Summary
I've tried numerous ways to make money online, experiencing many failures and successes, and I aim to share these lessons with you to guide you on the best paths while avoiding the same mistakes I made.
When it comes to online ads, patience is essential. Ads such as Google AdSense require significant traffic, ideally 10,000 visitors or more, to generate a meaningful income. Joining ad networks like Mediavine once you reach this traffic level can increase revenue significantly (between $10 and $20 RPM), translating to $2,000 to $5,000 a month. Hence, avoid joining AdSense prematurely.
Digital products sound appealing; however, creating one-time purchases like eBooks has lost traction. My experience showed a revenue cap, earning about $5,000 from a $50 digital product. Instead, shift your focus towards building courses and communities. Think about offering continuous learning and community value which people seek in the current market.
Selling your own product, particularly courses, is my top recommendation to make money online. By building trust through valuable content, you can guide people to your course, priced at $500 to $1,000, combining it with coaching for even more value. An efficient structure is funneling your audience to a landing page for a lead magnet to start engaging them.
Affiliate marketing is a proactive and viable initial revenue stream. By promoting others' products on your platforms, you earn commission without handling any fulfillment. YouTube presents a prime opportunity for affiliate marketing through descriptive content and placing affiliate links in video descriptions. Focus on linking high-demand products that align with your content.
Sponsorships come with time and audience growth. Start by including brands in articles that rank for their product category keywords, a strategy that fetched me $5,000 monthly. Once your content presence grows, relevant sponsors will naturally start reaching out to you.
Building a successful online income stream demands consistency in content creation. Passion plays a role in your drive. Choose a niche that you can deeply dive into for the next five years. Balance your professional skills with hobbies to find a niche which can potentially unlock multiple revenue streams.
Ultimately, when establishing an online business, focus on affiliate marketing and building an audience to sell courses. Ads and sponsors will materialize with growth, but these two will be the foundational revenue-starting paths. Begin by generating engaging and helpful content, converting visitors into email subscribers and eventually course attendees.
Though it might seem overwhelming, setting a structured content creation plan using AI tools can be beneficial in brainstorming and organizing content. Use them to explore potential sub-niches and content ideas before diving into production.
The key is realizing the opportunity present online for financial growth while focusing on creating impactful and valuable content consistently. It’s a journey that requires deliberate effort and commitment but offers significant and lasting rewards.
Ultimately, the goal is to build a sustainable, online business providing both purpose and financial freedom, leveraging the power of affiliate marketing, course creation, and steady content creation. The journey incorporates ups and downs, but perseverance and learning from each failure fuel eventual success.
Video
How To Take Action
Action Plan
Start with Patience and Understanding
I would suggest starting with setting the right expectations. Remember, earning money online takes time and effort. Be patient and don't rush into methods like Google AdSense without substantial traffic (10,000 visitors or more). This way, your efforts are worthwhile once you start.
Focus on Building and Selling Courses
A good way of making sustainable income online is to create and sell your own courses. Think about what knowledge or skills you can teach others. By providing valuable content consistently, you can build trust with your audience. Aim to create courses priced between $500 and $1,000, combining them with coaching for added value over time.
Use Affiliate Marketing Wisely
Affiliate marketing is another viable strategy. It's often low-cost and can start providing revenue with relatively little effort. Choose high-demand products that align with your content and place affiliate links in blog posts or YouTube video descriptions. This way, you earn commissions from sales without handling any product fulfillment.
Build a Consistent Content Creation Schedule
I recommend setting up a structured content creation plan. Consistency is key. Choose a niche that you can passionately explore over the next several years and create content around it regularly. This helps to build your audience, paving the way for future revenue streams such as courses, affiliate marketing, and eventually ads.
Leverage AI Tools to Assist in Content Creation
Though creating content might seem overwhelming, using AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude can help brainstorm and organize content. Utilize these tools to explore potential sub-niches and generate content ideas, giving you a head start in creating valuable and engaging posts or videos.
Overarching Goal: Sustainable Online Business
Ultimately, focus on creating impactful content that provides real value. The goal is to build a sustainable online business that not only provides financial freedom but also personal fulfillment, using strategies like affiliate marketing, course creation, and consistent content delivery.
