In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we’re gonna talk to Graham Cochrane about how you can build a passive stream of income utilizing YouTube.
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In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we’re gonna talk to Graham Cochrane about how you can build a passive stream of income utilizing YouTube.
In this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna talk to Graham Cochrane about how you can build a passive stream of income utilizing YouTube.
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Transcript
On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna talk to Graham Cochran about how you can build a passive stream of income utilizing YouTube.
What's up everybody? And welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And today on the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna be talking to Graham Cochran about how you can build a passive stream of income by building up a YouTube channel. If you guys have any questions, make sure you hit us up on Instagram.
Talk Cat Master Money Co. And follow us on Spotify, apple Podcast, whatever podcast player you love, listening to this podcast tune. If you want to help out the show, leave a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And thank you guys so much for leaving those five star ratings and reviews.
They are absolutely amazing. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you that have left a review. I read every single one of them, so thank you so much for doing that. Now today, I'm really, really excited to invite Graham Cochran here on the show because what we are gonna be talking about is how you can build up a passive stream of income utilizing.
YouTube and we're gonna talk through a bunch of different things on this episode because a lot of people have asked me different ways that they could build up passive income streams. So this is one where Graham has done this. He's built a million dollar business by utilizing YouTube. So I wanted to bring him on so he can kind of explain the process of how you can K think through this, and you don't have to have a big channel.
So he talks about that and he talks through how you don't have to have a big channel, but in addition, we're gonna talk about, you know, how you can actually start a channel. How you figure out what your niche should be or what you're gonna be talking about on. Then we're gonna talk about a bunch of different monetization strategies on how you can make money with YouTube and how you can make a passive income stream with YouTube as well.
We're gonna talk about why you don't need a huge audience and how you can actually serve a smaller audience and still make money on YouTube. Why you don't have to spend a ton of time on YouTube. Graham works five hours a week and has a million dollar business, so we're gonna talk about how he does that and how he systematizes everything.
In addition, we're gonna be talking about how to give as much value as possible to your audience, what type of gear you need to start a YouTube channel, how you can compete with competitors, and how Graham actually looks at this in a very different way than most people. He doesn't see people as competitors.
He sees them as collaborators, and we'll get into that as well. And then we'll talk about some of the best ways to monetize your channel. So this is a really great episode. Graham is fantastic at building YouTube channels. He has one that has over 600,000 subscribers, and his other one has 46,000 subscribers at the time.
And we're recording this episode, but his smaller channel makes more money than the larger one. We're gonna talk about that as well. So really excited to share this with you so that you can get into this, and it's something where you can spend a couple hours per week. If you have a day job and you're trying to make passive income on the side, you can spend a couple hours a week building up a channel around something that you're interested in, something that you know, and you can really make passive income doing that.
So we're gonna talk about that with Graham. So without further ado, let's welcome Graham to the Personal Finance Podcast. So Graham, welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm happy to be here, Andrew. It turns out we're like not too far from each other in the Tampa Bay area, so I'm pumped to connect in person, man.
Exactly. And we have some amazing weather right now too, which I'm sure a lot of people will be jealous. I think it's like 73 degrees outside, which winter for us is absolutely amazing. So we are so pumped to have you on today because you are the author of how to Get Paid for What you know, and that is what a lot of our audience wants to do.
They wanna learn how to increase their income, and that is one of the pillars that we talk about on this podcast all the time, is learning how to increase your income. Whether if it's something where you don't like your day job, maybe you want to increase your income and your interest outside of your day job.
So you wanna get paid for what you know, and you want to utilize those interests to help people and to serve other people as well. So there's a bunch of different things that you can do when it comes to leveraging and increasing your income, especially online, which is something that you know really well.
And YouTube is a big one. And I wanna talk about YouTube a little bit here because you've been really successful with your YouTube channel. I mean, you have two channels, and so you've been really successful with both of those, and I would love to kind of talk some of that today. But first, before we dive into that, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Yeah, man. So these days when I'm on a plane and people say, so what do you do? I, I tell them I make YouTube videos because instantly I've tried like everything I can imagine. But that's the one where people actually pay attention and go, oh, that's cool. I used to say, I'll have online businesses, I have education companies, I do coaching.
It's like their eyes roll over the back of their heads. But when I say YouTube, they get excited. But it's interesting because it's misleading, right? And we can get into some of this, like making YouTube videos. And having a business are two different things. And there's different ways to make money on YouTube, but technically I've had two online businesses.
Two companies. One started in the music space cause I'm a musician by trade. That's what I grew up doing. Wanted to be a rockstar, tried to get a record deal. Didn't really pan out, had to get a real job. I had no plan B. So I was miserable for a few years. Like what am I gonna do with my life? And then the great recession happened in oh 8, 0 9.
Moved to Tampa, helped a buddy start a church down here. I got a job, had a baby, got a mortgage, then lost that job cuz that company ran out of money, was on food stamps for 18 months. And I'm like 26. I'm like, what am I doing with my life? Like where am I going? And it was in that weird, stressful, like the darkest night of a soul for me and my wife of like, we can't even provide that.
I got this crazy idea. I thought I would start a freelance recording business cause that was my background. I could ramp that up. And I thought if I blogged and maybe put out some YouTube videos, This is actually very ahead of its time. I didn't even realize how smart this was. Like the only smart thing I did, everything else I just grew up through the dark was, nobody knows me locally, but if I put some content out online, I could at least show up in a Google search or YouTube search and I can do remote work.
So maybe I can just sort of prove that I know what I'm doing, show my little bit of client work and hopefully they will hire me. And what ended up happening is I started a content business. People were more interested in learning from me how to do it themselves, which there's aha moment for somebody on this, this episode.
Like that is where the money is. Cuz I made good money recording and there was a point where I realized I could make way more money, scale my time more if I teach others how to do it for themselves and sell the access or the coaching or the information. And that changed my life. So I ran that company, the recording revolution, 2009.
I started it. It's still in existence today. I don't make the content for it anymore the last couple years, but for 11 years I was the face of that. Built that to a million dollar plus a year business. And then was like, I want to teach people how to do this. Whatever the thing is, they know. And so the last five plus years I've been teaching on my personal brand, Graham Cochran, how to Get Paid For What You know, which is what the book's called.
So it's fun. I feel like it's really less about the mechanics and more about, to your point, the life it allows you to create. And what you're talking about on your podcast all the time, every vehicle, every person you have on the show is trying to help you live the life you wanna live. And online business and YouTube in particular is just one vehicle to help you.
Absolutely. That's absolutely incredible that you started from food stamps going all the way up to building up that million dollar business. And you did this all through online with stuff that you already knew. And I think that's one cool thing to kind of note is that you went into something where you really knew that industry well, and you knew things surrounding that industry well, and you were able to teach that because you knew all of that stuff.
So that stuff, kind of the first thing I want to get into is when you start a channel, you gotta figure out what your niche is going to be. And so as someone is thinking through this, maybe they've never done this before, maybe they've never worked online and they're trying to figure out what niche they want to kind of get into, how do you think about that and how do you choose a niche for your YouTube channel?
