What are we focusing on?

Kyle: We are going to be talking more generally to people who might not necessarily have a business already, they might be a salaried worker and now they’re at home, working from home and have extra time.

Or they’re being furloughed and they have a lot of extra time or for whatever reason are not working there they have time and maybe not as much direction as they’d like at the moment.

We thought it’d be useful to focus on these people and I know there’s a lot of them out there.

Harms: It could also be somebody who is now working from home and there’s not as much work to do, so maybe you spend the first four hours of the day working and then just twiddling your thumbs. 

And you want to be productive, you’re bored of Netflix, Amazon Prime, games, whereas now you’re saying I want to try something else. I’m just over this one-week, two-week relaxation period.

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Kyle: What can I do?

I want to come out of this having done something or with the new stream of income, new business or whatever it is.

Harms: The focus now is if you’ve got time whatever the reason is for that case, we want to help you focus on income generation online. 

Imagine there was no lockdown but something happened in the world or you may have lost your job or you’ve gone part time, you would go get a side income.

You’d go get a side job.

It could be a part-time job. It could be working for somebody who has got a business. 

There are lots of things you can do on the side but that still requires you to leave your house and do something in a physical manner.

You can’t get a job now in a café. Hospitality is one of the most common ways to just jump in and out of a job, restaurant, bars.

You may be thinking, but I could be a delivery driver, I could help out in the NHS and the health system, etcetera but the other risk there is the coronavirus going on. 

So you may not want to subject yourself to that risk.

I think what everybody’s doing in that industry is amazing, but somebody who has not been in that industry, they’re thinking the safest thing for me to do is stay isolated, stay at home, but what can I do now with that additional time completely online?

Kyle you’ve put together a cracking list of things we’re going to focus on in this guide, which only requires you to be online with Wi-Fi connection and a laptop is that correct?

Kyle: Yes, I’ve put together a list of a hundred different ideas or one hundred different services you can use, places where you can sell your skills, you can sell your time, or sell stuff in your house to start generating an extra income. 

Some of them and the ones we’re going to be discussing require no special skills at all.

Anyone can do them as long as you’ve got a computer and the Internet, and then we’re going to be moving more into professional skill focused additional incomes and then capping the end of this guide with creative, focused as well. 

There’s going to be a range of different things because everyone is going to have different requirements and skill levels.

Harms: What we’re not doing in this guide, which is where our passion is and what we love to do is we are not talking about is building out a complete online business.

We spoke about building a business, audience, tribe, offer, network. Under this model system that we call the BATON model. 

Now that is a marketing and online business creating infrastructure which can plug an idea into.

Whereas this we’re taking a step back from that and just saying right, we’re in this strange scenario which is lockdown so we need to get as many ideas across to you as possible. 

That list Kyle has put together it’s about 102 different ways and Kyle has ranked it in a specific way.

Kyle: On the left is the name of the service or the name of a place where you can generate income. 

I’ve categorised them by different types by locations, some are UK only, some are US only. The vast majority can be done anywhere it doesn’t matter where you are and then I’ve got the pay rate how much they pay, as some of these things are a dollar for completing a survey for example.

Whereas other ones are like recording an audiobook which will pay thousands of pounds or thousands of dollars. 

We have different pricing structures and then I’ve also categorised them by how much time and effort, and skill is required to get into them.

Generally you will find the easier ones, the ones that don’t require specialised skills will pay less. Finally I have a column called scalability. This is related to what Harms was just talking about, we are not talking about building a complete business of your own, we are talking about ways to generate an income. 

Ways to get cash in the door now.

Some of these, quite a few of these on the list if you start doing them today you’d make your first pound or dollar today. 

They pay immediately, whereas if you are setting up a business from scratch that’s very unlikely to happen, it could happen, but it is very unlikely.

Harms: Then you’re looking at a business lead in time, the preparation, the creation, the lens collection and everything we spoke about in the BATON model within the industry and infrastructure.

Kyle: There’s going to be a balance, we’ve got some things which you can do right now and you’ll be paid by the end of the day.

They are not going to be scalable, they’re not like building a business. 

We have one and done, which is you do it now you get paid. 

