There are dozens of ways to make money with an online business that pays.
Most of these business ideas are quick and simple, and…
That’s about it. (Examples: drop shipping, affiliate blogging, print-on-demand selling, etc.)
If you want nothing more than to make a quick buck, go ahead. Buy into the latest, trendy online business scheme. Realize you need to market to find buyers, but also realize the only way to get instant results is to drop a ton of investment on paid ads and create a pushy sales funnel.
You might make some money, but how long will it last without a growing, engaged audience that trusts you? Without leads coming in organically through search? Without passion and skill guiding your business?
It won’t. 🤷♀️
That’s why, to create an online business that pays – but ALSO lasts well into the future, and brings you joy, freedom, and fulfillment – you need to think beyond flash-in-the-pan tactics and dig deeper.
You need to decide, right now, whether you prize quick money over long-term success. Whether you want to buy into trends or build an actual business with legacy, one that will transform you from a job-seeker, a solopreneur, into a business owner and empire-builder.
If you’re more interested in growing a heart-led business over time, you’re in the right place. 📍 Let’s talk about what you need to build an online business you LOVE that pays you for years to come – not just this month or the next one.
How to Create an Online Business That Pays You for Years to Come
1. Shift Your Mindset and Invest in Yourself
Do you want to be here today, gone tomorrow?
Or do you want a build an online business that pays long-term?
Do you want a gig…
Or do you want a career?
Do you want to constantly wonder how you’ll make money in three months, six months, or a year from now?
…Or do you want to know exactly where your income will come from, both now and in the future?
The truth is, if you want the second option, you need to refocus your attention from “making money right now” to “building wealth over time.”
This video explains how I did it and made 13,000x ROI by shifting my mindset to long-term gains:
Why? I believe the right mindset is the ultimate foundation to pave the way for future success. Specifically, the mindset of high achievers, which looks like this:
- Roadblocks are growth opportunities. 🚧
- Doing the hard work now will pay off later. ⏳
- You can learn how to be successful. 🏫
- Mistakes are lessons in disguise. 💡
After mindset, you need to invest in your goals, your vision, and your blooming business. 🌸 That might look like:
- Building up your skills in your industry through courses, coaching, and other learning opportunities so you can proudly wear the “expert” badge
- Investing in a domain for your brand
- Putting together a content strategy to build brand awareness and an engaged audience
- Hiring your first contractor to help you handle the workload
2. Prioritize Passion and Skill Over Profits to Build an Online Business That Pays Long-Term
To create an online business that pays for the long-term, that lasts through the years…
Don’t start a venture just because you think you’ll make a lot of money doing it.
You might, but remember that no business is 100% profitable 100% of the time.
If the money is the only reason you went into business, what will happen when your revenue falters? What happens when you hit some inevitable speed bumps?
Your likelihood of sticking with your brand through its growing pains will be pretty slim if making money NOW is all that matters.
And, if you prioritize profits over putting sustainable, strong business processes and systems in place, your brand will never stop teetering between survival and collapse.
Why?
You won’t have the foundations that will give your biz resiliency. For example, if you don’t adopt a content strategy because you’re more interested in getting instant results from more aggressive marketing, you won’t have a way to earn leads naturally over time and build an engaged audience.
Instead, you’ll probably break the bank by shelling out money for ads. And the second you stop paying for them, that lead source will dry up.
Money alone is not reason enough to start the long, tough, draining process of business-building.
You need more motivation than that if you want to see it through and build a legacy – not just a venture or a gig or a lark.
You need passion and skill guiding you and pushing you when the going gets rough. Yes, you can have big goals about revenue and profits, you should absolutely want to make money, but those should not be the underlying reasons why you’re diving into starting a business.
3. Reach People Who Are Searching for the Pain Points You Solve
By now, you know that to grow organically and sustainably in an online business that pays, you need to do content marketing.
(Content marketing ROI is incredible, by the way. Check out the stats to see what I mean.)
BUT –
You cannot – I repeat, cannot – do content marketing without a strategy.
You can’t just brainstorm a random topic out of thin air, write a rambling blog about it, publish it, and expect results.
Topic research is critical. Specifically, you must write about the topics that hit two bullseyes 🎯:
- Relevant to your business and what you sell
- Relevant to your audience and their pain points
Your understanding of the first is a matter of course. You know what you do better than anyone. That’s why you should prioritize understanding your audience and their unique pain points – ones that YOU can solve for them with your business.
Why?
Your audience is searching for answers to these pain points in Google.
For example, say you run a content business. Your audience needs help creating content, and they’re searching for “how to write a blog post” in Google:
You research this pain point (phrased as a keyword) in a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. You find a variation that has a low KD or “keyword difficulty” (meaning it’s easy to nudge into the rankings and appear on page one with good content).
If you can address this pain point in your content and provide satisfactory answers while also tying in nudges to your relevant products/services…
If you do it better than the existing results for that pain point/keyword in Google…
It’s a winning formula for bringing in traffic, converting that traffic to leads, and warming up those leads over time so they become customers. 🏆
The right content strategy, carried out with a plan and consistency, WILL pay off.
4. Focus on Growing Sustainably – Long-Term Over Short-Term
One of the keys to building an online business that pays for years is to focus on sustainable growth.
This kind of growth is healthy. You’ll scale and expand slowly but steadily. You won’t grow too fast, because that brings in the danger of imploding.
Think of a balloon you fill with air too quickly – it’s far more likely to pop because you have less control. Conversely, the balloon you fill more slowly is more likely to expand without popping under too much pressure. 🎈
When growing a business, what adds in that pressure?
- Doing too much, too soon, without help
- Thinking you need to be on all the social media platforms all the time
- Not delegating tasks like content writing
- Funneling money into ads and neglecting content marketing entirely
- Putting too much emphasis on outside platforms and forgetting your website
These roads lead straight to burnout.
Just say no. 🙅♀️ There’s a better way.
For example, are you exclusively focused on social media and forgetting about your long-term marketing strategy (blogging)??
Are you running yourself ragged trying to keep up with social trends, trying to post engaging content multiple times a day, and attempting it all on EVERY platform possible?
You don’t have to.
Instead, I would implore you to stop, step back, and pause for breath.
Refocus your energy.
Where?
Your website, A.K.A. your content house. 🏡
5. Build a Content House
Instead of chasing your tail on social media, a better long-term strategy for pulling in engaged leads is to focus on blogging on your own website.
Your website is your content house, the place where all your content resides. As you create content in the form of high-quality, pain point-solving, keyword-optimized, engaging blogs…
- The more your domain authority will grow.
- The better you’ll rank in Google.
- The more traffic you’ll pull in.
- The more interested and engaged your audience will become.
It’s important to prioritize publishing content on your own real estate for a few other reasons, too.
For one, social media platforms exist at the whim of people who aren’t you. Ultimately, you have zero control over whether your posts remain in existence or disappear one day because some CEO or shareholder decided to pull the plug.
You also have NO control over where/when/how your posts appear in others’ feeds. Social media algorithms are notoriously fickle, and a platform can even randomly ghost or “shadowban” all of your content for no apparent reason.
The result? All your hard work goes down the drain. Your efforts will be wasted if no one can see your posts.
Enter your domain. Your content house. It’s a powerful platform because you own it, from top to bottom, and you have some control over how visible it will be in search.
Again, with the right strategy, your website can become your main source of leads – which means no more hustling on social media like a hamster in a wheel.
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