5 Things That Surprised Me About Side Income

Tonight we are talking about the surprises that I have learned along the last approximately 14 years of earning money on the side, both as a consultant and in passive income. So I have created programs that range from $4.95 up to over $20,000. And at each step of the way, you learn something completely different. It's like a different animal. So if you want to know how to do this and how to find an idea and how to start a business, we have an earnable program, iwt.com earn go there, put your email address in, and we will show you some of the techniques and a program where you can learn it. But tonight I want to talk a little bit about what I learned along the way, what surprised me, and what were some of the high leverage insights that I learned. So the first surprise I had was when I started doing consulting. Now, a lot of people have never done consulting, but it's basically getting somebody to pay you for a service. If somebody comes and mows your lawn, they are a lawn care consultant. Okay? It's just a word. So I started doing consulting for something very simple. I was teaching venture capitalists how to use social Media. What is MySpace? What is this weird thing? How do people use YouTube? This is back in the day, around 04.05. And I was like, wow, this is cool. I actually really enjoy it. I know this stuff like the back of my hand. And they are trading money, which they have a lot of, for knowledge, which in that case I had a lot of. So I started to learn, oh, wow, I can go in and I can share stuff that's second nature to me. They will happily pay. That was interesting. I remember also at one point, I was working for another firm, omidyard Networks, and I remember going in to my boss's office to try to get a raise and I was like, I'd like to talk about a raise. And he's like, why? And I was like, well, I've been here a long time. And he's like, no. And I just kind of walked out with my head hung low. And what I learned there was just simply asking for more money is not going to get you a raise. You have to make a contribution and you have to be worth more to the organization. Okay. And also the organization has to have the capacity to pay you more. So I started consulting. I don't even know, 20 bucks an hour or something like that. And eventually I was doing $25,000 for a day or even a half day. So the rates went way up. Now, that is not typical But I learned that when people say trading time for money is bad, they might just not be making enough money. So I really don't like that idea that trading time for money is bad and it's beneath us. Most people on this planet trade their time for money. And if you decide I am strategically going to make more money for my time and you build the skills, you build the network, and yes, you are a little lucky, you can increase the amount you are paid for the very same time. So I learned that I also had a bunch of friends who were consultants and are still consultants who have raised their rates. You can think about professional speakers, coaches, consultants, etc. They have reached really elite levels of the industry. Then I decided I wanted to switch to making money from products. And I am going to guess that most of the questions tonight are going to be about products and passive income. Passive income, the dream of America to sleep and make money just printing and just raining down on you while you're sleeping. All right, I'm going to tell you the truth about it. I do make money as I sleep, but it's not as easy and simple as a lot of the promises out there. And in fact, I have tried to be extremely honest. In order to make money while you sleep, you have to do a lot of work up front. So passive income requires enormous front end work and it also requires maintenance. Okay. Some of the stuff that I wrote years ago continues to generate income and bookings automatically. But we still need to maintain it. We need to make sure all the facts are still correct. We need to go through it and check it every so often. So it's not like you just set it and forget it. It's if you want to grow, you have to keep maintaining what you've built and then building more. So let's talk about it, everybody. Well, my students might know the first product I ever sold, which was $4.95 for an ebook online. That was Ramit's 2007 guide to kicking ass. Back then, I wasn't sure if anybody actually bought anything. In this case, they did. I sold over a thousand copies and I was like, oh my God, people buy this. And the people who I thought would buy this are not the ones who actually did. Like there were people complaining about the price. Hey, Ramit, maybe if you lowered it and gave me a 12 month payment plan, I'm like, what is it, 40 cents? What are we talking about here? No, no, I did not do that. What I discovered is that the people who bought had an open rate in Their in our email list, quadruple the rate of non buyers. What does that tell you? That was something there and I knew I had to find out. It tells me that people who buy tend to be better customers. No surprise, they are customers. And the people who in general spend more tend to be even better customers. It's no surprise. But when you think about it, you know, there's a lot of folks who say like oh well, well, you know what, let me just leave it there. People who buy your products are customers and the ones who spend more and buy more frequently tend to be better customers. It's self evident when you say it out loud, but people get murky and it becomes unclear. That is the way it works. So over time I went from a $5 ebook to as I mentioned, we have over 20 programs ranging from 5 bucks to I think over 10,000 bucks at this point. Our passive income is made up of, let me tell you some of the different products. So we have products on money, career, psychology, business, but we also have a book that sells on Amazon and all over in every bookstore we have, I think we have an Amazon affiliate account somewhere. It probably makes a couple hundred bucks a month. And within our programs we also use different strategies like upsells, cross sells, follow up funnels, all kinds of stuff. So we can talk about all of these in the question section tonight. So if you have questions about passive income, definitely think about your question and put it in the question box. I'll be happy to answer those. The thing that really surprised me about programs and passive income and books and even blog posts that you are building an asset and this is a profound idea that is not talked about enough. So when people say they're trading time for money, I told you, I don't really