We have the next level up which I call time constraint, which is basically for each hour you put in you get paid for that hour, but it’s not really a scalable business model.

Businesses ideally want to be paid without you having to put your time in.

Then it steps up from there you can build up your own brand and your own profile online, that’s the next level up, and then from there potential businesses. 

So activities you can start now, this week, which can then turn into a business moving forward.

The final level are activities which can become an entirely passive income they’re going to require a bit more time and effort, but then you could be generating money from this or income from this for years to come, without additional effort.

They’re all broken down in different categories and we’re going to be basically reviewing, surveying all of these different options for you to generate cash online now. 

Starting with these really easy ones which you can do now you can get paid by PayPal by the end of the day and then moving slowly into more complex, more time consuming, more skill-based activities which could become the foundation of the business.

Harms: What that will allow you to do is start to work through the list and maybe pick and mix, use this week as a pick and mix to say try that. 

Is it something I can see myself doing for the lockdown period and then come and ask Kyle and I questions on it.

Kyle: It is a pick and mix but we’re going to try and give you some commentary because if you’re just given a hundred or 500 different options that is too much. 

We’re going to try to give some commentary, trying to give you some guidance which ones are worthwhile which ones are maybe not as worthwhile, again depending on your situation, and if there are certain questions people are having we can find experts in particular niches, in particular business practices and try and get them on the show.

Why does an online business get a bad rep?

Harms: We wanted to give you a broad understanding of online business.

I thought the best way to do that and when Kyle and I were prepping our notes for this section, is to discuss very much why online business has a bad reputation.

Why do people think online business and think, oh no that’s not for me, or that leaves a feeling of uncomfortableness when the conversation around online business occurs. 

Even so much to say I have an online business and people look at you a bit strange like is that even a thing?

Is that even a proper professional or workspace?

They just don’t understand it. It can have a bad rep for a few different reasons, one is the fact that there is a lack of understanding here.

We’ve got three or four key points, but we can talk around those points. 

Kyle, why do you think online business has a bad rep? Because you’ve been doing this for a long time.

Kyle: Following on from what you’ve said there’s a lot of get rich quick schemes, there is a lot get rich quick mentality in the online business world.

A lot of the advertising you see a lot of the time online businesses talk about it will often be, here I am in my garage with my Lamborghini, or here I am in my $4 million home with my beautiful wife. I did all this online, I did drop shipping or I built an empire using Kindle books or I sell courses, or I do social media marketing.

Whatever it is, it tends to be somebody saying online business is the fix for everything and you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams next week.

There’s a lot of BS around online marketing and unfortunately the people who are good at online marketing and very good at selling themselves and that dream. 

They’re the ones making money, the people selling that dream, however, that means a lot of people now associate online business with these get rich quick schemes, which is unfair because there is a much wider diversity of ways to generate an income online.

Harms: I agree and I think the big misconception is that online business is not a business, it doesn’t have the same characteristics as a business, it doesn’t have the same need of that kind of business understanding when creating online business.

I think that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions because that industry is info entrepreneurs, info and education, and that’s okay.

That’s great, because actually subscribing to a course or whatever it is, it’s great because ultimately it’s going to give you that level of knowledge to go start in that specific field. 

I think the challenge is that when there’s a scenario like this there’s almost a feeling of a gold rush or selling the shovels in order to go cash in on a specific thing that is happening.

But the problem with that is there is a focus on very, very niche items like setting up a book publishing Kindle e-store, setting up an e-commerce shop overnight, Amazon selling and selling things on eBay.

There’s even more of the stuff that used to work a long time ago and people are still buying into, things like domain flipping, people very much focus on hey, become an affiliate marketing superstar overnight and all of these things that are very niche, but they fundamentally miss the fact that online business is a business.

Kyle: We have drop shipping, fulfilled by Amazon. We have affiliate marketing. All of these are techniques not a business.

All of these are techniques which can work.

So yes, you can make a lot of money publishing Kindle ebooks. 

The books have to be good though. Yes, you can make money drop shipping. 

Drop shipping is, I set up an online store I sell products to the online store and it goes straight from the manufacturer straight to the customer. I don’t see the item that’s what drop shopping is.

