5 Ways to Make Money Online With a Small Audience

In this video, I'm going to show you 5 ways to make money online with a small audience, primarily as a coach, a consultant, or an expert of some kind. Look, I've never been the guy who's been able to go viral, but these 5 things are what allowed me to build a 6-figure coaching business despite having a small audience. The first thing to do is to focus on fans, not followers. Followers grow your ego, but fans grow your income. Here are 2 of my videos that have completely different view counts. One is I paid for ChatGPT-4 so you don't have to. It got to 77,000 views. The other one is the best website builder for course creators with just shy of 900 views. Now I tracked the income that both of these videos made me, and I want you to guess, how much money do you think the one with 77,000 views got me? This video brought in a whopping $73. Not really gonna live off of that. But now I want you to guess, how much money do you think the best website builder for course creators with just shy of 900 views brought me. This video brought in over $10,000. At about just 200 views, it brought in an $8,000 coaching client. But on top of that, it also brought in course sales and affiliate income as well. So I show you this just to paint the picture that the quality of viewer matters more than the quantity of views. As Kevin Kelly says in his world-famous "1,000 True Fans" essay, which I'm gonna link down in the description, by the way, He says you do not need millions of followers, you just need 1,000 true fans. Now, a true fan will drive 200 miles to see you speak or perform if you're a musician or something, and then they buy everything that you have or everything that you create because they genuinely value you and your work. And if you had 1,000 people who paid you $100 every month, then you would have a 6-figure business. But now imagine if they paid you $2,000 every month. So if you want to make money with a small audience, you have to know who your ideal client is and make content that is useful for them. A small following can earn way more than a big following because it is more focused. I would rather have 100 people who are obsessed with my content and me and they buy everything that I have than have a million people who don't really care. When you focus on being useful to your target audience, you will get fewer views, but they will be people who actually value your expertise and want to buy from you. The next way to make money with a small audience is to solve painful problems and do the unscalable. Before you try making passive income, start by making active income. Now, there are two ways to grow a coaching business. The first one is hunting. And if that sounds aggressive, it's because it is. So hunting are things like direct conversations, cold DMing people, reaching out to people, going to networking events, speaking on stages. It's manual marketing and it requires work, but you can make money so much faster. Now, the other way to make money is gardening. So gardening is the long-term play. It's things like creating content, building your email list, creating digital products, and things that create scalability. Everybody wants a garden. They want to be able to just make a post and have clients come flooding towards them or send out an email and make tens of thousands of dollars overnight. And I'm not saying that gardening is unimportant by any means. You should start building your garden as soon as possible. But hunting is what creates cash quickly. So I have a client named Jason, and when we first started working together, I helped him build his first higher ticket offer for his futures trading coaching. It was 6 months of coaching for $3,000. Now, I had Jason start building his garden from day one, so he was building his email list, but it was a slow grind. So to make him money fast, we started looking at what else he could do that wasn't scalable, i.e., hunting. Now, the thing about Jason is that he is a dad of 2 kids. He's also a full-time orchestral musician who's been making money on the side with futures trading. And then he found me and we started working to start building his coaching business. So we had this idea. What if you just talk to the people that you work with and ask them if they want to learn how to make some extra money on the side of their job that they're already doing because you've been doing that for years? And in just 2 weeks of starting up real conversations with his coworkers, Jason had landed $8,000 in his coaching business. So if you never garden, you will run out of energy, but if you never hunt, you'll run out of money. And by the way, if you want help turning your knowledge, your skills, your expertise into a profitable online business, but you really don't know where to start, I put together a free 5-day training series. I'm calling it the Profit Your Knowledge Challenge. Every day you're going to get a new training and a workbook with action steps to help you implement everything that you learn. By the end of the 5 days, you will have a clear plan on how to turn what you know into actual cash. And if you do the work, you might even land a client by day 3. So to unlock this training and get access to day 1, click the button down in the description, or you can visit ProfitYourKnowledge.com/training. Now, the next way to make money online with a small audience is probably the most important one, and that's to make more offers. Coaches don't fail because they aren't helpful or valuable. They fail because they don't make enough offers. It took me 5 years to hit my first 6-figure year in my coaching business. And looking back, I know exactly why. The first 3 years were me mostly just learning and developing new skills. But I got to a point where I had enough skills and I was still at a standstill where I wasn't getting clients. So I did what any smart business owner would do and I hired a coach. One of