Family: If I don’t earn each week, then people don’t eat.

Fortunately, we have never been in the position where we haven’t been able to buy food.

There are three reasons for that. If you want to earn a reliable online income, then you need to make sure that you embrace these three factors for success as well.

1. Be Flexible and Creative

Things change fast, especially online. What works now will not work 60 days from now. That means you have to be flexible in how you reach your goal of a reliable online income, and when you get there, you have to be ready to shift on a moment’s notice in order to keep that income consistent.

Shift to what? Well, that is why you need to be creative. You need to think outside the box. You need to focus on your customer and their needs. How can you help them more? How can you better serve their needs?

For example, I started in the traffic exchange world. I built a site with over 200,000 members because I didn’t try to copy what other traffic exchanges were doing. Instead, I focused on what the customers wanted and how I could deliver that to them. They wanted signups and sales, not a traffic exchange.

Flexible, creative, and focused on the customers you serve.

2. Always Be Learning

Creativity comes from learning. You can’t be creative unless you have a lot of information milling around inside your head. You have to feed that information into your brain through continuous learning.

Often, when I am coaching beginning email marketers, they struggle with what to say in their emails. I tell them that they need to share useful content with their list, not just try to sell them things. However, how can you write useful content when you are not learning anything new? You can’t. If you don’t feel like you have anything to say to your audience, then the answer is to read more. The more you learn, the more you have to share.

If you are just starting out, then you should be reading, watching, or listening to experts in marketing for at least 1 hour each day. I regularly clock 2 or 3 hours of learning per day by listening to books, podcasts, and videos while I am driving (pre-pandemic) or working at my desk. Sometimes I pause what I am listening to to take notes on what was being said.

Learning comes from reading and taking in information, but it also comes from practicing. You have to DO in order to have the information really stick. You can take a copy-writing course to get better at writing emails, but unless you apply it by actually writing and seeing the response you get, it won’t do any good. I have more emails in my head than I can ever write and it causes no stress to write a piece of content like this because I have done it thousands of times.

Learn something new every day and put that learning into action.

3. Have an Audience

I hammer this into people’s heads because in the online world, everything else is irrelevant without an audience that supports you. If you don’t have a group of people who know, like, and trust you … you will never have reliable income.

In the last 6 months, I have launched 3 new products and websites. Every single one of those launches was successful and profitable. I am not trying to impress you. I am trying to impress upon you that the reason I could do that was because I had built an audience of people who know, like, and trust me.

When I launch a site or a product, I know that hundreds, or even thousands, of them will join the site and many will promote the launch, because I have a huge email list.

An audience makes reliable and consistent income possible.