Harms: You don’t need a distribution mechanism; the distribution is handled for you;

Kyle: It is done for you.

Drop shipping as an idea selling something which is delivered directly from the manufacturer to the customer, that’s fine. 

The problem is that that still needs a business underlying it, you need to be sourcing a product that people want, that’s high quality and then being able to market that.

All of these, fulfilled by Amazon, drop shipping, Kindle publishing etcetera all fine as techniques they are not businesses in and of themselves. 

First you need to start with the business part online business which most of these courses, most of the people you see on Instagram promise you riches, they forget about this part that they don’t tell you about.

You need a business first and then you apply these different techniques, these different tools.

Harms: I would agree and I think one of the challenges is that when somebody approaches these companies or these kinds of techniques, because there is nothing against the people saying in marketing that they’ve got a business, they’ve got to generate their own revenue and they sell this technique.

But the challenge is that sometimes when you’re wanting to build anything or create anything of value, it’s so much better and I think Kyle and I have learnt this over the years the hard way.

It is so much better to do something you’re passionate about something that you have a skill set for, something that you enjoy and that there is a market for that item rather than chase the dollar or the pound, the money at the back end of it.

What I mean by that is, the technique promises you to get rich.

The fact that you’re going to make three, four, five, £6,000 a month or some people even advertise 20, £30,000 a month selling by Amazon. Great. 

That’s okay, but are we going to enjoy doing that process because that kind of revenue generation is great, it probably is doable, but for a small percentage of people who already fundamentally understand business as a fundamental principle and online business is a fundamental principle.

So much so that they had the ability and the skill set to advertise and market to you for their particular course, so they know what they’re doing they are very good at it.

But they’re making the assumption that you also know what you’re doing in regards to this kind of business mechanism.

What I’m trying to say is chasing the money or chasing something that you can finally share your skill set with online.

Kyle: A really simple example is a T-spring. It’s basically on demand t-shirt printing and there are a whole bunch of different ones.

There are a lot of courses, a lot of people selling this business model where you custom design T-shirts and then you can sell them and make profit on each t-shirt, it is fine. 

The business model T-spring fine but the problem is you have to be a good designer first.

You need to have T-shirt designs that people actually want to buy and this was forgotten conveniently by the people who were teaching about this. 

This happened five years ago.

 The market was flooded on T-spring with people who were just rushing in because they wanted to sell T-shirts and make five, 10, $20,000 a month. 

None of them were good designers, that was the problem, so the market was flooded, it was oversaturated, people making crappy T-shirts.

Nobody was selling anything and the only people making money were those saying you should go to T-spring.

But that’s a nice simple example, there are people who are good at designing T-shirts who will make a lot of money on T-spring but that’s because they have the skills to actually build a business, rather than just using the technique of custom

Harms: T-shirt printing.

It’s the way that you’re going to generate your revenue.

That’s your idea as such, but that’s not enough. 

For us if you look at the BATON model the fact that you’re going to print well designed T-shirts will come right at the start in the business element.

We will then put that through the process of selling those T-shirts online, creating an audience, getting a desire and a raving fan base around your kind of design. 

Test that they can be sold, test there is a market for that kind of interest that you’re trying to sell to.

That’s why we feel online businesses have a bad rep but I think it’s useful for us to chat about what is online business very briefly, but also what’s the advantages of it?

And then we can talk about four key areas to focus on.

Kyle: I think you already touched on this when you said online businesses are a business, yes, we have the word online at the front but essentially it’s still a business and a business is the creation of something of value, whether it’s a product or service.

It is supplied to a market willing to pay you enough money for you to continue creating whatever that piece of value is. 

Without that unit of value, whether it’s a book, whether it’s your consultation service, whether it is stuff that you’ve made without that value that is valued by the market, the people that are going to buy it, you do not have a business.

That’s the same if you are off-line or if you’re online.

There used to be a very distinct gap back in 2000, you’d have online businesses that only sold online, and you’d have offline businesses which were brick and mortar shops. 

The two have now merged, especially most brick and mortar stores have an online presence now.