the first things that my coach asked me was, James Allen, how many offers have you made this month? Despite working 60 hours a week, I realized that I had only sat down to present and offer to about 1 person that month. Now, look, I barely made it through high school, but that math isn't mathing. So in 2023, I was at $30K a year. But in 2024, I hit my first 6-figure year in my coaching business. That wasn't luck. It was because I simply made more offers to help people and got over my fear of asking for money. So think about the number of clients that you want right now in your coaching business. Let's say it's 10. Now I want you to multiply that number by 6. That is the number of offers that you need to make. If you want 10 clients, you need to make 60 offers. And that could be in a year, that could be in a month. But that is a rough ballpark just to show you how much effort you actually need to put in and how many offers you need to actually start making. The problem is that most people don't even do that. They play with Canva graphics, they build slide presentations, they do all the things that make them feel busy and productive, except for doing the one thing that makes them money, which is making an offer and asking for money. So put up a sticky note or something that says, how many offers have I made this month? And get to work. The next way to make money online with a small audience is to do a promo every month. Everybody talks about building your email list, but few people talk about what to actually do with it. So I had a client named Wendy who was running ads to a masterclass and then to book a call where she would get coaching clients, and she was doing really well with this. One day she came to our call freaking out because her ads stopped working and she didn't know how she was going to pay her bills. Now, I knew that she was collecting email addresses with her ads, so I asked how many people were on her list And she said somewhere around 5,000. Awesome. But then I asked her the big question, when's the last time you emailed your list? And she froze and said, I don't know. That is the problem that I see all the time. People spend all this effort into building their list, but they never do anything with it. So we created a warm-up campaign to remind her list who she was and why they signed up with her in the first place. After a few weeks, we used one of my custom templates that I give to all my clients, and we made an offer to book a call with Wendy. In just 24 hours after sending that email, Wendy had 24 moms reaching out to book a call with her, which resulted in thousands of dollars in coaching sales virtually overnight. So if you are building your garden, an example, your email list, make sure that you are sending them emails. I love Gary Vaynerchuk's strategy and the book that he wrote called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. So the jabs are value that you present to your audience. The right hook is when you ask for something. It's give, give, give, ask, basically. So with your email list, share client stories. If your clients have a huge breakthrough, turn it into a story and just share that with your list. Share with them new content that you've made. Every time I make a YouTube video, I send it to my email list and address the problem and say, hey, we solved that problem in this video, go watch it. And also show what you're doing in your life and how that relates to what you help your audience do. Every month, do at least one promotion to work with you. That's your right hook. This kind of ties back to what we just talked about, which is making more offers. The more offers you make in your coaching business, the more money you're going to make. And the next way to make money online without a massive audience is to refuse to compete on prices. If you start competing on prices, is you will become a commodity. I used to constantly think about what other people were doing in their businesses, everything from their content to their offers to their strategies and their pricing. So I would lower my prices to try and be more competitive rather than pricing my coaching based on the outcomes that I help people get. But when I realized that people were paying me $5,000 and I was helping them earn $30,000 or more in a couple of months, I realized that I could probably charge more money. Not only were they making their money back, they were also learning skills that will help them earn more money in the future. You are building a business, and business is all about solving people's problems. And the bigger the problems you solve, the more money you can ask for and make. So rather than competing on prices, think about what the payoff of working with you is worth. Let's say, for example, you help save someone's marriage that would have cost $20,000 for a divorce. Could you justify charging them $7,000 to work with you if it actually saved their marriage? Absolutely. Because the ROI is so clear. This is how we should think about pricing. Instead of focusing on what your competitors are doing, focus on what problems you can solve for your clients. Get really good at them and then price according to that, not what other people are charging. Charging more for the work that I do is one of the single biggest reasons I was able to hit 6 figures in my coaching business while working around 20 hours a week. So if you've been thinking about raising your coaching prices but have been feeling a little stuck, watch this video and I will help you double your coaching prices in just 10 minutes. If you thought this video was helpful, please give it a like and share it with someone that you think might benefit from it. It really helps push the videos and grow my channel. And if you have any questions about any of this stuff, leave a comment down below this video and I will get back to you as soon as I can. As always, take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.