How to Make Your First Dollar Online in 4 Steps

In today’s issue, I’m going to share how to make your first $1 on the internet.

You might be asking yourself, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a dollar”, but that’s not entirely true.

Making one dollar on the internet changes your entire mindset around building income. Once you realize you can make $1, you know you can make $10. If you can make $10, you can make $1,000.

And so on.

The challenge is that most people will never make their first $1 online because they are too focused on how to make $1,000,000 online.

Start with $1, then worry about $1M.

Here’s how to simplify, focus, and create a tactical plan to succeed.

Other challenges to making money online

When I do 1:1 coaching sessions with people, they often face 1 of 4 major challenges when it comes to monetizing:

• They don’t understand people’s problems
• They have grown zero social media audience
• They don’t have a collection of interested people to sell to
• They overcomplicate the process, especially the technology

If any of these sounds like something you’re going through, then read on for ways to simplify, focus, and create a tactical plan to succeed.

How to make your first dollar online in 4 steps

1. Talk to people to understand their common problems
2. Grow a small audience around solving that problem
3. Build a small email list of interested people
4. Use the easiest, cheapest, most familiar tech stack

Step 1: Talk to people to understand their common problems

Too many people are quick to launch a brand, course, or service around a problem they haven’t validated as being extremely painful.

Remember: everyone has problems. But people pay to solve the most painful ones.

Those problems generally fall into 3 categories:

• Health (get fit)
• Wealth (make money)
• Relationships (fall in love)

Look at the skills you have picked up over the course of your life and professional career.

What can you help people achieve? Who is 2-3 years behind you on their journey?

Find those people and talk to them!

Find out what is keeping them from their goals. Once you’ve talked to 30-40 people, you’ll probably start to hear the same common problems over and over.

Put together a simple but unique solution that you believe can help people overcome these problems. That solution can be as easy as a short coaching program, a 7-day email course, or an eBook.

Next, you’ll need to make people aware that you exist and can be helpful.

Step 2: Grow a small audience around solving that problem

Once you understand people’s most painful problems, and you have a solution to solve them, you need to generate awareness for yourself as a potential problem solver.

So start creating content online, every single day that shows off your expertise. The easiest place to get traction on your content right now is LinkedIn, IMO.

Look at the number of people who have built huge income streams around being known for solving one very specific problem.

• I want a better job (wealth): Austin Belcak
• I want to unlock my potential (health): Dan Koe
• I want to write better emails (wealth): Cold Email Wizard
• I want to learn to attract women (relationships): Kamilla the Dating Coach

They’ve always stayed on message and on topic. Their content helps people solve these problems.

If you want a deeper look into growing an audience, here’s a thread I wrote that teaches you the 8 types of content you can use to grow a close-knit audience:

Step 3: Build a small email list of interested people

Once you create content around solving a specific problem, you’ll attract a small audience. But an audience is a finicky thing. Because you’re always at the mercy of each social media platform’s algorithm.

That’s why I recommend building a small email list of interested people. A really simple way to do that is to offer something valuable in exchange for their email address.

That can be a lead magnet like a checklist or worksheet, an ongoing newsletter (like this one), or you could build free guides (like these) and turn them into PDFs.

You want to make sure that whatever you offer, it’s directly related to the problem you’re solving.

Here’s are 5 golden rules for creating your first lead magnet:

Step 4: Use the easiest, cheapest, most familiar tech stack

Once you have a great lead magnet, you need to offer it somewhere.

This is the part that trips up 90% of people I see trying to make income on the internet.

Don’t overcomplicate this.

Use a website builder like Carrd and create a simple landing page. When people enter their email address, deliver the lead magnet.

Once you have a few hundred emails, send an email out to people offering your unique solution that we discussed earlier.

(Note: You can choose to leverage an expiring discount to create urgency, should you want to.)

If people want to pay, make it easy. Have a buy button in your email that sends them to a Stripe payment link or Gumroad payments page.

If you offer a service, redirect them after payment to a Calendly link to book time with you.

If you sell a product, deliver the product via email or host it on a platform like Gumroad.

If you think it needs to be overly complicated, look at how Sally Wong is making money online.

She tweets about drawing Notion avatars to her audience, features a pinned Tweet about making her first $1 online, and occasionally shares a link if you want to buy.

The link has zero complications. It's just a form with 2 questions and then a payment portal.

No fancy technology. Just easy peasy!

To Conclude:

This is just one of many ways to earn your first $1 on the internet, so feel free to pick out things you learned in this issue and apply them to your unique situation.

If you already have a nice following on social media, you can eliminate step 2 and simply start talking to your audience to understand their common problems.

Or you can read my article on how Anthony went from $1 to $100,000+ using this same step-by-step method on LinkedIn.

Sometimes, you don't need a lead magnet and instead can simply promote your product or services directly on Twitter or LinkedIn.

It's up to you to get creative, and I hope this issue has given you something to think about in your journey.

Well, that's all for today. 4 steps to your first $1 on the internet.