- [Mark] There are two types of people in this world,
those that follow the rules, and those challenged the norm.
For everyone that's ever felt
like they think a little bit differently,
then this video is for you.
At school we're told to work hard, go to university,
get a good job, and then, and only then if we're lucky,
retire at 65 with a pension.
But what if there's a way to escape this rat race?
To break free of the chain society's has placed on us
and live life on our own terms?
The obvious answer to this is passive income,
money to requires little to no effort to earn and maintain.
But is there really a secret to unlock this holy grail?
Is living the laptop lifestyle as good as it seems,
or is there a dark side we never get to see?
And it's just really an option for anyone in any country,
or do you need a lot of money to begin with?
That's exactly what I'm going to be uncovering
in this episode of
"The Secret World of Online Millionaires."
- Hi guys, it's Mark.
So something that's always fascinated me
is the laptop lifestyle.
Are there really people out there that have found the secret
to making millions just by using the power of the laptop
and the internet?
Of course, I make passive income myself.
However, the laptop lifestyle is still somewhat
of a mystery to me.
I have big warehouses that I ship all my products from,
so I can't just move country at a drop of a hat.
Well I could,
but my staff wouldn't be very happy about that,
or maybe they would.
So today I've arranged to speak to someone
that started with $0 and has now made over a million
in passive income from her laptop.
So I'm going to be asking her exactly how she did it,
so make sure you watch to the end of the video
so you don't miss anything.
If you like this type of video,
smash that like button to let me know.
All done?
Right, let's give her a call.
Hi, Katya, how are you doing?
- Hey, Mark, I'm doing good, how are--
- Oh, it's all buffering, give me a second.
(humming)
(upbeat music)
So here we are in sunny Malta,
and we're out of that buffering zone at last.
It's so much better to meet someone in the flesh,
particularly the viral marketing queen, Katya.
how are you today?
- I'm so good, hi, guys.
- So, should we dive straight in?
- Let's do it.
- So Katya, I've got to ask you the question
that I shouldn't ask a lady.
First of all, it's what age are you, but also,
and also this is a very sensitive subject,
how much money are you making?
- Well, Mark, you are coming in strong.
- This is the big guns.
- Well, I'm still in my 20s,
and I started my business when I was only 23.
Over the last few months,
we literally just passed a couple months ago
making over a million dollars in digital sales.
And the last few weeks, particularly,
we made about $100,000 in passive income.
- So if you were to break down some of that money,
how many income streams would you say you actually have
to bring that money into you?
- Oh boy, well, let's break it down, shall we?
So we have a product called the viral content templates,
an agency license for marketing companies,
a membership, a club.
From time to time one-on-one consulting,
speaking, sometimes I get invited to speak on stages.
Affiliate marketing.
(Mark laughing)
I will tell you this, okay?
I don't know how many they are,
but the more income streams you have,
the easier it is to make money.
It's just a fact.
- So keeping with the numbers,
How long did it take you to get to that
sort of 10 K rolling month?
- I believe he was about a year into starting the business.
It was only three months after
that I had my first a hundred thousand dollars sales month.
- So let's start right back at the beginning.
Where are you from and how did you start
on this amazing journey?
- So I'm originally from a small country in Eastern Europe,
Bulgaria.
I never had my own room, we had an outdoor bathroom
that you have to squat down to use.
(smacking lips)
- Nice.
- I never knew what was really possible until I...
Got into the online space,
until I got into social media
and I met people making millions and millions.
Nowadays, I live in a huge apartment,
I don't have an office, I wake up whenever I want.
- So what you're telling me
is you can live anywhere in the world,
as long as you've got an internet link and your laptop,
and you can make all this wonderful passive income?
- And a beach for me 'cause that's a non-negotiable,
but yes.
- So how young can you actually start an online business?
- Well, I think the beauty of nowadays is that
I have seen 12, 16 year olds
creating a million dollar businesses--
- Just using social media. - That just awesome, isn't it.
- So do you have to be a techie and have great tech skills
to make it with this online passive income?
- I'll be honest,
on a scale of one to 10 my tech skills are probably a four.
I say that the first, maybe five to $10,000 a month
you might have to learn some tech skills yourself,
if you don't have the money to invest.
We're talking you don't have no money to invest,
so, yes, you might have to learn.
- And when you want to learn something,
I always find it so much easier to learn it.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- When you're at school and they're teaching you
about things you don't want to learn,
it's like hitting a brick wall, isn't it?
But when you're open to learning, it's so much easier.
- Absolutely.
- So Katya, what is your number one secret
for building all those passive income streams
so someone could start even from an early age?
- So, if you don't have any money to start a business,
if you have no idea what business you can start with,
the least you can do is start using social media
to share content that you are passionate about.
There's two ways to a fish in an ocean.
Number one, you can cast a net and catch lots of fishes,
that's customers, clients,
you can go and cast a net then catch the money.
Or, you can be smart about it
and you can work on creating
your own beautiful coral reef garden
that's so beautiful and so entertaining, or so helpful,
fishes just want to come in,
and then you don't have to cast a net.
