Making money online is always going to be one of the most popular
topics on this YouTube channel because it's something that almost all of us want to do,
especially when it comes to working from home, which more people are doing every day now.
And it's amazing. And some of you want to be able to earn extra money because that
will just help you speed up your goals or make your life situation
a little bit less stressful. And that was true for me, and I've been doing this for a long time.
So today what I'm going to do is teach you the five levels or even the five styles of making
money online. And I'm going to try to make this as realistic as possible because I know not everybody
has a large audience, and that does make it easier when it comes to making money online, and
a lot of videos don't address that. So when it comes to the five levels or five styles of making
money online, let's start with the simplest one that doesn't require you to have a large audience
and that is just doing a service based business or the way that I approached it freelancing.
There are a lot of different categories of freelancing. I actually plan on making an
updated video about this because there are just more opportunities than ever
to do that. When it comes down to it, this is a skill based way of making money online.
So that's why it doesn't necessarily require you to have a large audience. What it requires
you to do is be capable of something that other people are not capable of,
that they would also be willing to pay for, obvious examples of service based skill sets
that differentiates you and make you extraordinarily valuable to people.
things like actually being a good writer or having the ability to use specific
software skills like graphic design or video editing photo editing? These are
primary examples. These are things I am good at because, well, I'm a creative person.
I'm also a technical person. And like most of you, I also like money. I like being
paid well for what I do. And what makes this practical is that when it comes to learning
skills and software, there are many affordable ways to do that.
You can do that with free content here on YouTube. In fact, when I started my YouTube channel,
I did a lot of tutorials that were based on software because I wanted to create more
free and accessible ways for people who couldn't afford to go to a good school, which is my story.
Yeah, I went to community college.
I actually did not get a four year degree, and yet I turned out OK. And why? Because skills
matter in the foundation of your skills that you can learn online is actually pretty good.
You can learn things like graphic design and video editing pretty much free from tutorials on
YouTube, especially ones like the ones I've made. You can learn from a lot of other people. You
could even take affordable courses on Skillshare and get structured learning around these things.
So I'm going to also recommend that I have an affiliate link for Skillshare in the
description down below if you want to check that out. Get plenty of free courses that
are great on there. And if you're a paid premium member, you can learn some more advanced skills.
Like Ali Abdul has a really great final cut pro training that you can do in terms of his course
there. And so that could make you really valuable to people, especially since more companies
are requiring video editing content in their marketing material.
You could use that to become a content creator yourself
when you have a skill like that that's in demand and growing demand
and you reach a high level of it and you can be good and fast. You don't have to be cheap.
If you're good and fast, you don't have to be cheap. And so that could be a great opportunity.
Graphic design is another one. Copywriting is another. There's just so many opportunities
if you learn technical skills and or software and you specialize your opportunities to either
build a freelancing business, creative boutique agency or anything like that become tremendous
Well, what about selling things? A lot of people make money online through e-commerce and selling
things. Some people make passive income that way. But what about that? I think that the foundation
of services is probably where most people can start because they don't have an audience.
If you want to sell things, then to sell anything,
you need traffic. What a lot of people want is to build an audience because then that is
free traffic that they're not having to pay for. But if you can spend even a little bit of money
advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok is relatively cheap.
As long as what you are selling as a product
has a really good profit margin on it, and this doesn't have to be you selling online courses,
I understand some of the skepticism around that. But you know, if you actually have
worked in a career for a couple of years and you know what you're talking about, you
can make an online course and sell it. I don't
have a problem with that. If you want to do it on your own website
or on Skillshare or anything like that. And it's not that free content will always be better.
Some people prefer structure and not hunting down videos
forever just because, well, that's a free way to do it. That being said, with selling products,
you can sell digital products or you can sell physical products. For example,
there are print-on-demand platforms like SpreadShop, and with this, you can.
Sell T-shirts, hoodies, you can sell posters, there's all kinds of things that you can create
with your skills and abilities if you have that background
and you can sell those products, and a lot of times that is physical products being made.
You're paying $0 upfront and it's $0 to sign up. You can use my link down below.
And so when it comes down to that, you have zero risk.
The only risk here is that, Oh, well, I might waste my time.
What if I don't make any sales? The time will pass anyway. And this is you creating an opportunity to
be able to make money in the future? The time will pass anyway. What are you so worried about? You
want to give that time to Call of Duty or talking to your friends on the phone or something else
that doesn't have any chance of making you money. So if you if you can invest
a lot of money upfront in something, you're going to have to invest time in it. That's
just how it is. So with something like spread shop, you could get into digital
e-commerce or even print on demand physical products really affordably.
The way that I do digital products is I use a platform called K.G.B.,
and I use this not only to do things like selling digital products like the YouTube
Starter Kit or the Brand Deal Starter Kit. But I also sell my own one-on-one coaching over there.
