Introduction
There’s nothing mysterious about making money online compared to offline. The laws of economics still apply; you still have to have a valuable skill that you can monetise and add value.
The problem is, you start with abundant time but scarce cash. Over time, that crosses over... until you have a mid-life crisis. The good news is that you don’t have to be this hustle-and-grind, sleep-deprived entrepreneur to make money online and you also don’t need to have a huge following.
Method #1: Trading time (and expertise) for money
If you’re good at a skill, you should be able to command a predictable income for it. That doesn’t exclude you from building something that pays you while you sleep. In fact, the goal is that you take the cash that you earn from this and feed it into something else, so that it turns into something that can take off and keep running without needing your active input anymore.
One of the benefits of trading time for money is that you can choose your workload. You’ve built a skill that you can monetise at any point in the future, and the great thing is that this skill helps you protect yourself from any company risk, because you are inherently valuable now.
These are just a few of the skills that you could consider monetising:
- Web design
- Audio or video editing
- Coding web apps
- Back-end integrations
- Graphic design
There are loads of other skills that you can learn, and you could actually be within the top ten of your chosen area if you really get your head down. You could even be within the top one percent within six months of consistent, focused work.
Once you've learned and stacked these skills, you can then either work freelance on something like Fiverr or Upwork, or you might want to apply to work with a company you like the sound of. Luckily, this is the era where location barriers don't matter, which makes it easier to reach out to a company and ask if you can do a bit of work for them. That way, they can test you out and if they like your work they might end up taking you on full-time.
Method #2: Selling your expert knowledge
If you have expertise in something and you can get someone a result, taking them from A to B, then there is a consulting role out there ready for you to create. This is our preferred method, because it doesn't require any degree of luck or a huge following. What it does require is for you to be able to get somebody a result.
The way that you package your knowledge is very important. Something that requires you to work one-to-one with someone – like one-on-one coaching or mentoring – is going to command a high price, but it's going to be very time-intensive. It’s going to require lots of phone calls and back-and-forth. However, I would recommend that you start with this to build out your systems.
The next step up is one-to-many, or leveraged, coaching. This is where you would have dedicated slots of time to interact with your clients. The rest of the legwork is done by stuff that you’ve front-loaded by materials that you've created that then keep teaching, even when you're not there.
The next step up from there is zero-to-many, where you take an entirely pre-recorded product and sell it at scale. This is great if you have high traffic and could end up being the end-goal to creating a consulting business, but it's not the way that you should start out. But we’ve helped hundreds of people to quit their full-time job, making between six and ten thousand a month, doing exactly that with the systems that we teach and the systems that we used to build Propane Fitness to the same level of scale.
What we help coaches do
The systems we have in place make sure that business is predictable, and that success is not down to chance. But you need to bring the expertise that will get a result for your client.
What about if you don't have specific expertise, but you want access to that scaled form of income?
If this is the case for you, then you could get into Affiliate Marketing.
Method #3: Affiliate Marketing (selling other people’s stuff)
Affiliate Marketing can be seen as a bit of a dirty word online, but I think this is because people try to resell products that they don't personally use or believe in. I think this is error number one of this sort of marketing. If you only sell products that you personally use or that you can really get behind, your audience will feel that you’re congruent and you'll do really well.
The way to get started is to pick a niche audience or your existing network, and start creating bits of content. These could be articles, videos or podcasts about that particular problem and how it can be solved with the product that you’re supporting. You then give a discount code for that product and you then get a percentage kickback for every sale that you refer. The great thing about this is that you don't have to handle the delivery at all – you just get the cash in your bank account, so it's a very lean operation.
If you’re considering this approach, believe in what Propane does and would be interested in selling our products, we actually have a very generous affiliate program which offers up to £300 per sale that you refer. All of our marketing materials are conversion-tested, so you just need to have a link that you direct people to, and we handle all of the rest.
Next steps
There are obviously thousands of other methods as well as the three we’ve shown here, but the ones that we cover are the most predictable and the ones that we personally use and recommend.
If you’re interested in finding out more about any of these, you can watch some of our videos on how to make money online where we go through all of the specifics in detail. You can also access some free training here.
We’d also be happy to have a chat if you’d like to talk through your own situation with one of the team. You can also visit this link to book a time slot.