The internet era has produced more millionaires than all other eras in human history combined.
Today, there are 2,095 billionaires and 46.8 million millionaires compared to 1982 when Forbes started to publish its list of the richest people.
According to pulse.ng, the first Forbes list had just 400 people and the richest man was Daniel Keith Ludwig with an estimated $2 billion in net worth.
Unlike “My Ultimate Guide To Making More Money Online Than You Can Use In A Lifetime – And Be Happy With The World” which focused on the fundamental strategies and mindset required to build an online business, this blog post narrows the focus to the specifics that the most successful online millionaires and information marketers have used to skyrocket their wealth.
You can get the earlier blog post here, which I recommend you read first before you digest this one because it sets the mindset tone.
In this blog post I’m going to focus on internet or online business gurus who started barely 15 to 20 years ago and have made millions within that short time frame.
This excludes the likes of Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Robbins who were already millionaires. But thanks to the internet the duo have been able to scale their empires further.
Gary has transformed his family’s wine business and is today worth an estimated $200mm, while Tony Robbins’ networth as at the beginning of 2020 was estimated at $500mm. Yet among internet gurus there are those that have made their fortune within 10 years and shorter.
This post will focus on the likes of Ramit Sethi, Brendon Burchard, Jon Morrow, Neil Patel, Ruth Soukup, Pat Flynn, and Michelle Schroeder-Gardner.
These seven gurus will give us a broad spectrum of the gurus online and how you can copy what they do and build your perpetual online money-making machine.
The age of the gurus in my sample ranges from 30 to 43, and their networth ranges from $2 million to $25 million. To put that within context, $2 million in Nigeria’s Naira is N700 million.
Jon Morrow is paralyzed from his neck down. The youngest on the list, Michelle, started her blog circa 2013 and a student loan of about $38,000 was still hanging around her neck.
Ramit Sethi’s first product was an eBook that he sold for $4.95. Today some of his coaching programs go for as much as $12,000.
When Brendon Burchard started in 2010, his only claim to fame was his novel, “Life’s Golden Ticket.” Today he has written four NY Times best sellers, including The Millionaire Messenger, The Charge, and The Motivation Manifesto. Oprah calls him “One of the most successful online trainers in history,”
If all these gurus can do it, you too can. I learn from all these gurus so I’m well positioned to share their secrets, reveal their strategies, and everyday tactics. Indeed, how you can be like them.
Before we dive deeper I want to sound a quick warning. You may become more confused after reading this blog post so to avoid that, I ask you to read my “How Experts Build Empire: The Paul Uduk Case Study” first by going here, and also read “My Beginners Guide to eProduct Development” by clicking here or here. Both will simplify a lot of things for you and also put many things within context.
Building a perpetual money-making machine is actually the end-game in the long tortuous journey en-route building an online business empire.
You will not be able to jump to the end-game unless you follow a “systematic, methodical, and strategic principles” as Ramit Sethi recommends. If you do, you will succeed, if you don’t, you will fail. It will be only a matter of time.
The seven gurus I follow and have highlighted here follow systematic principles and those principles have enabled them succeed beyond their wildest imagination. Having said that, let’s look at how you too can build your perpetual online money-making machine.
Types of Online Businesses
There are various online business models. They include selling physical goods online, as Amazon and Jumia do. This is referred to as E-Commerce. There are many subsets of this, e.g. drop shipping, market places, affiliate marketing, etc.
Then there is the sale of non-physical products, otherwise referred to as information products (info products).
Then there is online business; that is, conducting your business entirely online, with little or no offline presence.
My focus here is online business of which selling information products is a subset.
On the surface, the two (generic online business and selling info products) appear the same, but there are huge differences.
Selling information products in its purest form does not involve personal one-on-one with your client; it’s almost 100% entirely technology enabled. You sell the product, the client obtains what s/he ordered and the transaction ends.
At other instances, online business may begin online, and end up with physical interaction, either face-to-face, or technology enabled.
Of the gurus we have listed, the biggest proponent of online business is Ramit Sethi, and he insists there is a difference between merely selling info products and doing online business. And I toe his line of argument.
Other masters who are in this category, that is, who teach that people should approach online business strategically include Jay Abraham, Dan Sullivan, Alan Weiss, and Rich Schefren.
All these gurus emphasize that online business is not different from offline business and therefore should be approached strategically.
