4 Ways I’ve Quietly Made $1,000+ in 5 Hours
These take lots of upfront work, but they’re low effort to execute
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If I had to start my entire creator journey over again, I’d start with one important tool: the mailing list.
My mailing list is small. It has just 6k subscribers. But I love my newsletter. It’s a great creative outlet, it’s a fantastic way to hear from my readers, and it’s one of the ways I earn the most money with the least amount of work.
And boy, this summer, I needed a breather. This summer, I was busy. I traveled to Leeds, Paris, London, Reading, Madrid, Seville, Jerez, and Oxford. I went to two overseas weddings and started planning ours. I got COVID.
But of course, the peril of being a freelancer is that when you stop working, the money stops flowing. So I wanted to test out a few different methods to earn $1,000+ dollars “easily.”
I’m putting “easily” in quotation marks there because none of them were “easy.” These methods need:
- consistent content creation, like months or years of it
- digital assets — ebooks, PDFs, templates, courses
- deep connections with real people
- trust with an audience
None of that is easy to get! I worked incredibly hard over the past four years to develop those. But now that I have them, it means I’ve made at least $1,000+ in four different and relatively low-effort ways.
Here’s how.
1. Host a webinar
Last year, I started a ghost blog account — totally anonymous. I wanted to see how hard it was to get started again. It was pretty tough, but not impossible. I wrote once every week and was able to earn $1,000+ in a few months.
That’s not the method I’m talking about, though. When I did that, I found that publications were actually the critical factor for my success. So I designed and ran a free webinar about how I grew the ghost account.
After the webinar, I sold my course that helps people use publications as a tool to grow. I created and sold the course back in 2021, but I updated it up and made around $1,600 from that webinar.
