The internet has put bosses on notice.
More people are realizing they can come home from work and build their future career, permissionlessly, online. That’s what I did and I’m just a normal guy from Australia with Koalas in his backyard.
I spend far too much time working out what people are doing in their bedrooms late at night (naughty, I know!). Many people in my community have built and are on their way to building $100k+ a year side hustles.
Here are a few ways they are doing it. One might be an idea for you.
Sell reshares of content
I don’t currently do this, but I know lots of people who do.
Without too much effort you can build an audience on any social media platform. Then you can offer to reshare other people’s content to help their accounts grow in return for money.
The reason this is so effective is that buying traditional ad placements (like Facebook ads) costs a lot of money — and you only rent the audience. Paying for reshares allows a person to access someone else’s audience and convert them to their own followers/subscribers.
Rent to own instead of rent forever.
A handful of clients paying you $40 per reshare can easily earn you $100k in a year if you stick at it.
The one limitation is you can’t promote this service on social media apps or you’ll get banned. So you have to enter online communities in Discord and Slack to find people who want their work reshared. Not hard.
Become an unconventional ghostwriter
Once you discover people will pay you over $10,000 to write tweets, your perspective on money changes forever. — Eddy Quan
Many freelancers think the wrong way about content. They make the mistake of writing blog posts for clients which have a low perceived value. Company and personal blogs are so ten years ago. It’s highly competitive and doesn’t generate that much value.
Ghostwriting is a slight twist on freelancing. Instead of producing blog posts you create social media posts which have a higher value.
Social media gives someone instant access to a big audience, whereas most blog posts drown in a sea of boredom in the backyard of google search.
Have you noticed how most google searches don’t even take you to a website anymore? They just give you the answer on the same page. That further devalues writing blog content for an audience of no one.
Social media works and so people are happy to pay normies like us to produce content for them. The best one by far is to write tweets. They’re easy to write and don’t take much time.
Build community-led products
Everyone throws around the word community, yet most have no idea what it means. Just saying you have a community of people isn’t enough.
A community is a living organism. It’s either alive and well or dead. And unless you listen to a community and put their suggestions into action, it’s all talk and no action. Dumb.
The guru of community-led products is Greg Isenberg. I follow his content religiously. Why? The future of business won’t be customer-led. Nope. It’ll be community-led. Customers are transactional. They care about price. They shop around for the best deal.
A community-led person is different. They stick around. They are interested in loyalty. They are there for the experience and to have fun. They are with people who believe they are different and don’t aim to have mass market appeal. Go small and weird or go home is their mantra.
Greg says there are 400+ $1m a year community-based business ideas currently available. More are popping up every day.
How do you find one?
Simple. Greg says go to Reddit and look for Subreddits.
They’re thriving communities. Then you start conversations and look for problems you can solve. Once you find and validate a problem, you build a digital product to solve it. Or you partner with people who have the answers.
Destroy SEO with one keyword
I made a new friend recently. His name is Tim Stoddart.
On a podcast I heard him explain how he looks for single keywords on google that he can rank for. To reduce competition and make it easier he looks for longer tail search terms with intent to buy but less traffic.
Once he has chosen his keyword he spends time building a site that can rank for that keyword. Even if the keyword isn’t massively popular, he still finds ways to make good money from them.
One keyword phrase he found was “LSAT Test Reviews” This is a test you must do to have a career in law and pass the BAR exam. Oh, and you only get two chances. So he wrote 15-20 articles on the subject.
That made his newly created website an authority in this LSAT test niche in a relatively short time.
That traffic can then be converted into product sales or sold as leads to companies that offer LSAT Test preparation services.
Become a master of one long tail SEO keyword. Write 15–20 articles on it.
How to build a serendipity machine: make stuff and put it on the internet. — Jack Butcher
Teach your 9-5 skills
Teaching online is highly profitable.
Yet too many people put their hands on their hips and say “what do I teach Timbo?” Simple. Teach your 9-5 skills if you’ve got nothing else. I could easily teach people who want to work in banking what I know.
Or I could teach a workshop or course about online payment systems such as Stripe and Braintree, given I worked with them for so many years.
If your 9–5 skills currently earn you a salary, they can earn you a side hustle income too. You just have to be willing to sell those skills twice. Maven is one of the fast-growing eLearning platforms people use to do this.
Another type of person you can teach is someone who is two years behind you in any field or hobby. That removes the fear that you need to be some dumbass expert with a huge ego.
I’m 36 and right now I teach people in their 20s to do what I do. It works perfectly because I was them 6+ years ago, so I know their pain.
I know what they’re going through. I know how they feel — therefore, I can help them through my experience and skills.
You can too.
The Dan Koe slap across the face
My friend Dan Koe said in a recent newsletter “There are people selling $20K+ per year memberships for a Facebook group and weekly zoom calls.”
My mouth dropped to the floor. What the hell!
Seriously. When you have valuable experience and can lead a small group of people they’ll happily pay these kinds of high-ticket price tags.
All you need is 50 people at $20,000 and you’ve got a million-dollar business that can operate from your bedroom.
Obviously there’s some nuance to it. But it’s definitely possible if you’re willing to lean into your expertise, or develop deep expertise in one area by consuming loads of free Youtube and Twitter content.
The final strategy (with hardly any competition)
I’m a Web3 groupie as you may know. I freaking love it. It gets me all hot and bothered. My face goes red. My cheerleader scream gets loud too.
More than the excitement, Web3 is a great way to make $100k a from your bedroom. There are very few experts in this space and it’s growing enormously fast. Because you’re early you get paid disproportionally more money to become an expert than every other pocket of the internet.
I read a story recently from Gabagool.eth on Mirror.xyz about his life.
He spent most of his time being a broke teacher and trying to get paid to write. At best he’d get paid $50 for a book review or get a coffee voucher for his work. No one valued his teaching or research abilities.
Then in 2020 he went deep into Web3.
He started learning everything he could and sharing his findings via Telegram and Twitter Threads. This brought many new people into his life.
Now he’s no longer a broke teacher begging for handouts and trying to pay off a mountain of student debt. He’s employed by multiple Web 3 projects to do the work he loves. All because he decided to be early in a new field that has few experts so far and a long way to go.
Web3 is the easiest opportunity I can think of right now to make 6-figures a year in the shortest time possible.
Making money from your bedroom is doable. All you have to do is experiment with a few small bets online and see where it takes you.
If I can do it, why not you?