Quotes by Author
"I learned the hard way that building an audience takes time and effort"
"Timing is the crucial component of all of this"
"Ultimately, we want to be able to help people"
"The best way to make money online right now is creating content"
"You don't have to be an expert in anything; you can teach as you go"
Full Transcript
so you want to make money online in 2025 but you don't really know where to begin I get it look I tried tons of different ways to make money online so in this video I tried five main ways and I spent a ton of time on some to only make like $3 and some are now on autopilot making five figures a month so in this video I'm going to share the best ways to make money online right now and all the failures that I had along the way so you don't have to make the same mistakes that I made and if you stick around at the end I'll give you the number one way that I think is the best best way to make money online in 2025 in an automated way before we start this video I just want to give you a quick heads up that Black Friday 2024 is live as of today so if you click the link in the description below you'll get the full discount 62% off you'll get access to all of our products so you get AI income blueprint that course plus our brand new blog automation Factory course it's a new course and getting your blog social media strategy 100% automated so that's over 40 videos itself plus you get unlimited coaching yes it's a coaching program not just a course we have six expert coaches in there which we pay every single month to help our students plus all of the Legacy content blog growth engine 4.5 4.0 3.0 all the AI Frameworks the templates the PDFs the checklists it's over 150 Plus hours of content three live q&as a week every single week that are recorded 4,400 members to join and stay accountable with it's a lot of fun it's a huge Community we want you to join we'd love for you to join all for 62% off which is again the biggest sale of the Year all right so let's get into this video so when we think about making money online we all want to build these passive income streams right so I tried a bunch of different ways so let's get into way number one and that is ADS so ads are everywhere some of us don't like them some of us have ad blockers on our phones but ads are a one of the most common ways to make money online either through the YouTube Partner program just ads on your videos or with like Google AdSense ads on a Blog so back in 2019 I tried Google ads sense so I spent a bunch of time adding ads to a Blog that I had right Adam and.com and I was adding a bunch of AdSense scripts to the site and doing all these different things for AdSense I'm like all right I'm going to make money with Google AdSense that's what people do that's like the first thing that you do you have a Blog you do AdSense and I realized I was looking at the data the next day once I finally had it installed and I made like a dollar right so maybe I would have made like 20 bucks a month with AdSense now that's not nothing but it's not it wasn't worth the time it wasn't worth it it was like I was scraping pennies off the floor when I could have been waiting to build better income streams so what I did later on is you know if you have a website I would wait until you have like 10,000 visitors or more because you need a lot of traffic to make money with ads like we're talking about RPMs or Revenue per thousand visitors RPMs exist on YouTube they exist in blogging so if you're doing broader content your RPM on AdSense might be like $1 to $3 for every thousand visitors to your site so you have 100,000 thousand visitors to your site you're still making like a couple hundred bucks it's just not that much money same thing is true with the YouTube Partner program like you can join if you're making really broad videos like music videos entertainment videos you have to think about it the advertisers don't know you know it's really broad content they don't really know who's watching the video it could be anybody so if you're more specific if you have like a finance YouTube channel you can be making $20 RPMs or $30 RPMs same is true with blogging so what I would do is if you have 10,000 visitors to your blog you join medine which is an ad Network where I was getting like between 10 and $20 RPM so making a lot more so making a few th000 a month typically between two and $55,000 a month from Google my blog through mediavine and then another typically 4 to 6,000 a month through YouTube so YouTube you just wait you try to join the partner program and then you just wait based on the requirements but really it's don't the goal here is don't join AdSense too soon it's just like not worth it until you're getting more traffic and have more people uh visiting your content the ad revenue is typically what people always think of I want to start a YouTube channel I'm going to make ad revenue and that's you know you need millions and millions of views if you're only focused on ad Revenue so we have 4700 a month which isn't bad I mean that's as much more money than I was making earlier in my career uh 250 a day 230 200 a day 150 anywhere you know in the last 28 days on average to make that amount but really this is only 3% of my income streams like 3% of the actual revenue is just through this on YouTube so there's a lot better ways to monetize which I learned learned over time today's video is sponsored by wpx and I have an exciting announcement and that is that their Black Friday 2024 offer goes live today so as of today you can get 50% off all of their monthly WordPress and woocommerce plans you can also get 50% off all your domains if you buy a domain name and you can get four months free on all their WordPress and woocommerce annual plans too so I personally use wpx cuz mainly they're amazing technical support you can basically like send them a live chat message look it back you in under 30 seconds and they have free site migrations in under 24 hours and they have free sight speed optimization which can improve your Google core web vital score plus they have malware removal and a lot of site Security Options and of course a 30-day money back guarantee so we've worked with wpx for a long time now and they are my top recommendation for hosting if you want to start a website so now it's the perfect time to get started with their Black Friday discounts so make sure to click the wpx link in the description below and claim your discounted black Friday pricing they come fully recommended by let's talk about the second most common way that people try to make money online and that is digital products info products make it once put it on a website put it somewhere sell it and it's on autopilot right sounds great and Theory sounds perfect you create some little ebook you create something this is like where people's mind goes they think first ads maybe banner ads or YouTube and then I'm going to make a product a little digital product and I tried this this is exactly what I tried back in 2020 so I was building my email list list a little bit on my blog I was getting some traffic and I said I'm going to sell a digital product so it was a small digital product it was like a download it was a helpful download it was like a blogging launch guide and also it's kind of like a spreadsheet of a bunch of it was like a database of affiliate programs you can join guest post sites you can reach out to it was kind of like a a starter kit so to speak for blogging and it was pretty valuable it wasn't that bad but really when I think about moneti monetization and how much money I made it wasn't that much I think I was charging like $50 for the thing I probably sold maybe a hundred of them so in total maybe I made $5,000 kind of was doing it and I was like this isn't like the best way to make money blogging to a digital product like getting traffic to a Blog and then selling a digital product it's just like the revenue ceiling was so low I realized on that and I did it the wrong way now when I think about the wrong way what's the right way well digital products are kind of old and dying I would say doesn't people aren't buying info products when's the