The 7 Best Internet Business Models (From Zero Experience To Advanced)

A Dream

00:00You weren't born to work 40 hours a week doing something you hate. Numb your mind with endless scrolling. And wake up one day wondering where the time went. Every day. Zoom out and think, What would the highest version of myself do? Do that and ignore anyone that tries to convince you that something else is more important.

00:19It's not. Throughout my childhood, I was only made aware of one path in life. Go to school. Get a job. Retire with just enough currency to survive until death. I was fed the information from my parents, teachers and friends that solidified that narrow worldview.

00:41Now, of course, this is kind of out of our control. We don't. We don't know this as a child. The dream injected into my mind was to do well in school, choose a major that would increase my earning potential and aim high and become something like a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

00:57I didn't realize that I was being trained as a replaceable unit of society. I knew that there were millionaires and digital nomads and creatives doing what they love for a living, but I never really registered that as a possibility. It just seems so far out there, too far away.

01:12My mind couldn't fathom doing it because the only thing I knew was get a high paying job being repeated by those who never decided to pursue their dreams in the unknown. So eventually the potential of the digital world made itself apparent to me.

01:26I remember in eighth grade my best friend and I, we had pretty decent builds, right? I'm six foot five inches tall. And our math teacher, Mr. Schroeder, was the weights after school weights coach and he always bugged us about going and showing up to after school weights to train.

01:46I still remember how it felt to lift weights for the first time I've been in the gym for ten plus years now. I like weights, feel strong, they feel stable. It feels good to go to the gym, right? If you've been in the gym for more than like a year, maybe six months, you know that it just feels good to train.

02:04The very first time I bench press, I remember it was like £65 on this rusty bar and like my arms were shaking uncontrollably and it was just the weirdest pain, like pushing through in my chest and arms. And afterwards the pain was just like, even more unbearable, the soreness.

02:21But with time in progress, as with most things that you make progress at, rather than being distracted and just flooding your mind with cheap dopamine, I became obsessed with weight training in high school. My after school routine was to go home, drink pre-workout, grab my gym bag, review my training program, which was August 753 at the time from that August, hit the gym hard with my friend and then go back home, make a protein shake and watch YouTube videos.

02:47The only channels that I watched during this time were fitness channels people like Matt Augustus, Elliot Horse, Chris Lovato, Chris Jones, Scott Herrmann. And if you remember this golden era of YouTube fitness, you're welcome for the nice memories.

03:02The realization I had was this These creators were doing what they loved, impacting others at scale and exposing people to their potential. This is when I started to become aware of and deconstruct how I could do the same. After years of failures with a fitness YouTube channel, digital art, Instagram page, multiple marketing agencies and eventually seeing success with freelance web design while transitioning to a creator, I found what I was looking for.

03:25I'm here to make sense of the path for you. The path to purpose profits and peace. Before we begin, the Art of Focus book is now available on Amazon. We had a great launch day. The reviews are starting to come in and I'm just genuinely excited and grateful that the book is finally able to be ordered.

03:43I just want it in as many hands as possible. And if you've been on social media, I'm sure you're annoyed at this point by how much I'm retweeting people, sharing their posts like Instagram stories because the love. It's been three years and for this to finally come out.

03:57So if you want to grab that link in the description

Creators Are Decentralized Media Companies

04:00to start off, I want you to understand that creators are decentralized media companies. Media runs the world, media shapes culture, Media keeps people in chains. Media exposes people to their potential. That computer you're looking at, everything on the screen is media.

04:16The billboards you drive by shops on the side of the road, car brands next to you, song on the radio. That's media. We are in a spiritual war of ideas, and the word content is arguably more encompassing and makes more sense than media. So that's the term we're going to use from here on out.

04:32When I say content, I mean media. Everything you hold within consciousness is content, the content of your attention. Mindful content helps people grow, evolve and expand their sense of self. Mindless content encourages decay, stagnation, and defending their low development ego.

04:50That's the game we are playing. You are a content creator whether you water it down to a new age, Internet job or not. You write texts, you speak to your peers, you persuade your way into a career. You are doing everything that content creators do, but with a fraction of the leverage.

05:04And as Balaji says, physical then digital, then native digital. You will be an Internet content creator within the next few decades. It will be a necessity for survival. Here's how you prepare. You aren't a creator. You aren't a personal brand.

