How to Make a Small Amount of Money Online (and Grow It)

Without a doubt, every single person I’ve met who has a command of the ability to make their own money is more charismatic.

The reason for this is simple: if you have mastery of the ability to provide value in order to generate income it boosts your self-confidence.

Then you can declare independence from the system of wage slavery.

You’re no longer scared of losing your job, because you know if you do it’ll only be a matter of time before you build up your own empire.

How to declare independence.

Most of the people who I meet have jobs that they’re terrified to lose.

This makes me sad, especially now that I’m on the other side — I’d never take a job again working for someone, only as an independent contract (1019 superior race)!

Why would you sit at a desk all day waiting to die when you have an opportunity to make a small amount of money online and then grow it?

In fact, I’d like to argue that making a small amount of money online is incredibly easy.

Making $23.50 can’t be that hard right?

This article will show you how.

Once you make a one off $23.50, you can try for a more stable $10 in a day, then make your way towards $100 (which is all you really need anyway, particularly if you're living abroad.)

Alright, blah blah money making this and that.

You’ve heard this all before right?

Well no, because I intend to explain to you exactly how you can declare independence by earning an incredibly small amount of money with minimal effort.

A history of making money online.

You see, back when I was in Connecticut more than a decade ago now, I had no idea how to make money online.

I got the idea in my head that it was possible because I read a blog by Yaro Starak called "Entrepreneurs Journey."

This blog, watching Yaro build it up, make money from affiliate marketing and then life changing money from selling his own products was very inspiring.

I had this weird misconception –that I think a lot of people share,– that in order to develop income online that display advertising was the only real way.

I had to pick a "niche" write a bunch of content that ranks and people would hit the site, click the ads and I would make a little bit of money.

This is one way to make money online...

But it's not a good long term strategy. You're just building an information site, something that exists on the internet.

Not a brand people love, link to, tell their friends about want to come back to.

I did this with my online teaching website.

Wrote 150 blog posts about teaching online and abroad, made a bunch of money from Amazon Associates and Google AdSense over the course of two years.

Then whoops!

Google changes their algorithm and my income from that site dropped from $1000 a month to $100 a month.

You see, "niche sites" are a dumb business model.

You're just the middle man and at the whim of an algorithm. You're again not building a brand that people love and want to come back to for more.

If you aim for a dumb audience, you have to write a dumb blog.

I certainly don’t want to do this, and neither do you.

I realize a certain percentage of my readers are absolute idiots, but I’m not writing this for them.

I’m writing it for you smart people out there.

Dumb people: this is your cue to unsubscribe. This blog isn’t for you.

How I made my first $23.50 online, and you can too.

Fast forward to Thailand circa 2012 and I'm running this blog as a broke English teacher.

1. I’m writing a blog about personal growth strategies and expat travel.
2. One of my articles is a good fit for an affiliate offer from a woman's dating coach who I like and respect.
3. His helpful digital product has a 50% affiliate program.

So, that day I signed up for a free account on his site to join his affiliate program.

I simply navigated to my top ranking blog post that was getting Google traffic and social shares and edited the bottom:

If you want to dive deeper into this topic, my friend Evan has a helpful book you should checkout called Why He Disappeared. It breaks down step by step how to get the man you want to actually commit to you.

Then I went to the gym, cooked up some steak and eggs for dinner, and went to sleep as rain splattered forcefully on my windows as it was monsoon season in Thailand.

The next morning I woke up, got my morning coffee at a local cafe and noticed something:

“Sale – Evan Marc Katz- ID:XXXXXXXX Why He Disappeared”

Wow.

What?

I made $23.50 while sleeping. That was like, 800 Thai Baht in a single day.

I’d made money in my sleep!

Now, $23.50 might not seem like a lot of money, but at the time I was making $800 a month as an English teacher at a government school in Ratchaburi Thailand.

The Teacher Trap - Going Abroad and Getting Stuck as an ESL Teacher

I’ve been on both sides of the coin; a broke AF English teacher in Thailand making $1K a month to now being a self employed guy making a very good income while living abroad. It took years to make it happen, it was stressful (at my worst I was $7K

EDGE of DAVIDEdge of David

Taking this small step really gave me a lot of confidence that this whole business model might actually work.

You only need to be making $100 a day to do $36,500 a year. This is enough money where you can live abroad comfortably.

Now, I’m doing far more than $100 a day. You can too, but you have to start at a one off $23.50 first.

If you think about it, how much harder is it to make $100 a day after you’ve made $23.50?

Actually, not much.

The biggest leap is the first dollar. It's the hardest because you have to struggle to find your thing that people respond too.

You don’t need to be making millions to be free, just $100 and you can live abroad and do whatever you want (within reason).

It’s not as hard as you think it is.

How to sell online

You need a place to host your products and accept payment via credit cards and PayPal. Here are some platforms I suggest.