last time you bought a $50 ebook right I can't even think of the last time I did the RightWay is providing real value with courses and communities and I'm just kind of looking at my notes here cuz I have a Google dock up and I just look at things as I go through it just have little notes to jog my memory now it's not like a one-time digital download people don't want that anymore what they want is communities so actually interacting with other people consistently in a community and then course content helpful content where they can learn and it can be you know things that are actually updated so not a dead course that's just sitting there so for me like if you're new to the channel you don't know who the hell I am my name is Adam enfroy I started my blog it's maybe a million dollar three years in a row I started it back in 2019 and then I grew this YouTube channel to $3 million a year business within just two years so I don't have to go viral you don't have to create crazy amounts of content or you know let this whole thing absorb your life to make decent money I think it's just been taught wrong so really it's not about creating a little digital product it's what I learned the hard way in a lot of ways is actually selling your own product and that is actually a course and community so we're going to get into affiliate marketing my failures there what's going on now but first I want to cover like selling your own product now selling your own product to me it's the number one way to make money online because if you think about it that's what business is people you get attention and this attention algorithm driven economy whether through YouTube or content or a website and people buy something from you it's the number one way to make money right if you're people sell products and services it's literally the engine of business in this capitalist Society you sell things you make money you're providing value and exchange for money it's really that simple so it's literally how businesses operate now what's good about selling a course in community product is really you're just teaching and building trust with an audience over time which you're going to be creating content anyways you're going to be creating either blog posts or YouTube videos or something to get attention and visibility to your business you might as well be teaching with the ability to sell a course in the the future so when you're just starting out you don't have an audience yet you don't have a course to sell that's fine but kind of think about it in the back of your mind like maybe 1 to two years from now I want to set myself up so that I can sell a course for $500 $1,000 coaching for 3,000 $4,000 $5,000 a lot of people charge a lot of money if especially if it's coaching and ongoing support what's good about a course is you can funnel all of your traffic to a single landing page so that's the beauty of it you can send YouTube traffic there just with Link in the description you can send blog traffic with an exit intent popup on your blog going to a landing page social media traffic you can send everything you funnel everything to one page and that one page is just an opt-in page for a lead magnet so that could be something like the PDF the the ebook right everything the more that people are making money online the more people coming online the more competition there is online it's not that things are getting overly saturated it's just people's expectations are getting a little bit higher because everything's been done so instead of selling that 50 digital product you give away the digital product to just get people into your email list to then sell something of higher value for example my YouTube channel you could watch all my hundreds of YouTube videos on everything from email marketing affiliate marketing SEO blogging YouTube all of that stuff and the value there all together is just as much as a course would be now a course is more about the actual transformation The implementation so a course is different from YouTube and that a course is 10 20 30 40 hours of content in a structured format with a community with the resources with the guides so when you think about it that way it's not truly automated you have to set it up but then you do have customers and things like that so again people are expecting more you can't really have a dead course to make money online you can't shoot a 10hour course and then just never do anything after that like it sounds great in theory you could do it you could get some customers in and they would buy your $1,000 course but then if there's no activity no engagement anything like that you're going to have a lot of unhappy people because really when you think about it you're competing with other courses out there when you think about College college can cost $100,000 something like that if a course can teach you something valuable for $1,000 that's good individual experts on different topics that are not taught in college right that is the explosion of online education however there's also they're also competition so you kind of have to know what the trends are when you're thinking about this way of making money online so you can't have a dead course there's really two options one is you want to set expectations and there's two things and two things that we have that we've done one is we have a coaching program that costs as much as a course typically does so you can get a discount on it if you click the link in the description below you can get access into that funnel and see how it works and join us if you want to but it's a onetime price that is Affordable for most people that has unlimited coaching so it's actually a coaching program we have like six coaches in there you you can message them at any time so it's not just it's yes there's like 100 plus hours of video cont content in there but also it's coaching now most people charge like $8,000 $10,000 for coaching ours is much less than that so that's one path a one-time price or a yearly annual price we do a one-time price but you could do an annual price for a coaching program that's specific to the community and coaching and all that the other option that a lot of you know big creators are doing is more of the Netflix option so the streaming monthly subscription option so what that is is you get people in for $10 $20 $50 $100 a month and then at that price you know when you're selling information and it's a monthly recurring subscription you have to provide ongoing and consistent value or else people will churn out so with that think of what Netflix is how much value Netflix provides for although they keep increasing their prices I don't know what it is now maybe $15 a month or something like that you're getting a huge catalog of content so you look at any big Creator out there they have YouTube content yes they're creating it on their Channel but then they also have like content that is behind a pay wall of some kind so for that we have a product called income University it's just three live classes every single week so it's like a streaming option live classes every week and it's constantly being updated with new stuff and it teaches not just like Ai and blogging like the coaching teaches but it teaches like YouTube LinkedIn social media Pinterest all the all topics really mindset stuff all of that so those are the two things now I'm covering this part of in depth a little bit because this is kind of really important and it's nuanced and not a lot of people talk about it but if you're going to say like what's the highest possible Revenue I can make if I start a YouTube channel well you could sell a number of different things there's YouTubers that are selling a Netflix style service like look at the daily wire right they have a ton of content on YouTube but then you you can pay a monthly fee to get their documentaries and like more stuff and all of that behind the scenes or there's something like you could sell software you could sell you know through that you sell your own software tool or you could sell just a product like Logan Paul with energy drinks or Mr Beast with his chocolate bars and lunchable things so it's like you can