Making money online is about creating multiple income streams for cash flow every month
If you’re not happy with your job or just want to make more money, I’ve got five income sources you can use to make thousands a month. In fact, I’ve made over $350,000 from these five sources alone and just closed January at over twenty-thousand dollars!
I’ll show you how to get started, how much you can make and how to ditch the rat race forever!
We’re building a huge community on YouTube to beat your debt, make more money and start making money work for you. Click over to join us on the channel and start creating the financial future you deserve!
Online Income is the REAL Path to Financial Independence
Nation, let me tell you a story and see if it sounds familiar. I hated my first jobs after college. I worked in corporate finance because I thought that was the career path I wanted. The work gave me no freedom to make my own decisions, I had no control over my income and it felt like nothing I did really mattered.
So I latched on to the idea of early retirement. I saved every penny, took side jobs, all for that idea of Financial Independence Early Retirement; I mean, I was FIRE before FIRE was a thing.
But, and this is the reason that whole FIRE movement is bullshit, nobody really knows what IT is or what it really means.
At best, you get rich, retire early and become a sun-burnt alcoholic. At worst, you’re chasing a dream that keeps you chained to the old way of work, a slave to the 9-to-5 grind!
Thinking about this, I realized I needed to create something else. I not only needed to create that income I could live on but something that would give me a purpose and make retirement pointless.
Six years later and I’ve made over $360,000 from my online income sources; and cleared $20,000 in the last month alone. I grew my monthly income by over 70% last year!
Much more than the cash flow though, the five income streams I’m going to show you today have given me that sense of control over my financial future, they’ve given me a purpose that get’s my ass out of bed in the morning and I can’t imagine not doing this every day.
So I’m going to open up the books, show you directly from my income spreadsheet, the sources I use to make money, how much you can make and how to get started!
*Watch the video above for that look into my income spreadsheet.
My Favorite Passive Income Source
Here again is my income tracking for all my online business; that’s the blogs, YouTube, everything except freelancing which I haven’t done for a couple of years. And if you scroll all the way back to 2015, you see the first income source I started was self-publishing.
Self-publishing is easier than people give it credit for. Everyone has a book idea in them, right? What’s that book you wanted to right? The one where you’re an orphan that finds out he’s a wizard and has to fight the evil sorcerer that killed your parents.
I bet that would be a good one!
So if we go to the separate tab where I track my book revenue, I’ve made just under $85,000 on 12 books and that doesn’t include the fifteen-grand from selling the rights to one of these last December, so actually right around a hundred grand.
Scroll down to the graphic and it’s been pretty consistent. I published quite a few books quickly but then took about 30 months off to work on other income streams, otherwise this number would be much higher by now.
Understand when I say self-publishing, I mean writing out a book and uploading it to Amazon to sell as an ebook on Kindle. You’ll also sell it as a paperback and should record an audio version to really max out your income.
We’ve got a playlist on the channel for self-publishing and I just published a book detailing my entire process from developing your idea to making writing easy. I don’t want to spend too much time here since we’ve already got the videos on self-publishing, I want to spend more time on the income sources we haven’t talked about yet but I do have three tips to get you started and making money.
For the first time, I’m revealing the entire strategy I’ve used to self-publish 12 books on Amazon and average over $2,100 a month in passive income. In Self-Publishing for Passive Income, you’ll learn everything you need, from getting a book idea to making writing easy and selling more books.
Three Tips to Self-Publish a Book and Make Money
First is don’t feel like you have to be the world’s expert on a subject to write a book about it. People don’t buy books for the information, they buy books for the transformation. And there’s no better way to help them achieve that transformation than sharing your own personal story of growth.
Your experience has value and that’s what you put in the book.
So research the topic, everything someone would need to know to achieve that transformation but don’t overlook your own stories and your personality as a piece of that.
Next is to build this into your content strategy. What I mean by that, and this is something we’ll talk about next, is that you’ll probably have a blog or YouTube channel, something to help promote these income sources. So you’re having to create content regularly, writing posts or doing videos for the channel.
Make this all easier by combining the two. Plan out your book from first to last chapter and write one a week for your blog.
I see so many would-be self-publishers that sit down to write an entire book and just get stuck watching the cursor blink on the computer. Don’t try to write a book. Write one chapter at a time, use that for content on your blog or your channel, then when it’s all finished, put it together, refine it a little and you’ve got your book finished!
