Jeff Kikel of Freedom Nation rejoins us today to expand on his idea of "a bazillion ways to make money." Last week we talked about rental incomes and side hustles, and we dig a little deeper today.
One way is to find something you're passionate about and put up an online course on how to do it on a site like Udemy. For example, Jeff is really into Chat GPT, so he has a course on it online.
Jeff also talks about Private Label Rights, or PLRs - the ability to start with someone else's course, add your knowledge, and repurpose it.
You can create a YouTube channel dedicated to one of your passions - whether it's the Civil War or email marketing - Jeff cites an example of a stay-at-home Mom overseas who created income doing the latter.
Imposter syndrome is real, and there are several reasons why people don't think they can start a side hustle or create passive income. Jeff dispels many of those myths for us.
Find Jeff online:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JeffKikel
Website: https://www.freedomdaywealth.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkikel/
Email Paula Christine at Paula@PaulaChristine.com. You can also learn more online at www.PaulaChristine.com.
Paula: Hi, and welcome to Beyond the Paycheck, I'm Paula Christine. Last week we talked with Jeff Kikel, author of Freedom Day. Jeff gave us some great advice on how to plan for our Freedom Day, so you can download his free Pdf, go to the last episode, or actually, I'll put it in the show notes. We also talked about creating a side business. I asked him back today to dive deeper into how to create that side business. Welcome back, Jeff.
Jeff: Well, thank you, Paula. I appreciate you inviting me on again, and I look forward to the conversation today.
Paula: Let's jump right in. How do I even know how to start a side business? Do I start with something that I love to do?
Jeff: The expression I've always heard was, it's not work if you do something you enjoy. Don't decide to do something that you absolutely despise. Couple things that in my world I would say you need to or in what we call Freedom Nation. One of the rules of Freedom Nation is one, don't do things that you hate. Two, do things that are passive income or require very little activity on your part. I'll give you an example. This year I've become obsessed with ChatGPT and AI. I started doing a lot of experiments with it. One experiment was, I've been working on my Freedom Day book for probably about two years now.
Had the overall pieces of it together, but I was just having trouble because it's just, okay, you got to sit down, you got to write the book, and it's a great way to make money. It's a great way to build a reputation and all that, but it's work. It takes time. As I was experimenting with ChatGPT, I started to teach ChatGPT my terminology because with Freedom Day, there's nothing earth-shatteringly different that I do.
I didn't create anything wildly new, the only thing is I sequenced it together. I sequenced different things together that traditionally don't fall under the financial planning world that I've grown up in. Things like adding a bucket list and creating little side hustles or side gigs to pay for my bucket list that retrains my brain, and then I start doing passive income which will help me get to my Freedom Day.
I started thinking about, okay, well, let me put it together. Well, ChatGPT I started learning how to program it, or I started to learn how to teach it to think like me and to talk like me and to use my terminology. Well, then I came to the realization that there's a ton of people that were coming up to me and going, "Hey, Jeff, I know you're good with ChatGPT, can you show me how to do this?"
Well, I don't have time to show everybody how to do this so I quickly created a course. I went through and laid out, "Okay, this is how you write a book using ChatGPT," and walked people through it. I took that course, put it up onto Udemy and started selling that course. Instantly, that's something that I took probably about two and a half to three weeks to put together. Putting it up on Udemy, I don't have to do anything, it's on there, and it's working for me.
Paula: What's Udemy?
Jeff: It's basically an online learning platform where people can put courses up onto there. It's U-D-E-M-Y.com.
Jon: We'll link it in the show notes as well. I've used that platform, it's really great for folks who want to put together an online course.
Jeff: Yes. It's quick. It's easy. They do all the management of it. If I sell something, they get 60%, I get 40%, which I'm a good marketer. I've been driving people to my Udemy course, and I came to the realization, okay, well, if one course is good, 20 courses is going to be better. I need a resource because I don't have the time to create all these courses.
I did a little bit of research, and one of my favorite topics is what are called Private Label Rights, PLRs. It's people who- they like to create courses, they don't like to do marketing. You can buy the rights to take that course, reshuffle it with your own knowledge in there and then take that course and put it onto another platform.
One of my favorite sources for Private Label Rights is a site called Content Sparks. The lady that runs that is just a genius with content creation. She's wonderful about helping new creators and new course people. Her courses are absolutely outstanding. They're visually appealing, very easy to edit them into your own branding, and you can take one of those. I ended up buying probably at-- I think in the last probably month and a half, I've bought about 10 different courses.
I'm taking one each week. I am going through, I take one day a week where I rebrand the thing myself to my branding, and then I take one day, and I record the whole thing. Sometimes it takes two days, edit the video, which I have a VA that does that for me, and then I just upload it to Udemy, and it's there. I can also take those courses, rename them slightly and then sell them individually through other venues and things like that. That's a great way to do work one week and then have that working for me for the rest of my life.
Paula: That's so cool.
Jeff: Is awesome.
Paula: Again, I'm lost for words. Let's go to, I'm a stay-at-home mom. I want to generate my own income, and I don't really know anything about the things that you're talking about, but there's still things I can teach other people.