On the other hand, there are many internet millionaire wannabes who jump in with no other thing in mind but to “make money.”
They gravitate from one tactics to another (Gigs on Fiverr, Facebook Live, Photos on Instagram, SEO, and so on) looking for where to “make a quick kill”, with no overarching strategy to guide them. This is a recipe for failure as I elaborate below.
Ways of Doing Business Online
Broadly, there are two ways internet gurus approach business online:
- Tactically
- Strategically (methodically, systematically)
Those who approach their business tactically have what my coach, Ramit Sethi, calls “the shiny object syndrome.” They are always coming up with new winning ideas and tactics. They are running after the next flavor of the month. They never stay long enough to master any one thing or marinate on any strategy. They may be talking about Facebook live today, Pinterest adverts tomorrow, Google Adsense, SEO, link building, and all one naught next tomorrow, and so on.
Though they may make a little money now and then, when the reigning tactics go out of favour, they are left in a quandary looking for what to do next. They are opportunists. There is nothing wrong with leveraging tactics but they have to be a part of your overarching strategy to be deployed when the time is ripe.
There are tacticians like Ewen Chia, who is based in Singapore, who claim to be killing it massively.
Ewen’s tactics, which changed almost every six months, included:
- Autopilot Profits
- Fast Track Cash!
- Autopilot Profits System
- $5,000 From Scratch
- Superaffiliates.com – The Name Says It All!
- Copy Paste Income!
- Cash Siphon System
- Autopilot Profits – Your Online ATM Machine!
- Money On Demand
- Turnkey Internet Profits
- Profit 365
- Cash Biz
- Shortcut to $10k
- Commission Money Machine
- Succeed With IM
These are the so-called black-hat SEO tactics.
Don’t be fooled, Ewen’s biggest claim to fame was his first book, “How I Made My First $1million On the Internet.”
After that book, he wrote two others in quick succession: “How to Make Your First $1,000 Online In Just 30 Days”, and “Affiliate Money Machine.”
The three books were all written in 2009. Before then he’d co-written, with Mike Teng, “Internet Turnaround: The Use of Internet Marketing to Turnaround Company”, in 2007.
Ewen’s tactics revolved around gaming Google algorithms and since Google started descending heavily on those that try to cheat the system, not much has been heard of Ewen, at least not in terms of coming up with a brand new shiny tactics every three to six months.
Some even call Ewen an internet “scammer and fraudster” and warn those who care to listen not to buy his products.
A strategic approach to online business requires that you understand that the internet is huge, deep, wide, evolves rapidly, and without a well-crafted strategy you’re doomed to failure.
As far back as 2006, Rich Schefren, founder of Strategic Profits, released his Internet Business Manifesto which put into context the vastness of the internet and therefore the absolute necessity for a strategic approach.
Rich cautioned against trying to be a jack of all trade, the need to focus on the market and understanding what the customer wanted.
He advised all those who cared to listen, to act as entrepreneurs, rather than as opportunists, by putting in place the following overlapping systems:
- Sales
- Client relationship
- Legal compliance
- Traffic
- Business building
- Market Analysis
- Systems
- Content
- Technical
- Finance
- List
To dig deeper you can download “The Internet Business Manifesto” here or simply read what people are saying about the manifesto here and meet Rich here.
The Three Critical Components Your Require As a Beginner
As a beginner, your success online will require you master these three overlapping components:
- Your audience
- Your Products
- Your Sales System
There are nuances to these components and there are other things you need to do in the beginning game before you launch out.
The most critical thing is having a game plan and following it methodically in the audience, products, and sales continuum or phases.
At the beginning of the internet gold rush, there were many gurus that tried to buck this rule: they appeared on the surface to follow a systematic approach and they appeared to have succeeded. But they were all tacticians. And it didn’t last.
Those were the days when books such as “Launch” by Jeff Walker, and “Make, Market, Launch”, by Pam Hendrickson and Mike Koenigs were the rave.
In a typical launch, people made over a million dollars and this set the tone for people to think of the internet as a vast super highway paved with gold. Those days of marketing tactical hell, as Ramit calls it, has long gone.
Indeed my first coach @deanhunt taught me nothing but product creation. It sounded too good to be true that you could create a product and quickly monetize without knowing who your customers are.
