Having a clear profit path is one of the strategies to make money online. If you have no path to profit then you have no business!
When you’ve been around internet marketing as long as I have (10 years now) then you’ve tried a lot of different strategies and techniques which gives me a unique perspective as well as real life experience.
When you’re just starting out, however, you don’t have that perspective and experience so you end up wasting a lot of time following conflicting advice from different guru’s and getting more confused.
In order to make money online, it’s important to know that there are 100,000 ways to make $100,000! I’ve tried a lot of those ways…some worked and some didn’t. And the ones that didn’t work just weren’t a good fit for me.
My goal always is to have a high work/life balance so that means about 4 hours a day of work and then FUN time the rest of the time! I really like working less and making more 🙂
Maybe one day I’ll be like the infamous John Chow who works about 2 hours a day!
The key for you to make money online is having the right fit based on your skill set, time availability, lifestyle desire and knowledge level.
Last month (January 2015) my online business made $20,146 and although that was from multiple streams of income which is important, the bulk of that income was from strategy #4…so read on.
Here are my 6 Strategies to Make Money Online and Doubling Your Income in 30 days:
STRATEGY #1: Take a serious look at your skill set, time availability, lifestyle desire and knowledge level and compare it to the specific method of making money online you are considering. Seriously, do you know how many people want to sign up for my online courses and they aren’t good with computers, don’t even have a computer, hate computers or just aren’t very technical. The #1 skill set you need to make money online would be a computer and a solid understanding of technology. If you don’t have that, then you might consider an alternative to making money online. If you have deep pockets, then you can outsource the technical work, but that has it’s own set of challenges because you will lack the “understanding” of the technical process yourself and you will probably lose money and be taken advantage of by service providers because you don’t know what you don’t know. Let’s say you want to make money blogging, then you would need the skill set of “writing and editing”, right? If you want to make money by putting up dozens of niche websites then you would need to have the technical skill set of building websites. The point is to know yourself well enough to not sign up for things you can’t do, don’t have the desire to do or can’t afford to do. So if you only want to work 2 hours a day because you have a full time job or you’re a full time parent, then you would need a strictly passive source of income like publishing ebooks on Amazon.
STRATEGY #2: Purge some of your services, products and programs because less is more. One of the things I did over the years (because I am a writer and that is my #1 Skill Set) is that I kept creating new programs and online courses. After a while I was managing so many different courses as well as doing website design services, website maintenance, ghostwriting, etc. I even had private Apprentice programs that were very labor-intensive. Eventually I got stuck in “service hell” which means that I was working on everybody elses business and didn’t have time for my own. So I did something brilliant! I hired a coach who was where I wanted to be (making $500,000) a year and I listened to my coach. The first thing Jason (my coach) told me was to start removing all the services I was offering and to “purge”. That was the best advice ever. I went from averaging $4000 to $10,000 per month in sales to $20,000 per month in sales by getting hyper-focused in my business. I didn’t realize it but I was trading hours for dollars by doing all the service work. Which led me to Strategy #3.
STRATEGY #3: Outsource to have true Virtual Freedom. One of the biggest lessons I learned this year by reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and also Work the System by Sam Carpenter was that if my business can’t run smoothly without me in it, then I’m screwed! Seriously, this is why the business fail rate is so high. It might work for a while as a solo-preneur with you doing everything in your business, but after a while that business model is certain to fall apart. To be honest, it was hard to let go of a lot of many of the tasks I was doing. I knew how to do them so well and I didn’t feel like training somebody else to do what I was doing! It seemed easier (i.e., the path of least resistance) to just do it myself; but I knew from reading Gerbers’ and Carpenters’ books that I really didn’t have a business because it was 100% dependent on me. So I bit the bullet and started to outsource a lot of the work I was doing myself and now instead of trying to do 100 things in my business, I’m focusing on just a few.
STRATEGY #4: Create high-end packages (or package) that gives a high-value to your clients (so you can stop chasing new clients every month). This is the biggest change I made in my business in the past 3 months as I purged many of the services I was offering (Strategy #1) and instead started focusing on my Amazon Best Seller program because I knew I could offer the most value to my clients! After all, I was 100% guaranteeing them that I would get their book to the best seller’s list on Amazon. So I combined my internet marketing coaching with my Amazon Best Seller’s program and came up with a very unique program! This changed my business tremendously because I don’t have to go out and “hunt” for new business every month. I have a high-end program and it gives me the time freedom to focus on this one program instead of spreading myself too thin and marketing dozens of programs and services. So what is your one specialty that you could create a high-end coaching package around? If you haven’t heard of Bill Baren’s Master of Enrollment program, then you might want to look into it. Bill has an amazing story and making this change in your business is sure to double your income in 30 days!
STRATEGY #5: Decide on which technical pieces of your online business you can do yourself and which ones you should outsource. The most important training course I took was back in 2011 was from Angela Wills (my former Virtual Assistant) called Website Design Mojo which teaches everything you need to know about WordPress. The second most important skill I learned was Aweber (which is list-building through opt-ins and auto-responders); Aweber has it’s own training once you are signed up. I would recommend learning these 2 skills and then outsourcing them once you have a solid understanding. As far as social media goes, graphics, writing, etc. I would suggest hiring a good Virtual Assistant and outsourcing these tasks. You will probably pay around $30-$35 per hour and you will need to commit to 10 hours per month. Just make sure the Virtual Assistant has the skill-set you are looking for.
STRATEGY #6: Once you have a solid foundation (a website with all the important elements in it) then you should consider paid traffic. This is what changed my business from relying on SEO, keywords, blogging, etc. to steady streams of income to market my programs. My Coach, Jason Nyback, is a true paid traffic expert and I would go so far as to say a “savant” in this area. You can sign up here for his strategy session, but please do so only if you the foundation built of your online business and you are ready to take it to the next level. Make sure you tell Jason that Michelle Kulp sent you so he can give you VIP treatment!
I probably could go on with a few more strategies but I think you have enough strategies to make money online. The most successful people have a Coach that they have access to and can guide them in the direction they want to go.
If you haven’t done so already, make sure you sign up for my Top 10 Ways to Make Money Online!
