Everyone wants to make money online.
Some admit it. Some deny it. Some secretly write “end of America” content to earn it and then pretend they hate money. Whatevs.
Regardless of where you stand, making money online is the future. The constructs of work are changing as the permissionless economy fuelled by AI and automation gains traction.
The quickest way to never make money online is to be cheap.
If you’re already struggling you’ve got nothing to lose
Creator Ayodeji Awosika has said multiple times that when he was broke the cost of learning to make money online didn’t phase him.
He said, it’s not like things can get any worse so I may as well use whatever money I have to give it a shot. I echo Ayo’s comments.
Early in my online career I had a toxic mindset — and I knew it. I paid thousands of dollars to attend a conference to try and change. It was most of the money I had left after walking away from a business I loved.
If I’d been cheap and never gone, I might never have figured out what I know now.
Free is the worst quality piece of garbage
One platform I tried to learn earlier in my online journey was Quora.
Smart people like Sean Kernan and Nikolas Goke were crushing it. I thought I might be able to find some readers there.
So I did a free Quora course on Youtube.
Sound was terrible. There was no video. The screen share was blurry. I could hardly understand the presenter. The course was long and boring.
The worst part was the strategies taught were outdated.
I would have been better to never do the course. I got what I paid for: complete garbage.
I didn’t lose money but I lost a lot of time. That’s what free does. It erodes your time. In the process, you lose faith and start to think your online goal isn’t possible or it’s a scam.
Scouring the internet for free strategies can take a lifetime too. Maybe you’ll find them. Or maybe you’ll find conflicting approaches or outdated strategies like I did.
The nightmare that is mentors
The mentor virus is everywhere online.
“Will you be my mentor” is a message anyone with a LinkedIn account has likely gotten before. I get them all the time.
Mentor equals free coach. Asking people to be a mentor is the lazy way.
Here are the questions that come to mind for a mentor:
- What have you tried?
- Will you likely succeed?
- Have you got any existing results?
- Have you put in the work already?
- Could mentoring become counseling?
Often the answers to these questions aren’t great. Therefore, asking randoms on the internet to be your mentor is no better than playing the lottery.
“Hi” messages
This one also makes no sense.
Cheap people who don’t learn how the online game works get told to network. This is a wishy-washy term that means nothing. It causes people to send “hi” messages.
With no context and zero research a “hi” message is guaranteed to get no reply. Still, just on my own online accounts, I get loads of these every day.
Making money online means you’ve graduated from “Hi School” and figured out how to communicate like a human using wifi.
Getting people to feel sorry for you
This is another cheap tactic.
People beg for others to donate money to them via Kofi donation platforms, tips, or buy me coffee buttons. Instead of making people feel like they got value, these cheap folks make us feel guilty instead for not “supporting them.” Yuck.
Making money online is about giving value. The End.
Wanting shortcuts/hacks
Cheap people want shortcuts or hacks.
They think making money online is the lottery. Like all you need is some secret and all your Cinderella dreams will come true overnight. In the morning, a rainbow unicorn will show up at the door and whisk you off to the dream life.
I haven’t learned any hacks over the last 8 years other than put-in-the-work and forget about luck. You make your own luck.
Thinking you already know
Course creators know this secret about their students: they love to skip key lessons. Why?
Many people who want to learn to make money online think they already know. They see a lesson titled “how to write an online bio” and skip it because it seems obvious or cliche. They think they know. Everything.
They don’t. You may know a concept like an online bio, but that doesn’t mean you learned the right way.
The key to making money on any platform online is to understand the nuances. The subtle things 99% of people skip over because they’re high on dopamine and sugar water.
Not wanting to invest
Cheap people see everything as an expense.
A book is too expensive. A course is too expensive. A conference is too expensive. A paid coach is too expensive.
So they stay stuck in the land of free. One day they die in the land of the free having never achieved what they set out to do in life, drowning in regrets.
The key to making money online is to see every cent you spend on the goal as an investment, not an expense.
For example, If you pay me $1000 to coach you for an hour and I help you make 6-figures then that’s a decent ROI.
Rule: measure value instead of cost.
One prospect once said to me, “Your $97 course is simply too expensive.” I looked them up on LinkedIn. They had recently graduated with a 6-figure MBA degree and felt lost.
$100,000 down the drain on education that got them nowhere. How’s that not a scam?
Taking risks
Cheap also means being afraid to take risk.
Like some people think too hard about spending a hundred bucks on a business book. They’ll ask their boss whether they should. They’ll ask their family. They’ll ask friends at a BBQ.
I mean you’ve gotta take risks in life. If you can’t even take a $100 risk what chance have you ever got of taking a bigger risk like quitting your job for whatever you build online?
There’s no point avoiding risk. That’s how you drown in regrets. The point is to make a series of small bets and then double down on the winners.
Wanting too much
I invest money in my online education all the time.
The difference is I don’t read a book, go to a seminar, or do a course expecting to get the blueprint that’ll make me $1M in the next 30 days. Nope. That’s a loser’s mindset.
I do self-education to learn one golden nugget at a time.
If the entire book is trash but I got a couple of quotes that changed my thinking, then the price of admission was worth it.
Stop looking for end-to-end solutions. Start investing in blocks of self-education you can reassemble in your own way to make something freaking beautiful online.
For those who can’t invest, read this
Some of you are in a rough financial situation. Maybe you literally have $0 to invest in your online journey or can’t even pay the rent.
If that’s you then avoid the cheap trap. Double down on your one source of income and use the money to get your head above water again. That’s okay.
Plenty of us have gone through it. Just don’t bother with the making money online game until you’re ahead again.
It all boils down to this…
Cheap people don’t money online because they don’t understand the #1 rule of the entire game:
Invest money online to make money online.
If you can’t grasp that concept yet, you’re not ready to make wifi cash.