- So the more value you provide,
the more money you can make.
So if we boil it down
to your most successful digital product,
can you tell me all about that?
- I woke up one day
and came up with the idea of this product.
At the time I was thinking,
I really want to create some templates that I can use
for my social media on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn.
And then I thought, wait,
but if I need this maybe my network,
and my friends, and my customer needed that too.
So, I just put out a post on Facebook that said literally,
and I'm going to tell you exactly what it says.
If you are somebody who wants to grow your following
but you don't have the time to create content,
if I created a pack of a hundred social media templates
and I'll only sell them for $30, would you want them?
No answers in the first 15 minutes and I was sweating,
I'm like, "Nobody wants this."
And then the 15th minute, I got like 10 yeses and 20 yeses.
- So this is a great way of doing your own market research.
And ultimately what you've done is you've found a need,
It was a need for yourself.
- Yes.
- But quite often a need for yourself
is a need for someone else.
- Always. - So.
- And obviously it snowballed from there.
- We ended up making 1,300 sales
- 1,300? - In three weeks.
- Which was $36,000.
And we only spent $1,000 in advertisement.
- And the thing I take from that,
which is what I say a lot of the time is,
you've done proper market research that
it's no good just asking your close friends and family,
because you ask them, they don't want to upset you, do they?
- They want to say,
"Oh, that's wonderful, Katya, that's wonderful."
And you go to the market and no one wants it
because they love you and they want to be kind to you.
So real market research is as you've done, that is,
push it out to everyone, as many people as you can.
- Yep. - And get a truth answer.
- So how do you stand out in a marketplace is so crowded?
How can you shine above everyone else?
- It is really difficult to stand out
as if you're entering a industry
or a product that is very popular
and there's already lots of other people selling it.
I would say that there's only three things
you can do to stand out.
You can either be first, you can be better,
or you can be different.
- The fourth one is the one
that a lot of people come up with,
is make it cheaper.
(Katya laughing)
Right?
What sort of a mistake is it
to make it cheaper than everyone else?
- I believe that the price will determine who you attract.
So I always say this,
if you want to go mass market, as in everybody buys it,
if you want everybody to buy it,
you do have to make it affordable.
But if you would rather make a million dollars
selling to a hundred people, you can do that.
You just don't sell it at $30.
- So the way I like to think of it
is like a Walmart and a Gucci.
They're both different businesses
and they both have different clientele and they both work.
You don't have to be the cheapest and race to the bottom
because it's a race you're never going to win.
So this sounds really great but can anyone do this,
or do you need to be particularly brainy,
or particular qualifications?
What would you say to them?
- I don't believe that you need qualifications
or a degree to create passive income.
When you start at the beginning,
you're going to feel like you're not good enough.
or you don't have enough value
to start making money from this.
And I had this to start with,
and you say it's a race to the bottom, you have no idea.
I started my business with charging £10 a month.
I did have that,
I did have that fear that I had to be the cheapest--
- You think you're going to get found out, don't you?
Sort of as if you're a fraud.
- Exactly. - But of course you're not
- It was only when I realized that
I do have enough knowledge I can share,
and I'm not just somebody who just popped out of nowhere
and learned marketing in three months
and started selling about it, no.
I have done marketing, I have done sales,
I have worked for so many different organizations.
So by the time I started my business,
I was already an expert
- For me, my education started really when I left school
and I always refer to it as the school of hard knocks.
And there are lessons that are going to treat you well
for the rest of your life.
- 100%.
- So if they want to start a business today,
what steps should they take to get on that road?
- The first thing you need to do
is build an audience around a topic, or subject,
or knowledge that you enjoy.
But without thinking of monetizing yet, or making money
just to build an audience that you can give value to.
- Don't forget this step one.
You've got to constantly keep building on that step one
and keep giving value.
- 100%.
Step two is to go and ask that audience what they want
and create a product in mind that they want.
- And you don't have to make money on that product.
You know, it's such a great learning curve,
as long as you're not losing money, you can just break even,
and you can learn so much from that selling experience.
- Step three, once you have an audience
and you have a product and you've sold that product,
you now have an audience of customers.
Now you have to treat these people really, really well
and you have to help them get results.
You have to help them get exactly what they bought
and get that transformation that they're looking for.
- So keep delivering value to your customers.
So through this journey,
to getting you to this point of a laptop lifestyle,
do you feel luck played it's part?
- I definitely believe in
being in the right place at the right time.
Having said that,
if you aren't prepared for the luck when it comes in,
nothing's going to happen.
- What we're really here is when,
luck is when opportunity meets preparation.
If you're prepared when it comes along
you can take full advantage.
- Exactly, so, yes, opportunity does play a part,
what you do with that opportunity dictates what happens.
- Whether you are lucky or not.
So Katya, where am I going to leave the next video?
- Oh, it's right here.
- But don't go there just yet,
don't forget to subscribe to the channel,
ring that notification bell, and like the video.
Okay then, I'll see you on the other side.