Especially nowadays we are in quarantine you’re seeing businesses that do not have the ability to sell online, or the ability to deliver online purchases. 

They are now screwed or they have ceased to exist because now people cannot leave their homes.

Increasingly online and off-line have merged. 

We spend a lot of time on our phones, even if I’m going to a coffee shop which doesn’t sell things online, how do I find a coffee shop? I use this.

When we do talk about online business we are more and more talking about just business in general, we need to remember the fundamentals of business.

Harms: The advantages then are if I were to think what benefits has it given me over time?

For me personally it was fundamental a bit more control of my time, i.e. I wasn’t the kind of personality who would like to go and commute to work, spend an hour commuting an hour coming back.

It was a case of building a mechanism so that I could wake up and walk to my office, because there are two approaches to this. 

One is building an online business where you can press play and it does things automatically which a part of the business does, but then there is also a part of the business where the creation is still required.

The monitoring is still required. 

There are two sides to the business.

Kyle: It depends on how you design it. It is the same as an off-line business. 

You can have a business that is based in an office that has staff and you as the business owner, you could have built it so that you are able to step back.

That’s just how you designed it or you could have built it so you’re needed every single day and you’re working the longest, even though you’re the business owner, same thing whether you’re online or offline.

There are certain benefits of online businesses; they tend to have lower overheads because you are not renting the space which leaves you saving a lot of money. 

Whether that’s on the rent to the electricity utilities, etcetera, that just costs money.

Online businesses tend to always get away with not having staff or being able to outsource your work and use freelancers around the world so that you can take advantage of employment arbitrage.

You can hire someone in the Philippines or in India, Vietnam who is just as good at the job but costs 10% of the price of a local worker, that is employment arbitrage.

Harms:  Because English, depending on what you’re hiring them for English is not the thing that you’re paying them for.

That’s not the process, you’re also not paying them for the creative thinking, the critical thinking, we’re paying them for a set of instructions or some technical abilities that are now universal.

This is like the online business language or the online world language, which is just technical. That’s what we are paying them for so they can be anywhere in the world.

Kyle: If I’m hiring someone to build a website or ecommerce facility I’m not going to hire them in London. 

Since it’s too expensive and you can get those skills anywhere in the world.

Connected to that is the fact that online businesses unlike off-line businesses are global. 

The first one I set up the first automatic online business I set up, most of its customers are in the US. The second largest was in Holland for some reason, and the UK was, I think, like fifth or sixth. It was down the list and it doesn’t matter.

Once you’ve set up a store online you can access anybody in the world, which is not the case if you build a coffee shop here in London.

Harms: Which coffee shops are facing that challenge at the moment, some of them are adapting, but not for revenue just for brand recognition at the moment which is the kind of stuff we spoke about last week.

How should you approach an online business?

Harms: There are four key areas to focus and create a business around.

These are four advantages, but they’re also if you reverse engineer those advantages, the focus on building the online business and I say, if you can get as many of these four the winning formula is if I get all four in place for my online business, then this is a winning formula.

Those start with number one, which colours Kyle has sort of touched upon, which is the need to be flexible and diverse.

Typically, we are all dependent on one income source, which is a salary. It could be an income source from your own particular business, think about diversification within your business.

Let’s assume that your business only sells off-line and it is a coffee shop. 

So what could an off-line coffee shop do online in order to hedge their income or diversify their income?

If I just think off the top of my head maybe they could be selling directly to customers their ground coffee beans as a service which they can sell via their shop for their e-commerce store.

That’s one way to think about diversification because if they don’t, the scenario occurs where coronavirus hits or something like this or you have three or four staff go sick overnight, it could be outside coronavirus.

Or something happens on that particular high street they close a train station so the foot traffic now diverts to another train station and no longer do you get that foot traffic for your coffee shop.

All these things are real-life scenarios, but there’s no diversification of income, it is no different to us relying on one salary and we have no other mechanism.

Try to think of online business as having a diversified income stream or income generation entering your life.

Kyle: That is mainly for the existing businesses if they have a stream of income online it allows you to add another stream of income which can be related to your core business, but it’s coming from online.

Therefore, as Harms says if something goes wrong with the off-line for whatever reason you have this continuing stream of revenue. 

