There are some tempting alternatives that will pay me 10-20 times more for pointing you in their direction. But I don’t use them. How can I tell you to use something that I don’t trust with my own business? My mindset is based on integrity, because I don’t want you to buy one product from me. I want you to join my tribe and stick with me as you build your business and become successful. I want you to post comments on my blog about your success and tell your friends about how I helped you. I want you to trust me because I put your best interests in front of my personal financial gain. I want us to travel this road together for the next ten or twenty years.
You should treat your customers the same way. And it might help if you call your customers clients. That word seems to make the connection feel stronger. You want to think of the people who give you their hard earned money as something important. The more you care about them, the more they will come back for more and more. You want to put the best material you can assemble into your blog or podcast or radio show or whatever project you start. Even before you are making money, make sure your content has quality.
Now let’s be clear – when I talk about quality, I don’t mean spending 80% of your time on making things look pretty because you’re nervous that someone won’t like your work. When I say quality, I mean solving people’s problems in an entertaining and emotionally satisfying way. It’s ok if your website is ugly as long as the words have value. You can focus on making your site prettier after it’s generating income.
Integrity is rare in this world, and that’s an unfortunate thing. Hype and lies are profitable in this world – if I told you that you could push a magic button on your computer that would make you a millionaire, this book would fly off the shelves. Most people hate the idea of making money, especially if hard work is involved. I would rather help a smaller group of people succeed than make a large group of people feel excited for twenty minutes while they read a book they will never implement. I’m interested in building a tribe of people who can succeed around me. That’s what gets me excited, and I hope you have the same ideas in your heart.
54
Turning Your Assets and Skills into Income
At this point, you might be tempted to say that no one cares what you have to say about your hobby. Just like my relative who told me no one wants to build stuff at home anymore. Or my friend who said nobody wants help passing the Bar Exam.
We are at the point in the book where your mindset is everything. It’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s where we separate the people who are serious about making drastic changes to their life from the dreamers and the excuse makers. If you decide that your knowledge or skills have no value, then you should stop reading this book. Fold it closed, hit the power button, throw your Kindle in the fireplace, because absolutely nothing I can do matters anymore.
If you are stuck right here, you can jump back to the beginning of this book and accept the gift I offered you. When you do that, I’ll send you an email. That email will be from my real account. You can reply with your assessment sheet, and I’ll give you an idea that you can use to move forward.
Hopefully, I have shared enough with you by now that you are getting a feel for things that people would be interested in. Later on, I’ll get technical with the exact steps you can take to generate income. But let’s start with the big picture plan. You start by figuring out what you want to talk and teach about. Then you do some research to find your audience.
What do the people you want in your tribe like doing? Do they spend their time on Facebook or forums? Do they respond to video or blog posts? The more you understand your target audience, the better. Read reviews, read message boards, and listen to the words people use when praising a book or magazine on the topic. You should also pay attention to headlines and bullet points for video courses and blogs. What kind of benefits are they advertising? What kind of promises are they making? Are they things you’d be interested in buying yourself?
Before releasing this book, I did lots of research on Amazon. I found where you were hiding. The cover of this book, the length and the description were all designed based on your desires. I researched what you wanted to learn about and created a book that met your needs. I could have written something that is about ten times more technical. But you would have found it too convoluted and overwhelming. Rather than throw you into the deep end I’m starting slow so that you can follow the process and achieve real success.
Once you have found your audience and the medium they respond to, you can start to put together something that meets their need. You start with a blog or a podcast that is all about their needs and desires. You provide content that is both interesting and informative. You start by creating your first piece of property. A place where they can listen to what you have to say. The more you entertain or inform them, the more time they will spend with you. This is the start of the relationship. Over time their trust will increase, and you can then sell things to them. It might only take an hour to move through that spectrum of trust. It all depends on how the new client found you.
You want to create and sell products that help them. Do the research and make sure your training will work. This is where you start to generate income. If you are purely in the entertainment space, then you may focus on recommending stuff that you think is cool. That’s totally fine. That is how the majority of websites make their money. It’s the business model of every news site out there. They don’t sell anything directly.
