The Personal Finance Podcast - The Cheapest Ways to Become a Millionaire

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Episode 17: The Cheapest Ways to Become a Millionaire  In this episode we cover:  How to Start a low-cost online business How to build a website How to create Niche Sites How to create amazing FBA products How to make money online  Want to create your own website? Check out BLUEHOST HERE (Affiliate) See all the examples Here Resources in this episode: Blogs  Smart Passive Income  Making Sense of Cents  The Points Guy  Digital Photography School Niche Sites  Parrot Secrets  Food Truckr Kitchen Knife Guru Blender Dude Amazon Products  Go Yoga (Affiliate)  Savvy Infusion (Affiliate) M1 Finance Best Place to Invest  Personal Capital Free Wealth Management and Budget App  CIT BANK (Best Savings Account)  ** Some links may be an affiliate link and we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products we truly believe in.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What's up, everybody, and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host, Andrew, founder of dollar after dollar.com. And today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about the cheapest ways to become a millionaire. We're going to start getting into side hustles now. We're going to have a lot of episodes on side hustles because I truly believe that side hustles are a tremendous way to increase your income so that you can begin building wealth. And a lot of people who are just starting out really need those side hustles to add to their income so that they're able to start investing and building their financial future. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go through

three of the cheapest ways to become a millionaire. And these are all side hustles, but they're really cheap to start up. Some of them are just a few dollars to start up. And if you build up these side hustles, you have the potential to make a million dollars. And I'm going to give you a bunch of different examples of companies that have made a million dollars by just the small startup costs. So if you truly aren't making enough money, this is a great thing to look at. This is a great way to look at side hustles because if they're inexpensive to start up, all the risk you're taking is with your time. That's it. All you have to do is put in the work and put in the time. So you have absolutely nothing to lose, especially some of these side hustles that cost a couple bucks,

you have absolutely nothing to lose at all. And since we're looking for inexpensive ways to start a side hustle, obviously the internet is going to be a big player here. So all these businesses are on the internet because that's a cheap way to start up a side hustle where you don't have to invest a ton of money into significant amounts of products or warehouse space or things like that. The internet is a way that you can house a business without having to put in a huge influx of money. So let's get into the cheapest ways to become a millionaire. To kick it off, one of the cheapest ways to become a millionaire is to actually start a blog. But unless you're a celebrity or a public figure, this is not a way to become a millionaire quickly. And none of these

options are a way to become a millionaire quickly. But you can't just set up your blog or your website and think people are just going to magically appear on your blog. You got to put in the work, you got to take the time because there's a lot of work that you have to put in. It's actually hours and hours and hours per week to be able to build up a successful blog. But it is extremely cheap to start a blog. And blogs can become million dollar businesses. And I'm going to give you a bunch of examples of million dollar businesses that actually are blogs coming up here shortly. But for the $4 a month startup cost, you really can't beat that to start a business. You truly can't.

And some of the things you just have to understand and work your way into are things like SEO and how to market to people through social media and various other aspects that's going to allow your blog to grow more and more and more. And when you're starting a blog, the ROI or the return on investment becomes your time, not money. So your time is what you're putting in to the business to be able to grow the business. It's not much money at all. Four dollars a month is all you really need to start a blog. But there's a laundry list of bloggers who actually are making a ton of money. They're making millions of dollars a year. And they're in throughout all sorts of industries from fashion to beauty, to finance, to golf.

Anything you can think of, there are million dollar bloggers within that industry. And I'm going to show you how bloggers make money and how websites can make money as well. And it's not as difficult. as you think it may be. The hard part is sticking to your blog or your website for a long period of time. Because most people quit too early. Most people stop and they quit way too early. It's a long game when you come into a blog. You're going to be writing and writing and putting in hours and hours of work and nobody's going to be reading it for the first few months or for the first year. And so you have to have the mental fortitude to understand this is going to work in the long run if you put in the time, put in the effort. So first let me break down how someone,

actually makes money blogging because the average Joe thinks you just write post, hit, send and that's it, and bloggers are just going to have a flock of people come to their website. That's not what you do. That's not how you directly make money from your blog. So let me break down exactly how you can make money from your blog. The first way is affiliate marketing. Now, if you've never heard of affiliate marketing, it's a way that you partner with different

companies and you put together an affiliate link for your website that you can put on your website and you can talk about this product and you can talk about the things that you love about this product and be able to make money every time someone clicks and buys that product. Or it's a service or it's a piece of software. There's all different various types of things that you can find affiliate marketing products for. So one of which for me is if you look underneath on the show notes here, I have a link to personal capital. That is an affiliate link. And I use it all over my website because it's something I truly believe in. And if you're going to use affiliate marketing, it needs to be something you believe in. You don't want to start spamming your readers.