Jeff: That's the thing. I think the greatest way to make money in this world is information. We are in the information age. Just go on to YouTube and look at some of the craziest stuff that people geek out on. Civil war stuff. I'm an expert in civil war stuff. I can throw up a YouTube channel where I talk about civil war stuff. I could sell courses on how to put together uniforms. There's a bazillion different things. In the mom world, if I was a stay-at-home mom, I would be a billionaire because the cool thing is moms know other moms. Anything that you can do that maybe is in your world that you're good at, are you good at how to find coupons and how to really leverage coupons?
Well, boom, you can put together a YouTube channel where you share that information, build an audience, and then maybe you put together a little ebook that gets you some email addresses, and then maybe you put together a course based on all that, that you can guide people to. One of my favorite people ever that does this it's a lady, her name is Mira Kothand, K-O-T-H-A-N-D.
I don't even remember where I bumped into Mira online, but she was perfect example. She lives in Indonesia or Singapore, I can't remember which. Stay-at-home mom. She was looking for a way to make a little side income for herself and her family. Mira just decided, "Okay, well, I want to get good at something." She went and took a whole bunch of courses on how to do email marketing, and she started to go online and teach people different concepts. A lot of her stuff goes more towards women because she really leveraged Pinterest at the beginning.
She started building this crowd of people that were like, "Hey, I want to learn how to do email marketing," or "I've got a little side business and I need to know how to do this." Mira just kept building and building, and she started with a book. I think that's where I came across her. I saw something about it. I read her book, and then I started really following what she was doing but perfect example. She was a stay-at-home mom who didn't want to go back to work. She wanted to stay home with her kids, and she's built a wonderful career for herself building products.
I just saw she's now launched a mastermind course on how to get out of the-- everybody thinks, "Well, I just have to keep creating and creating and creating," and she's like, "No, you create stuff that you can keep driving people to from courses and things like that," like she's done.
Paula: How do you know how much to charge for your course?
Jeff: I think you got to look at what competing courses are out there. My AI book course, I priced it really low for the simple fact that I wanted to start driving people to it. I'll bump the price up. Easily, if I were to sell it with all the stuff that I put into it, it's $1,000 course, and I'm selling it for like $34 at that point because I needed to get some reviews, and I needed to get people going with it. The Udemy route was a simple one for me because I didn't want to have to set up a whole platform and everything else. I will eventually set up a whole learning platform when I have a few more courses to put in there.
Jon: Can I just zoom out for a second here, Jeff? I've got two key takeaways so far. The first is, you don't always know what you know. I go back to your civil war analogy. Imposter syndrome is real. "Oh, I don't have any skills. I don't have any talent." Now, there's going to be something that you're really good at or really knowledgeable about that you can put online. If there isn't something you're passionate about to your other point, the information age like you talked about last week, if you are passionate about something but know nothing about it, you can learn everything you need to learn about on YouTube or the internet or podcasts or wherever you're going, and you can really become a self-taught expert in just about anything these days.
Jeff: Absolutely. If I'm teaching a basic course, I really only need to be about two lessons ahead of the people that I'm teaching at that point. Honestly, they don't know anything. I'm just teaching them every step of the way. Then I keep learning, and I keep going down that path. There's tons of free information available. There's tons of courses on this. The way I look at it is find something that really you have a passion about or you geek out on, and there's going to be other people that geek out just like you do.
Paula: Yes. You could generate some revenue from it.
Jeff: Absolutely.
Paula: I could do this, you can do it. John could do it. I think about some of the other mothers or people at home, how do you even take the first step?
Jeff: That's basically steps two and step three of the Freedom Day method. Step two is we build a bucket list. We build a list of a hundred things in 10 different categories, a hundred things that we want to do before we die. We're going to pick just three of those that we can do in the next six months. If people want to listen to my strategy on how to do this, listen to the last show.
Okay, now I've three things that I'm focused on, and I know this is what they're going to cost. All right. I'm not trying to make $20,000 or $30,000. I'm not trying to buy a Lamborghini or basically, like most of these internet dorks that are out there, rent a Lamborghini and then sit in front of it and make people think that I'm making millions of dollars a year.
Jon: All those influencers.
Jeff: Oh yes. You look at my driveway I have a Camaro, and I have a 12-year-old truck. I'm not trying to tell people that I'm making billions of dollars a year. I'm not, you know what? I make a lot of money, but I make a lot of money, and I don't spend it, or I don't try and show off with it. Get those three bucket list items, and all you have to do is focus on how am I going to pay for that.
Speaker 1: What's a simple way to do it?
Paula: Let's go back to the example that you used last week. You talked about your cars, trains.
Jeff: Yes, planes, trains and automobiles.
Speaker 1: Planes, trains, and automobiles, Paula, think of the movie.
Paula: I was trying to think of the movie. I'm not a guy. I don't remember all those movie things. You wanted $500 a month.
Jeff: A month.
Paula: If you took your $34 class, the course that you did, you have to sell 14 a month to get that 500.