Yeah, that's the question, right? Because everything else you can figure out, it's all the technical skill and most of this is really figuring out the who you're gonna serve and what pain points are you gonna help them solve. Like that's the most important thing. So it's worth spending some time like dreaming a little bit.
So I talk about this in my book, but a couple of simple exercises you can do is come up with a couple of lists, right? List one is you start selfishly and you list out everything you love to do or talk about. So like my list would include watching football, eating pizza, going to the movies, binging Star Wars, travel.
I love personal finance. I'm like super giddy. I get to be on this podcast cuz like I dork out on your show and all these kind of shows, reading investment books. Random stuff, right? And you start there because you can create businesses doing stuff that you don't care about. Like I could create a business selling toilet paper and I could have people run it, but that's not the kind of business I'm trying to build.
I wanna build a business. I don't want to exit from. I wanna build a, a business that just becomes part of my life. It takes only a few hours a week and it pays all the bills and then some. And I can take it with me wherever I go. So you might as well build a business around something you wanna talk about for the next 10 years.
Think about the next 10 years. What could I talk about and nerd out. Once you have that list, and it might be random, like again, eating pizza is random, but you can monetize almost everything on that list, if not everything. There's people that monetize eating pizza and they're crushing it. But that's the second list, which is, okay, if I look at the list of things I'm passionate about or I have some experience in or I've done before, what on that list is marketable?
Meaning what do other people care about on that list enough as well as me that they might pay to learn about or to talk to me about or nerd out about? And that's, we're gonna have to do a little bit of research and you can start in, you know, there are there Facebook groups about this stuff, like affinity groups basically are, go to Amazon.
I tell people, go to Amazon, look under the books category, typing your topic or niche and. If any books come up, there probably are, but see if there's any books by major publishers. If there's books that major publishers are publishing on this subject, you know, they've already done the research. They believe that there is at least a market for this.
They don't know if that book in particular will do well, but there's a market for this. So they've gone and done all the work for you. And then see what books are in that category and see which ones are the best sellers and see what the titles are and see what the subtitles are. And read the two to four star reviews.
Ignore the one and fives cause those are the fan boys or haters. But the two to fours that are like, this was good but didn't answer this question. Like you can learn a lot about what people in that niche are looking for just by Amazon book reviews. And it'll just give you a sense, if you wanna quickly in the privacy of your own home, figure out could I make a living talking about Star Wars?
Yeah, you could. Could I make a living teaching people how to do like woodworking? You could like anything you think about, you probably can't, but you want to know for sure that there's a market for it. And I will say this. If you see a huge market like, gosh, everyone like personal finance, like how many books on personal finance, how many talking heads, it's already covered.
That's a great sign. That means it's a really marketable niche because the more saturated the better. That means you don't have to guess if people are willing to spend money on it. That's the worst thing is you're in some crazy micro niche. It's possible I have some students and crazy micro niches crushing it, but there's a higher chance also, or an equal chance that you'll get some crazy micro niche and it's not proven yet.
Nobody's spending money in that area yet, so it's okay to have a very saturated niche and it's also, okay. The last thing will say here, and we can nerd out wherever you want to go. Don't think about this as like, what am I an expert at? Eliminate that word from your vocabulary. Think about what do I have experience with?
Who have I helped before? Maybe it was just you, like the people I help, or the person it was me 10 years ago in both of my brands. What questions did I have? Where was I stuck? Could I help that version of me from 10 years ago, five years ago, a year ago? If you just had some awesome transformation, then that's a better place to be landing when you think about this.
That is so incredibly true, and I love the actionable tips that you're giving there where you can kind of go on Amazon, look at some of the books that are actually working with major publishers, but at the same time, there are so many areas where you can really get into it. And a lot of people do worry about that oversaturation, but truly there is always ways to make that content better.
And there's always ways where you can carve out your niche within those big, big niches and so that you can be able to kind of carve your way in there. You'll have an audience and if you do it the right way and you build it the right way, you can really do a lot of cool things, especially if you're serving people.
So I know one big thing that a lot of people will ask when it comes to YouTube channels, this is the first thing that caused analysis paralysis for me. I remember this was what type of gear do I need for a YouTube channel? Because a lot of people will kind of go down this rabbit hole, and I think it's probably one of those things that, you know, you have your setup ready, you just kind of go and you hit record.
But at the same time, a lot of people are thinking through this stuff. So what kind of gear would you actually need if you've, once you find your niche, if you wanna go out there and start your channel, what kind of gear would you suggest that somebody starts with? Yeah, it's a great question. Again, I come from a technical audio background and people would ask the same question about, Hey, I wanna record my music.
What gear do I need? And they would be so fixated on the equipment and I always wanted to get them past the equipment. I'm like, bro, you could spend like pennies, or you could choose any brand, like you can use anything. All of it works. It's really about the person in the driver's seat of the car, not the car itself.
So just try to keep that in the back of your mind. Do a little bit of research, but don't be so paralyzed that you don't go make the content, because that's what matters is just getting your voice out there. The great news is two things. One, we live in the age of smartphones, right? Your smartphone in your pocket is.
A thousand times better than the camera. I started with in 2010, January, 2010, my first video uploaded. It wasn't even hd. It did not handle low light at well at all. It didn't auto. It was like awful. And that's how I started. I have a friend that says, go ugly early. Like just post. Just upload. Because no one's gonna see it cuz you have no following.
So now is the time to be ugly when no one sees it. I know you wanna show up professionally. I get that. I'm a creative too. I want it to look good. I want it to be professional, but just experiment in general. So that's a mindset thing. But the phone, dude, these phones look amazing. If you give them good lighting and they can handle low lighting pretty well.
But really, lighting is the key. My wife's a photographer. She'll tell you. Lighting is everything. So lighting and then decent audio. Not expensive, but decent. So for example, If you had an iPhone or a smartphone and then a clip on, they call him lavalier mic, a little mic that clips on your shirt, it can plug right into the bottom of your phone.
Um, and that alone, if you have a little tripod that holds your phone and you got good lighting, that alone will crush. And one of my friends is a guy named Sean Cannell. He runs a couple of YouTube channels, but think media is just. An endless resource for anything about how to make good looking video for your business or for anything.
So go to think media on YouTube and binge his videos. They're all free and he's got courses, but you could do so much with his free stuff. And he has a few videos on how to make professional looking videos on your iPhone or your smartphone. And he'll tell you like, are you already have the camera? Just get these mics.
And then he gives you a variety of ranges and then maybe this light or get in front of a window and you know there's more variety of like what the light will be like, but you can do it in front of a natural light window. That's all you need to get started. Audio is important. I will say that as a audio guy.
Like don't just use the mic on your camera even though they're good. It's just too far away. And it'll sound like the room. Like put a little $20, $50 lavalier mic that clips on your shirt and that you won't even see the cable. Just, it'll dangle down, plug into your phone. Game over. It'll look amazing. And then there's free editing software to just trim off the ends and just upload the darn thing and experiment.
I couldn't agree more. And I think for a lot of people, a lot of people, even on YouTube will argue that audio is more important than the video side just because a lot of people will click off a video if the audio isn't as good. So just investing that $50 into some simple mic, being able to actually make the audio better is fantastic.
