making money

Recently I’ve been going through an identity crisis. I know what I want to do, and what I’m good at, and what I enjoy. But increasingly I’m becoming less relevant to my audience (“Great Derek, you want to write books and travel full-time. But how can you help ME?”) On the one hand, I’m finally able to focus on my …

If you have a good idea for a business that provides value (by making something people want, need, like or enjoy), it’s easy to get sidetracked by details that don’t matter, and waste months playing around with websites and logos (by which time, you’ve probably had a totally new and better idea!) You need to test your ideas faster by …

Years ago I made a cover for a book called “Not For Hire.” The aim of the book was an announcement to the world that I could not be bought. It depended on making so much money with my own passion projects that I never needed to take on work I hated. Some people call this level of success “F*ck …

Over the past seven years, I’ve built a few platforms that get a decent amount of traffic. For the past three years, I’ve been trying to convert some of that traffic into revenue through digital products and courses, so I can focus more time on my writing. Although I have had some success, I’m also sure things aren’t going as …

Note: I’m not at $10K a month in passive income yet, but I think I will be by the end of this year… this post is about my plans to improve my sales funnels. I don’t like talking about how much my business earns, because it doesn’t give the full picture. With all the services and tools I pay for, …

Recently I figured out that far more people are searching for “how to write a book” than “how to market a book” – because far more people want to write books than people who actually finish writing one. The insight I gained from that was, I can’t just be targeting clients and customers where I want to reach them. There’s a …

I’ve been making a living online for almost a decade, but I still have trouble pricing my services and offers. I usually focus on making everything a good deal. I include lots of bonuses and options to make the value seem incredible. I also tend to price low. This is probably a mistake. I see book coaches or other people offering …

It’s already 2017. I didn’t do a “yearly wrapup” for 2016 like I do sometimes. The last month of 2016 flew by and I still feel overwhelmed with projects. I felt like 2016 was a lot of waiting and working, without seeing major results. My income went way down, as I spent most of the year avoiding client work (just taking …

Even though I don’t consider myself an expert at doing online courses, I did pretty well with my first one. So this is an (epic) case study explaining everything I did to make 5-figures with my first course launch – without any affiliates promoting it for me, and without doing any webinars. I hope it will be useful for anyone else thinking …

I just learned something new from Ryan Deiss and I’m putting it here in case I forget it. It’s a simple rule to online business that rings true for me. “You don’t have a traffic problem.” What you really have is a problem with motivation and conversion. If you knew that you’d get $10 per visitor to your site, A) You’d …