I know a lot of you guys on this forum are looking for side hustles or a way to get started making money online. The easiest way to do this is to offer some kind of service.
Yeah, of course we'd all like 7-figure businesses that run on autopilot (LOL) but realistically it takes a lot of time, effort, failure and 'school of hard knocks'-style education to get anywhere near that level.
In the meantime, you have bills to pay and offering a service is the quickest way to get started with this online thing and making money PDQ. Not only that but consulting in your market is one of the best ways to really get to know your customers. And once you know them intimately, THEN you can look at creating eBooks, courses, etc., to solve their problems. But first you have to know what those problems are!
I've been doing online marketing for about 5 years now. For the first 2 years I worked as a musician, as a bartender and did whatever odd jobs I had to. Then I'd come home and keep trying different ways to make a buck online. Then about 3 years ago I sort of started to break through.
It wasn't until I came out to Thailand after getting laid off, with virtually no money in the bank, that I was forced to really make shit happen. And in the span of about a year I built a successful consulting business. You'll be shocked at what kind of awesomeness you're capable of if your back is really against the wall. I still can't believe I didn't starve to death. There were a few close calls...
Anyway, the very first thing I did online that made me money with any kind of consistency was writing articles. And I built my article writing service entirely on the Warrior Forum. I didn't even have a website. And actually the beauty is, you don't need a website. The Warrior Forum IS your website. It's your platform to sell your service.
Writing is just an example. This can easily apply to any kind of service. And in fact, I've run 3 very successful services on the Warrior Forum now, with the last one being the biggest success yet. But since it's illustrative I'll keep using writing as our example throughout this post.
Warrior Forum (or WaFo) is free to join and has over 700k+ members. It's the largest internet marketing forum in the world. It actually just got acquired by freelancer.com which worried me initially. But they haven't made any substantive changes to the marketplace section. What really makes WaFo the *perfect* place to offer a service in my opinion is that:
1. You can do low-cost market testing quickly (key word!) find out if there's actual demand for your service.
2. You can market yourself properly.
#2 is so crucial. If you try to sell writing services on oDesk or eLance, for example, you have really no way to market yourself. There's your profile, your feedback and your rate.
So how the hell can you distinguish yourself from the thousands of other writers, equally talented as you, and willing to work for less pay? Answer: you can't.
But on the Warrior Forum you offer your service by posting a sales thread, which enables you to brand, position and market yourself intelligently. There's no bidding, no bullshit. Just you and your sales message in front of potential buyers.
An example I like to use is that if you're an article writer, you're competing with hundreds of other writers who are willing to work for less money. But let's say you offer articles only about dating topics. And you market yourself as THE dating article guru guy. This process of making your offer more specific is called 'niching down'.
Think about it, if some dude out there has a huge dating site and needs tons of content, who is he more likely to hire: some generic article writer who writes about SEO, health, current events, etc., or THE dating article guy...?
Assuming there's enough people looking specifically for dating articles, do you reckon you could grab a nice chunk of business from those people if you position yourself as an expert in this specific area? You betcha.
And might you also be able to charge more than the average generic article writer because you're the go-to expert in your sub-niche? Damn straight.
This is almost impossible to do using a site like oDesk or Elance but it's totally doable on Warrior Forum.
As an example, here's my old (now defunct) writing thread:
www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hire/422975-affordable-native-english-articles-researched-written-published-author-fast-turnover.html
What this sales thread format allows you to do is to write a compelling sales message, accumulate positive reviews and repaste them right into your thread (social proof/authority), offer review copies (to get the initial reviews) and generally communicate to your potential customers why you're the best guy to do the job.
And again, this is all predicated on there being enough demand for your services to begin with. Quick failure story of mine: At one point I thought it would be a really cool service if people sent me their handwritten signature. Then I'd make it thicker in Photoshop and make the background transparent so they could paste it after blog posts, sales letters, etc. Here's the old thread:
http://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hir...eting.html
I got exactly zero sales. What was the problem? Instead of looking around the forum to see what kind of shit people actually needed, I instead came up with my own cockamamie idea of what *I* thought was rad and then tried to create demand out of thin air. Rookie mistake. You can't create demand. Read that again.
Now if you have no clue what service you could possibly offer, that's perfectly fine. The idea is to find what people are willing to pay for and then fill that demand. I'd actually advise against something that has a too-low barrier to entry like writing and go instead with something like "forum expert" or "wordpress expert" or 'ecommerce expert' or something that involves a complex set of skills that you can slowly acquire over time and keep raising your rates while essentially getting a free education.
Don't spend too much time deciding on something. No job is what you think it's going to be. I've always loved writing ever since I was a little kid. But once I started writing articles for people I began to truly hate writing. I was getting carpal tunnel and writing about the most boring shit you can imagine. So find something with profit potential, give it a whirl and take it from there.
Regardless of what you choose (and later switch to), you're going to be out there in the trenches trading value for money. You'll quickly learn a lot of really useful things like expectation management, dealing with deadbeats, raising your rates, negotiation, professionalism, etc. These sills will serve you in anything you do in the future. They even overlap with game.
You don't have to know what you're doing right away. Start by taking small assignments and learning along the way. That's exactly what I and many people have done. If ya'll saw the kickass Digital Project Management thread by LouieG you know that a lot of business is figuring things out as you go along
Ok, so for the practical bit:
I've put together a four-part video case study that goes through finding a service to offer, posting your sales thread, writing your sales copy and moving on to bigger and better things (unless you strike gold the first time around).