And it's funny that you mentioned Think Media because that is exactly how I learned how to find all of the gear from my YouTube setup. So fantastic resource. And I benched through all of those to kind of figure it all out. And I think that's the one of the best ways that you can check that out as well.
And Sean is absolutely amazing as we start to do this and as we start to create content, obviously our goal is to start to make money. So how do we start to grow our channel so that we can get monetized? Yeah. So the most important thing I always say, the asset isn't your products. It, it isn't even really you, even though it kind of is in a backwards way.
Your asset is your audience. If you have an audience, if you have people that are paying attention to you. Aware of you who like you, who are familiar with you, that is where the money is, that is the asset. So audience building is your first job and it's your most important ongoing job always, because you can figure out the monetization model on the backend anytime you want.
There's a million ways to monetize, and we can talk about so of them today. But add revenue, your own products. You could write a book, you could do a live event, you could do sponsorships, you can do affiliates, you can promote other people's products and do joint ventures. There's a million ways to make money, but none of them will make you any money if you don't have any audience.
Like that is the asset. So I always say like without an audience, nothing is possible, but with an audience. Anything's possible. Whatever you're interested in or whatever opportunity comes your way. Also, and you know this as having a fantastic podcast that has so many downloads. When you have an audience, people are interested in you, Hey, what could I do for you?
Cuz they, I want to get on your podcast cuz they're looking for an audience too. So you become very likable when you have a big audience. And big doesn't have to be like huge, like you can monetize. I'll give you an example. I have two YouTube channels. Uh, the recording revolution's like over 600,000 subscribers.
My personal brand to date is like 43 or 44,000, or maybe it's 45, not nearly as big, not even a 10th of the size, right? It's not quite even a 10th of the size of the other one. But I make more money with the smaller channel than I do with a bigger one just because of the way I'm monetizing it. So size doesn't determine necessarily your money, but start with audience building.
And so the way to do that is to make content that people are already looking for. Don't be creative. Please don't be creative. Be very clear. Clarity over creativity. So you think about it, that's why it's best to start a business around, in my opinion, what you already know or around helping the you, the version of you a year or two or 10 ago.
Because then you can say, well, okay, before I lost a lot of weight and got in shape, let's say your fitness instructor before I lost a lot of weight and got in shape. Or maybe you're not even a fitness instructor, you're just in shape now. And people are like, whoa. You know, Andrew, you look great. What did you do?
Well, what did I look like before? And what were my habits before? And what was I, how was I feeling inside about my health and my body? Like what were my fears? What did I desire? What like videos were I watching? Like what products did I buy that I thought were gonna be in the magic bullet that didn't work?
Like just ask yourself the questions that you were asking. And then those are all video topics and you just start to then plug in, play a video for every single one of those questions. And Sean has a great framework for this too, cause he's strategic with videos. But it's either start with the, the top questions, do product reviews.
Do this versus this, like this strategy versus this strategy, or this brand versus this brand versus videos crush. You could do trend videos like what is trending right now in this subject, like do a video on it, because what you're doing is creating content. Again, nobody knows you exist yet, and you're attaching it to something that's a keyword that someone else is already searching for right now.
And that's how you become discovered. Nobody knows you. They're not looking for you. They're looking for the topic, and you hook onto that and it rises you up. And I'll give you a quick example. I wanted to test this with my daughter. So two years ago, she's 13 now, but when she was 11, she's like, dad, I wanna launch a YouTube channel.
And I was like, what do, what do you wanna be about? She's like, I want to do these walkthroughs of this video game as a dab. I was like, okay, you can't put your face on the video, but if you're gonna do screen recording of your video game and you're talking over it, I'm totally fine with that. And then she recorded this little screen recording thing and she's like, all right, dad, I need to make a channel.
Help me do it. So we made her a channel. We uploaded the video and she's like, what do I title it? I'm like, all right, well, tell me what the video is about. She's like, well, it's about this game roadblocks, and the game inside of that is this game, and this is the thing I'm doing. It's this type of build.
That made no sense to me, but I was like, that's what it's about. Let's title it exactly that in that order, and then we put the same type of language in the description. If you're looking to how to do X, Y, and Z and Roblox, boom, right? We upload the video, we walk away, go have lunch, come back three hours later.
Mind you, she just created her channel. She has no subscribers or followers, and one video, and we type in Roblox, whatever the game is, we type in those simple keywords. She's on the first page of results on YouTube. Within three hours with no subscribers and she was blown away and I was like, this is gonna be great for when I tell people, cause they don't believe me, right?
YouTube these days is democratized for the new user. Like they've changed the algorithm to not favor dinosaurs like me that have like 600,000 subscribers. I used to always show up number one, cuz of my subscriber size. Now they're like, it's all about relevance. If it's what people are typing in, if this person has a video on that subject, and then if they get some likes and people are leaving comments, which is just a natural, organic response to good content, then it'll only propel you further.
But it starts with just make the content, that's the conversation they're already having in their head. And you'll start to show up and then it begins. It's so true, and that's kind of how this podcast started. It was the steps that I took to kind of build wealth over time, because I started off, when I graduated from college, completely broke living paycheck to paycheck and kind of go into that process.
And that's kind of what I teach now, and it's really just what you know, already utilizing some of that and seeing what you can teach other people is so incredibly powerful. And I love that example of your daughter being able to be on that first page. And for most people listening, like that's something that, that's really cool that that happened, uh, for those keywords as well.
So that's absolutely amazing. Now, competition is a big one here. I think a lot of people worry about this, but we kind of just debunked that a little bit there. But how do you compete with bigger YouTube channels like this? What kind of content can you create to compete with those big channels? Yeah, I mean, one thing I would say is, Eliminate the word competition, from your vocabulary.
I don't believe in competitors. I believe in collaborators. So it's actually the opposite. You actually want to embrace those people that you view as competition and go make them your friend. That's how you'll grow fast. So for example, like you're in the personal finance space, like. It would be like scarcity mindset thinking to say, you know, I wanna be bigger than Graham, Stephan or any of these other people.
Like I don't wanna talk to them and I'm gonna be frustrated with what they're doing. It would be strategic to go make friends with all those people. Love what you're doing, love what you're doing. Dave Ramsey, love what you're doing. Robert Keyak, whoever it is, like make friends with them no matter how big or small love on them.
Add value to them. Just find a way to see if you can turn any of them into a potential collaborator. And that could become a friendship or even a business partnership. But that has the worst case of the best case is like they just say, Hey, let's do an episode together, or let's do a collab. And then what you're doing is hijacking their audience.
You're getting in front of their audience cuz their audience will love you and your audience will love them. And so it's a win-win. Rising tide raises all ships kind of deal. So just maybe flip the way you look at 'em and say like, how could, even if I'm a tiny channel, there's gotta be a way I could become friends with somebody.
And don't be afraid of reaching out. Most people will say no or ignore you. It's okay, but all you need is one person. To be like, yeah, I'll come on your channel, or Yeah, let's do something together. Or yeah, you have some unique knowledge about that area of expertise. I'll give you an example. You know Ramit Satie, I will teach you to be Rich.
I remember years ago, I followed him since 2006. I remember years ago him saying like, I brought on a guest person to talk about real estate cuz I don't own any real estate, so I'm not gonna do blog posts on buying a house. Cause I never bought a house. And this person approached me and was like, Hey, I see a gap in your blog.