05:19You are just a person who is conscious of their character in virtual reality. You already have an account. Are you a consumer soaking in value or means while giving nothing in return? Or are you a creator contributing to humanity with the value you produce?

05:34This is not an Internet phenomenon. The masses are consumers. They leech off the government, their parents, the school system, and blow around like a bird in heavy winds. Life happens to them. Life is assigned to them. They don't realize they are fueling society with the attention.

05:47A select few are creators. They contribute more than they take. They control their destiny by controlling their attention. They encourage the destiny of others by capturing their attention and expanding their consciousness with valuable content.

05:59Now we need to talk about attention. Here's the question I want you to mull over for a bit is how are you going to expand someone's consciousness if you do not first capture their attention to do so? How do you expand it without capturing it?

06:14Attention is the first step. Attention is the root of existence. You have to capture attention if you want any form of success. But then I don't want to capture attention. It seems so unethical or salesy or whatever word that was put into your mouth, and you're just regurgitating because you didn't stop to think or question it.

06:30Are you mad that you are using your attention to watch this right now? Is it unethical that your attention is drawn to important things? Is it unethical that your attention goes to your phone when you get a notification? Do you just want nobody to capture your attention?

06:43So you just want to, like, sit and avoid the rest of your life and do nothing and have no meaningful experiences. You don't want to experience the human life. You don't want the highs, you don't want the lows, you don't want the story. That's what capturing, holding, delivering value on attention is.

06:59Wake up, learn to persuade. If you don't, you are actively choosing to let unethical people win the spiritual war. You aren't conscious by opting out of the game of life. You are arguably less conscious than the sleazy businessman who at least provides a fraction of value with the product he is selling.

07:15That genuinely improves some people's lives, others not so much.

If You Don’t Create A Product, You Are Not In Control Of Your Future

07:19And that's okay. Now, another lesson that I want you to internalize is that if you don't create a product, you are not in control of your income and therefore most of your life, because a third of your life is work. And if that third drains your energy for the other third and the other third is spent sleeping, then yeah.

07:39Your work is important and you need to take control of it. The ability to earn with your intelligence, not your time, labor or looks is how you become in control of what you do and how much you make. That's a quote from my book, The Art of Focus out now.

07:52And from that quote we're talking about earning with our minds or earning with our intelligence. I got a question the other day that my editor sent me, and it was along the lines of like, hey, if I'm into fitness, do I need to, like, post shirtless pictures and do that?

08:07No, you need to earn with your mind. You need to earn with your intelligence, you need to earn with writing, and you need to understand how to create value. There are plenty of fitness writers out there that simply post tweets to Instagram or whatever with actionable advice.

08:22So now let's answer a common shallow but good question, which is how do I make money online? I'm not sure why this isn't talking that well, actually, I am sure why this isn't taught in schools, because that takes away from the social machine.

08:36It takes away from you being educated into a job that runs the old economy, that allows society to exist. So you doing your own thing is the biggest threat to society in many cases. So making money online isn't taught in school, at least taught well, because if the people, if the professors were if the schools and professors were making money online or Mike had more money than they made as a teacher, then they wouldn't be a professor.

09:02They don't have the experience, they don't have the results. This is why I actually recommend taking courses from creators and not limiting your mind and shutting it off. We're like, all courses are a scam. No, they're not a scam. They are the only way to learn about new opportunities that were created by creators.

09:19You know, society creates jobs, creators create jobs. Are you going to learn from creators that created the job so you can get into those ones and have more freedom in your life? Or are you going to be put in as a cog in the social machine?

09:30It is very important where you get your education from because it's going to determine a lot of your life. So back to the point. How do you make money online? No, it's not from sponsorships or ad revenue from YouTube or even platforms like X monetization.

09:43Now we're on Instagram where I have 1.6 million followers and I get paid like a measly 300 bucks for Bible reels. So I make about 300 per month from X as well, which is nothing. And about ten K a month from I don't want to I don't know if I can if you can say it.

10:01I remember it used to be a thing where you couldn't say how much you make on platform, but that's how much I make here. And don't get me wrong, that's great. Life changing money. But if I actually take into account how long it took me to get here to 500,000 subscribers, that's a lot to hundreds of thousands of views per video on videos that actually prefer and have higher RPMs business videos because that's where people are running ads.

10:28Like if you think about it, that's just that's like four years long and it's worthwhile money to a lot of people. But I want to paint more of a perspective to make you understand what you're missing out on. If you just don't create your own product.

