6 Simple Ways to Make More Money 🤑

Highlights from today’s email:

• ✍🏻 How to get hired as a Freelance Writer

• 🗞️ How to start a local newsletter in Africa

• 💰 6 simple ways to make more money

• 🤖 Building a content website with AI

•  🎯 This week’s remote jobs for Africans

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📰 News

Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened its first international Skills Center in Cape Town, South Africa. The center will host classes on cloud computing, events, and career opportunities on AWS platforms. (Link)

The Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First Program has launched. It’s 10-week equity-free accelerator program for Seed to Series A African or Africa-focused startups using AI in a transformative way. Application deadline is September 6, 2023. (Link)

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule. How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in. If you have a spare hour and feel like being utterly terrified, this is a compelling account of how Elon Musk became one of the most powerful people in the world.

That should make us all very uneasy. Especially if you have any friends in Ukraine or Taiwan. (Link)

💡 Business Building Tips

How Packy McCormick Makes $3.5m/year From 180,000 Email Subscribers. His business and startup-focused newsletter, Not Boring, includes $20,000 one-time sponsorships, a private job board, and a VC investing “syndicate.“ (Link)

How Marketing Can Save Your Business From the AI Apocalypse. The hosts of HubSpot’s in-house podcast predict online businesses will depend on marketing even more, now that AI has allowed anyone to build complicated software products. (Link)

Expert Content Strategy Template for Online Businesses. Superpath’s Jimmy Daly shares his simple in-house content strategy to help you better identify your target customers and how content will drive revenue in your business. (Link)

20 Successful Blogs And Their 2023 2022 Revenue Numbers. While it hasn’t been updated since January, this short list is packed with inspiring examples of personal blogs that became massive media companies. My favorites:

• Epic Gardening: From one guy in his garden to $10m a year

• Zenmaster Wellness: Mental health blog making $180k+ a year

• GiftLab: Gift idea affiliate website making $1m+ a year

• WellKeptWallet: Super basic personal finance website making $600,000 a year

 (Link)

👩🏽‍💻 Career Resources

Webinar: Picking the right tech career in Nigeria, 3rd Sept. The webinar will explore Nigeria's tech talent's best career options, focusing on the technologies that will influence 2023 and 2024.

Learn how to get ahead in the tech industry and get insights from prominent reports and discussions with industry experts. (Link)

How to Get Hired as a Freelance Writer – Expert Advice! Two established content marketers discuss how to get noticed by 6-7 figure businesses with massive content budgets.

#1 Tip: Don’t just show a portfolio – show the results of your work (traffic, search rankings, leads, $ value, etc.) (Link)

🤖 This Week in AI

Taking a Blog From 0 to 820K/mo SEO Traffic with AI Content. Jake Ward shows how he used his Byword.ai tool to grow a finance website to nearly 1m monthly visitors in 16 months. (Link)

🤖

Why pay ghostwriters in Kenya when AI can do your essays? ChatGPT has devastated Kenya’s academic cheating industry, and it’s probably never recovering. So, time to look for another career. (Link)

🗞️ How to Start a Local Newsletter in Africa

Ryan Sneddon is the founder and editor of Naptown Scoop, a weekly email newsletter he started for his hometown Annapolis (pop. 40,812).

He describes Naptown Scoop as “The local newspaper that gets sent to your phone – but it’s a lot more fun.“

Ryan claims Naptown Scoop has ~15,000 subscribers and makes “six figures.“ That’s over $100,000 a year. Most of his revenue comes from selling simple banner ads and text sponsorships on the newsletter.

Local newsletters are an incredibly easy business to start and run and come with lots of perks – so long as you can commit to 2-3 emails a week. On the Newsletter Operator podcast, Ryan outlined his playbook for success:

1. Start sending a weekly list of events in your city

2. Run Facebook ads for the event list to get your first 1,000-2,000 subscribers

3. Start a referral program offering birthday shoutouts

4. Monetize the newsletter immediately, even if you only have 200 subscribers

5. Work with local businesses that have big advertising budgets, like real estate agents and financial advisors.

6. Charge advertisers upfront.

💰 6 Simple Ways to Make More Money

Last week, I was at an entrepreneur’s dinner with ~15 other business owners. The attendees included agency and e-commerce store owners, consultants, coaches, and freelancers. Everyone was location independent – they can work from anywhere.

We were each asked to share the #1 tactic that had significantly boosted revenues at our businesses. The answers were all surprisingly similar, simple, and easy to apply.

You can easily start applying our favorite tactics to your business today:

1. Hire a coach: A career or business coach has years of experience with a wide range of professionals. They can use this to guide you through many challenges and chapters in your business.

   My career coach, Juliana Rabbi, is directly responsible for $10,000s in revenue over the last 12 months.

2. Start outsourcing: Any business requires a lot of repetitive tasks that don’t generate any revenue and stop you from focusing on tasks that do. As soon as you can afford to, you should hire someone to take over these tasks.

   I’ve been working with a fantastic VA (via Talentpoel) for two months now, and she has been transformative to the business.

3. Raise your rates: It sounds simple, but it can be incredibly scary to tell clients or customers you’re charging them more. So, most people don’t do it with current clients or customers.

   However, in the past, I’ve increased my consulting rates by 30-60% with current clients, and they didn’t mind.

4. Join a mastermind: A mastermind is a group of professionals who meet regularly to support one another by sharing their ongoing business challenges and offering suggestions to one another.

   Everyone says masterminds can be the most important support you receive, but maintaining one takes a lot of work, and you need to be careful who joins.

5. Work with bigger clients: Everyone likes the idea of helping small businesses grow. But while it’s great for starting out, you’ll never get rich from it (probably).

   Instead, pivot to working with B2B clients in big, evergreen, boring industries. They have a lot more money, and they’re happy to spend it.

6. Focus on 1 task 70% of your time for 3 months: Shiny object syndrome is a common problem for entrepreneurs. Often, it’s necessary – as you have to balance lots of responsibilities at once.

   However, if you can focus on one task, project, or challenge for the majority of your time, often the results can be transformative. One attendee boosted profits at her e-commerce store by only working on one aspect for 70% of her time, and condensing all her other work into the remaining (very limited) hours each week.

The best thing about all these tips?

You can apply them to any business and you can start today.

🎯 Remote Jobs This Week

Content and Marketing Roles