So you don't talk about real estate. And I'm a real estate expert. Could I guest post? And I remember thinking light bulb. That was really smart because he just got onto a major personal finance blog and it was great for Ramit because he needs content and he doesn't know anything about real estate. At least at the time you didn't feel comfortable talking about it.
So you can always find a win-win there in general. So it's like make them your friend. And two, keep this in mind. Is that you are unique in terms of your voice, your personality, and you could teach the exact same thing as the biggest player in the space. And they're gonna be people who prefer to learn it from you, even if you're tiny, because they just connect with your personality better.
And people don't understand this until it happens to them. And then they get an email. It's like, you know what? People like Amy Porterfield is big in this space. Or even Sean Cannell, any of these people. I was learning from Amy or Sean. But you know what? When you started to talk about courses or YouTube or a podcast, like it made sense to me when you talked about it, or I like the way you explained it, so I now just listen to you only.
I don't get that. But it's something about your personality, so that can't be repeated or replicated. And then the third thing I would just say is your secret weapon as a content creator is to be polar. Is just to say the things that ruffle feathers, not two ruffle feathers, but say the things that people are believing already be opinionated, but they're too afraid to say.
And the bigger people get, sometimes they get too afraid to rock the boat cause now they have a big audience. So your secret power as a newbie content creator is to just come out and not be mean. Don't put anybody down. I don't, I mean that's a strategy that could work, but I don't, I don't subscribe to that.
But like if you really believe against something or force something, or you don't like a product or you don't like a strategy, or you really prefer something that's counterintuitive, just say it and be bold and let people go. What? They won't like you, but they'll pay attention. And then other people will really like you.
Cuz like, I'm so glad. Finally he said something that I've been thinking in my head, but no one was saying, you can really rise to the top quickly by just being bold and saying polarizing things. If you copy what everyone else is saying, you'll sound like everybody else. And then no one will pay attention to you and you'll disappear.
And that's the opposite of what you wanna do. And it really is key to become friends with some of your competition. We'll put it in quotation marks or some of your peers because a lot of times you can do those collaborations like you were talking about. And one creative way to do this is if there are conferences maybe within the niche that you're in and you know, some of those collaborators go to those conferences.
That's a powerful way to do that. Like in the personal finance space, we have one called FinCon and all of the personal finance creators go to this conference and we all meet up and we, we do all these different things. You build relationships, you make business deals. There's all these different things that you can do.
And that's just one cool way to have these collaborations because really it's a win-win situation for both parties if you can get together and you can kind of have these collaborations. So I love that thought process of thinking of it as someone who you can actually collaborate with instead of the competition.
Now, as we start to think through this, we start to maybe slowly grow our channel. We have an audience in place. You mentioned a bunch of different ways that you can monetize your channel on YouTube. What are some of your favorite ways for people to monetize, especially maybe when they have a smaller channel and you know, are there any that are more efficient than others that you've seen?
Yeah, for sure. So the big one that people see when they think YouTube is they, they think ad revenue. Like I get a million views on this video and then I'm getting like a fraction of a penny of a penny. You know, like office space, like, and then it all adds up. And for sure that is a huge revenue driver for a really big channels and not big subscribers.
It's really about views. Cuz you can have a lot of subscribers from a year ago, but if they're not watching your videos today, you don't get paid. It's all about views or brand deals and sponsorships. Like brands are like, Hey, you know, so this video is sponsored by, you know, whatever. They're getting paid a check.
It could be 10 grand, 20 grand, a hundred grand, whatever it is to like be the sponsor of that video. Cuz again, your audience, that's a great example of the audience is the asset. If you can go to a brand and be like, Hey look, you know Wells Fargo, I'm a personal finance podcaster, I have hundreds of thousands of downloads.
They'd be like, yeah, let's pay you to talk about a product we have or whatever. That's what most people think about ad revenue or brand deals. Two problems with that strategy. One, you have to have a huge audience. And they have to keep paying attention. You can't just have blown up once or gone viral once.
You need every week people to be watching your videos, and that is hard and rare. If you do it, man, then you just have more opportunity than the rest of us. But most of us won't have a huge channel with millions of views every week. Two. You don't control your destiny. You are still literally getting paid by other companies that can come or go or change their terms or whatever.
You're beholden to them. And also on the ad revenue side of things, you're banking on YouTube continuing to pay you, which they should and they will, but they could change the terms. They could, they, we all click, I agree, do whatever the terms are. We have no idea what we agreed to and they could change anything, so that's dangerous.
There's a subset of that, which is affiliate marketing. You could promote other people's products, and so it's not a one-to-one brand deal, but it's, you're still getting paid. If people buy the thing you've talked about through your custom link, that's powerful too. But again, those terms could change. I've made money on all of those, but the one I like the most, especially for small channels, is having your own digital products.
And by that I just mean simply think of an online course. We've all took, taken 'em by now. If you don't know what it is, think about masterclass, right? Like you learn acting from Natalie Portman, right? You, you learn how to play basketball from Steph Curry. Like it's a video training. That's what I've been doing for 13 years.
And it, it's the perfect compliment to like a YouTube channel or a podcast where you're already like teaching something. I'm already adding value in this educational format. And then it's like, Hey, if you're liking this, I have an entire course. Even if it's just two hours, we dive deep into this strategy or deep into this how to do this.
And you sell it for 47 97, 2 97, whatever it is. You're super fans. It's gonna be a funnel. Like most people will enjoy the free stuff. Fewer of them are gonna wanna buy your stuff. But you can make really good money on a small audience if you control the product, cuz then you can control the pricing. You can have different tiers of pricing, you can have subscription models.
This is all the stuff I nerd out on because it really is like controlling your own destiny. Having your own products is always the most lucrative way to go long term, especially if your audience is. Absolutely. And I think that is one really cool way cuz you have complete control as well. I think a lot of times with the algorithm and when you have to worry about other channels.
This is the same thing if you're on social media or any of those other things, you don't have full control over the audience and you don't have full control if they change the algorithm or anything along those lines as well. So making sure that you have your own products as well as a really important thing that you want to have in place.
Now, how can we, as we have this small audience, maybe how can we create these successful passive income streams? Do you create a course maybe on something that you're talking about all the time, like some evergreen content that you're talking about? Or how can you actually do that and how do you think through that a little bit.
Yeah, so there's like four components that you need to make this run on autopilot, and it's pretty simple and it's powerful once it starts to scale, which if you're making content on YouTube, let's say, don't be misled by like how slow it's growing. It becomes exponential at some point. And then if you already have these things in place, all of a sudden just, it's a factor of like 10, a hundred where you're making more money for no additional work, and that's when it becomes magic.
So here are the four components, right? Searchable discoverable content, which we already talked about. You're making the videos that people are searching for, or it could be blog posts, it could be a podcast episode, and you're faithfully posting at least once a week, is what I would say. Just commit to something once a week and make it juicy.
Second component is what we call a lead magnet, so this is, don't waste the content. To your point, Andrew, like, you know, YouTube could go away tomorrow if I'm posting an Instagram that could go away tomorrow. So what I wanna do is not just own my own products, I wanna own the audience. So let's get them off of the platform and onto my own email list.