The other way to think about diversification is the fact that online businesses in particular if they are structured correctly, you can have multiple online businesses.

Whereas if you set up a shop or a chain of coffee shops that is probably going to be all you’re doing.

Again depends on how you structure it because you have locations, staffing, you can hire managers, etcetera but there are a lot more moving pieces. 

Whereas once you’ve learned to set up an online business and you’ve successfully done it, doing that again and again and again and making them automatic is relatively simple compared to doing it with a physical business.

I made some courses about this. 

It teaches people how to read and write Chinese. I don’t touch that and I’m not running any ads that just trickles in money.

Not much because I’m not pushing it at the moment but I’m going to guess it’s £700 to £1,000 a month based on something I built maybe five years ago and I do not touch. 

If I want to get a chunk of money I can run a sale and do some email marketing and get a chunk of cash in.

Having a few of those businesses just running in the background is really good for diversification because if any one of them suddenly stops working, it is not the end of the world. 

You have five or six of them whereas if you have one form of income it is tricky.

Harms: Because what we don’t know now, I think the time that we are living through right now which is just crazy is yes, we could do a classic swot analysis.

What are the threats against this particular income source?

It’s really a case of it’s very difficult to know now in this strange time what the truth for it is going to be.

Yes it’s good to do some research to identify what that is. 

Let’s look at what industries as a research project have survived right now are doing quite well right now, we run a special webinar which is going on at the moment that Netflix increase their revenue by about 15 million US dollars per month just in the UK.

Some businesses benefit during this time, whereas some industries have completely lost income. I think that’s where we want you to be thinking about an online business as an advantage, but also a focus area.

How can I have a diversified range of online revenue streams?

No doubt there will be some new ideas and businesses that weren’t necessarily timed for a time like this because a lot of business success is down to the timing element of it.

When is it launched?

When is it launched into a market that is ready for it?

Virtual reality for example maybe not quite right at the moment.

If you look at VR now if there was a lead-in time for what’s happening right now, VR probably is really well placed as a product for what’s happening right now. I guess it just wasn’t an adoption period that was happening.

New ideas will also form that’s number one.

Number one is the need to focus on flexibility and diversification, and that is a great example blog of 10 ideas you get started with straightaway. 

Just to start to understand how other businesses are operating and good case studies.

What is number two on the list ?

Kyle: Is probably the main benefit of an online business compared to an offline business.

We talked about how they are very similar but the main thing with online business is that your overheads, your costs of running the business on a day-to-day basis are very low. 

Again you do not have to rent a building, you do not necessarily have to have staff, your main upfront course is going to be a laptop and your Internet connection.

From there hosting a website we are talking about £50 a year or so, we are talking about very low costs compared to having a physical location.

This gives us a massive amount of flexibility which is what you talked about.

If I’m paying £2,000 a month to rent a location I need to be making at least £2,000 a month to be covering that straight out the door. 

If I’m not making £2,000, I cannot cover my rent and my business is going to be at a loss very quickly.

With an online business, you don’t have the overhead issues.

Even if your sales get completely trumped because of what is going on. 

You’re not hemorrhaging money; you’re not losing money because you’re not renting space and you’re not spending a lot of money just keeping the doors open.

Harms: It becomes a thing of who can survive the longest and an online business will out survive a company that has got to pay rent, staff, bills, certain taxes, certain rates depending on where they’re based in the world.

So, that is a challenge.

All of these things add up, and for a small to medium size business this can be serious money.

There are people renting office spaces who may not get a discount and these office spaces will cost five 10, 15, £20,000 a month depending on what the location is. 

If we were brought up in the world of online business it can sometimes be absurd to us that somebody is paying 20, £30,000 a month for an online off-line office space.

I think it’s crazy considering you may have maybe not different results, but you can certainly have a business that can survive for a long time because all we have to cut, say, for example, we looked at our online business.

We may just have to cut it if we lost all of our income from some subscription services. 

Maybe some expensive ones that cost £200 a month, maybe trim down on advertising costs. 

But again, that’s a choice that we spend money on.

Kyle: We would cut them and then restart them in a few months’ time.

