Understanding your finances, budgeting to create investment money, and getting the most out of what you spend is great, but true financial freedom comes when you start writing your paychecks instead of cashing them. I’m going to show how to do that with simple online side hustles.
What side of your paycheck do you sign? If you’re like most people, you don’t sign it at all and you have the money direct deposited. However, if you were to still get a physical paycheck, you’d sign the back when it came time to deposit or cash it. This is how life is for 80% of the population. For the other 20%, they sign the front and hand it to the person who signs the back.
Why Signing the Back Of Your Paycheck Stinks
The person who signs the back of the paycheck may practice good financial habits and be building wealth for the long term, but their schedule will always be on someone else’s terms. They’re always going to be asking to go on vacation, required to work 40 hours or more a week, and be unable to retire with benefits until they’re allowed to.
The person signing the front of the check seems to travel whenever they want, work less than anyone in the office, and is on a fast track to a cushy retirement.
Which path would you rather be on?
How Online Side Hustles Lead To Financial Freedom
You achieve true financial freedom not just when you have enough money to cover your bills without stress, but when you can live life 100% on your terms. This means creating income on your own as well as creating your own schedule.
When you get paid by someone else, you abide by their schedule. They pay you in exchange for your time and services. Even in commissioned sales where you have some control over what you’re paid, you’re still tied to the schedule set by your manager or your customers.
In my own entrepreneurial journey, I realize that to truly be free, I need to have either enough investment income coming in to live off of or have a business that I own. The problem is that in order to generate $100,000 comfortably in investment income (stock dividends and interest payments) I need a principal of about $2 Million invested earning 5%.
If I touch the principal at all, the income stream decreases. It can take a long time to save $2 Million dollars and on top of that, you’d have to pay taxes on the $100,000 income at normal rates.
This is where online side hustles come into play…
What I Noticed About My Former Customers
When I sold cars, my most successful customers always had their own businesses. In fact, this is why I pursued the rental business in the first place. After having built my rental car business, I quickly realized that although I didn’t have a boss dictating my schedule, my customers were.
I had to deal with issues at all hours of the night because it was a one-man show. I could never really take a day off without fearing the phone ringing with a fire that had to be put out.
How Online Side Hustles Changed That
That is when I discovered the power of affiliate marketing. Simply put, being an affiliate marketer is like being a commissioned salesperson on the internet. You sign up to represent a company that you believe in and that has a valuable product to offer. They then give you a referral link for you to “hand out” to customers.
The idea is to send customers to their business using this link so when they buy something, you earn a commission. It’s very similar to a “bird dog” in the car business. When you buy a car from a dealer, the salesperson usually asks you to send customers their way in exchange for a referral fee, usually $50 or $100 per sale.
Now that I have set up a few systems in place and have a steady stream of people checking out my offers, I also have a steady stream of commissions coming in along with it. Because this is all generated online, I am not tied down to one location. And because I’m not interacting 1 on 1 with my customers (in fact, I almost never talk to them) I don’t have a schedule to keep either.
Because of my online side hustle, I have time and location freedom. In time, I’ll have full financial freedom too.
How Do I Get People To See My Offers Without Talking To Them?
To get my referral links onto the screens of qualified and interested buyers, I create a video, a blog post, or a Facebook group to attract people who might find a use for my product. In this space, I may review the product or show how it personally helps me.
This way, there’s very little “selling” in the traditional sense and it’s more like creating something for someone to stumble upon. If the person sees the post or video and likes what they see, they buy. There is no overcoming objections or hard closing tactics at play. It’s simply a win-win-win situation. The company wins because they got a sale. The customer wins because they got a product they like. And I win because I received a commission.
Once my content gets created, it lives on the internet forever and is working 24/7/365 to generate commissions. Over time and with enough content, I’ll generate an income stream big enough to live off of comfortably. Once this happens, if I want to take a month off, I can without fear of any fires popping up while I’m away.
All of this is possible because there are multiple tools available to automate my business follow-up so all I have to focus on is creating more content.
Now, I’m Really Free
Once my business reached this phase, I knew I had made it. Not only am I creating my own paycheck, but I’m doing it without any employees to manage, and without any schedule that must be strictly adhered to.
Sure it requires discipline and scheduling to keep creating on the regular. However, if I just wake up one day and decide I’d rather go out for a stroll rather than post, I can guilt-free.
I just have to make sure I get back to work tomorrow.
How Can You Start An Online Side Hustle?
Fortunately, this sort of thing is not unique. there is a well-worn, proven path to success in this industry. By capturing existing buyers from marketplaces, you can start earning commissions sooner rather than later and get paid to build a list of loyal customers instead of putting in time and effort in the hopes that you’ll get a lead.
Once you build up your lead list, all you have to do is email them with offers and commissions will pretty much come on demand. To get started, I created a program that teaches you how to do exactly that.
Learn how to make money online without spending it with The Brambila Method. I wrote a full review of it here:
I talk about the story of why it was created and exactly what you’ll learn as a part of the program.