And people think email is. So 1999, email is, if you look at the stats, email's still the number one driver of sales online. That's how every brand, home Depot, banana Republic, apple, they're sending you emails and that's we're triggered to buy from emails. So you want to own that list. So you do that not by saying, please join my email list.
Cause nobody wants more email. But you do that by offering them even more valuable content for free. This could be a guide, it could be a cheat sheet or a checklist or a video workshop that you offer them inside of your content. Say, Hey, if you enjoy this, you're gonna love my six figures checklist to go from whatever you're making to six figures, or the first 30 days or whatever.
It can be a pdf, PDFs crush. And you offer that by saying, go to this website, it could be your website slash whatever. And they have to enter their email address to download it. And so now they're on your email list and you tell them like, look, you're also signing up for my email list. I'll send you awesome free content every week, but this is how you get the download.
And of course they can unsubscribe at any point if they want to, but this is the move free content. To your email list to a lead magnet, and then you write a couple of pre-written emails. We call this a funnel. Some people call it an auto-responder or an email sequence. It's just more emails that you've pre-written.
You have a tool like MailChimp or Cajabi or Convert Kit that all they are is just like a tool that when people. Join your list. It knows, okay, Andrew's new on Graham's list. Send him email one today. Send him email two tomorrow. And these are emails you pre-written and those emails start to just welcome them.
They add more value. Like here's another trick I like, here's some of the stuff that might be helpful to you. And you're like showing authority and credibility and all of this is still free, by the way, is like over-delivering. Because now this is the third piece of content for free that they've engaged with.
Like they found you online, they downloaded your free guide, they're getting a helpful email in a couple of days. You share the fourth component, which is you mentioned your course or your digital product. Could be a paid community, could be coaching if you do one-on-one coaching. But ideally it's something that's digital that can rinse and repeat without you being involved.
So a simple mini course, even if it's a $50 course, it offers that to them automatically. It's like a salesperson saying, Hey, you might like this for you 24 7 without you being. So content lead magnet, the email funnel or sequence that then offers the digital course. You put those things in place and it might take a little bit of time to get them in place, but once you've got 'em in place, the back three, the lead magnet, the email sequence, and the product, you never have to touch again.
You only do number one, which is the ongoing content. Like this interview we're having right now, the front facing thing, which is free by the way. So the thing you get to spend your time doing is giving away content for free. And all the selling happens privately, behind the scenes without your involvement, without you having to promote yourself or shameless plug anything.
And it works on autopilot. And then the more people that find you online, as you do collaborations, as the algorithm likes your content on YouTube, as you just, whatever, over time, they all funnel into that system. And then you're selling more product, literally doing no more work than you did a year ago.
And that's, that's how you become. And that's why I absolutely love this system. For a lot of people, especially a lot of people that who listen to this podcast are, you know, people who are trying to grow in their career, but they're trying to find ways. Maybe they don't love their career, they want to get out and they wanna pursue financial independence or work that they absolutely love.
And this is an amazing way to do that, is using online to kind of leverage that. Because as you can hear Graham talking here on the backend, all of the selling and all of the things that you have to do to get people to buy your product is happening automatically. And then all you have to do is serve those people and give them tons of value upfront, whether it's your YouTube channel, you can do this all different ways, but with the YouTube channel is one of the most incredible parts.
So, What's happening here is your time that you are spending on doing some of this stuff is just going into your content. Instead of having to go into some of these other things on the backend, it's all set up automatically so that you can just keep on building content. So even if you're worried about the time commitment, maybe you're working full-time, you're working 40, 50, 60 hours a week no matter what it is, but you have four hours a week that you can put towards, you know, building up a YouTube channel.
You have that availability to be able to do this and put this in a play, especially if you have maybe more money than time, you can outsource some of the editing and outsource some of the other extra stuff that you don't wanna be doing. And then you can just be creating that content and having this business on the side.
And eventually it can grow large enough like Graham has here where he has a seven figure business just from YouTube being able to grow large enough where you don't even have to work anymore. So that is one of the cool things that you can have in play as well. And then all you have to do is just focus on creating and serving other people.
So I absolutely love that. And it's one of the coolest ways that you can do that. So how do you actually create the right type of content on YouTube to attract maybe the best leads or to go towards your masterminds or your online courses or anything else along those lines? Yeah, so there's probably two phases, right?
Phase one is when you're just getting started, you don't have a product to sell. So it's really just start talking about all the things like we mentioned earlier, that your ideal audience, the people you would want to hang out with in a room and like help, what are they already talking about? So just try out tons of content and you'll see, you'll figure out like it's only a handful of topics that really drive the needle.
Like you might have some subtopics, but you'll figure out what the hot topics are that will help inform what products to make. By the way, that's why so many people get this backwards. They get excited about online courses. They saw some guru in a Facebook ad talking about it. And so what they did is they went and built an online course and they have no audience, and the course might actually be kick butt.
Like it might be really good, but if it's not the course that anybody asked for, then all that time and all that money and effort is wasted. And they go, I didn't sell a single copy. Well, because you did it in the backwards order, right? So the order number one is build the audience, then learn from that audience what of your content.
They really engage when they really like. You're basically researching by just interacting with them. Like you learn by engaging with these people and making content. And so for example, in the music space, when I was making all these videos about how to home record your music, I realized that two things jumped out.
One, there was a piece of software called Pro Tools. It's kinda like the Photoshop of the music world. Like people really got confused about that and they had more questions about that software. And then two, after you record your music, the post-processing is called mixing. And that's people could learn recording and that's a little more intuitive to learn.
But mixing is just very confusing for people. And they were like, I'm clearly sucking at this cuz it doesn't sound good. And they have a million questions there. So I learned after, of all the content I made, when I talked about pro tools or when I talked about mixing people really paid attention. I'm like, okay, I need to make courses on these subjects to just take these topics and dive deeper so it'll tell you what to make.
And then, so that's phase one. When you go make a product or products, then you can start to zoom out like a master c e o, and say, okay, let's think about this. I want to make money and I wanna sell these products that I've researched, that I know people want. So now let's backtrack it and let's make content that's related to that that people are looking for.
So it's qualifying the right people. Let's give them a lead magnet that's probably similar in the same vein. So like the really interested people like, oh, I want more of that. And then had emails about that, that by the time you mention your product or your course, they're like, oh my gosh, I have to have this.
It's like this beautiful path you're laying out for them. And it's self-selecting, right? Because the people that aren't interested are gonna jump off the path at some point, but it's just a really clear path. It's not random content. It is kind of for a purpose to get them to that initial product in your email funnel.
And that's fun. And you're just sort of, at that point, you're like making sure you're tweaking some of that stuff and you don't always have to do it that dialed into the product. And as you add more products, you'll have more things that you can push people to, but that's where it starts. Engage with the content first.
Let them tell you what to make. And then once you've made the product or products, reverse engineer the content to lead right to that. And that I think is one of the best systems to have in place, even though as you start to create content, you're gonna see people asking a bunch of questions for you. And then when you go through those, you're gonna see the same question coming up over and over and over again.
