The average Millionaire has Seven sources of income”

Building income streams is not easy. It will take a lot of time, effort and systems to make each new income stream work in your overall plan.

Making more money is essential though, on your path to financial freedom, and there really isn’t a way to make a ton of money over your lifetime than to learn how to build multiple streams of income.

Before we get into it though, this article is part 4 of 5 in a series on building wealth.

You can find the other four here:

Wealth Generation Overview
Lifestyle Design/Cutting Expenses
How to Pay off Debt
Simplified Long Term Investing
This wealth-building strategy prefers that you have restructured your lifestyle to create a gap of opportunity, meaning you have reduced expenses to the point where you earn more than you spend. And that you’re well on your way to becoming debt-free.

If you’ve done those things, then you can risk the extra time required to make more money. Without a frugal lifestyle, more money will just cause you to spend more. Plus, that money you don’t spend is already tax-free, so it’s extra money in your pocket the government can’t touch.

I digress. This is an income post, and you’re here because you want to learn how to make more money!

This article won’t be listing “10 ways you can make more money.” Instead, I am going to give you a system you can use to actually make money through building an income stream.

There will be a companion post released tomorrow detailing dozens of different ideas and resources you can use to make better use of the system I break down in this article.

Read also: 3 smart money moves nobody talks about

The Income Generation System

“printing machine” by Bank Phrom on Unsplash
You might not even realize it, but if you have followed the advice outlined in the previous posts in this series, you have created a Wealth Building System, with two subsystems. One for suppressing expenses and another for paying off debt.

The Income Generation system is the next subsystem in your financial freedom machine.

This system is designed to help you choose and implement multiple streams of income over time, adding more lifelines to your finances.

Why multiple streams? We live in an uncertain world. Competition in life is fierce, and everything is subject to change. With many different streams of income, you won’t ever be reliant on any one source.

When you rely on one source of income, like a job, you have zero leverage. They own you, in a sense, because you do not have the freedom to act in your best interests when your entire livelihood depends on a single point of failure.

It’s terrifying to have only one income stream. Stop it.

Let’s work together to break ourselves free from those chains.

Read also: The 8 millionaire skills I wish I knew at 18

Here is the system overview:

Brainstorm income ideas and choose the best
Pick an income stream
Learn how to do it well
Make the first $1
Automate it or create a workflow
Keep it updated and improved with metrics
Repeat with another income stream
Step 0: Brainstorm Ideas and Create a Goal

“men’s white dress shirt” by Tammy Duggan-Herd on Unsplash
What do you want to do to make money?

Tomorrow I am publishing a massive list of ideas to assist if you struggle with this, but for posterity’s sake let’s use some examples.

For Wise Healthy Wealthy, as a brand that values personal development content primarily built around writing, I could brainstorm the following:

Medium Partnership Program
Affiliate Marketing
Launch a Patreon
Write an eBook
Create an online course
Offer 1:1 Coaching
These income streams start from the easy to implement to more difficult to implement. This will be my overall income stream roadmap I would follow.

When all revenue streams are active, it would look a lot like this.

For you, your brainstorming list could look like the following:

Increase Primary Job income?
Start Freelancing
Drive for Lyft or Uber
Sell stuff on eBay
Offer to coach others
Offer consulting work
Your Revenue Streams would look like this.

This article is about you, not me so the rest of the examples will involve a hypothetical example.

I have provided a case study about how I recently implemented this in my own life to turn Medium into a revenue stream. You will find that case study towards the bottom.

Step 1: Pick Your Next Income Stream

This is a decision for you to choose. It could be one of many things, but you need to pick just one.

Then focus hard on it.

Let’s use an example that could potentially work for everyone. Freelancing.

Freelancing is a fit for everyone because it entails you doing work you’ve likely done before but on your own terms. You set your price, you find your clients, and you prove the service.

There are a lot of sites out there that help freelancers get work.

Step 2: Learn How to Do It Right, Then Get Started

Image by Daniel Chekalov on Unsplash
Whatever income stream you decide, you will need to do some research. There are a lot more wrong ways to do a thing than right ways.

Set yourself up for success by spending as many hours as you need doing research and planning to prepare yourself.

A word of caution though.

Do not get caught in analysis paralysis. At some point, you’re going to have to just do it.

Let’s take freelancing. If you want to freelance, you need to sign up on sites like Fiverr and Upwork. Especially if you are just starting to build a network.

Take the relevant tests and get your profiles set up. These sites might not be the best places to get long-term clients, but the point here is to make money, not to min/max how much money you make.

You won’t make anything if you never start.

If you need to take a course to learn how to do something better, then do it, but take a leap and get started at the same time.

Remember, done is better than perfect, and in this case starting a freelance job before your ready might be exactly what you need to get yourself ready.

Step 3: Keep Going Until You Make that first $1

Image by Kody Gautier on Unsplash
I’ve said this once already, it’s hard to make money. If you give up before you’ve seen that first dollar you won’t know how much effort it takes to make money.