10:41So in those same five years, I've totaled a little over 5 million in revenue and I've taken home 90% of that. So actually 4 million of that was made last year, 2023. So you can see how exponential it is and what having a product unlocks 4 million a year versus ten K times 12 120,000 a year from creating your own product or just relying on the platform because it's the same traffic.

11:06So I started on Twitter in late 2019, and before that I was a web designer. So late 2019 November I didn't make that much. But in 2020 on Twitter alone, I made 100,000 bucks. And that was a balance of freelance web design services, a bit of marketing consulting, and then courses slash info products.

11:27So try making that much with just YouTube alone in your first year of ad revenue, try it. So in short, how do you make money online? Actual money. And I hate saying make money online. How do you how do you like earn an income? How do you earn a creative income?

11:40Doing what you want. You start a business, you need a product and customers. That's pretty shocking. I know, but your job as a business is to attract people to a product so they can hand you money in exchange for it. Obviously, there's a lot more to that, which I've covered in previous videos, but the product that you give must have equal or greater value than the money that you receive because people are like, you say it like that where you're just selling a product for money.

12:06It seems so like superficial. It's like, okay, well what product are you selling? Like, are you not putting any effort or energy or love into the product that you're putting out into the world? Are you just like patching packaging up a pile of dog shit and asking someone for money for it?

12:22No, business isn't a bad thing. Get over that limiting belief. So here's the magic click. You write content, you put effort into getting eyes on it, which is a crucial step that everyone ignores, no matter how much I tell them, because this is where the work comes into play.

12:36People who like your content follow you. You create a product, you market the product. Your main lever is content. If you can gain one follower, you can gain 100,000. Your secondary lever is marketing. If you can make $1, you can make 100,000.

12:49That's the new economy. That's how individuals with technology that has sprung up in the last five years. So most people still view this idea as crazy. It's not normal yet in your eyes, earning income, doing what

7 Digital Career Paths

13:01they enjoy. So now finally, we need to talk about the seven digital career pass or seven income streams that you can build. In essence, these are pretty much five different kinds of products or services that you can create that are a way to earn a diversified income through the audience that you're building.

13:18The first click is that one. You need a brand. You need to be writing content, you need to be creating content, you need to be attracting followers. You're not going to have anyone to fuel your business if you don't have followers or an audience that find you valuable.

13:31And one thing here don't necessarily just write content instead, you need to build in audience. There's a slight difference. Writing is necessary, but most people stop there. They don't put effort into getting their content shared, making their name known in the space, and making friends that help them grow.

13:49And I discuss growth mechanisms in the video how to build an audience on social media with zero followers, something like that. But we also provide that network. We have a community of people in Cortex University, which is an expensive higher ticket program for serious creators or writers, but that's where you meet people of like minds.

14:08You don't have to pay to join, like my community that has education. It's an education program. You don't have to pay to join communities like you can form them and find them online. I'm just happening to plug one where you know the readers are or, you know, the community members are actually serious and wanting to build businesses together with the things that are taught inside Cortex University.

14:29So now onto the digital career paths or the income streams or products or services, however you want to label it. Whatever makes the most sense to you. This is how you monetize a traffic source or audience.

1) Working For Another Creator Or Brand

14:39So first is just working with another creator or brand, because most people, they don't see this as a possibility. They either try to go get a conventional job or they try to build their own business from scratch. They're both good options, but you can also work for a creator or a brand to gain experience in building your own.

15:00Your profile is your digital resume. Your content is how you attract opportunities and gigs. The more people that know what you do equals, the more people that may hire you. Now understand the network effect if you only have 1000 followers, but each of those followers has 200 to 500 followers, and each of those followers has 200 to 500 followers.

15:20Then you have an indirect network of 40 million to 250 million people that can spread your name. Yes, the math is correct. And of course, that's if every one of those followers and the follower followers and the followers of the followers, if all of them reach, read and share your stuff.

15:35Yeah. Then you have that potential and you have to take into account like engagement rate, quality of content and whether those people will even log in to social media to see your content. So let's give a very generous 10,000 people per month, somewhat knowing who you are and what you do.

15:50Multiply that by 6 to 12 months of effort and I find it extremely hard to fail in this game. So there are a few skills required for this because if you want to work for another creator or brand, you need a skill that will help the creator or the brand.