And like Graham said, all of a sudden you start to realize, well, I need to create some, some courses on this stuff so that people can really just go from point A two point Z really quickly and be able to serve those people who have those questions. And speaking of that, creating that value, I think that's one of the most important things that people need to realize is what you need to focus on is who you're creating this for.
And you need to give them as much value as possible, and you really need to be generous with your time and generous with the way that you serve these people. That's really what you're doing is you're serving these people. And I learned this a long time ago from Pat Flynn, who I know you know as well.
Mm-hmm. , who was someone who really spoke about this all the time. He has a book called Super Fans where I learned this from. And you kinda look at this and say, Hey, I wanna give as much value as possible to people. I wanna be as generous as possible to people. So how do you kind of do that as you create your content?
Oh yeah. You said the magic word, generosity. That drives everything. I mean, if I had a business strategy, it would be giving or generosity. Uh, superfans is a great book. Pat Flynn is a great example of doing that. Well, and he has for many years. Another book that comes to mind is the Go-Giver by Bob Berg and John David.
Man, it's a little parable that you could read about a salesman, but the whole vibe there is like you give so much away. You focus on them, not yourself. Even like turning someone away to a competitor if it's the best fit for them. If you run your business like that, you, it's like magnetic, like all of a sudden you can't turn off the hose.
It's like so much business coming your way. On a practical level, you get two types of people when it comes to making free content. They go, okay, I get this model. I need the free content. I need to get 'em on my email list and then funnel course. Got it. And they say if I give too much away in the free content, they're not gonna wanna buy my paid course is what the fear is.
And it's an assumption. That's all it is. It's not a fact, it's an assumption, but they work off of that assumption. They never test that assumption. They work off it and they go, okay, therefore, what am I gonna do about it? I'm gonna either publish hardly any free content, or I'm just gonna go right to paid ads that just push right to the product.
Or if I do content, I'm gonna make it really light. It's fluff, it just teases. It's more about the what of it never about the how. And I've heard really smart, successful people say, I won't drop names and say teach the what? Sell the how. I completely disagree. Like I, that might drive sales initially, but it doesn't build a brand.
Like it doesn't build a huge following. It doesn't build loyalty. Like I'm playing a different game, which is teach it all like for free, like teach it all for free. Cuz what happens is, number one, people are like blown away. And so they instantly are like, this guy's giving me the goods. And, and so that creates something that you can never go fabricate, which is loyalty and trust, right?
So powerful. And then two, they talk about you. Can you believe there's this guy on the internet like teaching everything about audio recording or like he's giving you the whole framework for how to build an online business? Like this is crazy. Like there's no pitch for a course. They're so confused. So they'll talk about you, they'll mention you, and so now that's more marketing.
This is what will drive your business to go from zero audience to massive audience because people are craving it and you're gonna stand out. So now you have a bigger audience, which we've already talked about is the asset. And then you're gonna find that people it, giving it all away never stops somebody from buying from you.
It just never does. Some people, maybe there's probably some small percentage that are like, well, I learned everything I need and I don't need to buy his course. That might happen. What I have found for my audiences with that is they usually buy my courses anyway and they treat it like a tip and they'll email me, say, Graham, I feel so bad.
I have listened to a hundred of your episodes. I built a six figure business last year. I've never paid you a dime and so I'm just gonna go buy all your courses as a way of saying thank you. So I still make this sale like after the fact, and this happens all the time. I'm like guilting them. I'm not even guilting them.
And that's when I know I'm winning. When they've just consumed so much value for free that they wanna buy my stuff out of like guilt. It's really real. So it's never stopped anyone from buying and it does the opposite. You give so much, they get a taste of what you're able to give them and the way you think they want more of.
Because what we're building, it really is a personal brand. Whether you have a name for your business or not, it's really you that you're selling. And so they just want more proximity with you. The more you give, the more they like you, the more like if you invited them over to your house, like they would come because they like you that much.
That's how you make this sale because they trust you so much and they're like, well, if his free stuff was so good, I can't imagine the paid stuff. And before you think the paid stuff is just the exact same thing as the free stuff? It never is for a couple of reasons. One, the format is so different. I can drop nuggets on YouTube all day long.
But an online course, if well-developed, people are paying for curation. Like I'm giving them the the linear steps. They're paying for proximity because inside the course they can ask questions or I can show up in a video training and answer their questions. I'm not gonna answer every comment on YouTube.
There's just too many. So they're getting proximity to me. Also, sometimes people know I need to pay attention, like they. Pay for something to force 'em to take action. And then they're gonna get a ton of results out of the course. Even if you might have talked about a lot of the same stuff for free. It just will click differently if they paid, cuz people who pay pay attention.
And then four, there's just a level of depth that you can get to in an online course or a paid community that you just can't in an episode of a podcast or a YouTube video or even a hundred YouTube videos. And so I feel like in this era of so much, You're gonna see more and more people overwhelmed.
There's so much content out there, it's just overwhelming. So where there's overwhelmed, there's opportunity. Just remember that. And so for your course as the opportunity that you can have of like, I'm gonna simplify this for you. Just, you could even sell that. It's part of the sales process. Look, there's so many YouTube videos on this topic and it's overwhelming, like real estate investing.
Like you could watch all these so overwhelming, just take my A to Z real estate investing course and you'll start from here. And at the end of the course you'll be here and you'll know exactly what to do. And people are like, thank you, this is great. I'm just gonna bio Graham's course. And I don't have that course, by the way, but I'm gonna buy Andrew's course or whoever it is and just do that because it just will simplify my life so I don't have to scroll endlessly.
So give, give, give and you will sell more. It's not, one doesn't affect the. I couldn't agree more. And I think that was one of our initial goals here at the Personal Finance Podcast and Master Money was we were looking to give more free value than somebody willing to pay for. And kind of giving that away as much as we possibly can.
Stuff that you'd have to pay, you know, advisors and things like that, you know, thousands of dollars to even have to, to get that information. So it's kind of one of those things where you gotta give as much as you possibly can serve your audience, and then good things will happen, you know, in the long run.
That's kind of what we truly believe here as well. So I absolutely love that part of it. And you know, there's so many different course tools that you can utilize out there. We just launched our first course recently this year and we used Cajabi as well. So I was interested, cuz I know I've heard you talk about that you were the number one cajabi partner and you beat out a a bunch of other people.
How did you actually do that over the course of your career and kind of build that up? Oh man, this is a perfect segue. I did everything. We just talked about YouTube. Hey, no one was talking about cajabi on YouTube. I don't know why. They were just like, oh, I'll put my affiliate link on my website and maybe people will click on it.
Like, yeah, they might. So I decided, how about I just make the best cajabi tutorials on the internet because people have questions about how to use this tool and Kajabi's own videos, God bless them, are awful. And I was like, okay, I'm a user. I mean, I've used it to run two multimillion dollar businesses. I can just show what I'm doing with my businesses and answer all the questions.
So I just start with one video. And, um, make it super juicy and just show them the backend of my million dollar business in Kajabi. And it wasn't really like educational, it was just like, here's what I'm doing, here's how I'm using it. And it just drove so many. And I, I, I mentioned my affiliate link and it drove so many signups and then I was like, I should do more of this.