Not only is this an easy way to write and keep you from that writers’ block but those blog posts are going to be instant marketing once your book is launched.
Finally here is that it’s all about your book launch, that first week or two when your book is available on Amazon. If you can rank the book on Amazon with some initial sales, it takes very little after that to keep a book ranked and making sales on the world’s larges ecommerce website.
To get those first sales, it’s going to take a little more directness than most people are used to so this is going to be a growth experience for a lot of you. But you need to start talking to people a month in advance and then directly ask them to buy a copy during that launch week.
This isn’t something that you can just drop a post on your Facebook feed and figure people will click through. You have to ask them in a personal message because that’s the only way to really get the results you need.
Using Affiliate Marketing as an Income Stream
Next I started making money with affiliate marketing, first a few hundred dollars and growing steadily to over $6,000 last month.
Now we should probably back up here and talk about that idea of blogging or having a YouTube channel and making money.
When most people say the make money blogging, what they actually mean is from all these sources we’ll talk about like self-publishing, affiliates, sponsors and their own products. A blog itself is just a bunch of pages and words on the internet. It doesn’t MAKE money but it brings people, that’s your distribution.
Think of it like the local Kwiki-Mart. The bags of Cheetos and bottles of yoo-hoo, that’s the stuff that’s actually making money. The Kwiki-Mart is just how you get those Cheetos to the customer. In the same way, these income sources are how you make money but you need that blog or channel to get them in front of your customers.
Now I want to keep this video focused on those income sources but I’ve got a free checklist on how to start a blog that I’ll link to below. It’s going to give you everything you need from getting online to growing your blog and make it all super-easy so make sure you check that out.
Click to reserve your spot at the FREE YouTube Quick-start Webinar! I’m sharing three strategies that helped me grow my YouTube channel and double my business income. I guarantee they WILL work for you. Seats are limited for the webinar, so make sure you reserve yours.
But I want to get back to affiliates because this can be a huge revenue source and it’s really easy to do.
Affiliate marketing is just talking about a product or a service then putting a link that people can click on to learn more. If they go to the website and end up buying the product, you get a commission.
Now there are a couple of warnings here for affiliate marketing. First is you don’t want to be selling out to just any product. This is your community, your blog readers, and you don’t want to alienate them by being a shill for shitting products. So you only partner with affiliates or products you use or ones you’d recommend to your mother.
Another warning is, you’re not going to make money talking about just any product. You’ve got a niche for your blog, so you generally talk about a certain topic. That means you’re going to attract people interested in that topic and you can market products around it. For example talking about the new Black & Decker Toaster, no matter how great it is, on your pet grooming blog…probably isn’t going to get too many sales.
Find the half dozen or so products that really solve a problem for your audience and stick with those.
Now if we jump back into my income report it…kinda looks like I’m breaking my own rule here with 68 affiliates I’ve worked with but understand, this is over six years, six blogs I’ve owned and the YouTube channel, so there’s a lot of different topics I’ve covered.
So I’ve made just over $147,000 on affiliate commissions and last month was over $6,000 alone. But if we look at these top performers, really only a handful produce the biggest share of this income. Just four of these account for 60% of the total income and you can see in January that just four affiliates were 80% of the income so definitely that less is more rule.
We’ve got Blue Host here which is the web hosting that I use for my blogs and recommend to new bloggers. We’ve got M1 Finance and Webull, the two investing sites I’m using most lately. We’re using M1 Finance for our 2020 dividend portfolio and I love the features on Webull for research and stock trading.
The other big affiliate here has been Fundrise, the real estate investing site I started using last year and am really happy with. I invested $1,000 last October and have already made $20 in dividends and $24 in appreciation, so a 4.4% gain in just four months.
Tips to Making Money with Affiliate Marketing
So you can make a lot of money with affiliates and I want to show you how to set this up and a few tips to be successful.
The easiest way to get started making money here is to join what’s called an affiliate network. These are sites like CJ Affiliates or Share-a-Sale that connect affiliates with publishers, that’s you.
You go to these affiliate networks, search for products and companies relevant to your topic and ones you use. If they have a program, you’ll get a special link that will track when someone clicks on it and credit your commission if they buy something.
Now you can’t just start spamming these little links all over the internet. It’s annoying and people aren’t going to buy something just because you said to. You have to actually demonstrate the product, compare it to some of the alternatives or basically provide some kind of information that answers a question for people. You provide that information about the product, your experience using it and then let people make their own decision whether it’s right for them.