16:05The good thing is, is that you're building a business, you're building an audience, you're already practicing skills that other creators need, especially if you get good at one specific one and you can go help them with that, then you're doing well.

16:19So some of the skills are just social media growth, content writing, email, copywriting, funnel building, landing pages, etc. brand design, lead generation or marketing. Pick one, learn it, implement it, pick the next, learn it, implement it, Then write about it, Give advice, Teach.

16:35Some creators may reach out to you, some you will have to reach out to you. None of this is guaranteed, but you can increase your chances of success by growing your audience, by reaching out to more creators about helping them with your skill set.

16:47You will have to learn all of these skills along the way. It's what's necessary to build a business.

2) Start A Service Business

16:52So the second route or the next route, we can treat this as like a progression. First, you work for someone else. Second, you start a service business and you can go straight into this. If you have a skill that has gotten you results. And when I say skill, I mean anything that has solved the problem in your life or helped you achieve a goal, preferably within the health wealth relationships market.

17:11So if you're a fitness pro, you're good to go. If you're a mindset, bro, you're good to go. Although that one's a bit harder to frame in position in the market if you're a business guy, marketing guy skill guy like web design, graphic design, productivity, etc.

17:27you're good to go. Or if you work for another creator, you take what you learned from them and what you help them with, because the only reason you're working for them is because it gets them results. So you take what you did for them and you package it up into a service.

17:40And a service business is good to start out with because you're landing clients. You're not trying to sell a $50 to $100 product, you're landing clients for 1000 on the low end and 50,000 on the extremely high end. So let's say 1000 to $5000 is what you're aiming for.

17:56So these are the types of service businesses that we actually care about starting in this digital economy. First is tutoring similar to coaching, but you teach your skill to another person one on one. Like if I were to have weekly calls teaching someone web design or graphic design or email marketing or whatever your skill is.

18:15The second is freelancing, which is obvious. You just help the client with whatever your skill is, like web design, which is a good starting point. You should learn how to create a better offer because you won't last long selling something that simple.

18:26The third is coaching or consulting. This is where you help people implement your skill or system. You don't do it for them like freelancing. You do it with them and guide them. And the fourth is an agency. Think of an agency as a freelancing business with employees or contractors that deliver the service.

18:42If you don't have employees or contractors, you aren't an agency. You're a freelancer. So you start a service business because your audience isn't large enough yet to monetize. Of your other avenues. If you charge 2000 a month for a specific service, then that only takes 2 to 4 clients a month to actually like reach a pretty decent income.

3) Affiliate Marketing

19:02Now the third is affiliate marketing, which I'm not a huge fan of, but it has its pros and its cons when it comes to affiliate market. What an affiliate is, is you get an affiliate link from a creator or a software or a product or service, and you make a commission on how much of it you sell.

19:20So let's say that you want to be an affiliate of my course. To our writer. I don't offer affiliates for it, by the way. It's just a pain. But let's say you're an affiliate. I give you a link, you go and plug that link, you create content around it, you build a brand around writing whatever you want to do.

19:35You plug it and you get 50% commission for each one you sell. So the beauty in this is that you don't actually need to build a product. You don't actually need experience or expertise. Yet you can get an affiliate link for a product, write about the product based on what you learn from it, build an audience around that, monetize along the way.

19:55And then once you have enough experience, you go and create your own product because you already know how to sell it and you have an interest that audience. Now, outside of that, I do like, I don't necessarily recommend affiliating for all these products, ones that you believe in and then ones that you will promote consistently or just include in the course, like into our writer.

20:13I have an affiliate link for Tweet Hunter, which is how I schedule my content. So it only makes sense that I plug that because I don't have a software that does that yet. But the point is, is to not get stuck in this phase and build your own thing and just understand that it is an option.

4) Digital Products

20:29Now, number four is digital products. Once you have a large enough audience and the ability to actually get results, you can make a decent income with digital products, but it makes sense to follow this progression, monetize with a service business, grow your audience, get results with a service business, grow your audience, turn what you offer in your service business into a digital product, grow your audience, get digital product buyers and upsell them on your service, grow your audience and do whatever you want and quit client work.

20:58So you have more free time and saturate the market for beginners. What I mean by that last point saturate the market for beginners. I've evolved. This is from personal experience, right? I've evolved beyond web design. Therefore, when I left the space, I'm still a creator, I still have a large audience, but I'm no longer taking up the web design market.