And it's fun. I love Kajabi. I was already evangelizing for Kajabi since 2013, which was about three years before they had an affiliate program. So this was like nothing new for me. So YouTube, because when people type in, what is Kajabi? Should I use Kajabi? Cajabi versus Kartra? Cajabi versus Teachable?
Like all of a sudden Graham pops up and it, what's funny is I now have customers that buy my products that are like, I found you cuz I was looking for a caja. Which goes all the way back to what we talked about. This is the power of a YouTube platform, which is a giant search engine. It's like nobody knew who I was, but if I made a video about Kajabi, they were looking for Kajabi videos.
And then there I show up and then now they're like, I like this guy. Wow. He teaches it straight up. Wow. That was helpful. And I'm just, I'm giving, giving, giving. And then that's all I've ever done. And it's just the beauty of, let's say like you could post on social media cajabi videos, but they disappear.
Right. And unless it goes viral, it's gonna disappear in the feed. A YouTube video will stay around forever. And so I'm compounding my content on Cajabi, let's say. And that's what's allowed so many people to find me. And then it was like, wow, making money. Wow. I'm getting closer to Amy Porterfield's status, cuz she was like the number one affiliate.
And then my life's goal was just to beat Amy Porterfield at one thing and I jumped over her as the number one affiliate for Kajabi a couple years ago. So it's been fun, but it's just what we've been talking about and people are so confused, like, how did you do it? My guys, it just gave away great information.
It just shared it. Just shared, shared, shared, and just try to make each video super valuable that they were like, I would've paid for. And I love that idea as well because if people are sitting here and they're struggling, well I don't know what to really talk about. If you are really good at some specific tools, this is something you could talk about as well.
There's people who are making millions of dollars a year just making notion templates. Mm-hmm. and teaching you how to use Notion for example. There's new opportunities coming up, like learning, teaching people how to use chat G P T and there'll be things that will come up doing stuff like that. So just current events.
So there's just so many different ways that you can kind of create content for people and create value for other people. Just kind of thinking outside the box. So this is a great example of if you are good with a tool, if you've been using a tool for a long time, there's people who make millions of dollars a year teaching Excel.
There's so many different examples out there. This is another way that you can create an additional income when it comes to being on YouTube as well. So I love that you brought that up and that is a really cool story cuz Amy's got a huge audience, obviously, and that's one that's really, really cool that you were able to do that.
So this is my favorite thing that you teach and this is something I really need to learn because I work way too many hours. So you teach people how to work less, but they can actually make more money by working less. And you kind of go through that process and you know, you teach it on your podcast and all your other platforms as well too, which I absolutely love.
So how many hours per week do you work and how can someone actually, you know, work less hours but make more? Great question. And I love this stuff man, because this is where you get into like why we have a business, which is to live a life that we wanna live. Like we want the money, but then even that is for a life.
So you need both money and time. And this is something that Tim Ferris like brought to light from you. When I read the four Hour work week and when it came out in 2007, I thought that book was crazy. I returned it to Barnes and Noble. I was working in corporate America at the time, I just couldn't comprehend it.
And then I lost my job and was starting a business and I rebought the book in 2009. And then I finally like, I was ready, the student was ready then to like learn. And the thing I took away from that book was time is just as valuable as money. Actually time is more valuable than money. So I wanna make decisions that give me both currencies, time and money.
So to answer your question, these weeks I work less than five hours a week. Now I spend more time like connecting with cool people like you, or like I was watching a cool course on like, like real estate stuff and like life insurance. Like I'll nerd out, I wanna learn stuff, but actual work to run my business less than five hours a week.
Um, and most of that has been as a solopreneur, it's not like a huge team. I'm starting to expand my team right now because I'm trying to do some different things. But the way it works is one technical thing and then two concepts. One, the technical thing is what we talked about, which is having a passive income business model.
And if you have a service-based business, you can create a passive income element or arm of your service-based business. So maybe you keep doing the coaching or you keep doing the consulting or whatever you're designing websites, but you could create a passive income element, which will help you scale.
And then you could take fewer clients and make the same amount or more money. So don't throw it out. If you're like, well, that's not my business model. You could still incor, everybody can incorporate it, but you need some element that's recurring or that's passive or on autopilot. And by passive, I mean scalable.
So like we said, those four components, the back three, I don't do anymore. I don't have to build products, I don't have to build lead magnets, I don't have to build a funnel. It's all built. So all I do is one episode of the podcast a week takes me less than an hour. You know, that drives the business now.
So that's my only one of those four things I have to keep doing. I don't even have to, the money would still print, but it would eventually die off. But if I'm like, just wanna keep it going, it's the business model is part of the answer. The other two things are like mindsets. And it's like the 80 20 rule, which I just love Pareto's principle.
It's challenging to think about the fact that we all work hard and we all do lots of things and we're doing them for a reason. May not be a good reason, but there's a reason we're doing 'em. Could be posting to TikTok, it could be checking email, it could be whatever it is you're doing, there's a reason you do it.
And we don't want to offend ourselves by questioning, why am I doing that thing? Because it's almost like questioning ourselves, like what's wrong with you? But really the smart people will, will every once in a while, and I recommend every quarter or half a year. Analyze everything you do, like take a Google Doc and just bullet point, what's every single task I do in a given week or month?
Cuz some things are just monthly. And once you see all this stuff, not just like I post a video, we'll break that down. I have to create a thumbnail, I have to come up with a title, I have to write the description, I have to edit. Like everything you do when you see it, you'll like vomit a little bit. Like oh that's a lot.
And then you start to go through this filtering process that Tim Ferris talks about, which is eliminate, automate, delegate in that order. Very important. So the thought is that most of the stuff we're doing is not necessary. In theory, 80% of what we're doing is only leading to 20% of our results. So you know, it's not always perfect 80 20.
But if that were true, and just if you don't believe it, just ask if it were true, that would mean I could eliminate 80% of the things and still make 80% of the money I'm making, which is a pretty good trade cuz now I have four fifths of my time back. Maybe I just make less money and have more time, or I could double down on the 20% and make twice as much money in half the ti half the time.
If you're following the math here, it's helpful with a visual, but I always start with like questioning ruthlessly. Is this necessary? So like I did an experiment, uh, when Covid happened, everyone got on social media even more and I was like, oh, and I hate social media in terms of having to post. I was like, you know what?
I'm just gonna get off for a whole year because it's gonna be good for my soul. And then I'm gonna just see if it makes any difference. I'm not gonna know what's happening. I'm not gonna see any of my dms. Like if cool opportunities come through dm, I'm not gonna see it. I'm just gonna disappear. My business five Xed that year, , uh, and I realized, actually, I already knew.
I was like, okay, social media might drive some sales. But it didn't, not being on, it did not affect me from growing. So I'm okay with eliminating it completely or like outsourcing the crap out of it or whatever. But I, I start with questioning everything. What could you eliminate and test it. All you can do is test it.
Like, stop doing this. I did this by posting. I would post three times a week for four years, and I was like, okay, what if I only posted twice a week? Does my traffic go down? Does it stay the same? Oh, it stayed the. Oh, it went up a little bit. What if I only post once a week? It's still going up. I'm like, okay, well that just saves me a lot of effort.
