5 Ways to Make $10,000 a Month
I’m going to share 5 ways to make $10,000 per month with you. But I need a little disclaimer: obviously, you can use everything I’m sharing today to make $10,000 per month. But, you can also use it to make $1,000 per month, $2,000 per month, or $4,000 per month. We all have a different income threshold we need to get to so we can be comfortable – but you can use these strategies to get here no matter what your marker is.
5 Ways to Make $10,000 a Month
Want to listen to the podcast version of this post? I’ve got you covered!
We are SO close to the end of 2020 that it’s hard to believe! (And let’s pray that there’s a magical reset when we get to January 1 because no one wants another year like 2020).
This year, I’ve watched businesses literally crumble as a result of the shutdown. And I also watched businesses thrive. I made more money in the first few months of the shutdown than I had made the first few months of the year. It’s weird because I wasn’t working more – it’s just the way things happened. When everyone went home in March, they all started watching YouTube, so I saw increases in all the important metrics. I was making more money from YouTube AND from anything that my YouTube videos sent people to buy.
If I took anything from 2020, it was the importance of diversification of income streams. And, as a business owner, knowing that things could change at any moment and having a backup plan for when they do.
I saw hairstylists who couldn’t open their salons backup because they didn’t have the money to reopen when they could. And I saw hairstylists create baskets full of hair products to sell curbside to their customers when they couldn’t cut hair. The people who were willing to innovate and change things up experienced the fewest negative effects.
If you’re looking to diversify your income streams in 2021, then you’re going to want to keep reading.
(I also mention that it’s almost the end of the year because that means there are only a few more podcast episodes left until I am RECORDING THEM FROM MY NEW STUDIO! If you want to see the whole process of getting the studio ready, go follow me on YouTube because I’ll be documenting it there. And I’m going to do a whole podcast episode about it next week!)
5 Ways to Make $10,000 Per Month
Providing a service
I’m talking about this first because it will always be the thing I recommend first to get to a certain income level. Providing a service is the quickest way to meet a specific income level. You can charge so much more for a done-for-you, one-on-one service than any of the other things on this list.
When I started as a web designer, I was charging negative nothing for my services – and it was awful. PLEASE don’t do that. Increase your prices if you’re not charging your worth!
I was charging $75 for an ENTIRE web design when I started. Sure, I was working with beginner bloggers, but I was doing full-custom blogs. And $75 is not enough for that. But, when I closed down the web design services for my business, I was charging between $3,000-$5,000 for a website. Some of them were a bit more than that.
If I was charging $5,000 for one website, then I would only need to design two websites per month to reach that $10,000 mark. When I was doing web design, I would make sure I was booked out three to six months in advance so I knew my income for that time. Then, I would book more as I got closer to that six month mark. When I hit that price point, $10,000 a month was absolutely doable.
There are plenty of services you can offer to get you to those income goals of $10,000 per month. But, asterisk here: they will require more work. Web design was INTENSIVE, so you can charge more for it.
Let’s say you’re a social media manager, a VA, or something of that nature, and you have packages ranging from $500 to $3,500. I throw out those numbers because I have a local social media agency in addition to all of my internet stuff, and those price points are what our local agency charges. And I live in an area with very low income rates.
So, if you are working as a social media manager outside of an area that has massive income restrictions or globally, then you could be charging way more than that for your services. We require three or six month retainers, and all the things. It only takes three of those large packages or some combination or large and small packages to get to $10,000 per month.
This is applicable to all services. From a personal trainer to a videographer to a contractor, it will work.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: “but I don’t have time to do all of that work!” But I did some math so you don’t have to here.
Let’s say you’re a VA. You charge $50 per hour and you work 40 hours every week for a month. You’re still not quite hitting that $10,000 per month mark there. It may be that you physically don’t have the capacity to do these large amounts of service. Maybe you can only work 20 hours a week because your kids are home and you can only charge $50 per hour – then you’re looking at one of two scenarios. You could up your prices. So now you’re charging $90 per hour because you’re a specialized VA and working 40 hours a week for a month and you’re making $15,000 a month. If you are only working 20 hours a week, then you’d be in the $7,000-$8,000 range.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Okay but I need to make more than that and I can’t work that many hours.” That’s when you hire people to help you.
If you’re charging $90 per hour and you find someone who charges you $30 per hour, or someone brand new who charges you $10 an hour, then you can take on an extra 20-30 hours per week. That would double or even triple your bottom line and you’re only paying out a small percentage of that.
Sure, it’s a lot of work – but think about the help you can hire if you’re making $20,000 or $30,000 per month. We’re always met with a top-out point when we can’t do anymore as just one person. Hiring someone at that point is where you scale and make more money with growth.
Courses and Digital Products
I’m lumping courses and digital products together, but they sell at very different price points. You can charge all kinds of money for a course depending on your expertise, authority, etc. Anywhere from $20 to “the limit does not exist” makes sense for a course. Digital products are generally sold at a lower price, and you need to sell more of them to hit your goals. But, if you have a large audience, that might not be a big deal.
Imagine that you created a signature course and sell it for $1,000. You passively sell it through your email list or a free webinar or something else. If you sell 10 of those courses per month, you make $10,000. It may be that you’re doing a live webinar every month. Selling 10 of something from a webinar that you’re consistently feeding new traffic to isn’t that hard, guys.