21:15I went on to more. I sell a book now, like I have certain courses that are going to phase out with time simply because I'm just evolving as a person. I'm going to write more books, I'm building a software. That's what I'm talking about. So if you think saturation is such a big deal, it's usually because you're in an echo chamber of people that only sell that thing for now.

21:34So for simplicity, we're going to consider digital products, courses, cohorts or memberships. If you can sell to $150 digital products a day, you make six figures per year in revenue. If we do the math, that means you need to get 80 people to a landing page and convert at 2.5%.

21:52If you write an X thread or Twitter thread and promote your product at the bottom, you would need around 10,000 impressions to pull this off more or less if you have 1000 followers. But I have a friend who has 10,000 and they share my thread and if the thread is persuasive, I can almost guarantee I make two sales a day and that's with a small following.

22:10The cool thing is that even if I don't make those two sales, I am building an audience that may buy my products later. So there's a few more, but I'm just going to go through these really quick. So this video doesn't get too long because these aren't ones that I necessarily recommend.

22:23And if you're just a beginner, you shouldn't be focusing on these right now, but you should have awareness of them. So you have something to work towards down the road

5) Sponsorships & Ad Revenue

22:30and you have options. So number five is sponsorships and ad revenue because like YouTube newsletter, podcast sponsorships, they can be good money, but you need a large engaged audience to do this. And if you have a large engaged audience, why don't you just build a digital product and take all of the profits for yourself?

22:46Like there's a reason Mr. Beast couldn't accept a certain sponsorship for his videos because they couldn't, like, afford his prices. It's because he makes more with his own products that he's built. Like if you're going to be sponsored by something, why not just create that product?

23:01If you know it's going to sell to your audience, why not just create the product yourself, not hog up promotional space in your content? Like if you're being sponsored and you have products and all this stuff, you're just going to be promoting the entire video, right?

23:13If you really want to be sponsored by someone and you love their company, just build your own competitor and take over. So it's the same with YouTube ad revenue. Stop caring about it. If you're so focused on like YouTube ad revenue, you're not going about this the right way.

23:26You don't you weren't building a business.

6) Physical Products

23:28So number six is physical products. Once you again, once you have an audience, this is all like once you have an audience, once you have an audience, then you can start with physical products. I sell a planner now link in the description for that.

23:39If it complements what you're doing, it's not as profitable as digital products, but it's still fun. It still brings in money,

7) Software Or Service Scaling

23:47and if you want to do it, that's an option. The seventh is software or service scaling, so you can either build a software based on the systems that you've created with your products, or you can scale your service business like freelancing or tutoring or consulting with a team.

24:02You can turn it into an agency and take it even further. But this is really dependent on the lifestyle you want to live. I took the step off the deep end and now I'm building a software and it could take over a lot of my life. But last year, when I was creating videos on the four hour workday, the one person business when I was doing those things, you can make 1000000 to 5 million a year and live like a rich person doing that.

24:23So it's really dependent on your personality type. And if you want to push further at this point

What Makes A Profitable Product?

24:28because you sure as hell don't have to. So now just what makes a good product to end this video? I teach this in digital economics, but a good product is a system for behavior change. Value equals behavior change. If people change what they're doing for a positive outcome, that's value.

24:45That's what your content and products are trying to do. Your philosophy is your brand. The way you live is your product. My philosophy is that people should build their own thing, become sovereign, and do what they want. My product is my writing system that allows people to do that.

25:00The way I live is wake up, write for 2 hours with breaks for creativity and handle other tasks in my business. And that's pretty enticing. I have results and a unique system that allowed me to do that. The system came from trial and error toward my end goal, my philosophy of doing my own thing and becoming free.

25:16It will take time to get to this point and you need to be okay with that. Build a product or service anyway so you can actually fail soon. If you don't fail, you don't have something to improve and if you just wait for something, if you just put your failures off, it's going to be a harder failure and you're going to get more discouraged and you need to pursue your goals and achieve them.

25:35So you actually have experience you can monetize. Sitting around and doing nothing keeps you trapped selling for someone else. That's it for this video, my friends. Thank you for watching. The Art of Focus is out now. First link in the description.

25:47You can also get to our writer digital economics Cortex University. Sign up for that cortex app waitlist other stuff. Just look in the links and description. Thanks for watching. I appreciate you guys. See?