Jeff: Yes, or if I'm selling it on my own personal site, I'm probably going to sell it for $200. I only have to sell two to three of those a month to get there. Let's make it even simpler. How could you make a hundred dollars a day? Pretty simple. Have you ever heard of a place called Uber? Have you ever heard of any of the food delivery sites? You could do that. Very simple. You don't have to create anything. Something's out there already. It's not the long-term solution because I don't want to be doing that nonstop because It's a never-ending process.
I can't get to passive income that way, but I can train my brain to go, how can I get what I want without thinking that it'll never happen, or thinking that oh, this is too hard to do, and I don't want to do it or whatever, or I have to create this course. You don't have to create this course. All you have to do is just do something that pays for those three things that we're trying to accomplish.
Paula: If you think about just what you said about Uber, if I have credit card debt, if I work Uber Saturdays and Sundays and I know that you're like, "I can't because I don't have any free time," whatever. If you did that for a year, maybe you could be out of debt.
Jeff: Yes, You have 168 hours a week. Let's say you worked 40 hours a week. You sleep, let's say the same. That's 80 hours a week. What are you doing with the other 40 or 50 hours?
Paula: Okay, I'm going to be my daughter right now, who says, "But mom, I can't. Who's going to watch my kids?"
Jeff: Okay.
Paula: What do you tell her? She's going to kill me for saying that.
Jeff: Figure it out. If you don't have somebody to watch your kids, what can you do while you're watching your kids? Because you're not just sitting there in front of them nonstop. You're doing other things while your kids are doing their thing because it's a little creepy if you're just sitting there watching your kids every minute of the day. There's going to be something else that you're sitting there watching T.V, you're reading a magazine or whatever. Could you not peel off 10 hours, let's say throughout an entire week to focus one hour or two hours a day on something that generates revenue?
If you can't leave the house, what else can you do? Over the years as I was building out Freedom Day, I started experimenting with a lot of different things. When I first started my business, we weren't making a whole lot of money. We were transitioning to a wealth management practice. For the first six months, no money was coming in, and I had to figure out ways to make money. I was literally getting up in the morning driving Uber. I would deliver food at night. I'd work during the day. After a while, I was like, "Okay, I don't want to do that anymore.
What else can I do?" If you have some skill, if you can be an administrative assistant, you can go on to upwork.com. My virtual assistant who I've had for three years now is a mother of four in the Philippines. I work with Monica. Monica runs my podcast. She runs a lot of the stuff behind the scenes. She books guests for my show. That's what she does for a living and stays at home with her kids and takes care of her kids. If they go on vacation, she just takes her computer with her and, and we work together that way. There's a bazillion ways to make money in this world.
Paula: You should do a course on that. A bazillion ways to make money in this world, there's your title.
Jeff: A bazillion ways that-- there's just a never-ending amount of ways. Google, or even better learn ChatGPT and become an expert in ChatGPT because there are tons of businesses that are looking for help in that way. If it was me eight years ago when we were first starting the businesses, and I was looking for ways to make money and ChatGPT had been around at that time, I would've been banging out articles for clients all day long. I used to hire people to write articles for my blogs. I don't anymore because I literally can crank out 20 blogs in a week, for four different blogs that I have.
I used ChatGPT. I use it to flesh out the articles. I'll go in there and say, "Hey, I want to write an article about," whatever, "Underwater basket weaving ChatGPT write me a 1,500 world SEO optimized article on underwater basket weaving. Focus on these three areas." Boom. Done. Hit enter. It'll spit out probably about 800 to 900 words because it never gives you the full 1,500. I take that, go over it, look at what's in there, make some changes to it, run it through Grammarly to clean up the grammar and plug it into my blog site.
Jon: I actually took an underwater basket weaving senior in college. There you go.
Jeff: There was somebody, I could have stole the course.
Paula: Doesn't surprise me. You are just a wealth of knowledge. I so much appreciate you spending time with us today.
Jeff: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Paula: How does somebody get ahold of you if they want to further this conversation?
Jeff: If you're on LinkedIn, just look me up on LinkedIn. That's usually a way to get ahold of me pretty easily. The other is to go to my YouTube channel, just search under Freedom Day with Jeff Kikel, Jeff, K-I-K-E-L. That's where all the Freedom Day information is going up. All the thought processes and everything are going up on there right now because We're really focusing on the channel.
Paula: Yes, I think I have to go check it out. Just a great source of information. I think it's because you think outside of the box, you're not thinking that traditional nine-to-five job.
Jeff: I will say there's a playlist on the site that is-- it's called the top 10 books that help me get to my Freedom Day. I went in there, and I laid out the top 10 books that I really feel helped me get to where I was, that helped me retrain my brain. I'm now putting up one every couple days of I gave you the whole list, and now I'm giving individual book reviews of each of those. That's a starting place on how to retrain your brain a little bit.
Paula: I will check that out.
Jeff: Please do.
Paula: Thank you so much. I've learned so much from you today. I really appreciate you.
Jeff: Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for inviting me on the show.
Paula: Oh, you're welcome. I definitely think we have to have you back. I really do. If anybody wants to get ahold of me, they can reach me at paula@paulachristine.com or check out my website @paulachristine.com. Thanks again, Jeff.
Jeff: You're very welcome. Thank you.