The very first course I ever actually sold was $797. I sold it to seven or eight people. I didn’t have a big audience at ALL – I had maybe 500 people on my email list (that’s with a good cushion). If you continually build your email list and do a launch every month, you can easily make $10,000 per month with courses.
A digital product works a little differently. Let’s say your digital product is $49. Then, you need to continually grow an audience who wants that thing. You’d need to sell about 200 of those every month to hit that $10,000 per month goal. That sounds like a lot – and it is. But if you are constantly feeding the group of people who want that thing, it isn’t that hard.
I’m going to use my friend Christina Scalera as an example. Christina is an attorney, and she sells contract templates via her business, The Contract Shop. She created all of these contract templates for different industries and purposes. Let’s say most of her contracts cost $249. If she is trying to make $2,000 per month, then all she has to do is sell 40 contracts per month. If she can keep up with constantly driving people to her funnels, that isn’t a hard number to hit.
Sponsorships
Sponsorships are a weird one, and it’s one I’m diving more and more into as I continue to grow my audience. You can get sponsorships on any platform that you use to create content. Companies are looking to get their product in front of the people that you’re talking to, so you might as well get sponsored to do that.
The caveat here is that you need to establish a fairly decent-sized audience before you work with sponsors. That doesn’t mean you can’t work with sponsors when you’re smaller because you can. But, that does mean you’ll charge way less for the same amount of work. With sponsorships, you typically charge by audience size. So the work is the same for an Instagram sponsorship with 200 followers as it is for an account with 200,000, but the price is 100,000 times more.
I know people who make a full-time, six to seven figure income just from sponsorships on their podcast or Youtube videos.
Let’s take me for example. Sponsorships are something that I’m currently leaning more into. I’ve told you this before – if I could create only free content and never have to sell anything of my own, I would be okay with that. I LOVE creating content. And the only way I will ever be able to create a lot of free content is by working with sponsors.
Sometimes, people kind of scoff at sponsorships. But think about the free content and value that you’re able to get because of that sponsorship. It costs you nothing when you watch a sponsored video or read a sponsored post, but it allows that creator to continue to do free content for YOU.
I find the world of sponsorships really, really interesting. We’ve secured about $4,000 in sponsorships just this month, JUST as I’ve started to lean into it. It’s not even like I’ve tried very hard – we’ve just been reaching out to companies I want to work with.
Again – you do NOT need to have a massive audience to secure sponsorships. Back when I started on my first podcast with Jaclyn Mellone, All Up In Your Lady Business, we did sponsorships. She has done some blog posts on my site about how to secure sponsorships as a smaller podcaster (which you can read right here).
We started All Up In Your Lady Business in November, and we had our first sponsor in February. It was about $800 per month and we were a very brand new and small podcast. To be completely honest, I have more downloads per month on this podcast than we ever did on All Up In Your Lady Business, and I’ve never once had a sponsor on here. And we found others, even with small numbers.
Sponsorships are a great way to get to that $10,000 per month mark. I work with a company here locally with their marketing, and we did an influencer campaign last year during Christmas. We were spending anywhere from $200 to $800 for these influencers depending on their followers. Think about that as a whole. If someone on Instagram has 20,000 followers, maybe they’re getting $350 for a sponsored post and some story mentions. They would need to do 250 of those per month to hit $10,000.
Now, that’s a lot. It might be that they’re okay with making $2,000 or $3,000 a month and doing other things to supplement that income.
When we were looking to do this influencer campaign, we reached out to a really big influencer – I think she had 500,000 followers at the time. She charged $5,000 for a sponsorship. We didn’t do that one because it was out of budget. But $5,000 for a post and some story mentions means she just needs to do two per month and she’s made $10,000!
Affiliates
Most affiliates are not paying out an extraordinary amount of money. It will probably take you awhile to get to that $10,000 mark using just affiliates.
If I sell a $2,000 camera through my Amazon Affiliate link and I make 5% of that, then I made $100. I would need to sell 100 of those cameras per month to make $10,000 just from that affiliate link. That’s aggressive and excessive. It may be that I can do that one month but not the next, so it’s not consistent.
I have included affiliate links in my YouTube videos, blog posts and Instagram for years, and I still only make a couple hundred dollars per month from Amazon. Affiliates will probably be one of your smaller, supplemental streams of income. BUT it’s definitely something you should think about.
Both of the people I know who make a substantial amount of money from affiliates are tech reviewers, so their whole job is reviewing expensive equipment and recommending it to people. I do know of a few people who were able to quit their job JUST based on affiliate income.
Now – put them all together!
You don’t have to JUST do one of these per month to get to $10,000. You can do a little bit of all of them! I do ALL of these plus more every single month in my own business to reach my income goals. I don’t do a ton of services anymore, but I still do them.
The power here comes in combining all of these. It is important to diversify your income streams AND not leave all of your eggs in one basket. You’re going to get to that $10,000 mark if you focus on one, and once you get there, diversifying and adding in things to make “easier” money is a great tool to supplement. If one of these completely falls off the face of the earth, then you have others to build on.