like that phrase because it's usually used kind of condescendingly. Oh, you trade time for money. So pedestrian. But I think actually most people can have a good job and if you really get focused on it, you can earn A lot of the challenge is that even if you are working at a 9 to 5 job, you still have to think about building an asset because your job could be taken away, you could be fired, you could be laid off, you could go on disability, or a global pandemic could happen. Whatever the case, suddenly that entire single source of income could go away. So what do you do if you are working at a 9 to 5 job and you want to build an asset? An asset is something that can produce income even as you sleep. An asset does not need the Same amount of work as a 9 to 5 job. An asset can be incredibly powerful. So what are some examples of assets? Of course, there's writing a book, there's building a program, a video course, all that stuff. But the most common asset in the world is portfolio investing in the market. So before I ever had a business, I was investing in the market. I built up a portfolio, and that was my asset. And that asset has grown. And I believe that the vast majority of people should start there as their primary asset. It's easy, it's low cost, it's effectively as automated as you can possibly hope for an asset to be. Okay, then I started my business and I started creating lots of assets, so programs, a book, etc. And I didn't think of them like that. I was like, I got to write this book so people stop asking me about iras. Here you go. But it turned out, in retrospect, this book is an asset. And even as we speak, people are buying it on Kindle and physical books, et cetera. They're buying it at indie bookstores, they're checking it out at the library, and my publisher will get a check, and they will write me a check every quarter or so. That's an asset. I wrote emails that have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's an asset. I wrote blog posts, and even my team worked on blog posts that bring in people to our site that then turn in to customers. That's an asset as well. So you can start to see, wow, there's a lot of possibility around here to create an asset. An asset is taking what's in your head, maybe as a consultant or a 9 to 5 employee, and packaging it up, documenting it, and then making it available for other people to access. Incredibly simple on paper. Incredibly profound. Because this asset doesn't sleep, this asset can be automatically sold and used. And that is how you can start to really scale both your reach and also your income. Okay, Next thing that surprised me was scaling. So what you see often is that most people will create one asset, maybe it's a ebook or a video course. And they'll be like, oh, my God, I can't believe it. I sold $1,000 or $10,000. And they're like, this is awesome. What do I do now? And the answer can become very complex. So we have actually built several programs to show you about more advanced strategy traffic. We have a program called Endless Audience, Serious Strategic growth program called Double Engine Growth, and a variety of other programs that show you the more advanced side of scale. We're talking about if you're a multiple six figure business or higher. I learned that scaling is really hard. And this is why you see a huge amount of coaches or people who have programs or books, and I would say something like 90 to 95% of those folks stay at the 1 to 2 product level because it's hard to scale. It's hard to figure out, how do you harness traffic? You might be able to sell your product to your list of 500, but now you got to get 500 more, maybe even 500 a day. Where do you find the staff to be able to help you scale? I used to tell myself I just want to have a small, simple, intimate team. But I realized that I care more about impact than just having a small team. And so I needed to grow. I need to learn management skills. And that is very challenging, especially for people who are typically solopreneurs. You have to learn a lot of skills. You have to learn copywriting or find a great copywriter who will work with you, which costs money. You have to learn traffic. You have to learn customer service, all of it. And you have to be good at all of them if you really want to scale. So scaling is hard. And we may have some questions about that tonight. Finally, the big surprise was, what do you get? This is a question that I believe more entrepreneurs need to ask themselves, which is, what do I get if I'm working hard, if I'm taking risks, if I am putting it on the line? What do I get if things work well? Do I get paid more than I could make on the market? Maybe that's what I want. Do I get flexibility to be able to work from home or go to yoga in the middle of the day? Do I get to travel for six weeks at a time? That's what I get. And do I get to delegate some of the things I just don't want to do? More entrepreneurs need to ask themselves, what do I get? What you find is that most entrepreneurs never stop to ask themselves that. They just create another 10 jobs for themselves. And they don't actually think about how do I want to use my business to live my rich life. And so I got flexibility. I've worked from home for what, 16 years, and I love it. And I hate fluorescent lights. I will never go to an office and work in an office where there's fluorescent lights. No, thank you. I got to work with an amazing team of people I like and respect. I don't have to work with people who I don't like or not good at their jobs, they don't work with me. And I got to be able to have a very flexible lifestyle where Cass and I can go and travel for six weeks at a time and go to these crazy amazing places. And the business still runs. In fact, the business still grows. So that's what I get. But I would challenge every entrepreneur to say, what do I get if my business does well? The best thing about that is it gives you a vision because you're going to be stuck in the weeds at certain points. You're going to have a tough time with your technology or your conversion or your funnels or whatever and you're going to want to quit. You're going to want to say, why am I doing all this stuff? Let me just keep it simple, have one product. But if you have a vision of what you're going after, both on a just a personal level, but also your audience, it's going to make it a lot easier to persevere. So in just a second I'm going to ask people and we're going to take a look at the questions. But those are some of the things that I got the surprises from earning a side income which became my full time income. Cas, do we have any questions tonight?

