💵 The average is $885. The median is $200.

After years of buying courses that didn't work, I ended up with something almost embarrassingly plain. One link. One system. One hour a day. If it took more than three steps, I stopped teaching it.

I wish someone had handed me that on day one instead of letting me spend years finding it the hard way.

By the end of this you'll:

Let me give you the real figures before anything else, because most people in this business won't.

Forbes puts the average side income at around $885 a month. That number is close to useless. The median – the middle person, the one you're more likely to resemble – sits nearer $200 a month. The average gets dragged upward by a handful of people doing very well.

Two hundred dollars a month. That's the honest picture. For some people that isn't worth the bother, and if that's you, you can stop reading with my blessing. For others it's the gap between comfortable and tight.

The same reporting found about three quarters of people doing this spend under ten hours a week on it. That's the range to plan around. My own one hour a day was my choice, not a requirement, and it came years after I started.

Here's the part that surprised me. Kiplinger reports that people who start a business at 50 are roughly twice as likely to succeed as someone starting at 30, and that the odds keep improving for a good while after that.

Now, that research is about businesses generally, not specifically the sort of small online thing we're talking about here. I'm not going to tell you it transfers cleanly. But the reason behind it does travel. We've already made the expensive mistakes. We can spot someone overselling us. And we're not trying to impress anybody.

AARP has a plain guide to starting a side hustle after 50 if you want to see the range of what people actually do.

The thing that stops most people isn't the work. It's not knowing which of the forty things to do first.

So here's one, and it costs nothing.

→ If you're ready to start, work through the first lesson of A List of Your Own this weekend. The first three lessons are free, and they're there to give you a feel for whether online marketing is something you actually want to do.

It's my own course, so weigh that accordingly. Here's the whole deal, plainly. The first three lessons are free and cost you nothing but your email address. If you want the rest, it's seventeen dollars, once. Not seventeen a month, and not seventeen now with the real course sold to you later.

That last part is why I built it the way I did. Nearly every program I bought over the years had extras. The upsell at checkout, the coaching tier, the tool you apparently couldn't do it without. I got roped into plenty of them, and it's the main reason I spent so much and had so little to show for it.

Skip it if you already have a list and know what you're doing with it, or if email isn't where you want to spend your time. And if you get to the end of lesson three and decide it's not for you, that's a fine outcome, and you'll have learned something real about what you don't want.

Why a list, out of everything you could start? Because it's the closest thing to yours in this business. Social accounts get suspended and the rules change without warning. A list of people who asked to hear from you travels with you, even if you change everything else.

Realistically: it's slow at the start, the first dollar feels stranger than you'd expect, and it builds from there or it doesn't. The passive part comes last, if it comes at all. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

If you don't, nothing bad happens. You'll be where you are now, which for a lot of people is fine.

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If lesson one isn't for this weekend, my Safe Online Income Action Guide is a free download you can keep for when it is. Nothing to buy, yours to download and keep.

This is one of my free guides. There is nothing to buy, and it is yours to download and keep.

See You at the Bank 💰
Bob

A short story from my place – years on the road, and the slow honest search for a way home. No sales in it.