build almost any true brand online with YouTube and you can sell a number of different things now the key is when you're just starting out thinking of selling your own product it's like well that sounds insane like I'm not going to get that big they have like they're making like 10 videos a day or like you know now they're publishing like a video a day and then they're publishing backend content like that's a big that's a big Media company at that point there's probably 50 plus employees there so how do you get to a point where you can even think about something like that well it's really just starting and it's just knowing that when you're starting a Channel or a website or anything when you're creating content there's multiple options you can go the coaching route you can go the Netflix style route where you have more content coming out consistently you can go the selling software route or or you can sell a physical product route and it's really depends on the niche for example I teach how to make money online so it's coaching and Netflix style stuff makes the most sense for me and software could work too like if I created my own software tool or something like that but we just haven't up to this point but I don't want you to get overwhelmed here I'm just kind of covering the Nuance so you can think about in the future because I think a lot of this is like not knowing how big the opportunity is when it comes to creating content and building a business most people just try to create some silly Instagram content or make some views on Tik Tok they don't know how to monetize it so when you know how to monetize it you can do that from the very beginning and I learned this over the last 3 years doing this on YouTube like I didn't know it at all at the beginning you go back to my earliest videos I was just saying stuff in an awkward way and I didn't exactly know how this backend sales engine behind YouTube worked but you have to know the things that you don't see are the things that make people the most money the backend sales system behind all of this stuff so with that said don't get overwhelmed what you would do is you just start creating content what's easier is you don't have to when you teach something you don't have to be as big as a giant YouTube channel for example think of like now I don't know what your political persuasion is I'm just using like the daily wire as an example or some liberal thing pods sa America I don't know what they are but like if you're talking about politics there's a reason that they're they're publishing a video every single day it's because people watching political videos they're not going to click on really a affiliate links necessarily they're not going to buy a course about politics so it requires a lot more views now when you're teaching teaching is going to be the key because it actually opens up all of the revenue streams that you can use to make money online you can have affiliate links to products you can have courses on things that you're teaching you can have sponsors and you can have ads so when you teach you need less views because you're making more money per view because you have all the revenue streams at your dis osal so instead of having a political channel that needs a video every day to try to go viral and shorts and get people to buy maybe a Netflix style thing what you do is you create a small Channel maybe it's in gardening maybe it's in playing the guitar maybe it's in woodworking or DIY stuff and you're teaching and through that you just have a consistent content schedule you create videos you create blog posts you do those different things and then over time you can monetize in four ways so through affiliate marketing first cuz that's easy you just add affiliate links into your YouTube video descriptions or in blog posts people need products to do stuff for the most part you can't kayak without a kayak you can't fish without a rod and a reel so when you're teaching people how to do stuff you can also mention and recommend the products that you're talking about so affiliate marketing is first and you don't need a Hu huge audience for this because you can make a lot more money again if we're only riant on ad Revenue then that's all that we're going to be making like I showed you 4700 a month it would never make $100,000 a month that's just not possible if you're doing broad entertainment content or entertainment blog posts you need to teach now if you don't have anything to teach that's another conversation we all have different starting lines of where we're starting sometimes you might feel like you don't know what you're going to talk about or you think I'm 18 years old I don't have a ton of experience or I don't know you don't have to be an expert in anything you can teach as you go as you learn and often times it is a lot better to learn from somebody who's actually learning it themselves becoming intermediate to actually over time so this stuff changes kind of quickly right you know info products used to be a huge thing buy a $50 ebook to learn something doesn't really work anymore people want communities or coaching now to do that you just have a small YouTube channel a small blog and make sure you're funneling it the right way so that kind of starts with the lead magnet like what are you going to provide for free and it's really the lead magnet is pretty simple it's like it should be high value cuz someone's giving you their email address you got to provide them something of high value value in return so something like if you're doing woodworking it would be the here's my 10 woodworking tools that you absolutely need to get started that's a really good resource it's not paid it's not going to you know it's not going to cost money but it's a good resource to get an email address and then through that you just use something like kit formerly convert kit or another email marketing tool to send automated emails over the course of three four five six seven days to get them excited about buying your actual course so that's all that the back end is it's a lead magnet going into an automated email sequence getting people automatically into your course so that's the automation part that's easy you know you create the content once the backend system is set up people will be able to become a lead become a customer and get into your community without you having to do anything so you don't have to like physically add them into the community right you can use zapier or these other tools to connect everything together so you can use like school or you can use thinkific speaking of which thinkific actually has a huge Black Friday sale going on right now it's kind of starting early you can get like 40 or 50% off on think kic plan so if you need like a website if you want to build an actual site with thinkific hook it up to WordPress whatever and then sell courses on there you can have a full course website and the pricing right now is like the best it'll be all year for sure so I have a link uh down below it's my special link you can use to get that huge discount on thinkific it's what I've used it's one of my favorite tools out there they have a great support team so you can save a ton of money you get like 3 months free you get access to their accelerator program to learn you get a bunch of site page templates social media starter kit and you get 50% off this wobo plan which is really cool it gives you you can build digital workbooks inside of your course so really if you're looking to build a course website like think of it in your header of your blog or something it just says course and then you click that course button it takes you to this full course website where you can have all your courses in there laid out and courses are pretty easy you just shoot videos much like this if you're creating YouTube videos you just create them in a templated format I have full videos on how to create and sell online courses now with this Revenue stream you have to build an audience over time you have to build trust over time now to build any type of online business to make money you need consistent content that's just the truth you know unless you're just