I also sell a membership. And so these are different ways of making money online. But I
do have to pay upfront to use the Jabi platform, but I get things like unlimited video hosting
on that platform in return for that without
having my videos interrupted with YouTube ads when people are trying to use them to learn something
I also get basically unlimited hosting to upload all the files, the downloadable assets,
the Photoshop templates, those kind of things. Some people use Shopify as a cheaper option,
especially if they're doing digital. That usually starts out, I believe, around roughly $30 a month.
And then obviously, there's a margin on any of your print-on-demand stuff over there.
Some people use this to sell. Their photography prints,
and some people use this to sell other physical products or do e-commerce.
So there's just a variety of opportunities for you to sell things, but you don't need traffic.
Most people get that traffic just like you would if you had a physical retail store,
either by buying advertising or building an audience as an influencer. So you just need
to be aware that you can invest time, you can invest money or you can invest both.
And those things kind of determine your outcome on this type of thing,
whereas if you do a service-based business, yeah, you could run ads to grow it, but may
not be necessary. You could actually go and you could do networking and you could find clients.
You can reach out to people. You don't need a huge audience to be successful
doing client services work. You might need to build up significant traffic
for product-based businesses to work for you. And so this Segway is pretty easy into the third
level or style of making money online, which is you can become a content creator
or influencer. This has a pretty low barrier to entry in terms of
cost. A lot of people do it with just their smartphones. When I got started,
I did it with what looked like a toy camera at this point.
This was like $230 back in the day. Back in my day, everything
was pretty new. This whole 1080P HD with a flip screen thing was absolutely new back in my day.
So yeah, this was like $203 back in 2008-2009,
which back then I was a broke college kid, and that was probably like all the money I
had in the world. So you can do things like that and start with what you have where you
are and you just do your best. And for a lot of people, your smartphone is better than
most of the equipment they had the first few years that made content on YouTube.
And so if you decide to become a content creator, especially on YouTube,
you can monetize with ad revenue as long as you meet the requirements
of 1000 subscribers, 4000 hours of watch time. It's not as challenging as you might think.
I know some of you get overwhelmed by that, but I made several videos that guide you
through the exact process to at least get monetized on YouTube. And then I have other
videos that teach you how to make money on YouTube through things like brand deals,
affiliate marketing and also selling your own products or services.
Like, I actually teach all of that because it's what I did,
and it's how I did it. And so you can learn from that. I'll link to some of my favorite
videos on this in the description down below because it'll help a few of you.
This is something that takes time. It is not
the norm for people to make a lot of money on this upfront for the first two or three years. It just
also depends on your approach, your niche. I've done videos about which ones pay better.
00;09;39;12 - 00;09;58;13 Unknown
Frankly, the reason that a lot of people struggle with this is they don't bother to learn how
platforms like YouTube or TikTok or Instagram work. They're expecting to jump in and make
money right away on something that is a legitimate career that requires you to gain some experience
knowing how cameras work, knowing how to use editing software
00;09;58;20 - 00;10;21;03 Unknown
. Knowing how a system. The platform actually operates knowing how to be good on camera are all
individual skills that would represent a career. You're rolling like ten really valid skills.
So headline writing all these things into one thing if you become a content creator,
it should take you time to be good enough at that to make money.
So it may be something that feels like a low barrier to entry,
but the levels of competition are not low. If you want to be successful
and it's going to take time, and for some people, it's going to take an investment.
People who blow up overnight are rare anomalies. However, it is possible without being rare
and without being extraordinarily lucky to be "successful" and to make a few hundred
or even a few thousand dollars a month from something like YouTube in a realistic way.
If you are thinking about it and if you treat it like a real career and the potential can be almost
limitless when it comes to this. If you are serious, if you are doing this as a hobbyist,
then you're not necessarily trying to be a full-time content creator.
You can make a couple of hundred bucks doing things you enjoy and
like on this platform. That's the most realistic thing I can tell you.
But if you are going to be serious about it, you're going to have to
approach it with a career mentality, and you're going to have to be a little bit competitive at it
like if you were a track or cross-country runner, my training for a marathon. And
that's not about really being competitive with like other people, but being competitive in
terms of respecting what a grind it actually is and that it's not always going to be fun.
If you just want to have pure fun with it, you can make some money.
But maybe not full-time money, just being honest with you.
Another level of making money online. This one is definitely not passive, in my opinion.
It could have passive income-type elements to it. There are ways to automate it.
But building a community or membership program is one of the more practical ways to make
recurring income from what you're doing versus something like YouTube.
00;12;12;12 - 00;12;28;14 Unknown
You can end up on a treadmill. And there are ways that, yes, it could
theoretically long term become passive, but starts out very, very active and starts at an upfront
loss for most people. Memberships, on the other hand, are recurring monthly income.