I could hardly wait. I created about seven products in quick succession, including Wealth Beyond Your Imagination, The Service Blueprint, and Mastering Basic Credit. Without the two other legs (audience and a sales system) and a strategic game plan, they could not and did not fly.
Unlike a brick and mortar business where you can set up a corner shop and your neighbours would quickly troop in to buy, online business is different.
First you have to find the customers, find out what they want, structure what they need and then deliver to them.
Most importantly, the internet operates on algorithms, and unless you follow the rules set by the algorithms you’re are doomed to failure or at best, subpar performance.
You may be surprised I didn’t include automation as part of the three critical components I earlier listed. Yes automation is vital but it’s not the most important, at least at the beginning.
Indeed it’s the least important. Automation is the technology aspect of your business that enables your audience to discover you, enables you to sell your products and massively scale.
Automation is what enables you to set up a perpetual online money-making machine as part of your sales process. Before I cover that aspect let me very briefly cover audience and products.
Your Audience
Your audience, or customers or clients are the people that need the “solution” you have to offer. In online business, you have to go and find them.
This requires painstaking relationship building. While people say over 3 billion surfers are on Facebook at any given time, not all these people are your clients.
You’d be lucky if you found 1% of your customers on Facebook. Your work is to find your ideal clients wherever they may be using your blog or website as your launch pad.
You’ll look for them online through search (Google, Bing, etc.), via social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
You’ll have to cast your net far and wide, in places gurus refer to as “fishing hole”, with the objective of getting your first 1,000 die-hard fans.
Fans are those that will buy everything you bring out, Sounds easy, but it’s not. When you do find your first 1,000 clients, you’ll be able to scale to 10,000, 50,000, 100,000, and eventually to 1 million.
Indeed when you get to the magic number (10,000 clients), you’ve virtually reached a point of no return and if you continue to scale, produce remarkable content, and stay connected to your clients, it’ll be a matter of time before you join the league of internet millionaires.
Discovering your audience generally involves finding answers to three questions:
- What problems does my target-audience wake up thinking about?
- Which websites do they visit in search for a solution?
- What groups are they a part of?
Having found out the answer to these three overarching questions, you now begin the arduous task of befriending your target audience, through relationship building.
Remember they are human beings who need your help to solve their burning problems.
If your solution is spot on, they will be your fans forever. Read about the concept of 1000 true fans by @kevinkelly here.
Your Product(s)
Before the advent of the internet we first heard about gurus such as Tony Robbins, Jay Abraham, Harvey McKay, and Brian Tracy, to mention four, through their products.
They were physical products recorded in audio tapes and shipped to customers who’d bought them.
You basically had no way to compare the products. If you had a bad product and developed buyer’s remorse, you were stuck.
Today you’re competing against hundreds of other marketers in your niche so your product better be the best or within a twinkle of an eye you’re out of the game.
Your product can be anything under the sun, e.g. teaching cats how to walk on their hind legs, or it could be a coaching program that shows people how to speak at TED or TEDx, or teaching people how to make money online, or it could be a productivity hacking software.
The varieties are infinite. Here are the 52 different kinds of information products you can produce, by Janet Switzer. Get it here.
Your product must target a customer’s specific pain point, it must have excellent features that translate to great benefits.
The product must be well packaged, properly priced, and appropriately positioned. Your customers must perceive your solution as the best in its niche or category.
Your Sales Machine
If you have carefully built and nurtured relationships over time, dived deep into understanding your fans’ desires, pain points and aspirations, and developed killer products that meet their exact needs having deciphered what they initially thought they wanted, you’re now in a winning position to sell and your sales will take off as a rocket propelled grenade. You have arrived.
Amateurs rush to sell, but winners first focus on learning – to understand what their customers want and need, what products or solution will be perfect for the customers, how the solutions need to be packaged, positioned, priced and delivered.
These are the steps strategists follow. Indeed I can write a book on each of these steps but that will be counter-productive to you as a beginner. What you need to know right now is to internalize that sales come last for the beginner. It’s an end game.
Throughout this blog post, you’ve not heard me talk about tactics or models such as affiliate marketing, Infographics, funnels, landing pages, lead magnets, link building, search engine optimization, evergreen products, referrals, Google keyword planning, 100% money back guarantee, guest blogging, productivity hacks, HTML, and so on.
As important as these individual tactics are, you don’t need them when you’re first starting out. Even if you need to employ them as you’re starting out, you need to deploy them within the context of an overarching game plan and strategy.