you want them to be able to believe and trust in what you're marketing. And if you're promoting bad products, then you're never going to build a successful audience. And your audience is what you need to cater to. Your audience is what matters. You cater your audience first before you try to make money. And once you start catering to that audience and giving them value and bringing them things that they want to see,

then you'll be able to start promoting products that you believe in that you can start becoming an affiliate for. So this is one of the first and one of the best ways to start making money on your blog. The second way is you can make money on ads. Now, ads are just thrown up on your website, and usually you can do them through Google or various ad networks. Like Google Adsense is one of the best ways to start. So when you're just starting out, you're going to get a Google AdSense account. You're going to slap some ads on your website, and you're going to make a couple of cents per click. This takes a while. Once you build up readers, you can actually make a real income off ads. But you have to

build up readers, and then you can get into different ad networks, things like Ezoic or Ad Thrive. these ad networks will actually help you optimize your ads. So once your ads are on your website, it'll increase the revenue for your ads. So it's a really cool way and a passive way once you get some content on your website to be able to build an income. So now you have two income streams already. You have affiliate marketing. So you're promoting products you love and you have an affiliate ads. And so these ads will come in to play as time goes on.

The third way is you got to create products. So what are digital products? Digital products are things like ebooks or online courses. Now, ebooks used to be a lot more popular in the past, and people would be able to sell ebooks. Now, online courses are truly the way to go. And these online courses can make a ton of money because you're creating one product and you're just updating it. That's all you're doing, and you're making $50, $150, $200 per sale.

But you can't just start these digital products right off the bat. Maybe an ebook you potentially could. But an online course, you really have to have credibility and you have to have an audience and you have to build up an email list to actually be able to sell with an online course. And these are three of the ways that you can do directly on your blog to be able to make money with your blog. But there's also indirect ways that you can make money with your blog. And one of which is speaking.

So if you're in the business industry, you're in the finance industry, or you're in any other industry that may have conferences, then there's going to be a plethora. How do you like that word? Pluthora. There's going to be a plethora of speaking gigs out there for you, especially if you're an influencer in the space. So those speaking gigs are a great way to make an extra income on the side. And consulting is another great way to make money indirectly from your blog because you portray your skills on your blog. You portray your knowledge and you can provide consulting.

Say if you're in social media marketing or you're in SEO or you're into building sites. You can provide consulting for other people so that they can work on their own business and help them out. And then lastly, there's coaching. Most industries you can coach somebody in something. Whether you're in beauty, it can help you teach people to put makeup on or if you're in finance you could be a money coach or if you're in any other industry there's all sorts of coaching online golf coaching there's all sorts of different ways that you can be able to be coaching within your

niche and i just gave you a ton of different ways to make money from your blog alone there's a bunch of various different ways that you can do it you just have to put in the time and you have to build up the audience so like i said the beginning there's just a huge slog to be able to build that up but once you build it up then you have a diversified source of income that you can start to push towards your net worth. But give me some examples. What are some examples of bloggers who actually are making real money? So I'm going to show you a few examples of different blogs.

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Concerned about your gambling or that of someone close to you. Call 16-531-2600. Or visit Connxonxontera. So the first one, if you go to the points guy. The points guy.com is a website that actually promotes travel hacking. And travel hacking, we're going to have a future episode on, so stay tuned for that. But travel hacking is essentially a way where you use credit card points to be able to travel for free. Now, the points guy makes a ton of money off promoting credit cards.

And he has a full-time business now doing this, obviously. And he has a whole team around him writing more articles about various ways to travel and how to travel hack and the best credit cards. credit cards and things like that. And he makes money every time someone signs up for a credit card on his website. And if you look at the credit cards on his website, they're all great cards for travel hacking. They're products that he believes in and his team believes in. And they're able to go ahead and promote these products and make a commission off each sale. Another one is Digital Photography School.com. And what they do is they give people tutorials on how to take better pictures with their camera. And they promote all different products like camera gear and things like that. But

in addition, they also have courses on their website where they teach people how to take better pictures. And this is just another example of how you can use different products to build up your audience and be able to create things that your audience actually wants. Another one who's popular in the podcast space as well and in the business space is smart passive income. And he teaches you how to build an online business. That's the founder Pat Flynn. And he teaches you how to build an online business. And now he has a ton of courses. And he also has physical products that he created. Like he has a switch pod, which is a way to mount your camera on a different tripod. And it's really cool the way that his business has grown. And he's making well above a million dollars a year through

