Smartest Path To Five Figures In A Month (Even if You're Starting from Zero)

Most people think you need to start a risky business or have special connections to make $10,000 a month. But what if I told you there are two proven paths and one of them requires zero business experience, zero startup capital, and can actually be less risky than a traditional career? Now I'm gonna break down both paths using real examples, including how one of my students went from zero to landing job offers from major companies, then scaling to over $180,000 per month. And I'll show you the exact frameworks they used. So if you appreciate me doing this type of video, let me know by gently tapping that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, so path number one is the smart employee route. And the strategy here is to get paid while you learn, aka get paid to learn valuable skills. And this is perfect if you don't want the stress of starting a business, but you want to escape the traditional career trap. So here's the framework. Step one, choose high leverage skills. Not all skills are created equal. You want skills that are in high demand, Now, some of the top skills right now are certain types of programming, especially if it has to do with the cloud or AI, data science and analytics, digital marketing and growth, cybersecurity, IT, and anything involving sales skills. For instance, software sales. So step two is to learn while getting paid. And this is where most advice goes wrong. People say, learn to code in your spare time, but that takes forever and you're competing with people who do it professionally. Instead, find entry-level remote positions or find freelance work where you can learn on the job. Now, I've made tons of videos on my channel talking about exactly how to do this, but this is literally the smartest way to learn skills. Get paid to do it. We're talking junior developer positions at growing startups, marketing assistant roles at digital agencies, data analyst trainee positions, customer success roles at SaaS companies, et cetera, et cetera. All right, quick break, quick break. This Tuesday at 9 p.m. Eastern time, I'm doing a one-time only workshop where I talk about how to get money quickly with AI. And you can check it out down in the description and the pinned comment below. I'm gonna be showing you this new opportunity. It's completely free, and it's amazing whether you basically want to use it to get a better job, use it to network, use it to make some passive income, start a side hustle, make a full-time income, or even start a full-on business. It works incredibly well with all of those, and it's completely free. And at this workshop, I'm gonna be giving away my profitable Niche Predictor GPT. This is a GPT-powered piece of software that I've been working on for quite some time now. I've been trained on thousands of hours, my teaching, coaching, consulting sessions, et cetera. And so you don't have to spend months or years trying to figure out how to find a profitable niche. You can find it in a matter of minutes or even seconds in some case, because it can literally tell you right away if a specific niche that you're thinking about will be profitable or not. And I'm gonna be giving this away one time only at the workshop. So make sure you show up. Click the link in the description or the pinned comment below. And when you're done registering, make sure to click on add this to your calendar so it'll show up in your Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar so you can make sure that you won't miss the chance to grab the profitable Niche Predictor GPT. And you'll also be able to ask me questions live. So I look forward to meeting you. See you Tuesday, 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Click the link in the description, the pinned comment below. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Now, there's several different methods to do this with absolutely no experience. The first method is to be willing to work in an undesirable location. So we're talking about a small town or maybe a part of a city that people don't wanna live in. Now, typically you would be working in person for this type of role. Now, this is a drastic measure, but if you want to basically ensure that you're going to get a job, this is a good way to go because there's not gonna be nearly as much competition if you have to move to the middle of Montana in order to get your job. And then you get your first one to two years of experience and you are golden after that. Now, if you don't wanna do that, there are other methods. One of them is to start by freelancing. You can start by making gigs on a website like Fiverr, getting some freelancing roles, and that is real experience because you're getting paid to do this. And if you do a really good job, they might hire you full-time. Another method is, let's say you're already working in a job right now, you can bring up to your boss that you wanna do a project that involves whatever skill you're trying to learn. Now, make sure this is something that would actually help the company, and a lot of the time, bosses will love the initiative. For instance, if you're working for a company and their website sucks, you could say, hey, I wanna redesign the website. And again, that counts as experience and it counts as paid experience. Another method is you could go around to local businesses in your area and basically pitch doing a job for them. So, as an example, if you're learning digital marketing, you could pitch that you're gonna run ads to their business and all they would have to do is just pay for the AdSense and then all they'd have to do is just pay for the ad spend and then maybe a little bit extra after that. And again, that counts as paid experience. Now, you'll typically have to go to the business and ask the owner, but if you really don't wanna do that, maybe you could just reach out to your family or your friend network and see if anyone has a business and they're willing to let you work on it. And then they can just pay you a single dollar so it's technically paid work. And again, that counts as experience. Now, to be completely honest with you, the fastest way to learn these skills and land your first job is to just simply have a mentor, right? Have a coach who can kind of look over your stuff, give you feedback and tell you what to do. And that's why services like Course Careers are so amazing. Course Careers will tell you exactly what to do to get into the job and you can even get feedback from coaches and you're involved in a community when you join. And this is a community full of people who are trying to land the exact same job. So just as an example, a really good job is tech sales. I've interviewed tons of people on this channel that have taken Course Careers and been able to get into tech sales with no degree, no experience, and they've been able to do it in a very short period of time. So if you want a free training from Course Careers for tech sales, but you could use it for any of the other courses as well, you can check that out down in the description and the pinned comment below. But yeah, during this time, you want to be building up your portfolio. So not only do you have the skills, but you can showcase projects where you demonstrate your competence. Basically, you make it absolutely unarguable that you have the skills because you're demonstrating them. So what you're aiming for here is to do your best to get a remote job. Now, I know I mentioned that you could go to an undesirable area and get a job there. That is an easy way to do it, but most people don't want