Make that first $1.

When you make that first $1 it will be an amazing feeling of validation. If you can make $1 you can make $1,000. It’s just a matter of scale, momentum, and process.

In the world of freelancing, you can work on a per-project basis, or work hourly. I recommend taking both kinds of work. The hourly work will get you paid faster, but the project work might pay you more.

Once you realize the effort required to make that first dollar, you can decide how you want to approach things.

Step 4: Automate or Build A Workflow

“man writing on whiteboard” by Tammy Duggan-Herd on Unsplash
Once you understand the effort required to do the work, you can now begin to analyze that effort to look for ways to optimize or automate.

Is the work something you could hire out yourself at a cheaper rate? In which case you become the middle-person between the client and the person doing the work.

That could sure save you some time.

Or maybe there are tools out there that can improve your overall workflow and allow you to do better work, faster?

ATTENTION: 🌹DEAR FARMERS, SEE THE 6 TYPES OF FARMERS THAT WILL BE BIG TIME LOSERS IN 2023 HERE

Step 5: Monitor Metrics and Continue to Improve

You can’t improve without data.

My daily mantra is “Acquire knowledge, and improve.” You can’t get better without first gathering data and acquiring knowledge.

If you are coaching, poll your students and see what works and what doesn’t. For freelancers, what areas are you attracting more clients in?

For Authors, what does your audience or beta readers say when they read your work? Find a way to gather data to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Image by rawpixel on Unsplash
Do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

Step 6: Repeat

Photo by Wim Arys on Unsplash
Once you have an income stream that is working, making money, has an automated or productive workflow and can be repeated week after week, you can then start to turn your focus elsewhere, towards another income stream, or towards investing.

Be careful though not to over-extend yourself. Burn out is real if you go too hard too fast. It can take months or years to develop a true and consistent income stream.

Once you feel you are there, then start the process over.

Rinse and repeat, over and over again until you have several reliable sources of income.

Once you have a large Gap of Opportunity, a manageable lifestyle, and zero bad debts, you can then start putting that excess income into investments so your money can start making money on its own.

Case Study: An Example In My Life

For the Wise Healthy Wealthy brand, we currently make money three ways,

Medium Partnership Program
Affiliate Marketing
Patreon Account
Currently, all three of these revenue streams are tiny but are being ramped up over time as the brand builds followers and our valuable content is recognized.

This case study walks through how we engaged with Medium to create our first income stream as a brand.

Step 1 — Choose Your Income Stream

As I’ve said, we chose the Medium Partnership Program.

We chose this route because I was already writing on Medium, and so it fit within my timeline and offered a fast route to monetization.

Step 2— Learn How To Do It Well, Then Get Better

Medium Partnership works like this:

Write good articles
Paying subscribers read them, clap for them, etc.
You get paid a portion of their monthly subscription
So the first thing I needed to do was learn how other medium writers were structuring their content. How would I get access to these authors?

I signed up to be a medium subscriber. Then a read. A lot.

There are a lot of articles on how to succeed on medium, by the way, so it took some time to parse through those to find the relevant information.

Then I decided the only way to duplicate this effort was to post a lot. I have a fear of publishing, so I started a “Daily Publishing Project” to overcome that fear.

So I started writing every day. It was difficult, but creating legitimate revenue streams is going to require a lot of effort upfront. I copied the styles of the most successful writers.

It took three weeks of writing before I saw any results.

Step 3 — Make the first $1

I realized I would be officially a paid Medium writer about three weeks after I first started writing frequently.

Total estimated payout:

$2.36

Yes! I was so excited! This may not seem like much but this meant I was officially a paid writer! Moreover I now knew exactly how much effort was needed to earn that money.

To make money on Medium I would have to write more content and engage more readers. Enough for them to take action and “clap.”

Good content will bring in more readers, so as long as I keep writing I should, over time, attract more readership.

So write more I did.

I kept writing, and in the end, my first payout was not $2.36 it was $9.83

Success. Repeatable success.

Read also: The path to becoming a millionaire (must read)

Step 4 — Automate or Build a Workflow

After I saw that small validation, I buckled down and worked to improve my workflow.

I started:

Capturing more ideas in one place
Using a mind-mapping tool
Creating better outlines
Writing multiple drafts
Editing my own work even though I hate it
This workflow, which you can read about more here, allowed me to improve the quality of the content I wrote on a daily basis.

I’m still working on month two, but it is looking like the income will be increasing, at least by a little.

That’s even more progress!

Step 5 — Monitor Metrics and continue to improve

Now I just have to keep doing what I am doing and pay attention to what works best.

Medium is great in that it has built-in metrics so I can see what works and what doesn’t.

I can see that consistency is having a dramatic effect on readership, so I know I need to maintain my pace. There are a few topics that readers are responding to, so chances are I will write more articles in that niche.

That’s it. I’ve seen the model works, so now it just needs to be improved.

CONTRIBUTED BY Garrett Petticrew

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