That’s how you serve your community at the same time as making money with affiliates. Answer the questions and let people make their own decision.
Now on to a couple of tips to make as much money with affiliates as possible. First is, like we talked about, find those few products that really solve a problem for your community. Focus on answering every single question around those four or six products.
You also want to do this in a few different types of posts. So we talked about comparison posts where you compare alternatives, for example if Coca-Cola was an affiliate then you’d make a post comparing Coke and Pepsi and as many of the other alternatives as possible like Dr Pepper or juice drinks, really give people as much detail as possible.
You can also do detailed step-by-step reviews of a product; tell people exactly how to use it for maximum effect and share your experience. Finally maybe you can even do a video review of it.
Getting Sponsorships for Your Blog or Channel
The next income source I started making money from was sponsored posts and sponsorships. Now there are some slight differences between these two income sources so I probably could list them separately.
Sponsored posts are when someone pays you to put an article on your blog, usually with a link back to their website. It helps get the word out for their product and adds a little SEO value for their search traffic. You’ll get lots of offers for $30 or $50 for these but even a small blog should be charging $100 minimum for a post and I’ve seen this as high as a thousand.
The real money though is in those traditional sponsorship ideas, so a company pays you to represent it and try out the product. I’ve just started doing these over the last couple of years but it’s already more than half that total $45,000 I’ve made from the two income sources.
Sponsored posts will pretty much come to you but you’ll have to work a little to get sponsors. Look around similar blogs and YouTube channels to see what other bloggers are promoting. Another good resource is the sponsor list for conferences in your topic, so which companies are paying for booth space or sponsoring the conference.
Reach out to these sponsors by email and make your pitch. You might start by asking for a demo copy of their product to test out or ask what’s worked in the past with their advertising. For how much to charge sponsors, look at how much traffic you usually get for videos or blog posts. Then estimate how many of those visitors click through for affiliates or links and apply that number to rates you find on Google Adwords for keywords related to the product. That’s how much the company would expect to pay for that kind of traffic and you can generally start negotiating around that amount.
You don’t need to be a professional athlete or some makeup diva to get sponsors and it’s an income source that can really make you a lot of money.
How to Make Money on YouTube
So I know I said that a blog or a YouTube channel is your distribution and really doesn’t MAKE money itself…but there is an exception here and you see it in this line for YouTube ads. I made just over $1,200 in the first month YouTube was showing ads on the videos and have seen that grow to over $8,000 in January.
So YouTube can be that product all by itself because the platform shows commercials and ads on your videos. I also make money through these other sources; so talking about affiliates and getting sponsorships, I make money through YouTube with those as well but the ads have been a surprisingly big source of income.
Starting and growing a YouTube channel is a whole series of videos in itself so I want to link to one that will get you started in the description below. There’s just so much here to talk about from getting started and making videos to growing a channel.
What I can tell you is that ANYONE can be successful on YouTube. I mean, look at me. We’re talking a face perfect for radio and my voice is somewhere between Gilbert Godfried and a whiny five-year old!
Click to reserve your spot at the FREE YouTube Quick-start Webinar! I’m sharing three strategies that helped me grow my YouTube channel and double my business income. I guarantee they WILL work for you. Seats are limited for the webinar, so make sure you reserve yours.
Creating Courses for a Consistent Income Stream
Our next income source is another kind of catch-all. So if you scroll through here you see I started my first course in December 2018 and since then I’ve added another course and a few other products.
So this is not just video courses but products like spreadsheets I sell through the blogs. I’m still developing these but I feel like this could really be the next level for the business.
For example, this investing spreadsheet I’m developing right now. This thing is going to have some features you won’t find anywhere else. You’ll be able to analyze your portfolio, compare a stock against sector averages or another stock, just lots of unique information all done automatically in the spreadsheet.
Being able to create a product like a course or even a traditional physical product, it works on so many levels. You won’t have to settle for just a commission like with affiliates. It’s something that you can keep selling, unlike sponsorships which you have to keep trying to renew. Products are where your business needs to evolve if you’re going to start making real money.
One way to get started here is just to think about your self-published books, so maybe converting those into a video course. You can also think about what are those most frequent questions you get from readers, how can you answer those questions or those needs with a product.
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Even though you can make a lot of money with any of these income sources, you’ll notice how I’ve used all of them together to really grow the business over these six years. The cash flow from any of these can be volatile from month to month but together, they really give you a chance to build something amazing!