Yeah. How do you figure out when to hire your first employee?

So my first employee was a personal assistant who worked with me for about 10 hours a week and she was awesome. I remember I was in my early 20s and my friends used to say, they used to make fun of me because they're like, you got an assistant just so you could show off? I'm like, no, I didn't. I want to focus on the high value things and I don't want to be scheduling meetings. It's just not a good use of my time, not even good at it. So there are some simple metrics that we have in some of our programs for how to know when to hire, but I'll give you a few right now. One, if you are losing deals business because you don't have enough time to service things, that's a good sign. That's a money problem that you can pay away. For example, if you do a launch and you're getting like 70 people emailing you the night before, hey, does your program cover this? If you had somebody who could answer their questions, you will make more money. So that's a no brainer if you're making enough money. Like I would say $150,000 is when you start to think about some sort of assistance and that could be a part time assistant. And then at a little bit more than that, it's a full time assistant. Then I would go use our program delegate and done. Which shows you how to find an amazing executive assistant. How to hire them. It's the actual questions I use in my hiring and then how to manage them. It's the whole playbook that my assistant and I built. There's some other things like I hired a book researcher who later became head of product at iwt. And most people really start off with something like a customer service person and, or an assistant and then they make a lot of mistakes in hiring and they hate it and they hate their lives. And I tell them, your life is going to be shit for the next 10 years. Accept it. Everything you love, it's gone. All you're gonna do is wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror and say, I hate my life. But finally you might get through it and things will be great. Maybe not though. So I don't know. I hope it's better for you. I finally got through it by the way, and now it's great.

How important is copywriting to your success?

Very, very important. I cannot overstate how important it is. I mean if you read my book or blog post or are you on my email list iwt.com just go there and sign up and you will see within five days how different our material is from anybody else's. These emails break all the rules. They teach you things you would never imagine in a free email on the third day and suddenly you're like what? I was never even thinking about buying anything and now I'm pulling out my credit card for a multi thousand dollar program. How did that happen? Part of the answer is copywriting. And so copywriting is not just about the mechanics. How long should it be? Nobody cares. It's how do I tell a story. And if you're thinking about money, I do some copy tear downs in earnable. I brought people to New York, I took their copy and reworked it right on the spot. And I remember there was a money relationships program that one of the students there had, he's from Brazil and it was very mechanical. You know, you disagree about money, you disagree about savings rate. And I rewrote the copy live right on the spot. And you can watch the student and he is pin drop silence. He took it back to his wife and they watched the video and he told me, I believe he told me, she cried. And that is what great copy can do. It can move you emotionally, but it can also help the right people make the right decision for them. So copywriting is amazing. We teach it in Call to Action. And Cass, you're using that program right now, right?

Yeah, I'm almost done. It is so great. It's been a game changer.

So give. Give an example of what. What is something that surprised you or blew you away in Call to Action?

Well, I liked how it not only covers tactics, but also the psychology behind writing copy. And one of the things you say in the program is it doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough.

Yeah.

Because I was spending way too long.

Yeah. Copy. Unless you are a professional copywriter, we show you how good it needs to be and then move on. Copy is just a tool.

Yeah.

I happen to love writing, so I like. I've studied intimately. And our copy team is awesome. But for the vast majority of people, it needs to be good enough to grow your business, and then you can move on to other things. That's the big mistake people make is they think they need to spend the next 10 years perfecting copy.

Yeah.

It needs to be good enough, and then you need to move on. That's what we show you.

Oh, and the other, like, massive learning that I had was to create the customer desire map. Where. Where they are, where they want to go, their fears, and, like, categorize it out based off of, like, survey responses and that I'll use for, like, years to come.

That's awesome. Last night, I was doing an earnable call. So every month we do a private earnable call where just earnable students come on. And I did business makeovers last night. They took their business ideas that they're working on. I presented some of them and showed people, here's what I would change. Here's how you get deeper into understanding your customer psychology. Think of this pricing thing and all this stuff, and they get direct access. So one of our. At one point, I was talking about how you want to ask your customers why they chose you out of all the other options. And you're often surprised. Business owners are often too logical. Oh, they joined my thing because they want to roi. It's so much more efficient.