One of the important wealth-building principles I advocate on this blog is the separation of time from making money. Detaching your time from the process of making money and moving towards trading less of your time for money. It is very hard to work your way into wealth. I have written at length about this in my popular article my 3 favorite strategies on building wealth in your 30’s.
The primary path I recommend has been content creation in the form of digital products such as Podcasts, Online courses, YouTube videos, and Blog Articles. For instance, by creating an audio podcast, your audio file can be played on iTunes multiple times without any additional effort from you.
However, I get a question that comes up many times. Can providing content be a sustainable way for me to live? Can creating content support my life?
Supporting Yourself
Creating content and putting yourself online is the single most important thing you can do for yourself period. In his book, Show Your Work, Austin Kleons suggests a 2 step process on how to achieve this. It is as simple as doing good work and sharing it with people on the internet.
For example. Let’s assume you just finished school as an architect. You currently have no job offers and are at home. Not fun I know. But what if you decide to use your social media feeds and produce a new drawing every week and share it online. What this simple habit means is that you will be producing 52 different drawings in a year. Eric Anderson in his book, Peak, says that there is no limit to improvement through practice and that the more you practice any skill the better you will get good at it. So by simply drawing and posting it publicly, you get good yourself. You improve on your craft and become better by enhancing your valuable skill set.
Secondly, by posting it online you increase what Gabriel & Lauren describe in their book Super thinking as your luck surface area. What does this mean? The more you share online, the greater chance of you being seen and noticed. There is a higher probability of a person coming across your drawing on social media feed and giving you a call to offer you a job or work than you keeping all the designs in your head. In other words, chance favors the prepared. By putting yourself out there you increase your level of serendipity.
Josh Kaufman, the author of The Personal MBA, did a similar thing. He read several books on business and put together, in my opinion, one of the best books on understanding the fundamentals of business. What’s important for our discussion is that he is now considered a business expert. He teaches and consults on how to run and manage businesses. Why? Because his blog and the subsequent book have shown us his understanding of business.
Living Like A Rock Star
The third part of why creating content is a viable and sustainable option for your life is that you don’t need to be a rock star. Let me explain, When we all think of content creators, we think of them as being Rockstars or having mega-success to make a good living. Well, the reality is you don’t have to be mega-successful to make a living as a content creator. In his article, 1000 true fans, Kevin Kelly suggests that all you need is 1000 dedicated fans. 1000 true fans who would buy your audio which they can listen to for free on YouTube. The mathematics is simple. If you can get 1000 people to spend $100 on you per year, you would end up earning – yep you guessed it- $100,000.00 a year. Yep. This idea can be applied to all businesses which need a customer base. If your business has 1000 dedicated customers, you could be easily earning 100,000 per year in revenue. The key lies in getting customers to subscribe or taking customers’ mobile phone numbers and building a relationship. If you keep at it as with everything else. You will eventually build your 1000 true fans.
Finally, the internet’s ability to scale means that there is also the chance of being a rock star. As with all things, compound effect is always at work. A lightly viewed YouTube video can trend and make 100 million views. You simply have to keep trying and lady luck could be on your side.
My Thoughts
To wrap up, making yourself visible online with your through writing and sharing your thoughts could be a viable vehicle to get you noticed and expand your luck surface area.
Until next time wealth builder, let’s build wealth.
Interesting. I like the concept of making money without using your time. I need to explore different ways I can do it in relation to my interests.
Contagious is a good book on what makes ideas go viral. It can be used to build on Living Like A Rockstar.
Very interesting. You want to expand the concept into a subscriptions model to regularize the payments.