chado said:
Ideas:
- start a self help site similar to KYIL/GLL (not my favorite idea)
- build a social media following on IG/YouTube and transition that to something else
- ?
Both terrible ideas in my opinion. Self help sites / blogs take ages to make money. Success stories like KYIL are very rare and usually only possible if the founder has good writing skills, a lot of experience in what he his writing about, and a great believable story the readers can identify with. And even then you need to put in countless hours just to make a few hundred $ per month in the beginning. All of it extremely hard to do if you do it next to your 8-5 job. Building a social media following and making money from it is even harder because it is more difficult to monetize and there is a lot of noise in the space.
If you want to build an online business, you always have to think in terms of TRAFFIC and OFFER.
Offer = what you are selling and how profitable is it?. Can either be your own product (digital or physical) or somebody else's product (but then you'll only get a small commission). With a social media following or a self help site you are limited to affiliate products in the beginning, so it is hard to monetize (that's why I recommended KillYourInnerLoser to create his own digital product by recording an online course). Needless to say, your offer should be something your target group desperately wants. Your offer also determines how many people you need to reach in order to make your desired amount of money.
Traffic = the people seeing your offer. So your website visitors or people finding your social media profile. Here the important question is: "how do I get eyeballs onto my offer and how many eyeballs do I need"? With self help sites and blogs it mostly comes from organic Google searches (takes a long time to rank on Google) or through backlinks in other forums and you need a very high number of eyeballs (= website visitors) because your affiliate commission typically is very small. That means you have to do high volume in affiliate sales. With social media profiles it is even harder to get eyeballs because there is no such thing as SEO or posting backlinks in other places. In other words: those kinds of business models require a lot of work and a lot of time (don't expect to make any significant money in the first year) and you'll get very little money in return. Better alternatives would be business models that only need a very low volume of eyeballs or business models where you can buy traffic in a profitable way (e-commerce), but that requires a lot of expertise in paid traffic.
With the "Traffic + Offer = Money" formula you can dissect almost every business model, regardless of whether it is Amazon or KYIL, GLL or even my way of making money online. For me it is like this:
Offer = Facebook ads that make my clients more money. One client who stays with me for a year is worth 25k - 50k to me. That means I need relatively few eyeballs onto my offer compared to a blog selling an affiliate product with a $20 commission.
Traffic = people I manually reach out to + people who got referred by previous clients
As you can see, this is a much simpler business model with fewer moving parts. The offer and traffic components are more simple and yet more profitable compared to starting a blog or a social media following.
For Amazon it would be this:
Offer = product market place people love. Amazon gets a small commission on every sale (that means they need high volume)
Traffic = people go to Amazon because they remember the brand (the same applies to Facebook or Netflix but is the exception in the online business world)
For Amazon, the big challenge was to build the brand to a level where people would just return to Amazon over and over again. If Amazon didn't have all this free traffic they have now, it would be impossible for them to be profitable because they are only making a small commission on every sale on their platform. Same applies to Netflix and Facebook (even though those two had it easier because they offer entertainment).
chado said:
@AGF I would also be curious how you got involved in the e-commerce side of things and making $8-10k a month.
By pure luck. In my last year of university, I was looking for a summer job and stumbled upon a guy who was looking for a web designer. I reached out to him and said that I had built a website with Wordpress before (that was a blog I tried to build but failed for the above mentioned reasons). He trusted me and gave me the job. I made €1,000 in one week and my mind was blown (€1,000 was a lot of money to me back then) that I can make money online that easily. So I continued to do web design on the side while going to university. Eventually I dropped out a few weeks before graduation and went all-in on web design. Then one of my web design clients asked if I know how to run Facebook Ads. So I learned FB Ads and discovered that it is a much better business model than web design. Once I made the change to FB Ads as a service, my income jumped from $3k per month to $8k-10k per month. Now I am working exclusively with e-commerce business and I can see that their business model might be superior to mine (especially when it come to scalability). So I might change to e-commerce in the future.
I guess it was a mix of learning new skills and jumping on opportunities whenever I felt it was worth it. I started with my own blog / niche site, jumped to web design when I realized it was better to make money and then jumped to Facebook Ads after I realized it's an even better business model.
I think the key to success for me was that I started while I was still at university. That way I had almost no risk but also a lot of time to invest into this business. It also helped that I dropped out of university and immediately moved to Thailand to keep my living costs low. That allowed me to work full-time on building my web design business even though I wasn't making that much from it back then. This wouldn't have been possible if I stayed in my own country since living expenses are much higher there. If you start an online business, you want to be able to cover your living expenses as fast as possible. Because then you can quit your job (of course only if you online income is stable) and work full-time on your online business. This is when real growth happens.