So far this year, I’ve made about $40,000 working from home.

For reference, I make money online from six different places..

• My online course (60%)
• The Medium Partner Program (20%)
• Facebook ad revenue (10%)
• Facebook supporters (1%)
• Youtube ad revenue (3%)
• Sponsored videos (6%)

In another post, I detail how I actually make money via these channels. In this post, though, I want to talk about certain strategies I use to make more money deliberately since the start of the year.

Let’s talk about it..

1. Find Out Where You‘re Making The Most Impact

Whether you’re a writer, a course owner, or a coach, you need to figure out what’s helping you convert time into the most money.

Take Facebook, for example. I spend about 6 hours per week making new videos for Facebook and Youtube. That’s 24 hours per month. What do I make from that?

I make about 14% of my earnings per month with my videos. Then let’s take my Medium posts. I spend 25 hours per month writing new Medium posts. Medium, however, makes up 20% of my earnings per month.

I’m making more writing on Medium in the same amount of time. That’s powerful, eh?

You need to track this sort of thing. I’d recommend tracking both the amount of money you make doing certain things as well as the amount of time you spend doing them.

Above is a spreadsheet I use to track time spent on each core part of my business per month.

If you see that you’re spending inordinate amounts of time on something that’s only yielding you 10% of your earnings, then try to cut down on it.

This can also be extrapolated to social media platforms themselves..

For instance, this is a graph showing me the amount of people who have purchased my online course who also found me from my Wordpress site.

In short, I’m seeing an average of 3 people per month. That’s about $600 — not even 25% of my average monthly earnings.

The overwhelming majority of people who take my online course sign up via Medium. It’s not even close. I also get a pretty big bump from my LinkedIn page, which has 13,000 followers.

Knowing this is key. You’re going to waste a lot of time (and make a lot less money) working from home if you have no idea what actions are yielding you the most results.

What gets measured, gets improved.

Lately I’ve spent more time marketing my course on Medium, and I’m making much more money every month because of it. It was a small tweak that started earning me $1,000-$2,000 more per month.

I wouldn’t have made that tweak if I wasn’t constantly re-evaluating how I spend my time.

Here’s an actionable tip..

Start logging how much money you make per activity as well as how much time you spend on each activity. It should take you about an hour per week to both log the hours and reflect on where you’re seeing the most results. It’ll be the most valuable 4 hours you spend all month.

2. Work With A Partner

If you can pay them, great. If you’re both trying to create something together and agree to split whatever you make later, that’s fine as well.

Take my co-editor, Stephen Moore, for example.

He and I have a really cool relationship. We’re friends, but he seems to know what I’m going to say before I say it. He takes the editing duties for my publication off my hands so I can focus on other things that yield me more money.

Right now, Stephen and I are on the brink of creating a product for the Post-Grad Survival Guide. Given my full workload, it would’ve taken me a full year to create something like that. With his help, we’re going to have it ready in 4–5 months.

Having a reliable partner is like making a clone of yourself. It’s adding 40 extra hours per week to your workload. Sure, you need to pay your clone, but you gotta spend money to make money.

Stephen and I have weekly calls, we’re in constant communication, and we’re building something really amazing together that quite frankly I’d never have the time to create by myself.

I’d suggest either paying someone to help you, or finding a partner who’s okay with helping you on a new project in exchange for splitting the profits later.

This has been massive for my business this year, and allowed me to work on sprouting multiple money trees.

3. Find A Way To Automate Things

My online course is largely automated. I already created the lessons, the students go through it on their own pace, and the funnel itself is 90% automated.

I write a call to action on my blog posts, folks sign up, they automatically get 5 emails over 5 days, then I invite them to a live webinar that I put on.

After they sign up for my course, they get access to the material and get taught by me via video lessons while I go do other things.

The only things I need to do is put on the webinars and show up for my students in the Slack channel for a few hours per week.

The craziest thing is, I spend about 4–5 hours per week on my online course and make about $1,500 per week from it. It blows everything else out of the water, and I don’t spend much time on it.

Because I don’t need to! That’s the beauty of online courses.

You got to find ways to automate things. ConvertKit does a lot of that for me with automated email campaigns and sign up forms.

Once things are automated, you can work on other ways to make money. I’ve always believed the ideal strategy for making money online is..

1. Create a revenue stream.
2. Automate it.
3. Create another revenue stream.
4. Automate it.

So on and so forth.

If you take another look at my time management sheet, you’ll see that I’ve divided up “core business” by “new frontiers” at the bottom.

What I’m trying to visualize is, how many hours I’m spending developing new forms of income. Sure, those hours aren’t giving me anything right now, but they will later on.

These strategies have helped me make a lot more money this year compared to last year.

Remember..

1. Find out what actions are making you the most money right now and pump more time into them.
2. Find a great partner so you can “clone” yourself and work on more things.
3. Find ways to automate what you do.