As a small business owner, especially a coach or consultant, you're going to feel the glass ceiling at some point, with the level of income that you can generate.
Why?
Because you're selling your time for money and it’s a finite source.
My grandma has always said that you can buy everything for money except for time.
And while I agree that you can't buy time, better usage of your time or better usage of your resources can increase your income. This article is going to go over various income streams so that you can break through that glass ceiling and win back your time, or at the very least, maximize the revenue that you can create, with as little of your manual intervention as possible.
Jumping into different streams
We've talked about selling online courses. They are a great opportunity but they take a lot of time to create, and totally worth the investment. Be sure to check out several articles I’ve written on the subject 👇.
Getting your course ready for LAUNCH!
Why creating evergreen products is important to scale up
Also, once you decide to commit to a course, you should know my go-to-would-recommend-to-anyone course hosting and sales site is ThriveCart.
I’ve written several articles on ThriveCart, you can check them out below.
The Perfect Course Platform: ThriveCart Learn
Course platforms - which is right for you?
Got a community?
If you have an engaged audience that shows up in your social media pretty consistently, you might want to consider creating a paid membership or a community, even if you're charging very little. This will enable you to get another stream of income. In this private community, you can give even more value to your members and it will give you a chance to nurture them away from the noise of social media and its algorithms.
Set up a server (Slack, Discord, even WhatsApp). Have people connect. You don’t have to drop in every day. Just every so often. Watch as the community grows wings and takes off on its own.
The power of groups
You might want to consider creating a group course.
A group session is a session where you are training/coaching, not to one person but to a group of people.
You're still investing that one hour. And even if each person is paying less than your hourly rate, you’re still making more than your hourly rate.
Let's say your hourly rate is a hundred dollars and each person is paying $50. They're getting it for half price. Or even if they're paying $25, they're getting it for a quarter of a price. And if you have four people, you're already making that $100, but it's a group program. So you can actually have 15 people or 20 people, and you'll be making more for that time.
ScheduleOnce is actually perfect for that because you can create group sessions and limit the number of participants and require them to invest in X number of sessions per group.
Plus, you can define the exact dates for each session.
Have you noticed a pattern?
Another income stream that you can create is affiliate links.
(Hint: I’ve used two in this article alone)
Now I know a lot of people are against affiliate links - for whatever reason.
I am not talking about just promoting any product for the sake of promoting a product. That's not me. But if you've read my blog for any amount of time, you already know that I highly recommend the tools that I love. And when I recommend a tool, it's after I've tested it and after I've made sure that it's right and simplifies the workflow in the best way possible.
If you do this for your clients, you're creating another stream of income.
For example, if you are constantly recommending that your clients use Tool X, become an affiliate of X. When they purchase, sometimes it will give them a discount and more often than not, it will also give you a kickback. Different companies do it in different ways. And you have a sum total of the amount of kickbacks that you can get. Sometimes you can define who gets it more, your clients or yourself.
Having an affiliate program is not just to market other people's products. It's to help you gain income from products you're recommending anyway.
Got Merch?
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Another stream of income that's really great (and I'm just now learning to embrace it a little bit more) is creating merch (or merchandise) like a shirt or a hat or a cup, a mug, or a pen, with your logo or with sayings or something that will speak to your clients.
Merch is great especially if you have a loyal community or for a group program, for example, the price doesn't have to be steep. You don't have to earn a lot of money per item, but selling merchandise through a drop shipper or print on demand company could be beneficial for you to build your brand.
I’m not on the merch wagon quite yet, but would you be interested in Day By Day merch? What kind of things would you buy? Drop me a line, let me know.
Wrapping up
I encourage you to think about what passive streams of income you can create that are aligned with your values and your company. And remember, it's more than just time for money. There's value and there is building that brand loyalty and making sure that everything you do is aligned with both, yet still bringing in more income, generating more revenue for your business.
Once you go down this path, you’re no longer a solopreneur or freelancer… you’re now a small business owner. It is a totally different change of mindset.
