How to Build Multiple Income Streams at Once
This is my recap and review of episode 1261 of Marketing School — a podcast by Neil Patel and Eric Siu. I’ve added notes on how you can benefit as a writer on Medium. If you enjoy this post you should check out and listen to their podcast here.
Recap
The first question Neil and Eric ask is if you should even try to build multiple income streams at once.
Neil says yes. He’s not talking about multiple businesses — just monetizing your existing business in different ways.
They talk about their blogs, where they generate revenue through:
- Consulting
- Ads
- Public speaking
- Events
- Premium subscriptions
- Partnerships — sending traffic to others in a similar space so those businesses can send their customers to Neil and Eric.
The duo encourage us to think about ways to add value to our audiences instead of focusing on how to monetize right away.
They caution that what you want to avoid is starting multiple businesses that are unrelated to each other. Neil talks about advice he got from Brian Lee:
- Keep laser focus until your growth starts to level off
- Keep creating expansion through things like up-sells, down-sells, and repeated purchases.
Eric talks about shiny object syndrome and a sphere analogy:
- Success is at the edges of a sphere
- You are in the middle of the sphere trying to make it to the edge
- If you keep changing direction you never get to the edge and waste time, money and — most crucially — opportunity
Neil talks about how you can go from one income source to others:
- Look at what you already do and monetize or increase revenue
- Look for low hanging fruit so you don’t have to start from scratch
- Look at your traffic, and social media channels for these low hanging fruit
With Marketing School, they built a podcast, grew their audience, then figured out how to generate income through sponsored ad — not the other way around.
Review
The biggest takeaway from this episode is to look for low hanging fruit from your existing business; there are probably ways you can monetize what you already do. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
How you can translate this to your Medium content
The number one way people generate revenue on Medium is through the Medium Partner Program, but you don’t have to limit yourself to that.
I’ve seen people get clients from the content they post on Medium.
You also have the ability to link to products related to your content, either through affiliate links or by selling your own products.
Just make sure you stick to Medium’s guidelines, especially if you want to have your content curated!
Again: the key is to look for the low hanging fruit. Don’t try to zig zag to different edges of the sphere. Use your existing expertise and business to increase your number of income streams.
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