12 interesting ways people are making money online with their knowledge

Ever since I first used the Internet in the early nineties, I’ve been interested in earning money online.

I’ve dabbled in many ways, from selling products to making affiliate commissions, but I’ve always loved the opportunities for sharing my knowledge with people who are willing to pay for it.

I still find it fascinating that you can have people willingly pay you for your knowledge on a topic, even if you are not an expert, and have not been formally schooled in that thing.

I have earned a great living coaching hundreds, while living abroad, on skills I taught myself as a freelancer.

I have coached, sold courses, books and been on live workshops. But I am continually excited by all the other opportunities that the web (and its users and innovators) is providing for anyone willing to teach, guide, coach, consult and help.

Some of the following I have tried and loved, and many I am considering for the next phase in my coaching business.

Through my own research, being a student on courses and talking with others, I am seeing incredible success and wealth being generated from these strategies.

Maybe they can inspire you to use your knowledge in a lucrative way. What’s exciting is that you don’t need to be a genius or hold formal qualifications to guide others who need your help.

Some people might only be a few steps behind you who are willing to have you show them what to do — and pay you well for it.

Here are some interesting ways you can monetise your knowledge and experience in no particular order:

One-to-one coaching

This was a life-saver for me when I first started out coaching in 2014. I’d been slammed with a massive tax bill while living in Vietnam and found myself in the dire situation of having to find around $8,000 within two weeks.

I turned to coach people through Skype even though I was nervous and didn’t feel ready. The great thing about coaching people was that you can receive the full payment in advance, whether it’s for a month or more. You will have to put in the work to close those sales, but once you get going and demonstrate you can help people, you will build up momentum, confidence and income fast.

Coaching has been one of the best things I could have decided to do. It’s hugely fulfilling to see people have break-throughs and see their lives change first-hand.

Tutoring through the web is also a good option for a slightly different strain of teaching from coaching, like teaching English or guitar through a site like Learningfy.

Online course launches

Rather than making an online course available year-round, I’m seeing people limiting the availability of online courses to a few days at a time. This creates urgency, to encourage the buyer, and often massively increases sales for the year.

I’ve seen people (mere mortals, who are not celebrities) make over a million dollars for a single launch and do it all over again twice in a year.

See: Jeff Walker

Monthly premium memberships

Obviously, there are many iterations of all the examples I’m using, but one of the ways I’ve seen people monetise their expertise is through premium ‘inner circle’ membership groups.

This allows subscribers who are willing to pay, say $60 per month, for additional content like weekly live calls, interviews with special guests, accountability through other members, a private chat forum, and so on.

If you can pull in hundreds of premium members over time to tune in to whatever extra content you want to provide, it starts to add up into an above-average income.

See: Lewis Howes

Webinars

Webinars, or online seminars, are streams, videos or screencasts broadcasted at certain times that users can tune into. I’ve seen paid webinars joined by hundreds of people when marketed well. That’s tens of thousands of dollars for you for an hour of your time.

They can be paid for, or free, and often lead to additional ‘upsell’ (or ‘downsell’) sales of other products, once the audience has received, say, an hour of value during the seminar.

People love the live component of webinars, and there’s often an opportunity to do live Q+As for listeners.

You might, for example, host an hour free class on a topic, and then encourage listeners to buy your book, course or take you on as a coach. So, even if the webinar was free, you generate lots of sales from happy students who received plenty of initial value.

Paid reports or booklets

Say you have an email list of subscribers and you have some knowledge in a niche area, like trading bitcoin, painting, social media marketing, or metal detecting.

You could sell a subscription or one-off reports or booklets on a topic that helps your subscribers. You could put in your own extra research, or just share some useful points or a ‘cheat-sheet’ on a specific issue.

If you can help someone make money, improve their relationships, build their business or improve their well-being in some way, people will pay for it.

Regular niche reports, mini-courses, audios, or ebooks are a way to do this, and they don’t need to take as long as writing an entire book to do it.

You might even create a paid email newsletter subscription, providing exclusive content within the regular email newsletter itself for a monthly fee.

There is no end to how many of these you could sell. The more your subscriber-ship grows, the more sales you can make.

See: Altucher Report

Mastermind groups

You can bring people who are willing to pay more for access to your insights into a Mastermind group. People also pay to join a club in which there are other members who they can network with.

It can be a premium get-together of any kind, and any name, where knowledge is shared for the mutual benefit of the group. I’m talking about bigger ticket pricing, whereby members pay you $1000 or more per month to be part of this elite group.

If you are knowledgeable in a particular area and can genuinely help others get to where you are, you can stand to earn very well from these higher-level groups.

You could structure it however you like, from a limited closer-knit higher-price group, whereby members get closer attention, to a larger, even limitless group.

See: Dean Graziosi and Brendan Burchard

Group coaching

Similar to masterminds, group coaching is a good option for people who might not be able to pay for your one-to-one coaching and will settle for spending a bit less to be part of a live online group or hangout that you regularly teach, support and hold accountable for taking actions to change and grow.

Online teaching via third parties

I’ve seen people making a great living by making videos for a third-party course and teaching sites like Udemy, CreativeLive and Skillshare.

Because these sites already have an active marketing setup and following, you need only record and upload your course to start seeing students enrolling in them.

Online school or university

I’ve seen more accomplished coaches and teachers build substantial collections of classes around particular topics that they can sell pieces of — or in full.

For example, Grant Cardone’s online university sells access to the whole suite of his sales training videos and resources for $5,000 and upwards, for a year’s access. He also sells individual modules.

See: Grant Cardone University

‘Deep-dive’ coaching workshops

Obviously, this is just an example and can be tweaked in your own way: but I’ve seen interesting twists on online group coaching, like a launch for an entire month of daily hour-long+ live workshop sessions for $97 each.

The teacher here had a reasonably decent-sized following and email list, which helped, but it allowed a higher number of students to be involved and sold on a generous deal.

Recording all the live sessions also allowed the coach to repackage the sessions into courses to sell at the same price point later.

See: Steve Pavlina’s 30-day Abundance Integration Deep-Dive

Crowd-sourced product launches

If your business is oriented around physical products that regularly get updated — or new ones created and produced — you could use a crowdfunded campaign through something like Kickstarter or Indiegogo to generate funds with a deadline.

You could, for example, write a sample of a book, post and promote it, attract funds from enthusiastic supporters, complete the book, and then share it, with or without extra bonuses, depending on how much a contributor paid.

See: ‘Unsolicited Advice’ book and others, by Adam J. Kurz.

Patreon monthly funding

The website: Patreon (and others like it) is a place to earn money from supporters of your work and ideas consistently. You can request donation payments for the content, work and teaching you currently provide, or you can provide additional, premium, bonus content to those who pay you, especially those who pay you extra ‘premium’ weekly or monthly payments.

Like so many other potential sources of online income for your knowledge, the amount you earn is only limited by your creativity and hard work.

See: (previously) Jordan Peterson and Philip DeFranco.

This is an open post, and I know I have not included all the options. If you know of — or have — any other ideas for generating income online using your experience, skills and knowledge, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

If you have inquiries about starting or growing your coaching business, I may be able to help take you to another level.

Do contact me about that here.

If you have 10.9 seconds, I’d love to hear what you think, in the comments below.

What makes you come alive?