this business alone. And another one, if you look in the finance space, is Making Sense of Sense.com. And Michelle over at Making Sense of Sense posts income reports every single month. And you can actually see how much she's making. But she has various courses. She's a big affiliate marketer. And she does other things that allows her to create an income that's well over. $100,000 a month. So if you go look at some of these examples and a lot of these examples post-income reports, but if you look at some of these examples, it's amazing what you can do when your startup cost is only $4. And it just takes time and it takes effort. That's what you're investing. You're investing your sweat equity. You're investing your time and your effort to be able to

put in the work to be able to build up something like this. But you have to have the time and have to have the effort. A great way to become a millionaire inexpensively is to start a niche site. And if you're like me, you have way too many hobbies and not enough time to dedicate to those hobbies. But this is a great problem to have for someone who wants to start a niche site. Because a niche site is something where you're creating a website around a specific topic. So let's say you're really into golf. What you would do is you would create a website talking about something specific about golf. Say something specific about golf shoes.

And all you're doing is you're talking about golf shoes and you're promoting golf shoes and you're going through the process of talking about all these. products and how great they are and the ones that you like the most and the best ones on the market. And this is a way that you're actually going to build a website that makes money. And you want to make a niche site something that you can build off of. So don't call it, if you're going to make a website about golf shoes, don't call it golf shoes.com. Call it something like putfordow.com so you can expand it out and be able to talk about various aspects of golf and expand from golf shoes onto different clubs or different ways to practice in golf because this is going to allow

you to start a niche site that you can grow in. to a much bigger site. And this is how you get to the millionaire status is by having a niche site that you can actually expand out. And again, the cost to start this website is absolutely nothing. The price you pay is up front is for your time. It's your time that you're putting into the niche site and the time you're taking to write for the niche site that'll allow you to make it a set and forget it system once you get the niche site going. Now, the biggest thing with niche sites is you have to understand a couple of things. Keyword research and SEO. So this is all expanded into SEO, but that search engine optimization. So you have to know how to write articles

that Google likes and that they're going to put in their search results when people look for those specific products. And the way niche sites make money is through affiliate marketing, but the best niche sites out there are truly Amazon affiliate sites. And there's other affiliate programs now. I think Walmart has them, Target has them. So there's affiliate sites for specific online stores that you set up and you get into their affiliate programs and then you get a commission every time someone buys a product for them. And it's at no additional cost to the user. It's at no additional cost to the person actually clicking the link. But Amazon, Walmart, Target, they're all thanking you for promoting their products on their website by giving you a commission. But niche sites also

don't have to go through Amazon. You can create the same products that you did in a blog, things like courses or e-books. And once you build a strong enough reach, you can truly have it at a set and set it and forget its system. So if you have one niche and you just covered every single topic in that niche, you can leave it as is and just updated it as needed, and you'll be able to have a passive income source coming to you. So here's a couple of examples of awesome niche sites. So one of my favorite examples is a website called parrotsecrets.com. And parrotsecrets.com is an entire niche site surrounded how to take care of parrots. Because I guess apparently parrots are extremely difficult birds to deal with. I just thought they talk on your shoulder. But the founder of this website realized,

and he's never owned a parrot, by the way, he realized how did it? difficult it is to deal with parrots and created a niche site to teach others how to solve problems they were facing. And so the founder actually read every book on Amazon that there was about parrots, and voila, Parrot Secrets was born. So the site sells about 15 to 20 ebooks per day. And that's seven days a week. So the cool thing when you set up these niche sites is they're selling for you seven days a week. And once you get the traffic there, you don't have to do anything. You're just letting the sales come to you. But the site sells about 15 to 20 ebooks per day, seven days a week. So if you use the low end, that's 5,400 copies per year. His gross sales on 5,400 copies per year is

$437,726 per year. This is from a website that costs almost nothing to start. And if you go to Parrot Secrets.com, it's nothing fancy at all. But he has a half a million dollar a year business just by starting up this website. And they make additional income from affiliate revenue and things like that that's just on his e-book sales is what I'm talking about. But they also have things where they promote cages and various bird food and things like that on Amazon. So they're making additional affiliate income on Parrot Secrets.com. And it's just a wild example of how you can make money in some of these niches. Another one is food trucker.com. And this is a really cool idea and it's taking advantage of the food truck trend that has been going on for a while here lately. And it's actually started by

Pat Flynn and SmartPassive Income, which I showed you on the blogging example. And food trucker.com teaches people who want to start a food truck how to start a food truck. And it gives you a bunch of examples. He has courses. He has a podcast and a bunch of various resources. But he does the same thing. He promotes products on there and various other ways and makes money just by talking about food trucks. That's all he talks about on this website.