E-junkie

E-junkie is a pretty basic service that handles transactions for digital downloads automagically. It's a steal a $8 a month if you’re selling a digital product like an ebook, checklist, audio file, whatever.

I suggest E-junkie for two purposes:

1. To sell your own low cost digital products. E-Junkie handles the distribution, payment, and affiliate payouts for your products, All you have to do is add a buy button to your website. With any product you're selling you should consider creating a dedicated sales page and adding a big buy button that links to your product hosted on E-Junkie.
2. You get your own basic affiliate program. Yep, with your E-Junkie account you can have your own affiliate program, that means people can promote your product to their audience and earn a commission.
3. It's cheap. E-Junkie is a full feature shopping cart. You can use E-Junkie to create a basic online store, host your products and there are no bandwidth limits or transaction fees. Just a simple flat monthly fee.

Thrive Cart

I actually prefer Thrive Cart over E-Junkie, but at one time price point of $495, it's a bit expensive for most starting out. However, I think it's worth the price for a few reasons:

1. Can customize the checkout page and set a cross sell. Thrive Cart comes with a drag and drop builder so you can customize the checkout page. A cross sell is a related product you can offer when someone is on your checkout page to increase the total cart value. This alone is why I prefer it to E-Junkie as Thrive Cart checkout pages look very professional.
2. You can also have an affiliate program for your products through Thrive Cart.
3. You can sell both low cost digital downloads like ebooks or video courses. For video courses you will need to purchase video hosting like Vimeo.

Thrive Cart is ideal for the professional marketer who will create a sales page for their product.

Teachable

Teachable is the best if you want to create online courses which you can sell at a higher price point as well as digital downloads like ebooks. Teachable also lets you offer coaching through your Teachable account. With your purchase, you get video hosting, a dedicated website to host your courses and a sales page builder for each course.

How not to be sketchy

One of the biggest take-aways with making money online and selling your own stuff is that trust is your most valuable asset and people won't buy from you until they've interacted with you over the courses of a few months.

Big flashing red buttons, pyramid schemes, and selling people shitty products that don’t help them are out. Instead, being an affiliate for products that actually help people and is in alignment with your audience needs is where it's at.

This is why I never recommend products that don't contribute to my life and you shouldn’t either.

Also, remember that most — probably 95% of your readers don’t necessarily need the product you’re recommending. So, don’t bang them over the head with it. Just say “hey, I read this thing is useful and it taught me about this. If you’re into this, maybe check it out.” Simple, but it actually works.

Big red ‘buy this NOW’ buttons do not work. Instead, our sketchification alarm goes off and we bolt.

Strategies for landing your first few dollars

Finally, here are two simple strategies that I use to sell products as an affiliate.

Pay attention!

The quick mention in-post.

Sometimes if I’m talking about a subject that’s similar to a product I’ve read, I’ll mention it casually at the very end of the post. Not in a bombastic way, just a legit recommendation. Like, "Hey if you want to dive deeper into this topic, the best book I've come across for how to get out of debt is [product name] by [author]. It helped me, maybe it can help you too?

Believe it or not, the casual reference does WAY better than trying to do a review of a product in the traditional sense. A review assumes your entire audience might want the product, which isn’t the case. You’re making a whole bunch of people who don’t care read something they probably don’t want to read.

I don’t like reading reviews, do you? No, because you’re smart. Interviews and casual mentions work best — but obviously do your own testing to see what works best with your audience.

Product review post

Product review posts that are not overtly review posts convert big time once they rank for their respective keyword phrase. The point of this style of writing is to help your audience out, but to also create something that gets traffic day in and day out from search engines.

For example here is my books every man should read guide with a bunch of links to Amazon. It gets traffic because guys are wanting to know what books to read and also gets traffic for specific book.

Obviously making money online isn’t for everyone.

Some of you are happy sitting all day at a desk working 40 hours a week. The point of this article is simple: learning how to make a small amount of money, even $23.50, can boost your self-confidence immensely and allow you to begin to start declaring independence.

If you know you could build a business making $100 a day on your own, you’ll be less afraid of taking risks with your life. This means if your trying to land a raise or a promotion, you won’t be worried about walking out the door if your boss hands you that 2% raise that you didn’t ask for.

Declaring independence is the key to developing the valuable charisma necessary to become a leader. A big part of that is knowing that you can go it alone if you need to.

This way if someone tells you to sit down and shut up, you can tell them to shove it.

You have the keys to becoming an independent freedom fighter now.

Now you can support yourself, pay your readers, and make a difference.

With that in mind, let’s go change the world. Will you join me?

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If you learned something from this, I’d love it if you could help share it with someone who it will help. Know someone trapped at a desk?

Send this to them.

If you use X or Facebook, ‘liking’ this or reposting it would be awesome.

Sharing is the only way my work reaches new readers.

Thank you!