Whereas if you are locked into a lease, if you’ve got a two-year, three-year commercial lease that’s not going to be possible.

We would just go on a website, click a few buttons and would cancel the subscription, we would rejoin in a few months’ time and most online services are like that.

For online businesses in general, the overheads are much, much, much lower.

Harms: There are no difficult conversations with another human being explaining why you can’t pay your rent, why you can’t pay staff members and all that stuff that goes into an offline business. 

We are just talking really very much around the advantage of online business, plus the focus on what it should be.

If you’ve got an online business and number one, it’s diverse, it’s flexible and now number two you’ve got low overheads.

These are two good solid components for you to think about.

If I’ve got both of those I’m already at an advantage in building my online business depending on where I’m focusing.

Kyle: A good way to think about this now if you are in the middle of this crisis as we all are, right now would you go and set up an off-line business?

As a thought experiment that would be absolutely crazy, raising money to go out and set up an off-line business even if everything opens up right now and people start shopping, going out again.

The idea of spending a couple hundred thousand pounds to set up a physical location right now after what we’ve just seen in the last month, and what we’re going to see over the next few months just seems crazy. 

Absolutely crazy to me personally.

Maybe some people are very excited to go and start new coffee shops after this, but I would not be that enthusiastic.

Harms: Trying to get bank lending on that now as well, that’s also going to be a challenging factor. 

No doubt we are going to see some government encouragement of stimulus for the relaunch of off-line companies, there’s no doubt.

Kyle:  Relaunch of the economy.

Harms: And off-line is a large part of that.

If you look at some industries we have no choice but we are not talking about all industries here, we’re talking about yourself and adding another income stream to your life.

That’s really the focus here.

It could be as you go forward and things start to recover now I need to focus on getting an online business.

Do consider these four things when building that.

Number three is an overreliance that businesses have on a need for face-to-face interaction.

If you look at the previous examples of yoga classes, coaches, educators and personal trainers. The entire business model is built on a face-to-face interaction.

That’s where the overreliance comes in, now we are not saying eradicate or completely remove face-to-face as we get through this time.

What we are saying is do not rely on this 100%, have another mechanism within your business if it exists already, or if you are thinking about creating a business think about how you can attach an online mechanism where there is not hundred percent reliance on face-to-face.

Because some businesses are like that they just do not operate without face-to-face interaction. Or in the past they could have had an option to have an online system they just chose not to.

Kyle: Even ignoring things like coronavirus, face to face means every time you meet somebody or a physical interaction it’s always going to take that same amount of time and you can only see that person or that group of people.

It is inherently or mathematically less scalable than being able to do this online.

We talked about instead of providing a yoga class to 10 people every single Wednesday afternoon, you could provide the yoga class to 100 people or 500 people.

Joe Wicks for example he’s doing PE classes for kids. If he was going to schools around the country and doing the classes for around 30 or 50 kids.

Because of his online reach because he has built this platform, he is now doing PE classes with the nation’s youth in the UK. You can’t get that scalability if you are relying on face-to-face interactions.

Doesn’t mean you don’t do it just means face-to-face becomes even more special; it becomes something you charge a lot more for in the future. 

Or it’s meetings only for extremely strategic and important topics and the rest of the time you focus on scalability getting to a lot of people.

And you can do that online, a lot easier.

Harms: What I’m seeing at the moment online and in terms of discussion forums and certain articles is now it’s literally the opportunity for them to change the education system for the better.

It is almost a prehistoric system that is currently operating, but there is now an opportunity in the discussion to rework the education system. 

And this is not discrediting teachers but you’ve got a brand, a skill set and sharing it online and in a morning can reach millions of kids.

Kyle: Joe Wicks the nation’s PE teacher.

Harms: II think that’s almost the way, there’s lots of discussion on which way the education system should evolve, but there is now an opportunity to build an online business in order to support the current education infrastructure in place.

That’s the message I was trying to get across.

Joe Wicks won’t be the only person because for every person who likes Joe Wicks there will be somebody who maybe doesn’t like his technique or disagrees with his PE philosophy. 