Another example is KitchenknifeGuru.com. And Kitchen Knife Guru sells everything from knives to cutting boards to sharpeners. And they do all various reviews on different knives and how to sharpen knives. And what type of steel is the best steel for knives and things like that. That's how they write these product reviews, and they make money off affiliate income, and they also make money off ads. And then there's the blenderdud.com. And all the blenderduddo.com talks about is blenders and the best blenders and various,

you know, this blender versus that blender and testimonials and recipes to use with your blenders. And these are all just small examples of what you can look into to be able to find niches that are underserved. And that's what you want to find within a niche site is a niche site that's underserved. Because if you find those niches that people are searching for, but there's not much content out there for them and you create the best site you possibly can there, then you're going to have a business online. You're going to have a true business online because they have to

be able to find you. And once they find you, then you'll be able to promote products and services to them and have a true business. I mean, a business that makes real money. Now, another cheap way to create a million dollar business is to create a product for Amazon. So products are easier than ever to create. And you can get in touch with manufacturers on websites like, Alibaba.com, and there's a ton of competition with manufacturers on these websites. So that competition allows you to create products that are truly inexpensive. They're not that expensive to create. Now, this is more expensive than the blogging, and this is more expensive than niche sites.

But it could take up less of your time in the long run. You're not working to create content constantly to be able to build up the site over time. So if you've never heard of actually creating products for Amazon, there's a bunch of ways to do it. And obviously, I'm going to show you some examples as well. but they don't have to just be sold on a website. You can sell them through Amazon FBA or fulfillment by Amazon, which is an amazing, amazing gift to all of us who are Amazon sellers.

Because what you do with Amazon FBA is you create a product with the manufacturer. The manufacturer actually sends the product directly to Amazon. The customer orders your product from Amazon. Amazon ships your product from their warehouse, and you collect about 70% of the profit. That's exactly how that works. And the amazing thing about this is you don't even have to, to touch the product except when you're first developing it so you can see it and make sure it's a

quality product. And from there, once you have that set up, all you have to do is market the product. You're not sitting with a bunch of boxes in the middle of your living room. You don't have to worry about shipping out orders every single day. All of this is contact list for you. And this is an awesome option for a few hundred bucks to get a product started. Sometimes it may be around a thousand bucks. But if you really hit on a couple of products, you're going to be making a tremendous income for yourself. The startup cost can vary. So if you're selling something like Bluetooth speakers, are going to have a much higher startup cost than something that is a little more simple. But I'm going to show you a few simple products here that people created that are making

well over a million dollars a year through Amazon. And the first one is Zen Active Yoga. So you can search Zen Active Yoga on Amazon. And they have over a million dollars per year in sales. The founder sold Zen Active Yoga to another entrepreneur who bought it for over a million dollars. But Zen Active Yoga, they just create various yoga products like yoga blocks and yoga mats, which are very inexpensive to buy when you're buying them in bulk. and creating a brand for these products,

and then they sell them on Amazon. Another one is called Savvy Infusion. And Savvy Infusion is like a water bottle that you put fruit in the middle, and it infuses into your water. And you can look it up and see what it looks like. But Savvy Infusion, and these water bottles are extremely cheap to make through the manufacturer,

and then you're able to send them to Amazon and sell them on Amazon and make a nice profit for yourself. And there's a couple of keys when you're selling on Amazon FBA, especially if you want to keep your expenses low, if you don't have a lot of money. And the products need to be lightweight because it makes the product cheaper to ship for you, especially when you're shipping from the manufacturer

over to Amazon. The product needs to be durable because it creates less returns for your product. And the product needs to be cheap to manufacture, obviously. And that keeps your costs slow. So really the startup cost to create your own product is about $1,000 to $3,000. But if you create the product

and do the process correctly, you can make a significant return on your money. Now before we wrap this episode up, I just wanted to talk about where I actually house most of my website. So to start a website, you have to host the website somewhere. And I use Bluehost for my hosting. And Bluehost.com is the place where I get the number, you know, $4 a month. That is one of the best places to start because it's a really cheap, inexpensive place to house your website.

And they'll actually walk you through the process. So I'm going to leave a link in the description. That's an affiliate link, by the way. But I'm going to leave a link in the description so that you can check out Bluehost and see if it's something that's going to work for you. And if you have any questions about Bluehost, just shoot me an email, Andrew at Dollar After Dollar.com, and I'll be happy to share my experiences with you,

but I hold all my websites at Bluehost, and it's a great and expensive place to keep your sights. Thank you guys so much for listening. And if this is your first time listening, consider subscribing so you never miss an episode. And hey, if you get value out of this show, consider sharing it with a friend because we believe that every person in this world

can build true wealth and build financial freedom, we want to share that message with everyone else because it starts right here. It starts with financial education. And it's not taught in high schools. It's not taught in colleges. So we want everyone to understand exactly how they too can build wealth and how they can go about building an amazing financial future. Again, thank you so much for listening and I hope you guys have a great day.