Market Research
Market Testing
Sales Copy
Calling It Quits
There's a lot more I didn't cover so if you have questions, fire away.
Yeah, of course we'd all like 7-figure businesses that run on autopilot (LOL) but realistically it takes a lot of time, effort, failure and 'school of hard knocks'-style education to get anywhere near that level.
In the meantime, you have bills to pay and offering a service is the quickest way to get started with this online thing and making money PDQ. Not only that but consulting in your market is one of the best ways to really get to know your customers. And once you know them intimately, THEN you can look at creating eBooks, courses, etc., to solve their problems. But first you have to know what those problems are!
I've been doing online marketing for about 5 years now. For the first 2 years I worked as a musician, as a bartender and did whatever odd jobs I had to. Then I'd come home and keep trying different ways to make a buck online. Then about 3 years ago I sort of started to break through.
It wasn't until I came out to Thailand after getting laid off, with virtually no money in the bank, that I was forced to really make shit happen. And in the span of about a year I built a successful consulting business. You'll be shocked at what kind of awesomeness you're capable of if your back is really against the wall. I still can't believe I didn't starve to death. There were a few close calls...
Anyway, the very first thing I did online that made me money with any kind of consistency was writing articles. And I built my article writing service entirely on the Warrior Forum. I didn't even have a website. And actually the beauty is, you don't need a website. The Warrior Forum IS your website. It's your platform to sell your service.
Writing is just an example. This can easily apply to any kind of service. And in fact, I've run 3 very successful services on the Warrior Forum now, with the last one being the biggest success yet. But since it's illustrative I'll keep using writing as our example throughout this post.
Warrior Forum (or WaFo) is free to join and has over 700k+ members. It's the largest internet marketing forum in the world. It actually just got acquired by freelancer.com which worried me initially. But they haven't made any substantive changes to the marketplace section. What really makes WaFo the *perfect* place to offer a service in my opinion is that:
1. You can do low-cost market testing quickly (key word!) find out if there's actual demand for your service.
2. You can market yourself properly.
#2 is so crucial. If you try to sell writing services on oDesk or eLance, for example, you have really no way to market yourself. There's your profile, your feedback and your rate.
So how the hell can you distinguish yourself from the thousands of other writers, equally talented as you, and willing to work for less pay? Answer: you can't.
But on the Warrior Forum you offer your service by posting a sales thread, which enables you to brand, position and market yourself intelligently. There's no bidding, no bullshit. Just you and your sales message in front of potential buyers.
An example I like to use is that if you're an article writer, you're competing with hundreds of other writers who are willing to work for less money. But let's say you offer articles only about dating topics. And you market yourself as THE dating article guru guy. This process of making your offer more specific is called 'niching down'.
Think about it, if some dude out there has a huge dating site and needs tons of content, who is he more likely to hire: some generic article writer who writes about SEO, health, current events, etc., or THE dating article guy...?
Assuming there's enough people looking specifically for dating articles, do you reckon you could grab a nice chunk of business from those people if you position yourself as an expert in this specific area? You betcha.
And might you also be able to charge more than the average generic article writer because you're the go-to expert in your sub-niche? Damn straight.
This is almost impossible to do using a site like oDesk or Elance but it's totally doable on Warrior Forum.
As an example, here's my old (now defunct) writing thread:
www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hire/422975-affordable-native-english-articles-researched-written-published-author-fast-turnover.html
What this sales thread format allows you to do is to write a compelling sales message, accumulate positive reviews and repaste them right into your thread (social proof/authority), offer review copies (to get the initial reviews) and generally communicate to your potential customers why you're the best guy to do the job.
And again, this is all predicated on there being enough demand for your services to begin with. Quick failure story of mine: At one point I thought it would be a really cool service if people sent me their handwritten signature. Then I'd make it thicker in Photoshop and make the background transparent so they could paste it after blog posts, sales letters, etc. Here's the old thread:
http://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hir...eting.html
I got exactly zero sales. What was the problem? Instead of looking around the forum to see what kind of shit people actually needed, I instead came up with my own cockamamie idea of what *I* thought was rad and then tried to create demand out of thin air. Rookie mistake. You can't create demand. Read that again.
Now if you have no clue what service you could possibly offer, that's perfectly fine. The idea is to find what people are willing to pay for and then fill that demand. I'd actually advise against something that has a too-low barrier to entry like writing and go instead with something like "forum expert" or "wordpress expert" or 'ecommerce expert' or something that involves a complex set of skills that you can slowly acquire over time and keep raising your rates while essentially getting a free education.
Don't spend too much time deciding on something. No job is what you think it's going to be. I've always loved writing ever since I was a little kid. But once I started writing articles for people I began to truly hate writing. I was getting carpal tunnel and writing about the most boring shit you can imagine. So find something with profit potential, give it a whirl and take it from there.
Regardless of what you choose (and later switch to), you're going to be out there in the trenches trading value for money. You'll quickly learn a lot of really useful things like expectation management, dealing with deadbeats, raising your rates, negotiation, professionalism, etc. These sills will serve you in anything you do in the future. They even overlap with game.
You don't have to know what you're doing right away. Start by taking small assignments and learning along the way. That's exactly what I and many people have done. If ya'll saw the kickass Digital Project Management thread by LouieG you know that a lot of business is figuring things out as you go along
Ok, so for the practical bit:
I've put together a four-part video case study that goes through finding a service to offer, posting your sales thread, writing your sales copy and moving on to bigger and better things (unless you strike gold the first time around).
Market Research
Market Testing
Sales Copy
Calling It Quits
There's a lot more I didn't cover so if you have questions, fire away.