going to be pumping ads and you know spending a bunch of money on ads and hoping that it works building an organic content-driven business on YouTube or Google is the best long-term path to do it now is it a get-rich quick scheme no it's not at all it takes time and it takes consistent effort but this is the key you want to make it fun you want to make it easy as possible you want to make it something that you can do in your spare time that isn't going to consume your life for example most people think of YouTube and they think of videos out in public or videos of Lifestyle stuff shot all over the house and a bunch of shots right well you also have to think about all those channels that are making a lot of money in things like Finance or my Channel about making money starting businesses or videos where it's just a camera and a person talking and teaching now these not only can make a lot more money with less views but they also only require me coming into this room turning a camera on turning a light on and talking so it's a lot easier for me to create this video than if I had to go outside and do like a camping video or I'm shooting a tent and then I'm shooting what I'm doing and it's outside and there's wind and wind screens and I have to shoot like 20 clips and all this stuff and drone shots and b-roll and all of that it's it's a lot easier to just do it consistently right so it's more again it's more about knowing what the algorithm wants creating consistent content that the algorithm likes over the course of time with a schedule that you never quit so if you're saying I'm going to post a YouTube video every week you just do that without ever wavering now you're going to have to do it for a while but you just do it without wavering so really the four main ways again to make money with a small following It's ADS like we talked about sponsors which again ads and sponsors both just take time to build you have to wait for the YouTube Partner program you have to wait for blog traffic sponsors aren't going to reach out to you until you're getting more views and attention so the two that you focus on at the beginning are affiliate links that you can add in right away to your content and then teach teach teach over the course of time to eventually build up your email list and sell a course now when you're just starting out you sell nothing you just build your email list you give the lead magnet away and you do an automated welcome SE sequence of emails just free easy stuff who are you what have you done what are you teaching and give give away your best resources here's my best blog articles here's my best videos check me out talk to you later you're just kind of building that email list because we're going from the algorithm in this attention economy from algorithm to ownership so we're going from YouTube views random people out there that they're going to watch your stuff and maybe they'll never come back but there's got to be a way to capture an email address from them or make some affiliate revenue or something just outside of AD Revenue so the only two you really focus on at the beginning are affiliate and courses so we covered a lot in courses because I have full videos on this and it is kind of the most important long-term one if we think of like the easiest ways to make money online everybody if you if you just Google or go on YouTube and search make money online you're going to find tons of videos about the laziest ways to make a $200 a day from your phone and that's a lot of what people consume on YouTube a lot of young people they just want to make money instantly doing nothing so if they want to do that there's typical ways where you would do online surveys make like 20 bucks or you would do Fiverr gigs of any kind making a little bit of money but you know I want to elevate the conversation because yes you can consume those videos if you want but I want to talk about ways to make a million and actually change your life because making an extra $20 a month it might buy you a case of beer or something well I loved to that in college and I actually did a lot of that stuff in college little Fiverr gigs and things that could make me a little bit of side income but if you really want to build a consistent business and change your life you need to actually Elevate yourself learn skills and do things consistently over the course of time for you and no one else you know in in this current economic climate with lots of tech companies doing layoffs and just inflation and just a lack of control and the you know the wage Gap Gap and low minimum wage and and the income inequality Gap and billionaire and all this stuff like there's got to be a way to use the internet to make money online and I'm telling you the best way right now is creating content and building an audience organically over the course of time and teaching and becoming known for one thing that's really it you have to do it it takes time but you have to do it if you want to you know build something now I'm not saying everybody should be a content creator that doesn't mean that if you're a nurse or you went to school you're a doctor you're a lawyer or you're just happy in your career then just do that that's totally fine but if you look around and you see like who are the people that are actually making a million dollars a year or more it's mostly people that are doing YouTube stuff or have an actual e-commmerce business or something online it's not your marketing manager like I was making 60 or $70,000 a year and saving 10% of their salary to work for 50 years right so there's a lot of Dynamics here when we talking about making money online there's time Freedom there's Financial Freedom there's you have to actually spend time a lot of time now doing something that you might not totally enjoy to get your time Freedom back in the future so there's a lot more opportunity now with AI with AI to speed up the process to create content to do all of these things that I didn't have when I first started all right that's a lot of rambling you know if you want if you think I should start a podcast or something where I can just ramble for like 2 hours or something comment podcast it's something I'm thinking about doing so just comment podcast below and I will know that you actually made it this far in the video and it's an indication maybe my ramblings could be in a different format where it's yes it's still on YouTube but it's also on podcasting platforms so with all of that said I I covered you know selling your own product because it's quite nuanced and a lot of that now I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty over the shoulder here is exactly what you need to click on and convert kit to do that like I have videos on that and I think that's kind of boring I do have videos on that so you can watch them when you're ready all right let's get into affiliate marketing so AFF marketing is it was before you know creating communities and having a YouTube channel it was my favorite monetization stream because a lot of people taught it wrong I didn't even know what it was back in 2015 2016 um I was able to I got a job uh as an e-commerce manager so I was doing marketing for an e-commerce brand pretty big one but I didn't even know what affiliate marketing was my boss is like we should do affiliate marketing so we signed up for Commission Junction and we were doing like coupons sites and stuff like that I didn't know what it was fast forward I moved to Austin Texas I became an affiliate manager for a tech company this is when I started learning more about it so I learned that like oh crap like Affiliates can make a lot of money there was one that was making over $100,000 a month just from our one product and I was like holy crap like this guy he's living in another country he's not it just it's just content that's ranking on Google and he's making that much money that's insane so I learned about SEO I learned about what tech companies are doing so not like like what does another blogger do or what does a YouTuber do but what would a technology company a software company with an unlimited budget do to scale their content and I took