You start selling when you have reached between 100 to 1000 customer base. Not before because no one knows you.
If you’ve got a winning product, your customers will quickly become your fans and your marketing will take off as a rocket through viral marketing, a process you’ve probably heard bandied about by people who don’t truly understand how the process works.
When once you’ve reached this stage, it’s time to rapidly and aggressively scale through automation and start building your perpetual online money-making machine.
At this point (with 1,000 customers) you’re probably making $10,000 per month. It’s time to fully automate and start redesigning your perpetual money-making machine.
Before we zero in on building your money machine, let’s look at the key takeaways up to this point.
Your Key Takeaways
If you ask any of the seven internet strategists we wish to emulate: Ramit Sethi, Brendon Burchard, Jon Morrow, Neil Patel, Ruth Soukup, Pat Flynn, and Michelle Schroeder-Gardner: they would probably concur with some of the takeaways here, if not all.
This is a summary of this strategy. Follow these seven uncanny steps distilled from the gurus Jon Morrow, Ramit Sethi, and Brendon Burchard :
- Have a system (to build an audience)
- Convert ideas into content
- Convert Content into traffic
- Convert Traffic into leads
- Convert Leads into sales
- Rinse and repeat
- And Build your business on Distinction, Excellence, and Service
Constructing You Perpetual Money-Making Machine
You’ve worked so hard, toiling day and night with nothing to show for it for months on end. But you’re determined. You’ve read all the motivational books that tell you, “never give up” and you’re a true believer. You’ve decided that giving up is not an option.
You’re in the trenches 18 hours per day, building relationships, creating amazing content, developing products your detractors will agree are million dollar winners, the money needle of your online business is beginning to stir, the flywheel of your business as Ramit calls it has begun to spin and gather momentum.
You’ve hit and surpassed the 10,000 mark in audience and $10,000 in monthly revenue. Indeed, you’ve reached what Malcolm Gladwell calls the “Tipping Point.” Now is the time to rebuild and put your perpetual money-making machine on overdrive.
It’s Time to Bring In Automation
One word describes your perpetual online money-making machine and that word is, AUTOMATION.
For your business to massively scale you have to transit to 100% automation so that everything you do start operating on what gurus describe as autopilot.
Sounds simple but it’s not. But as hard as it all seems, you can do it. The most difficult leg of the journey is getting your first 1,000 true fans, scaling to 10,000, and hitting the $10,000 mark in MMR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). Once you get to this point as I’ve said, nothing can stop you.
As you will discover, I’ll not discuss the marketing platform to use (InfusionSoft, Ontraport, Kajabi, Vonza, etc.) or the actual mechanics of programming your autoresponder system, scripting, what microphone to use for your podcast, and your YouTube tactics. All these tactics are better left for another blog post.
These are the things you need to do as you move massively to scale and build your online perpetual money-making machine:
- Install the most robust traffic building systems that meet your exact need. Get help from your webmaster: Mailchimp, Drip, ConvertKit, Aweber, InfusionSoft, Kajabi, Ontraport, and Vonza all come to mind. My tip: Go for Vonza.
- Kickstart your autoresponder system to move your business closer to autopilot.
- Keep producing remarkable content using the strategy of preeminence a la Jay Abraham.
- Quickly institute SEO strategies across all your platforms, blogs and websites for discoverability.
- Harness friendly forces to help drive your authentic self-promotion, your content and your voice. (Pick yourself, no one will pick you: Seth Godin; Choose Yourself: James Altucher.)
- Reach out to your mentors, teachers, coaches and other gurus for more support. Float JVs.
- Get your fans eating out of your hands by continuing to provide more dream-come-true solutions.
- Harness the power of online platforms and social media to keep funneling traffic to your fully SEO optimized blog and website. All these matter: Quora, Reddit, Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many others.
- Get your remarkable contents available in all key formats such as MP4 (video), MP3 (audio), eBooks, PDF, nfographics, stories and books.
- Lunch your flagship platforms and programs such as B-School (Marie Forleo), Elite Blog Academy (Ruth Soukup), High Performance Academy (Brendon Burchard), Earnable (Ramith Zethi), Serious Bloggers Only (Jon Morrow), Ubersuggest (Neil Patel).
