack.
Ankur gives some innovative ideas on how to use free distribution platforms like YouTube and even Udemy to build an interested audience and drive them to your premium course. We get into how to come up with your course topic, the tools to create your course quickly, and some pricing strategies as well.
Last year, Lise “came out of nowhere” as they say, and published 13 books in 6 months, and now earns between $3000 and $4000 a month in author royalties.
Of course the truth is she didn’t come out of nowhere at all; she came out of New Zealand and had already built a successful freelance writing business. However, the hustle of delivering work for clients all day had her seeking a more time-leveraged use of her skills.
Since she already knew how to write well and write quickly, she figured book publishing was a natural next step.
On this week’s show, I’m joined by Steph Halligan, who runs ArtToSelf.com. She’s a talented cartoonist who began a daily blog and email newsletter with inspirational and affirmational art — all created by her.
The site is 100% supported by donations from her followers, and even though it’s very early in the journey, I think there’s enough validation to say she’s on the path her 1000 true fans doing work she loves.
In November I released my Udemy course, Kindle Launch Plan: $1400 in 30 Days & an Amazon Bestseller.
It’s about time I break down what I did to create the course, launch it, and ultimately earn $3525 in the first 60 days.
Have you published a course on Udemy? How did it go?
Would you use their platform again?
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