those strategies now without money like I didn't spend money on this but I took the strategies of content and I used it for my own website so I took what I learned in the startup world and applied it to my own personal brand and it worked so I was able to scale affiliate Revenue with one writer and one assistant and got the blog to like 80k a month within a couple years and I was ranking for all kinds of software stuff so I still make usually like 40 to $50,000 a month with affiliate marketing through my blog because a lot of it's just recurring subscriptions so every time that a customer pays I get a percentage on that so every single month so there could be hundreds of customers for a specific software tool and until they churn out and leave I'll still be getting paid so but you know I've had some big successes like I've had uh one affiliate program make me over a million dollars just from like basically a few articles ranking uh I have had some failures along the way like for example I had uh I was making like $155,000 a month with Jasper and then over the course of time I just stopped kind of promoting it some of my content didn't rank as well and that slowly trickled down to zero or like 100 bucks right so uh it can be tough and it's affiliate marketing it's a numbers game and and things can fluctuate a lot so for example if if you're promoting physical products like let's say you have a Blog and you're talking about ice fishing and you're ranking for best ice fishing lures or something like that right it's a onetime payout so if somebody clicks your affiliate link and buys that thing they will you'll make that money once now if rankings go away now all of a sudden you're making nothing because no one's clicking your affiliate links so that's kind of the danger of putting all your eggs in one Bass it so having one time the dangers are you have one-time physical product sales that you're making if you only have one platform like one blog there is a danger that over the course of time that could go away because Google has changed the algorithm a lot they can just give you a man manual penalty or something for number of different reasons that they don't really tell you about and then all of a sudden it's like oh well that's kind of tough like I all of a sudden I'm not making any money through affiliate marketing because of that so what worked for me in 2019 would not work for me today I was ranking for a lot of different software stuff everything from like database software CRM software landing page Builders webinar software podcast hosting like tons and tons of stuff that was really Broad and that just doesn't work today as much I do think that for affiliate marketing blogging is not necessarily the best path right now now if you want to make money blogging I recommend you scale it with AI and you focus on getting a ton of traffic making ad revenue and building your email list which we can cover that affiliate marketing on YouTube is actually a lot better and easier now because think about it if you create a website it's a lot harder to rank for something like best credit cards best business bank accounts or things that are really competitive but if you created a YouTube video on the best credit cards you have a much better chance of getting views immediately and actually getting people to click on affiliate links in your description that's mainly where affiliate revenue is made is on YouTube and on Google that is it however Google is getting more competitive when it comes to the very very lucrative stuff best vpns best credit cards all of that stuff best IAS it's pretty competitive now much less so on YouTube If you create simple talking head videos doing it that way so overall it's a really good first Revenue stream for you because if you think about it it takes time to build an audience to actually sell a product but you don't need your own product with affiliate marketing all you're doing is sending traffic to someone else's products instead of your own own and you're making a commission on the sale then you don't have to do any fulfillments any shipping any inventory or any of that kind of stuff so it is really good at the beginning I think that there's a couple different ways to do it where if you're doing physical products if you have a Blog you need a lot of Articles ranking you see some of these outdoor sites and it's like they're talking about skiing hiking backpacking camping tents boots shoes jackets they're ranking for like 100 articles about these different things because they're making a little bit of each and it's a volume game you're making a little bit of affiliate revenue for each one and it's scaled out the other way to do it is high ticket so something that you are you know you're sending traffic to a page about the best gold IRAs or something like that Birch gold group you know gold Co Augusta go precious metals right something that's really high value where you can make a really high Commission because if somebody signs up for a retirement account and they spend $500,000 you can make typically 5 to 10% of that so you make 10% of $500,000 you can make $50,000 Commission on one sale I did that I have a video on that somebody signed up for a $500,000 retirement account I made a 10% commission and made $50,000 commission from one single affiliate link that person clicking and buying now with high ticket again things that are high ticket are very competitive I would recommend again if you're going to do something High ticket you do it on YouTube not on necessarily on a blog or you do PPC for your blog or you're sending paid traffic now that's a whole other Revenue stream might have another video on that as well but you know it's it's kind of nuanced stuff so again affiliate marketing it's a numbers game it requires consistent and ongoing clicks on your affiliate links if you think about conversion rates online it's like what's an e-commerce conversion rate like 2% so you need 100 people to visit a page for two people to buy which means you need about 50 people to click an affiliate link on average for a single sale so if you have if you're selling you know you say the best socks of 2025 the best oh they're amazing socks you put them on your feet they fit they're like $10 and your commission rate's 10% you make a dollar per sale so you get 50 clicks to those socks you make a dollar right so you get 5,000 clicks to those socks you make a 100 bucks or so I don't know I don't know math what I'm saying is it's a numbers game based on the commission rate that you're making the price of the product and how many clicks you're getting on this stuff now the truth is anything to make money online if it is lucrative if it's searched for a lot and the commissions are high the price of the product's high it's going to be the most competitive thing there is think about like best vpns right people are making a ton of money but they already wrote that article like 20 years ago so you have to timing timing is the crucial component of all of this timing is what makes especially with blogging timing is what allows you to get in early on a word Rank and stay ranking for years instead of being late to the game so if you're late to the game and you're writing an article about the best WordPress hosting or something like that it's not going to rank it's already been around for 20 years so you have to find new and emerging Trends in order to make money with affiliate marketing so it's a good Revenue stream I've made a lot of mistakes doing it I've made a lot of money doing it I do recommend it as the first Revenue stream when you're starting out because you can't really do ads yet you can't do sponsors and you can't sell a course yet so you have to sell other people's products by recommending it and again in any Niche any Niche that you're teaching people need products to do things you can't golf without a golf club you can't build a shed without a framing nailer and measuring tape and other things right so uh it's a good Revenue stream let's talk about sponsors we've rambled enough about affiliate marketing courses and all that kind of stuff and ads what about sponsors how does that fit in