- Scale even further and launch your mega books, podcasts, and TV show following the footsteps Tim Ferriss (The Tools of Titans), Marie Forleo (Marie TV), Tim Ferriss (The Tim Ferris Show), Pat Flynn (SPI), James Altucher (The James Altucher Show).
- Reinvest massively in your business to create yet more remarkable content, momentum and getting your flywheel spinning in overdrive.
Before you reach this level of expertise, you would have mastered the basics as I captured in my eBook, How Experts Build Empire: The Paul Uduk Case Study. Here is the summary:
- The web evolves at the speed of light. You have to constantly be in a learning mode. Anything short condemns you to a technology derelict within a twinkling of an eye.
- The web has less to do with technology as it has to do with relationships. Learn relationship building. Technology is just a driver and channel.
- Presenting on the web, whether coaching, teaching, or writing articles, is not a matter of transferring everything you have offline and dumping it online. You have to optimize it for the web.
- No matter the space on the web you’re competing in, you’re competing against the-best-of-the-best. You better be the best at what you do – at least think in that term and give it your best effort.
- Succeeding online is not a hundred meters dash, it’s a marathon, or better still, a triathlon. You must have a massive amount of patience and staying power.
- Those who succeed online approach everything they do strategically and have focus. They build assets, which they milk over time. Failures jump from one thing to the other – today drop-shipping, tomorrow affiliate marketing, next tomorrow PLR (Private Label Rights).
- To succeed online you can’t go it alone, you need mentors and coaches. Mentors will give you guidance and paid coaches are critical so they are committed to you, with clear goals in sight.
- You can’t be successful online without what Alan Weiss calls a million dollar web presence. You need a SEO optimized website or blog. You can’t depend solely on social media and mobile apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat or WeChat.
- You can succeed offline and transfer your success online, e.g. Tom Peters; and you can succeed online and acquire assets offline, e.g. Brendon Burchard. But you must be online because that’s the only way to scale today.
- For you to succeed massively and have thousands or even millions of followers, you must be known for something, stand for something, focus on something. For example, Tim Ferriss: Podcasting; Joe Polish: Marketing Advice; Rosalind Gardner: Affiliate Marketing; Noah Kagan: Software; Ramit Sethi: Internet Biz Strategy; Carol Tice: Writing; and Jay Abraham: Strategic Marketing & Positioning. Obviously a lot overlap but at least you get the gist.
- The internet is not paved with millions and riches you can amass to your heart’s desire for doing nothing. You must put in the hours, burn the midnight oil, and deliver value. Do these three and add a technology infrastructure to it, you’ll be able to scale and the millions will come. Read Ruth Soukup’s testimony.
- There is no gospel truth, holy-grail, or the one true way about the web just as there is none in life or offline, otherwise everyone would be a millionaire. Cut, dice and mix. Listen to what the market has to say – the trends. Listen to your clients for their pain points, aspirations, and desires; add massive value, and you’ll be fine.
- You can succeed using your name – Seth Godin, Ewen Chia, Tim Grahl – and you can use a brand name – Backlinko, Sumo, OptimizeMe – and you can do a combination – Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income), Jon Morrow (Smart Blogger), Brendon Burchard (High Performance Academy), and Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich + Growth Lab).
- A word on tactic. Don’t be so busy selling, you don’t hear the customer. Learn to relate and not just sell, sell and sell like my friends Magwood and Alvear.
- Learn the basics and be brilliant in them. Know how it all adds up. Know and appreciate the concept of cause and effect. Know drivers and enablers. Know the role of your products or offering(s); enlist social media in traffic building; use your blog or website or both to generate gravitas; embrace marketing and selling to bring in income; and employ mail delivery systems for building lists. In short, know and master how to integrate and align the web ecosystem to help you build a profitable online expert empire.
- Finally, have character and integrity. Without these ingredients, your expertly built online expert empire will crash like a pack of cards. It’s better to lose at a transaction than for a whiff of suspicion about your trustworthiness to crop up. Offline or online, without trust, you’re dead in the water. Remember, you’re doing business and building relationship with someone living thousands of miles across the globe. It’s somebody you’ve never met and may never meet. Be kind to your reputation as honesty remains the best policy.
Click here to download the full free eBook.
If you follow My Ultimate Guide to Building a Perpetual Online Money-Making Machine it will be a matter of time before you join the ranks of the gurus and internet millionaires. It will surely happen.