You might be a real technical expert, and your expertise lies more in the realm of converting visitors into customers. You might be wonderful at statistics or web design. If you have a skill in this arena, your strategy is more about implementing that skill rather than teaching it to other people. You can get into the service game where you let people pay you for your help. Even though you are getting paid for time, you now get to choose your projects and control your pricing. You can give yourself a raise whenever you like. My first online endeavor was helping people to rank their websites on Google so that customers could find them. I charged a flat monthly fee for my efforts. With each client, I simply doubled my price. I discovered that excellent results allow you to charge whatever number pops into your head.
There are thousands of ways to make money online and to include all of them in this book would make it tens of thousands of pages long. I’m sticking with what I know and what has worked for me over and over again. If you are interested in learning something that I don’t cover in this book, you can check out my blog at ServeNoMaster.com, and I probably talk about it there. You can also reach out to me via email, and I will help you find the mentor that meets your needs.
55
Connecting Your Passion to Profits
Let’s say you spent an entire day at your job – sweating, hands cramping, working like a pack mule. If you get home, and you have the choice of working on a blog that you don’t like that much or watching a movie with your family, you will probably watch that movie. But if that blog is instead about your favorite topic, then you will enjoy working on it. I like writing this book. That’s why it’s so long, and I’m writing so fast. I’m pumped to put it out into the universe and get it into your hands – and that kind of enthusiasm is infectious. That’s why you want to start with a passion-based idea.
There are many ways to turn your passion into profits, and we’re going to talk about them in the next section. You can start a blog, sell books on Amazon, start a podcast, or sell training and services. There are a lot of ways to make money online, and we are going to find the best path for you to follow in the next section. For now, just trust me that the more you like what you are doing, the more money you will make. That’s the easiest path to success.
56
Building New Skills
You can also consider mastering a specific skill that you can leverage online. Some of those skills are:
Ranking websites on Google
Ranking books on Amazon
Designin
g websites
Recording voice overs
Creating beautiful videos
Writing words that sell
Ghost writing
Media buying
Analyzing data to improve website performance
People are and will pay money hand over fist for people who know how to do this stuff, and you can use these skills to build your own business, too. Once you reach any level of expertise, you can release training to people further down the mountain than you. One of the most valuable skills you can develop is copywriting. The ability to write words that sell is a timeless skill and will be the subject of my next book. You can learn how to master copywriting without spending a penny on the bonus page for this book:
ServeNoMaster.com/book
This page has loads of additional content about each of the skills in this section as well as loads of tutorials. There is so much content that it crashed my server, and I had to split it into two pages! You can find links to my blog post and podcast episodes teaching how to learn copywriting and make serious money in less than six months without spending a penny.
When you develop one of these skills, you can leverage your way into some amazing partnerships. I use my ability to create Amazon bestsellers to forge new business relationships all the time. I have over thirty bestsellers on Amazon, all written under different pen names. I have a track record with this specific skill, and that is a value I bring to many new projects. It allows me to connect with people who would otherwise ignore me.
I'm a big believer in making money while you learn. I started building my first online business by selling services. The greatest thing about selling services is that you get paid up front. When I started selling my Google ranking service, I had no idea what to do. I used the first paycheck to buy the training and software that I needed to deliver on my promises. I provided amazing results and from there the clients started rolling in. It’s a great way to start; a few clients at the beginning can help fund your education if you are light on cash.
If you want to learn any of the skills from this list, there is a ton of information on my book page dedicated to helping you figure out the right skill for you and to help you find the best expertise. I can’t be everything to everyone, but I’m more than happy to help you along your path and find someone that can help you.
57
What is Your Time Worth?
We know how much money you want to make to hit each of your three primary goals. Now we want to work on that money to time ratio. At your job right now you get paid a certain amount of money per hour. If you are on a salary, you can pretend that you don’t get paid for hours worked, but we can still get a pretty solid number. Just take how much money you earned last month and divide by the number of hours you worked. That will tell you at least how much your boss thinks an hour of your time is worth.
But ultimately, there’s a brand new you, and you need to set your new rates. The problem is, you need to decide what the “new you” is going to sell time for, and I don’t have any easy answers for you here. Depending on the project I’m working on my price changes. If it’s a new project and I want to garner some testimonials, I’ll lower my price. My level of expertise also determines where I price myself. Right now, I‘d hop on the phone for about a hundred bucks an hour to talk about stuff from this book. If my phone starts ringing off the hook, I will keep raising the price. Depending on my desire to provide a service, I sometimes raise my price until no one wants to buy it.
