Making money online is one of the most misunderstood topics there is.
I saw this question recently:
How do I make money online without spending money?
The most common response was “fill out free surveys and you’ll get paid to do so.” This is how you earn $20 a year online and go broke.
Trying to make money without investing a dollar is stupid
It’s basically asking the question: Can I get something for nothing?
The answer is no. Life doesn’t work like that. It’s lottery thinking, where the odds are a billion to one against you.
Will you win Powerball on Saturday night? No. In the same way you won’t earn 6 or 7 figures online without spending a dollar. It even costs $8 a month now to tweet.
The common trait of 6 and 7-figure creators
I’m surrounded by 6 and 7 figure creators.
My wife thinks I’m weird. “Content, content, content that’s all you talk about.” Yes, honey, that’s right.
Because all my closest friends make money online as their full-time gig, I get to learn a lot about what they do. Let me cut to the chase…
Many of them are in their early 20s. The one decision they all made was to either join a mastermind, get paid coaching, or both. Without question all of them have done this, except they don’t realize they’re not the only ones.
The way people actually make money online isn’t something you can google. People build in public, sure. But they never share everything on social media.
What they’ve learned has value and they know it. So they offer to train others for money, which makes sense. Why? Their time is precious. They could be helping someone achieve similar results or they could be, you know, making more money online and working less.
A mastermind is where I met my business partner. I still pinch myself for the gift of his talent.
The best investment you can ever make is to pay for coaching or a mastermind and achieve your online goal faster.
Spend money to make money
You’ve heard this popular catchphrase before.
And it’s the damn truth. If you expect to make money online you need to treat the goal like an investor. There will be startup capital needed, you’ll need to make a few small bets, and you’ll likely do a few courses to upskill.
If you spend $0 how can you ever expect to be owed a return? It doesn’t make sense. Nothing in life happens for free.
The point of investing money is it keeps you accountable.
A friend of mine recently invested $68,000 USD to attend a 2 day business event. Some think he’s crazy, but he’s already got 6-figures of value from the live sessions.
Was there a chance he wasn’t going to show up? Nope.
Did he pay attention to the speakers? You betcha.
Did he try to milk everything he could from the event? Absolutely.
Free stuff has no value. If the event had been free, he probably wouldn’t have gone or done what most people do and sat there on his phone the whole time.
Investing money is like an accountability partner. The pain of wasting your money is too big for you not to take action. And that’s the difference between making money online and dreaming about it.
Invest money to guarantee you’ll follow through.
Free advice comes from amateurs
Many people try to make money online with a free Youtube education.
They sit there and watch hundreds of hours of free Youtube videos. The ironic thing is those videos are littered with ads every few minutes, so they’re always burning unnecessary time and being programmed by marketers.
Anyone who has time to make these free Youtube videos is typically an amateur. Because if they had made money online, they sure as hell wouldn’t be recording free Youtube videos in their free time.
Not all Youtube education is bad though. The problem is just the lack of curation. It’s hard to tell the good content from the bad. A lot of time is wasted consuming endless videos designed by Youtube to make you watch even more videos. This leads to procrastination.
You feel like you’re making money online — but the truth is, you’ve done nothing and just been entertained by marketers or influencers in disguise.
Professionals charge money. Learn from them instead.
Learning from billionaires doesn’t help
Elon Musk-style morning routines have become all the rage.
People think you make money on the internet by following some crazy set of principles, like “have a cold shower at 6 am while eating broccoli and standing on one foot.”
This has nothing to do with making money online.
It’s purely entertainment disguised as education. Following what Jeff Bezos did to build Amazon is useless. 99.9% of us aren’t going to be billionaires and don’t have access to his resources.
You’re better off learning from ordinary people who’ve achieved above-average results.
What you really want are these 3 underrated things
- Nuances — the challenge is a lot of making money online content is surface level. It never gets into the tiny details. You’re always left thinking, “yeah but how, when, what, why.”
- Contacts — spending money to make money online is how you join communities and collect contacts. Much of the online game is about who you know, not what you know. High-quality people are not hanging around in free Facebook groups complaining about algorithms and politics.
- Systems — the secret to a lot of online goals isn’t information but systems. I call them operating systems. They are checklists you can follow to complete a certain action. Like, okay, you want to build an audience on LinkedIn. There’s a system for doing that. You follow the system as you execute on the habit every day. I haven’t seen anyone give these away for free and they’re often paid.
The mindset to make it big online
I put this one last because most of us hate the idea of mindset.
But as cliche as it sounds mindset is everything. If you try to make money online with the wrong psychology, you’ll fail before you’ve even started.
The scarcity mindset — that we get by default from society — teaches us to see investments as expenses and opportunities as risks.
The growth mindset teaches us to invest time and money, see opportunities, and take small, calculated risks.
If it all goes wrong then this growth philosophy helps us remember failures are where the true learning happens.
Not wanting to spend money to make money online is a scarcity mindset. At the bare minimum you’ll need software to do anything online. None of the good tools are free.
Live from a place of abundance. For many of you, a lack of investment is the only mistake you’re making.
Dare to invest in your online goals and watch what happens when you do.