And so this is wildly practical. It's not for everybody because again, it does work the best.
If you already have an established audience or if you have some experience, some expertise or
you're able to create some kind of community or audience-driven experience that's unique.
And this is not something that most people probably have experience of doing.
But it can be really lucrative, and it can be very practical for you.
This is something that I usually say is either for entertainers or people who have a previous career.
If you're an entertainer, you can build an audience that will want exclusive access to you.
So that's the draw in for a membership there. However, if you're someone who has like a
formal career or background in something, you might be able legitimately to attract people
and to justify creating a group experience or membership around your experience and
your expertise, especially if you have a trade or if you have a profession that is very specialized.
And so these membership communities can be very, very lucrative, especially long term,
but they're not generally passive income. They are recurring income monthly, but typically
because you're creating an experience, they don't come passive unless you scale and you have a team
. And finally, level five of making money online
would be to build a platform or a software of some kind. This is advanced mode,
even for me. This is advanced mode, even with my background in tech. This one is something
that for me to do it, I would have to hire other people, which means I'd have to use
these other ways of making money to be able to do that. And if you thought that, that maybe might be
my grand plan one day is to just have somebody build me a software or build my own platform.
You figured it out. That is the master plan. Those are what we call goals. And so for me,
I feel that for some people that might have the experience, the technical background,
the coding knowledge, they might be able to build some type of platform
or software, whether that's alike niche content platform.
You see some of these coming up. You see things like nebula, you see things like story fire.
This can be extremely practical because you absolutely own the relationship with the
audience in a way that you can't when you're on rented land using something like YouTube..
Instagram, it's a whole different level, but it is a much larger commitment. It can be a much larger
investment and there's a lot of risks involved in this. But if you get it right.
Having a platform or having software can
scale exponentially in ways that I can't even begin to fathom explaining to you in terms of
00;15;21;07 - 00;15;32;21 Unknown
what the upside is. Because, as I said,
I want to make this as realistic as possible. But for some of you, some of you out there
are coders or you have relationships with people who are and you might want to explore this.
It might be worthwhile to make a software plug-in for something else or,
you know, an existing platform. It might be worth looking at. Can you
use the API of another platform and somehow leverage that into a moneymaking opportunity?
There's a lot that makes this extraordinarily complicated. I'd actually love to bring somebody
onto the podcast to talk about this and how to get it done in the most realistic
way possible. But I do feel like this is an opportunity that people are overlooking,
and I think that it's an example of where partnering with someone else who
has a different skill set may be the real answer. For some of you, that could be true
even when it comes to content creation. That can be true even when it comes to products
or memberships. It might be better for you to reach outside of yourself
and to do something with another person as long as there's trust
and transparency there. Now it's not going to be for everybody. That's why I like doing videos like
this is I can give you a variety of options and you can determine, well, what's realistic for
you working with what you know, where you are and what you have, what's realistic for you.
What's realistic for me will always be what's realistic for you, and I try to
be as upfront about that as I possibly can at the same time. I want you to know that
there are opportunities out there that you're probably leaving on the table or overlooking,
or that you might be underestimating yourself.
So just realize you can pick any one of these levels or styles that best
suits where you are right now because you may not always be there. Remember,
I started freelancing before I ever did YouTube content creation.
I did YouTube before I ever built my first digital products because having an
audience was going to make it more practical to approach that. Whether it's merchandise, whether
it's some other type of membership program, or whether it's a digital download product
like the Brand Deal Starter Kit to help people with their first brand deals and have resources
around that. Again, it's not an online course. There's nothing wrong with courses
if you deliver on what you're promising or things like the YouTube starter kit for people who aren't
graphic designers but need better banners and thumbnails or struggling with their titles.
There are products that I made around my skills,
but I wouldn't have been successful with them if I hadn't necessarily had an audience first,
and I wouldn't have had the audience if I hadn't built content around
my skills and things I used as a freelancer to make me money and to market myself effectively.
All of these things can be different places that you start at, just depending on what makes sense
for you, and you can reverse engineer a lot of what I've done successfully using my free content
in order to help you achieve your goals and make more out of what you already have.
Question of the day, what level are you currently at when it comes to making money online?
Or what level would you like to be at? What style would you like to explore?
Let me know in the comments section.
I'll try to reply to as many of you as I can. Thanks for watching this video. If you want
to make more money online, I definitely have a playlist you should check out.
And if you really want a video to watch after this one, especially if you're a YouTuber.
Watch my video on the highest-paying niches in YouTube. If you really want to make more
money on YouTube, this tells you exactly what you need to be doing. Both of those
will be linked in the description. As always, thank you so much for watching.
And don't forget, go out there and create something awesome today. Take care.