We live in a world where it’s getting harder to trust working for someone else. Plus, we’re seeing thousands of new people every single day start to build their own path to freedom by learning how to make money online.
So the big question is can anyone learn how to make money online?
The easy answer is yes. Anyone can learn it.
The hard answer is that not everyone wants to go through the motions of achieving it.
We’ve helped thousands of normal people learn how to make money online without having to get fancy with anything. And more importantly without scamming people or feeling like a scumbag.
So how does it work?
It starts with a simple formula.
A Simple Formula for How to Make Money Online
Over the years we noticed a pattern. Every single person that found success online followed this pattern and every person that failed didn’t.
It was so simple. What was it?
Audience x Offer = $$$$$That was it.
To make money online you need an audience and some type offer. The better the variables are, the more money you will make.
But the people who weren’t finding success wanted it to be more complicated than that and it wasn’t. When you find an audience that has a problem that is preventing them from getting what they want then they will pay someone to help them solve the problem.
And that’s all it was.
- Find someone that wants something
- Find what is preventing them from getting it
- Offer them the solution so they get what they want
And there you go. The simple formula for how to make money online.
So why is it that so many people struggle with doing this?
It’s because they jump from tactic to tactic and forget the strategy.
Strategy vs Tactics
You would think these are the same thing, but they aren’t.
Strategy is something that remains consistent. For example, in basketball, the strategy is to score more points than your opponent.
That never changes.
The tactics that you use to do that differ from team to team:
- Shoot more 3s
- Play zone defense
- Recruit more big men
With making money online we can see the formula above, but that isn’t a strategy. That’s simply a common formula that applies to everyone.
The strategy you decide to live by is dependent on you, but here at Odd Noodle, our strategy is pretty simple.
Serve our audience.
So everything that we do we do with the mindset that we are serving our audience in the best way possible.
This leads to an improved audience (remember the formula above) who love our offers (again, the formula) which leads to money.
But you might be thinking that simply serving your audience isn’t good enough. That doesn’t teach you how to get views on YouTube or sales through your mailing list and you’d be right.
However, you have to remember that tactics are dictated by your strategy. You wouldn’t do a tactic that goes against your strategy and that’s why having a strategy is important.
So what are the tactics that we use?
Well, that depends on when you’re reading this because tactics can change over time. Not because we like to change them, but because a lot of what we do revolves around things we can’t control.
For example, we post on social media and the social media algorithms are always changing.
So our base tactic is to simply push out great content, but today’s tactic might be to post 7 times a day on a platform and tomorrow that number drops to 3.
When we tell Creators to build a library, that is a tactic that we think serves audiences well. Having a ton of valuable content that they can go through at their own pace is a value that many aren’t doing.
So it makes for a great tactic.
But there are 100s of other tactics and this is where Creators get confused because they use so many different tactics that apply to many different strategies.
It’s a mess.
So what can you do?
How to Make Money Online Today
First things first, it’s important to understand the rules to the money game. Because what usually happens is that you’ll see a Creator find success and you’ll copy what they do, but you won’t find the same success.
It can be frustrating because you think it should be obvious, but it isn’t always.
For example, you’ll see someone grow quickly on Instagram and think that it just comes down to posting amazing content. But they very well could be in an engagement pod that boosts their stats.
Just something to keep in mind.
Once you understand the rules you can follow a plan. By no means are we saying this is the definitive plan of action to take, but it is the one that we teach our students in our Full Stack Engines program.
To simplify things we break it up into phases.
Phase 0: Your Audience
Before anything you need to know WHO you are going to serve (aka help). If you don’t know that person then everything else you do will be a waste.
You might be thinking what about your niche? Well, guess what?
Your audience is your niche.
If you need some help in choosing a niche then check out how to choose a money-making niche and 403+ great blog niche ideas.
Phase 1: The Site and the Offer
One of the most dangerous things you can do when trying to figure out how to make money online is to take too long to make any money.
That’s why we start off right away trying to figure out an offer to create to sell.
Even when we aren’t experts in a field, we know there are certain types of offers that we can create that will help our audience.
In this case, we always start with a book. Why? Because they are the easiest and quickest to create, plus everyone understands a book.
But more importantly, you can package a book with other things to make the offer more attractive. For example, we package some of our books with guides, workshops, and other things to make the book a more complete package.
During this phase we also get our site set up. It’s not anything fancy but it’s a great opportunity to ensure that we have something that we can link people back to from our social media accounts.
Create Your Social Media Accounts
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be everywhere. Pick one social media platform that fits your audience.
For example, if your niche does well with images then Instagram makes a ton of sense.
If you’re going to be talking to professionals then LinkedIn might be the place to start. Take your time and go through the social media platforms to see which one is a good fit.
And here’s the big thing. Your goal here isn’t to grow on social media.
The reason is that you don’t control the algorithm so stressing about your own growth will cause you to pause and consider if you want to do this.
So what do you do on social media in this phase?
Engage.
That’s it. You jump into conversations with others. Hop into the comments. Talk about the things you think you’ll be talking about for the next 5 to 10 years.