I'll just only post once a week on, on the blog or YouTube. So I try to just systematically eliminate things and then eventually you'll get to a point of things like you can't eliminate, they have to be done for your business to make money then, okay, could you automate that? Is there a software tool? Is there, you know, some kind of robot like chat, G P T, I mean, maybe there's like AI that can do it for you.
It's gonna be way more efficient and cheaper than a person. So automate the rest that you can and whatever is absolutely necessary. That can't be replaced by a robot. That's what you delegate. That's when you actually hire a human. Because that's how you leverage your time. And that could just be five hours a week of checking your inbox or 10 hours a week customer service.
I mean, it doesn't have to be much money. And that can really free up your time. So it's not a magic switch you pull, but it's like 80 20 the crap out of it. And then the final thing, I'll touch on it briefly is Parkinson's law, which is this idea we've all experienced that things expand to whatever a lot of time you give them.
So if you give yourself a year to build a course, it'll take you a year, give yourself 30 days to build the course. You'll get it done in 30 days cuz you get focused. And so you can kind of hack yourself by giving yourself shorter deadlines. And I would literally be a weirdo and say, okay, this year I'm only gonna work.
20 hours a week, I'm only gonna work 15 hours a week. I'm gonna go faster. I'm, and you see what you can do and you realize, man, I get a lot more focused when I force myself to be focused. And then you're literally freeing up your time and you're seeing that in the corporate world. They're cutting Fridays for a lot of businesses and realizing people could still get the work done Monday through Thursday.
And I'm like, that's Parkinson's law of like, huh, maybe we don't all need to come in and pay for the lights and the bills for five days a week. We can only come into four days and it still gets done. So passive income model 80 20, the crap out of your tasks and just trust Parkinson's Law is a real powerful force.
I love that. And I love the incredibly actionable advice that you have there where you're listing out all your tasks, you're figuring out what's really actually important, kind of going through all those steps and then figure out even if there's things that are important that maybe are simple tasks that you don't have to do, you can even hire a VA to do well.
There's so many different things that you can do to kind of get all of your time back because that's why we all do this. We want our time back because time is so incredibly valuable and that's why we build wealth. That's why we want to put our money and invest our money and grow our wealth so we can have our time back.
So that is really cool and I absolutely love the way that you kind of think through that and the thought process as you do this as well. So this has been incredible, but I wanna shift gears here cause we have a couple of deeper questions that we ask a lot of our guests, and I think we usually get some pretty cool answers on these as well.
So the first one is, what part of your worker life makes you come alive? Oh, this kind of stuff. Connecting with people like you, like having a conversation about something meaningful, that it's gonna benefit other people because it's recorded, uh, and it'll be out there forever. It fires me up cuz I could die tomorrow and at least I like downloaded something that might push somebody else like me a little bit further in their journey.
I love this kind of stuff. I love that and I love the rewarding side of that as well. The second one is, and I know you said that you love personal finance and I've heard you talk about it in your podcast as well. The second one is, what is the best money advice you've ever received? Oh man, let me think about this.
It's, there's two moments for me. One was when somebody finally explained compounding and compound interest that gave a guy like me when I first learned this fresh outta college was broke pretty much. When the record deal super awesome, rockstar thing didn't pan out, I realized I'm not gonna make a lot of money.
I was pretty down cause I was like, I'm not gonna be able to provide my wife like much of a life. Cuz that was my only skill at the time was just music. All my friends became doctors or lawyers. I went to, you know, finance banks and so I was like, man, I'm never gonna make money. And then when somebody explained compound interest to me and the time value of money, that's when I got hope of like, oh my gosh.
Even a normal person like me. If nothing else, just having time in the market or time in an investment, it could compound. It's not linear, it's exponential, which is the same as YouTube and content by the way. It's the same kind of curve. That was powerful for me. It gave me hope. And then I would say the other one is just like buying a house, which is very controversial and there's a whole movement in our generation, especially seeing our parents and maybe lose their house in the great recession and like, I'm just gonna rent.
And you know, hey, renting is great. I did it for a while and it was good for my family for a few years, but I've made so much money and I'm not a real estate investor. Like I have two properties, this office in my house and I've had a rental house at one point, which was my first house that we kept, and then I dropped it outta two.
I'm not very sophisticated, I'm trying to become more, but just by being in the market and owning that asset class, you can make so much wealth by doing nothing. And anyway, I know there's a lot of opinions on houses, but I'm like, guys, I'm so glad I was thinking about buying a house straight outta college because a lot of my friends aren't thinking about it till the thirties.
And they're like, man, you missed a decade of. A lot of growth. And now with that house, you can do so much anyway. Buying a house is very basic. Buying a house and compound interests were like light bulb moments for me, that gave a normal, average person hope. And that was before I had a business. Cuz having a business is, that's like turbocharging, whatever you're trying to do with your personal finances, I love those.
Those are some amazing staples when it comes to building wealth as well. And the last one, this is my favorite question, it's one that we ask every single guest. It is, what does wealth mean to you? Freedom means freedom. Yeah. And that's the, that's a common word, but it's like, I just want to do the things that I want to do.
Like, bro, yesterday, you know, you know Tampa, I went for this nice two hour walk on Bayshore Boulevard. Uh, I listened to a sermon. I just walked quietly. I just, I messaged a few friends back. I, the son's on my fa I'm like, dude, I want two hours in my day to be able to do, this is great. My business is running without me.
I had time to take my kids to school, pick 'em up from school that day, have dinner with my fam exercise. Just, that's to me the whole point. That's why business alone isn't the answer. It's like a business that can almost run itself as the answer. Because most business guys, they build something successful and they, you know what it's like, it's just another job.
They own their job and when it gets really successful, then they're so screwed because now they're like, bro, I make so much money and I'm such a success, and they, they're trapped. And that's not the point. I want enough money to do the things I wanna do, but I want the flexibility and the freedom to do it.
And I'm always even challenging my own business model. Like this year, I'm taking a lot of things off my plate. I killed products. I killed things that were making me good money. Like I killed a multi six-figure a year product because it was taking up my time and it was locking me into a weekly conversation I had to have.
And I was like, I need more flexibility. So I will always err on freedom and flexibility. That's what wealth is for me at the end of the day. Absolutely. And I think that is the absolute sweet spot, is having that freedom, that flexibility, and still utilizing some of your time towards the things that you love, some of your passions as well.
So I absolutely love that. Graham, this was absolutely amazing. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. Tell us about where people can find more about you, your podcast, YouTube channel, everything else. Yeah. If you just Google Graham Cochran or go to graham cochrane.com, all the contents there. I have this book, how to Get Paid For What you know, but I wanted to give your audience the first two chapters for free if they want to check it out.
Cuz chapter one kind of explains the industry deeper and and breaks down a lot of the like roadblocks people have mentally to get into this. And the chapter two is called the Value Circle, which explains the business model and talks a lot about the generosity piece. It's really, really enlightening and you'll get a sense of whether it's for you or not, but it's free if you just go to graham cochran.com/chapters.
The first two free chapters of my. That is absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for providing that too. We'll link it up all in the show notes below so that you guys can check that out. Graham, thank you so much again. This was amazing. Yeah, this was fun, Andrew. Thanks for having me on.
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