Two things are true about making money online.
It’s not difficult to make money online, but it’s also not easy.
Difficulty means you need a superhuman level of intelligence or talent to pull it off, which is not true. Most people can make a six-figure income online.
Making money online is hard because it’s time-consuming. Honestly, you don’t even have to grind for five years like I did to pull it off.
With the right attitude and ruthless execution, you could create a new business from scratch over a weekend. But even doing something in that short of a time-window requires patience and time consumption within that time frame — finishing a bunch of tiny little steps quickly.
Get the attitude part right, first. Next, execute. Last, simply be consistent until it works.
You can choose a variety of different business models, products or services, and price points, but the attitudes matter most. If you adopt some or all of the following guiding principles, you’ll be on your way to online business success and financial flexibility.
Work to Learn, Not For Money
Most people spend their entire life as an employee.
When you’re an employee, you think in terms of dollar per hour or salary output. When you’re making money for yourself, often you’ll have to spend time working on your business making little to no money to start, in the hopes you’ll make t more in the future.
You have to sacrifice short term gains because you first need to learn those valuable and profitable skills. Money is weird. If you focus on it too much, it’ll elude you. But if you focus on doing the things that attract money to you, it comes to you.
- Don’t focus on making the most sales, focus on having the best product or service with the best system to sell it
- Don’t focus on building the largest audience, focus on creating the best content, and creating the best system to promote it
- Instead of thinking, “How do I get people to buy?” think, “How can I make the buying decision so easy because the quality and persuasion is so apparent?”
Money is the closest thing we have to an objective measure of value. Become more valuable by becoming rare.
You can be rare, mostly, by not quitting. Most business owners don’t fail, they quit. Continue to learn and grow without quitting and you’ll be successful.
Remove This Word From Your Vocabulary
I wrote a successful personal development book and have a top-earning self-improvement blog. Self-improvement is the most saturated field in blogging.
Yet, I never worry about ‘saturation’ and neither should you.
As I mentioned in the first point, most of your ‘competition’ will quit. Unless you are trying to start some billion-dollar company, you want to be in an industry with proven success already.
If you understand the basics of your industry and figure out how to differentiate yourself, you’ll build a successful business or platform. You learn the rules and then break them.
I learned the fundamentals of blogging and self-improvement. Over time, I developed my own voice based on my personal experiences. I realized a lot of self-improvement advice was fluffy, B.S., and overly positive, which lead to me honing my non-politically correct, blunt, and almost abrasive style of writing.
When it comes to a personal brand, no one can compete with you at being you. If you have a product that isn’t attached to your name, you have to figure out how to position your product to make it unique.
This could mean:
- Targeting a very small section of a niche first, e.g., fitness programs for moms who just gave birth.
- Making your product premium, exclusive, expensive on purpose, e.g., designer shirts you only make one pair of each
- Talking about your special process for procuring the item, e.g., MVMT watches talking about their approach of cutting out the middle man to create luxury watches at an affordable price
You get the gist. Almost every industry or vertical has an angle to it. The combination of creativity and patience will help you win.
Achieve This Milestone and Celebrate
If you manage to make your first dollar online, congratulations, you are now more successful than the vast majority of people who aspire to make money online.
Most either think about it, but never try, or start, but end up making zero. If you’ve already made some online money, celebrate it. For those of you who aren’t there yet, when it does happen, celebrate each victory along the way.
Understand that trickles can lead to a flood. My first book sold for a couple of hundred books in the first month. Now? I’m on pace to make six-figures just from my book income.
In my first month on the Medium Partner Program, I made $225. Today? Let’s just say I make a bunch more.
My YouTube channel finally got monetized and I’ve made $135. But guess what? I don’t just see $135, I see the foundation for another income stream pillar both from ad revenue and the back-end products I’ll sell using that channel.
Start one stream, get it to work, celebrate the hell out of it. Start another, get it to work, celebrate the hell out of it.
Enjoy the trickle and use it to create an eventual flood.
Understand Business Down to a “T”
Most people specialize in one area, usually as an employee. Others, many online folks, try to become a jack of all trades and try several businesses at once.
I suggest becoming “T-Shaped.”
Build one skill or product, monetize and become an expert in that vertical first, then branch out. I spent four years learning how to write and monetize it before I branched out to YouTube, investing, and creating online programs.
Because I developed my foundation first, I have more resources I can deploy into other areas. I take the money I earned from writing and invest it. I use the foundational marketing skills I learned from blogging and apply them to these new areas.
When it comes to my education, I read and study a lot of random subjects, mainly to feed that information into my brain and create a unique worldview I can use for my core.
Most people don’t squeeze enough juice out of their core skills or products. You can become proficient in any industry, but not unless you stick with one long enough to become successful at it.
If you spend a few years focusing on e-commerce, you’ll have a successful store. If you write your ass off daily for years, you’ll become a successful blogger.
Then, you can build out your T and continue to create new skills and income streams.
Re-Wire Your Money Mind
In the long run, you’ll have to work to untangle many of the issues you have with money.
Here’s a shortlist of attitudes/concepts you’ll have to work on:
- Charging what you’re worth after years of working for less than you deserve as an employee
- Looking at money as a tool instead of labeling it ‘good’ or ‘evil’
- Spending money to make money, e.g., hiring people and running ads
- Going from a ‘saver’ to an ‘earner;
- Understanding scale and leverage
- Money likes speed, not intelligence
- Money is abundant and trades hands all the time, not scare
- Selling (a good product) is your duty, it isn’t slimy
- Feeling worthy of money, period
Most of the things society teaches you about money are the opposite of the truth. Society gives people bad money maps to keep them dependant.
You can figure out how to make this online business thing work, but not until you get your mind right.
You’re not selfish for wanting to live a free and flexible life. You can gain wealth ethically by creating something people want or need. It’s a fair exchange of value.
You can learn the process of building an online money vehicle. You can learn it. But not until you get out of your way long enough to do so.