As you noticed when I talked about my success using relationships, I’ve written some of the most successful dating books in the world. My book for women has sold so many copies that I no longer try to count. I just check out that royalty direct deposit every Wednesday with a smile. For a long time, I provided a great deal of private coaching in the relationship space. I don’t want to coach more than 3-4 people a year at most. So I charge $25,000 for me to fly out for a weekend and help someone where they live. My price used to be lower, but people kept paying it. I was totally booked, flying all over the place every weekend and getting worn out. My price reflects the value of my private coaching combined with my desire to stay at home now.
You want to determine how you value your time before you work on anything. That is how you’ll find out if you should do something or if you should pay someone else to do it. This is not a hard and fast rule because learning how to do something yourself is often very valuable and hard to calculate. You also want to decide what you want to sell any services for. A common mistake is setting a price for something without factoring in how much of your time it will take. Over time, you will get better at this, but I just wanted to give you some rough numbers to get you started.
VIII
Ways to Make Money Online
Don't let making a living prevent you from making a life.
- John Wooden
58
Freelancer
The first way you can quickly make money online is by selling your services to the highest bidder. Whatever your expertise, there are people who will pay for it all day long, and as you build up a reputation, you can get the fee you want.
Depending on the nature of your expertise you may sell it entirely online, or you might find customers online and then help them in person. One of the best places to get started is UpWork. I hire people from this site all the time. You set up a profile and post a portfolio. Then you just start bidding on the jobs that people post. I hire people off there all the time for projects.
The great thing here is that the money is in escrow, so you never have to worry about the client not paying you. The money is already out of their account before you get started. Before you jump at this, please remember that it’s hard to get picked for jobs when you first get started. You will have no experience and no reviews on there. Nobody wants to be your first client. So you want to find customers using other methods and then get them to hire you via UpWork. This is a way to get that profile started, and you can get some amazing gigs on there. The best part is that you only work when you want to.
Another great place to setup is on Fiverr. This site charges five bucks for everything. Well, that’s how it started, but now you can post all sorts of add-ons and packages for services. I have seen plenty of offers on there that cost more than one hundred bucks. The correct way to use this site is to build a customer base. You do a good job on something small for five bucks, and then you can do larger projects for more. This allows you to grow and grow. Yes, you start small, but there are plenty of people making six figures as vendors on this site.
At the next level, you can leverage. You sell a service for a high price, and you pay someone else to do it for a lower price. This is often called arbitrage, and we’ll discuss how to get into this game a little later.
I personally always sold my services directly to clients. I posted great ads on Craigslist and found clients all day long. You can find resources for finding clients and building your online resume fast at ServeNoMaster.com/book
59
Sell Services
Everything I do involves some degree of risk, and ultimately, my success depends on managing my fears and controlling as many risk elements as possible. Selling services can be very daunting at first, and if you’re used to getting paid per hour, you’re going to have to do a lot of new things to build your business.
Selling directly has more reward, but there’s also more risk. You deal directly with the client, which means you have to collect payment yourself. Small business owners are always trying to stay in the black and paying your bills will not be a priority. If you don't setup your systems in advance, you can end up spending weeks chasing checks, and some clients will stiff you.
When I first got started, I let some people pay me at the end of the month. When you are an employee, you get paid after you work, so this is how I acted when I was working independently.
It took me a while to learn that you always get the client to pay at the start of the month, wit
h automated billing. There are a few great tools for this. You can get a little dongle you plug into your smartphone that will swipe credit cards. You can also setup recurring payments. You take the credit card information once, and the software charges them every month until they cancel.
I much prefer my client having to act to stop paying me, rather than have to take action to pay me. That means that a lazy client will keep paying for another month or two. It’s a vast improvement over driving all over town to get them to write you a check. As you build up a reputation, people will write enormous checks within fifteen minutes of meeting you. It’s a heady feeling, but this is where integrity comes into play. Do not take the money if you can’t deliver the goods.
The difficulty with selling services is that you aren’t fully in control of your destiny. Eventually, you reach the top of your market, and you can’t raise your price anymore. The market won’t bear infinite price raising. So you will inevitably hit that wall. For some of those types of services that wall is around $25k a month for others, it is closer to 10k. But I find that most people can live pretty comfortably on three hundred grand a year. It just really depends on how high on the hog you need to live. Remember that sheet you made a couple of chapters ago? Look at it closely, and don’t get greedy. Not yet, anyway.
Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad Page 11