Kyle: I think the world of work in general is also going to change as there have been so many different businesses saying, you can’t do remote work you need to be in the office. 

Now all employees know, well we survived the last however months it’s going to be, and the business kept going.

I think flexible working in general is going to become more of a thing after this.

The reliance on face-to-face interaction will decrease and it will happen for only the most important things. 

Harms: I agree and it’s an exciting thing because think about how much time is getting saved for everybody, it’s an incredible amount of time. Think of meetings as well.

We’ve discussed three things so far which are essentially advantages of an online business, but also three things that you should have integrated or allowed to be the base of your online business in order for it to be a winning formula.

Kyle: The last one I would say this is more unique to online than off-line.

Online we tend to use our personal brand, we tend to be more human than if we are focusing purely off-line. 

Off-line you will call a company, you won’t necessarily know who you are talking to in the company, whereas online because the tools are at your disposal now, video, social media, the ways we reach out to people online it tends to be more person-to-person.

For example LinkedIn which is the largest professional social network it’s not about companies doing business with companies.

It’s about people in companies connecting with other people. It’s peer-to-peer, person-to-person, and I think online allows us to build this personal brand.

It’s who we are, it allows us to put ourselves out there as an expert in our particular field and become known for what we do.

Whereas previously would have to wait for more traditional media outlets like tv, newspaper or maybe a publishing house to validate you are important.

That’s not the case now, we have the platform now and the older publishing mediums like newspapers are slipping, they’re not as important anymore, they’re not the gatekeeper. 

They’re not the people who get to decide who is important and who is worth listening to.

Because now we all have this platform or multiple platforms where we can get our voice heard.

I think online really opens up a lot of opportunities there.

Harms: There are some extremely talented people who emerge online. 

You only have to search Instagram for five minutes to find some remarkable skills out there, especially with the creative and artistic stuff.

Now you’ve got such a powerful medium for example, the Sun paper coming out and saying hey guys please buy our paper. Which is a big wake-up call for everybody to say has the tide turned?

It’s certainly a great time, I agree with Kyle just to put yourself out there and start to receive those opportunities that are available.

You don’t have to wait for anybody to put us on.

There’s no barrier to entry. There is no please can you put us in this paper or begging to get on a newspaper article,

Kyle: Or please publish my book.

Harms: Also there is a thing which doesn’t really get discussed, which is when you are actually doing something for these mediums your voice is also filtered.

In the sense that you know you are censored or you can’t necessarily say certain things which social media is also now potentially going that way, in terms of censorship and not being able say what you want to say.

Whereas certain platforms i.e. your own website, you can say what you want, you can do what you want.

Kyle: Please use that power for good though it swings both ways.

Harms: But Kyle and I are very adamant on this as well, which is using a platform to spread the good and the positivity and the amazing things like the grandma passing down those pasta recipes.

That is an amazing example of using the power for good for sure.

Kyle: Or providing PE lessons for example these are good uses, but yes these platforms can also be abused.

Harms: Spread the love across the world with these things, the skills that you have. 

I think that’s where our discussion is, do you have a skill or service that the online world needs. If yes, now is a great time to share it.

Kyle: Looping that back to what we’re going to be talking about in this guide by going out there and sharing your expertise by coming from this place of giving value from your skills, or creativity or whatever is, there are ways to generate an income online.

That’s what the focus of this section is going to be.

Harms: Hopefully now you feel like actually online business is a business and there is a lot to learn in this, but I’m seeing it now as a business rather than this unique technique which is maybe the silver bullet, the magic pill, which is going to make me rich overnight.

That’s not necessarily going to be the case.

Then we focused on what an online business is, then finally the four advantages. 

But also, if you reverse engineer those advantages are four key things you should build your online business around.

We’ve also shared with you the big list of income generation during lockdown, it is a massive list 102 items on there are different and these are techniques.

These are different techniques and areas in which you can generate revenue.

They’re ranked in different ways which Kyle discussed.

What you have learned so far:

• 4 areas your online business should focus on for success
• Can you actually make money online?
• How easy is it to make money online?
• What are the different ways to make money online?
• Why does an online business have a bad rep?
• What will be the focus of this week on the bbo.show?
• Plus more

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