I get it. You have a job.
That’s why you can’t do that side hustle, right? That’s why you can’t make money online.
You just don’t have the time!
But let me ask you this. How much time is required to make money online?
Seriously.
Answer that question for me.
If you can answer it and you really don’t have the time, then I get it.
However, I don’t think you can answer that question because you don’t know. And that’s okay.
In this post, let’s come up with a plan for you on how you can start your side business while keeping your 9-5 job and not losing your mind.
How does that sound? It sounds good, I know.
First, let’s tackle your mindset.
It’s Not Time, But Reps
There is no right answer to how long it takes to make money online.
It could take one hour. It could take 1,000 hours.
Time isn’t the factor between success and failure.
Hitting the mark is.
If you hit the mark in the first hour then you’re good. But sometimes it takes you 70 shots and those 70 shots might take you 1,000 hours.
You probably don’t believe me so let me give you an example.
Let’s use this blog post as an example.
We’ll pretend it takes me 2 hours to write this blog post. At the end of the blog post, I present you with an offer.
It’s coaching (no this doesn’t really exist).
When I finish writing this post, I post it on Twitter. I DM some people that I think would be interested in it.
One of them likes it and shares it with their audience.
100 people end up reading the post. One of them likes the post and wants to be coached by me so they buy the coaching package.
I’ve now made money from less than 3 hours of work.
Is this possible? Yes.
But only if you hit the mark on your first shot.
But what about making more money?
Okay, I just write more blog posts and make sure people are aware they exist.
I can even schedule all of my social media promotions.
Email?
I can bulk-write all of my emails and be set for months.
It Takes Time to Find the Mark
People say they don’t have the time for a side business because they haven’t found the Message-Vision Fit.
And that’s where most of the time is spent on building a business.
Once you find it though, things become a lot easier.
If you don’t believe me, ask some successful people online if they spend more time working now that they’re making a lot of money or less.
If the answer isn’t less then they are messing up somewhere.
So how do you get to this point? That’s what you want to know.
Alright, let’s tackle that.
1. Pick the Obvious Improvement
People only buy one thing: improvement.
This improvement usually comes in one of six forms:
- Money
- Health
- Sex
- Fun
- Status
- Time
Give someone more of those things and they’ll probably give you money.
Your goal isn’t to find the quirkiest niche. That may sound fun, but come on.
Busting your ass and not making money isn’t fun.
So pick one of the improvements above.
Money is a great one because everyone wants to make more money.
It doesn’t matter if you know how to make money or not, I’ll show you how to get around that without cheating.
2. Pick the Audience
This is the one that will take the longest amount of time.
Not because it is difficult, but because you might not be the type that makes choices quickly.
But let’s say you have absolutely NO IDEA how to make money online. What do you do?
You go the Curator Path.
First, pick a social media network.
Let’s say you go with Instagram.
Now what you’re going to do is find 10 successful accounts on Instagram. Write them down.
Then pick one and spend a week going through absolutely everything that they do on Instagram.
Go back to the very beginning.
- See how their posts changed over time.
- See if they’re having discussions with their commenters.
- See how often they post.
- See if they collab with other accounts.
Study everything that you can to see what they do to get to their level of success.
Then share what you’ve found.
Continue to do that and you’ll start to build an audience.
Why?
People want to make money and they believe that growing on Instagram will help them do that. But they don’t get why others are succeeding and they’re not.
So you become the Curator of Strategies.
You break down what successful Instagrammers are doing to grow their accounts.
People will follow you because of this.
3. Your Offer
The formula for making money is simple.
Audience x Offer = $$$$$Step 2 showed you how to build the audience. So then what’s your offer?
You don’t know how to make money yourself so is it ethical to pretend that you do and create a course?
You play the game how you want, but I like this approach.
With each of your case studies, you give most of it away for free.
But you also keep some stuff hidden and you add that to the full case study.
You have to social media version of the case study and then the in-depth version of the case study.
Or maybe your in-depth version has an interview with the Instagrammer.
Over time, you will have a decent library of case studies. You can charge people to get access to this library.
It holds ALL of the secrets for Instagram success within it. Why wouldn’t people want it?
You can charge $20, $50, $100, or whatever for lifetime access to the library. Or you can try to make it a monthly subscription.
- People follow you because of your content
- People sign up for your case study of libraries
You keep on doing more case studies which means you keep on getting more followers which means you get more people to sign up for the library.
The cycle repeats itself over and over again.
And guess what?
Over time, you start to get the hang of Instagram.
You’ve studied others enough and grown your account so you could create another offer about how you grew on Instagram and how anyone can follow your plan.
Or maybe you’ve mastered content creation and you want to sell a course on that.
Or maybe you want to do some coaching.
How long would this take?
Again, it matters if you hit the mark or not with the right person.
You could get someone to buy your first in-depth case study after seeing a couple of posts on Instagram.
How to Make Money Online While Working a 9-5
The concept of how to make money online isn’t very difficult.
It gets a lot easier if you understand WHY certain things work and others don’t.
If you’re curious to learn the WHY of online business building then check out my FREE 5-Day Odd Business Bootcamp below.
There is nothing to sell over the 5 days.
It’s just you and me going over what it takes to build a successful online business without restricting you to a specific plan that you don’t like.
Instead, you’ll understand why people do what they do and why some succeed while others fail.
From there you’ll be able to craft your own plan (or steal the one I wrote about above) and find success online.