well it's a little bit different for blogging and for YouTube if we're talking about blogging what I've done before that worked really well in the past is you put uh brands in to your articles that already exist and are already ranking that's what brands want so for example I was able to put in a company called buzzsprout into my article on pod the best podcast hosting because I was ranking for that main product category keyword when you're ranking for the main product category that a brand wants what their brand actually is that's the most lucrative sponsorship deal you can get so they're paying me $5,000 a month to have them in that article now the tricky part of this is those best you know the product category stuff so when you think about a product category like best camping tents best hiking boots well a hiking boot Boot Company would really want to be in that article their entire goal is to you know if someone's searching for their product category like the best hiking boots they're in like every article so they have their own one ranking and then they're in all of the affiliate or sponsored articles so um the hard part though is like it's kind of harder to rank for a lot of those product categories now and then what happens if you're charging $5,000 a month and then all of a sudden you get pushed down to page two and now you're not getting any traffic to the brand the brand can kind of get pissed off by that a little bit uh that hasn't really happened to me as far as sponsorships goes but I've I've heard it happen to other people so how much do you actually charge for sponsors this is what we have to think about when it comes to content well for blogging it's kind of a simple formula how many clicks is their affiliate link getting so let's say you're ranking for the best webinar software and number one number one tool you're saying is demo random example and you're sending them 100 clicks a month you see hey and my thirsty affiliate my affiliate link sending them 100 clicks a month I can tell that so what is it worth well then you look at well what's that keyword worth you put best webinar software into the Google Keyword tool and it will tell you the range of bids on that keyword What It's Worth to a brand that wants to bid on that so then you take that let's say it's $10 so it's $10 cost per click you're getting a 100 clicks that's now worth that spot is worth $1,000 so it's really simple math you take the cost per click you times it multiply it by the number of clicks you're getting that's what it's worth and then you want to drop it down a little bit because you don't want if a brand can spend $10 on a click now yes you're getting you're giving them third party validation rather than them bidding on it paying for ads they're uh recommended by a third party website so that's valuable but I would just like cut it in half so you charge like $500 in that example now so that's like the most complicated form of sponsorship is adding adding sponsors into individual blog posts based on the keyword like that's the most when people think of sponsors they just think of like better help and uh what's that one cereal the the cereal that has protein and whatever that's called or all these big you know a comedian has a podcast and they do these big sponsors now that's what most people think about when they think of sponsorships because that's what most people see now to do those broad Mass Appeal sponsorships you need a lot of views you need a Mass Appeal YouTube channel most of us aren't going to have that most of us are going to have a small Niche YouTube channel where we're teaching something so in that instance you just want to find sponsors that are highly relevant to your audience the that's the best possible path so a lot of the times I talk about blogging or starting a YouTube channel some of the best sponsors would be things like website hosting a keyword research tool or things like that so it has to be very specific to the audience you can charge a lot more for that so I could charge you know $5,000 for a sponsorship on a video even if it seems high and the you know it's higher than normal while the audience is a lot more relevant so if you're starting a YouTube channel or a blog or anything like that just what I would do is just think about the top 10 companies in your Niche who they are the most popular ones and then think about like hey if I'm getting you know traction on YouTube related to things around gardening or like garden beds then what are the top companies how could I put those affiliate links into my videos would they be a sponsor in the future and you can reach out to them so some of it's Outreach having somebody reach out on on your behalf to have them become sponsors but if you're doing really well eventually sponsors will start reaching out to you so that's typically what happens over time is eventually you just keep turning out content you're doing really well sponsors will reach out to you so again sponsorships aren't the first Revenue stream anything you even have to worry about at the beginning just like ads because it comes with time and attention which takes time so again the only two you have to think about are just affiliate marketing what products do you want to talk about and teach and what course are you going to sell in the future so with all of that said we covered ads some failures there digital products and how that's turned into courses and communities high value stuff with two options either the coaching or the Netflix option we talked about affiliate marketing and sponsors so what would you actually do well the first thing is you have to choose a niche of some kind now sometimes passion isn't going to get you anywhere I'm passionate about some stuff like maybe running or things like that but running being outside in nature and running is a lot different than writing about it or shooting a video talking about the best running shoes so you have to realize that a passion will only get you so far I'm passionate about a lot of things but if I was making no money on this thing I would quit 100% of the time because people you know we want we want actual significance we want to be known for something even if we're not making money we want to at least have our subscribers going going up or our blog traffic going up so the thing the passion it will help you a little bit it'll help you kind of push through and keep creating the content but It ultimately will not help make you money you have to create an you know think about a niche that you could talk about for the next 5 years what do you want to be known for what's the one thing now this is really hard and this will often come down to what's your professional skill set like what's your career and then what are your hobbies we've had students where it's like I am really into active investing and teaching that I also really love tennis and I've been playing it since I was a kid in that instance I asked the student I was like well if your website if your face is on a website or on a YouTube channel 5 years from now what do you want to be known as the tennis person or the investor it was obvious to him that it was the investor so think about that like what would you want to be known for in 5 years what Niche could you get into that has both products like affiliate Revenue potential and something that you could eventually teach and sell a course in now most people spend money on courses related to like Fitness changing your body or making money or relationships those are like the three most common course ones but there's also all the Hobbies so there's like again playing the guitar playing the drums learning how to garden learning how to brew craft beer like there's a million different things you could do you could have a Craft brewery blog and YouTube channel and sell an access to a $9 Community with recipes and people interacting right it's very simple but first we have to figure out what the the niches so I have uh a niche Hunter tool you can see a lot of people are using it if you click the link in the description again below I'll send you this plus nine other so 10 total AI prompts these are system prompts