Phase 2: The Selling (aka Time to Make Money Online)
Selling?! Already?
First, if you hate the idea of selling then this is perfect for you because our goal at Odd Noodle is to teach you the art of selling without selling.
It sounds like an impossible task, but it’s very possible in today’s world.
Why?
People are used to buying from people. That means when we are looking for information we go to the people that we know.
Imagine someone has been following you on TikTok for 3 months. You’ve been posting consistently and really helping them out. They have gotten to know you a bit and because you’re always around they trust you.
So when you announce that you have a book on the thing that they need help with then guess what? They don’t need much selling at all.
They know you. They like you. They trust you. And now you’re offering them a solution to their problem?
That’s all that is needed.
But what about things like funnels and email marketing? Aren’t those needed?
The full answer is yes, but the short answer is it depends.
Depends on what? The person who is getting ready to buy.
If this is your first time on Odd Noodle and you haven’t come across any of our social media accounts then you don’t know us. You have no idea if you like us let alone trust us.
But we have an amazing Playbook (down below) that you can get for free that shows you more of the ins and outs of business building.
Once you download the Playbook you are put into a funnel (just being honest). The goal of the funnel is to help you decide if we are the people who will help you down the road.
If so then when it comes time for you to buy then we shouldn’t have to do much selling. We simply let you know that we have a solution for the current problem that you have.
Selling without selling.
Content Creation
To sell without selling you have to be prolific with content creation.
We like to attack content creation on multiple fronts:
- Social Media
- Blogging
Now, getting started with all 3 of these can be overwhelming and that’s usually because Creators tackle each one individually.
That’s silly.
A better approach, and this is what we teach in Full Stack Engines, is to start with a single piece of content and move out from there.
For example, we’ve created our book so it makes sense to create content that ties into the book. That way we can attract the right kind of people to the book instead of hoping that everyone we bring in has some type of interest.
Let’s break down an example.
How Rachel Makes $20,000+ a Month With Freezer Meal Guides
One of our students, Rachel Fairchild, makes over $20,000 a month selling Freezer Meal Guides. Sounds insane, right?
So how does she do it?
It’s quite simple.
She creates a guide that teaches you how to do freezer meals along with a ton of recipes. Then she goes on social media and posts videos showing her creating the freezer meals.
That’s it.
What this does is create a positive feedback loop within her audience. People come across her social media and see that she does freezer meals.
That’s the first checkpoint. If they don’t care about freezer meals then they will move on.
Those who stick around will get to know Rachel. They might even follow her.
There will be a smaller number that go to her profile and click the link in her bio to download the freebie.
So now she knows the people who are signing up are interested in Freezer Meals. That’s another checkpoint.
Then when she presents her offer she knows she’s sending it to people who care about Freezer Meals. It’s not that she assumes everyone will buy, but she knows there is a small percentage who are perfect for this offer.
And that’s it.
She doesn’t do ads. She doesn’t do pushy marketing or selling.
She simply continues to show people what is possible.
You’ll notice that Rachel doesn’t do any blogging even though it’s one of the things that we suggested.
This really comes down to niche and audience. While we would recommend Rachel do some blogging to get passive traffic, she’s doing fine without it for now so no reason to push it.
Phase 3: The Repeat, Review, and Renewal Cycle
This is what causes many people to stop trying to figure out how to make money online and that’s the repetitiveness of it all.
There is nothing fancy about this. You continue to produce content to continue to draw people in so that you can show them your offer(s).
So everything that is done in Phase 2 is stuff that is always done.
That’s the repeat side of this.
Yes, over time you are adjusting and making tweaks, but the concept is always the same. Produce content that draws people into your world.
The Renewal part is looking to see if there are other offers that you can create so that you can continue to help your audience.
Going back to the example of Rachel, every season she produces a new Freezer Meal Guide.
Here at Odd Noodle we might do a new workshop if something new arises in the things that we do.
At Odd Wonderful, we produce new books to tell the stories of the characters and worlds that they belong in.
But other than that the tasks are almost always the same.
Find great content to create, create it, and then give it to our audience.
It’s possible to try and make building an online business more complicated than this, but there really is no need.
How to Succeed & Make Money Online
Over the years we’ve helped thousands of Creators build sustainable sources of income online. We’ve also seen a lot more fail.
What’s the difference?
- Understanding that this is a marathon. We wish that everyone could be one of those top-secret success overnight types, but that happens once every billion people. Instead, know the strategy, to service people, and understand that is an Infinite Game. Not something that you accomplish over the weekend.
- First and foremost, focus on serving people. That’s it. The better you do at this, the more money you will make in the long run. No need to complicate it.
- Business is neutral. It’s not out to get you or reward others.
There is no timeline to when you will find success. But as you can see with the phases above the goal is to get stuff out as quickly as possible not because it works, but because it’s how you get feedback.
The sooner you can get feedback, the sooner you learn. And the sooner you learn, the sooner you can get better results.
These are all things that we emphasize in our program Full Stack Engines, but before jumping into that you can check out the Odd Noodle Playbook below.