that are very specific and multiple pages long to give you a spe very specific AI output to help you brainstorm this so I pasted it into Claude now you can use this in chat GPT or Claude both have free accounts I like clae for this stuff it's a little bit more creative so what it's going to do it's going to ask you for a main Niche based on that it's going to generate five sub niches so for any type of content you create to make money online you're not just going to talk about one and only one thing you run out of content ideas for example I talk about blogging SEO YouTube affiliate marketing making money online mindset stuff business stuff but it all is Under the Umbrella of helping people you know take charge of their financial future build a business for themselves if I only talked about one like it was only SEO for blogging it's one it's kind of boring two it's kind of risky because all of a sudden all my eggs are in one basket of content and what happens if no one cares about that topic anymore then it's kind of gone so you want to be a little bit broader in your approach and just creating the most helpful possible content for example I'll show you so like let's put in a niche CU what this will do is it'll give the five sub niches and then 20 individual article ideas you could create you can kind of be specific and weird in the approach you can say like I love gardening and then cooking what I Garden so that's like because it's like it's not just a niche is not just like one specific thing it can be what you're known for like maybe you're want to be known as the Homesteader that has a garden and Cooks healthy plant-based meals or something like that right so okay so based on this the subn would be vegetable gardening herb gardening fruit gardening organic gardening and container gardening so then all kinds of content ideas about the Ultimate Guide to Growing tons of different stuff there's millions of different keywords you could create here herb gardening content which of these sub niches would you like to focus on so I'm going to say uh herb gardening so with that here's the informational content ideas so simple healing herbs companion planting growing basil mint flagrant flavorful pesto herb gardening design and affiliate articles so you could also have affiliate content on the best gardening tools indoor herb garden kits arog Garden Harvest Hands-On review old herb herb drying kits and culinary herb seeds so different products in that Niche too and you can just do this over and over and over again paste this thing in until you're really happy with the ideas it comes up with and there's another one this is the AI YouTube idea engine so you just take this copy the whole thing paste it into Claude hit enter and it'll give you YouTube ideas so again with YouTube it's like you know regardless of if it's a YouTube channel or a Blog you're going to have to create a lot of content eventually hundreds of Articles or hundreds of YouTube videos now not to like look up the amount of think oh that's intimidating you it's time it's nothing but time so time will pass the question is are you going to create content or not so with YouTube again it's going to give me five topic ideas uh sub niches so I'm going to say I'm interested in day trading just some type of investing right so the main uh sub niches would be like crypto potentially stock market options Forex and then beginner guides things like that it could also be like Candlestick charts technical analysis like you'd have multiple different videos to have a well-rounded Channel um here's like top five cryptos to day trade crypto market trends day trading routine technical analysis all of that so again you can say I want to do uh crypto day trade crypto trading and then this tool will give you 20 ideas so the sub niches and then video ideas so again you just keep rolling through these until and then you can look at you know competition look at other channels and see what you want to do because it's really just about consistency and pushing through man when you start a YouTube channel and you have you do you publish your first video it's kind of scary it's like oh I have you know I'm putting my face out there I'm putting myself out there there's ways to do it without showing your face but I think like in the long run you do eventually want to because people trust people you know if you're a hidden person behind a crypto trading chart you're probably not going to have people buying your Community as much as you would by actually showing people who you are but you know you're going to publish that first video and maybe it gets no views maybe it gets five views you publish the second one maybe that one gets 10 the key is like if you can get in your first 10 videos to get one that gets into the thousands of views you have one pop off based on the click-through rate and retention based on a really good thumbnail I have tons of videos on the strategies that would be key so it's really it's just like you're setting yourself up and you're building leverage into your life for future success when it comes to making money online we start at zero no content no website no YouTube channel the only difference between my YouTube channel my blog and it not existing is just time passed I created a bunch of videos and time passed it's not like I'm getting going viral and getting millions of views on my videos it's just steady consistent progress over the course of time maybe getting 5,000 6,000 subscribers a month and you just keep going so with that said these AI tools you know using these copy and pasting them into cloud or chat GPT can really help kind of frame the first you know 20 pieces of content that you're going to create now when you have these 20 pieces of content then you you create the content there's a whole you know that's a whole another video for another day other videos on my channel but what you can do there is you just focus on being as helpful as possible creating that content and then over time we can start thinking about what affiliate links are we going to add into these what course could I sell in the future how do I start building my email list and all of that so it's a bit nuanced it's a way to build a real business because I want to create a video that isn't some dude holding a phone that says here's how to make the laziest $200 of your life that doesn't actually work so there's a real problem with two things there's an income problem in the United States incomes are not keeping up with inflation CEO salaries the price of homes the price of groceries all of that stuff and two there's a lot of people providing really bad advice out there and just saying make $100 a day on autopilot doing nothing so I'm here to tell you it's there's nothing scary about actually doing work it's actually fun if I had to go I've learned this over the it was a lucky lesson a helpful lesson to learn is that you know making passive income it's good it's not attached to your time but it you know you don't want to make it just to go sit on a beach somewhere that can be good and fun for three months but I promise you you're going to get bored eventually of that I did it I traveled around for 6 months partying having a good time working a little bit but like I think ultimately we want a little bit more purpose ultimately we want to be able to help people ultimately we want to build something that stands the test of time so if that's interesting to you if you want to work with me on it if you want to learn more about how to do it especially with AI and like scaling the process and actually creating these videos actually creating the blog post getting it done and just staying consistent make sure click the link in the description below I'll send you the 10 free AI prompts and my free AI Master Class it just covers exactly the whole process not just you know thinking about monetization and then planning so if that was interesting to you I hope you found it useful you know again comment podcast if you like this in a different format thinking about doing that and please like the video subscribe to the channel I really appreciate it I'll see you in another video