to do that. And there's also some downsides. Now, one of the upsides to going to an undesirable area is chances are the cost of living is quite low. So, you know, if you're making $50,000 a year and you're living in a small town in Wyoming, you're balling out of control. You're making a ton of money. But if you're making $50,000 a year and you're living in San Francisco, you're barely getting by. And you're probably living in a house with seven roommates. And this brings us to step three, which is geographic arbitrage. So you've probably gotten a job where you're making about, you know, $5,000 a month, maybe $4,000. Let's say you're making $50,000 a year. And this is where it gets really interesting because you now have a remote job, which means you can literally move wherever you want. And you can save a ton of money on stuff like gas or the food that you inevitably would have bought when you go out to lunch with your coworkers. And your effective purchasing power becomes equivalent to making $15,000 a month in a city like San Francisco. Now, at this point, you can either move to a cheaper part of your town, or you can move to a cheaper town in the United States or in the state that you live in, or you could move into your parents' house if that's a good option for you. Or if you're especially adventurous, and this is something that a lot of people, including myself, have done, you could actually just move out of the United States and travel the world. Just as an example, I lived in this apartment in the Philippines for a while, and I was paying $350 a month for a nice apartment in a gated community. So making $5,000 a month if you're living in the Philippines is like making $30,000 a month if you're living in the US. And there are countless people that are doing this now, and they're basically taking advantage of what's called geographic arbitrage. So let's look at a real example just to kind of solidify this. Let's say you're going into marketing, and specifically digital marketing. So here's a realistic progression. You start as a remote marketing assistant at a growing SaaS company making $45,000 a year. Then you learn email marketing, content creation, basic analytics, and you're getting paid to learn all of these things, and you're around natural mentors because other people in the business already know how to do it. And I honestly cannot relate to people who are lazy when they go to work because you're literally getting paid to learn in-demand skills. Like you're getting paid to do it. It hurts the business, it hurts your boss, and it hurts you if you're just lazy and you do nothing when you go to work. And almost every boss you talk to, if you're like, hey, I wanna learn how to do email marketing, they're gonna be like, sure, that's cool. Go ahead and do it. So you're probably gonna wanna get familiar with tools like HubSpot, Google Analytics, Facebook ads, et cetera. Now six months in, you're probably going to get a raise and become a marketing coordinator. And you're gonna be making about $65,000 a year. And you're now gonna be managing campaigns, creating content strategies, and building relationships with influencers and partners. 18 months in, you might land another job making around $85,000 a year becoming a growth marketing manager. And this is where you're running full marketing campaigns, managing budgets and teams, and making data-driven decisions. And then two or three years in, you become a senior growth manager or a marketing director. And this is where you're making 120 to $150,000 a year. And this is where you're gonna be leading marketing strategy for entire companies, managing teams and budgets. And you might even be able to get a percentage of the revenue or even equity in the company. Now, the beautiful thing about this path is that it's predictable, learnable, and doesn't require you to risk your savings on a business that might fail. So this is a path that almost anyone can take to make it to six figures a year within two to four years. And this literally doesn't matter if you have a college degree, previous experience, you could be coming out of high school and still make it to six figures in a very short period of time. Just as an example, I have an interview on my channel of one of the clients that we helped get a job at 16 years old, and he got a job making $48,000 a year. Now, that is an extreme example, of course, that's the youngest client we've helped. Just as an example, Keyshawn went straight from high school right into a digital marketing job. And at 20 years old, he was already making $70,000 a year. And then four years in, at 22 years old, he made it to $100,000 per year. So by the time all of his friends were graduating from college, probably landing $40,000, $50,000 a year jobs, he skipped college and he made it to over $100,000 a year within about three to four years. And you can check out a free training for the digital marketing course that he did down in the description and the pinned comment below. All right, now it's time for path two, which is the hybrid personal brand route. And I think this is like training wheels for entrepreneurship, right? Because I'm gonna be honest with you guys, entrepreneurship is incredibly difficult. Like most businesses fail, the ones that succeed usually aren't profitable for years and years. And business is just brutal, right? It's like people, like business owners have health issues, like it is stressful, okay? However, personal branding, in my opinion, is like entrepreneurship with training wheels. Now, getting paid to learn valuable skills, in my opinion, is a great place to start. But at some point, you've learned a lot of valuable skills to the point where you're gonna have a pretty good chance if you start a business of being successful. And the best type of business to start, in my opinion, is personal branding. And even if you don't wanna start a business, you should still do personal branding. And here's why. Josh, for instance, one of my clients who I helped grow on YouTube, when I first met him was basically making no money with his YouTube channel. And after us working together, he was able to use his YouTube channel to land two different job offers with Fane Companies. Now, just to put this in perspective, Fane Companies have a higher rejection rate than Ivy League universities like Harvard. So it is incredibly difficult to get into Fane Companies. And they were actually coming to him, and he was able to get two different offers from two different Fane Companies. And the reason is because a lot of the employees from these companies watched his channel, enjoyed his content, and when he decided that he wanted to get a new job, they were happy to help him. So whether or not you want to start a business or not, creating a personal brand is going to help you tremendously, especially if you're making helpful video content on YouTube. Now, after Josh got his dream job, he kept going with his YouTube channel, and it started making 3,000 a month, 5,000 a month, 10,000 a month, 30,000 a month. And with my help, he scaled it all the way up to over $180,000 a month. So at that point, he obviously quit his job, and now he's crushing it with his business. But it was a smooth transition, right? He was able to do it on the side, and he didn't have to quit his job and go all in on a business like most businesses out there. And even if he hadn't had success, his personal brand still would have been a massive asset for him, getting better jobs, getting promotions, networking, et cetera. And this is really what changed everything for me, right? Because I like to call this the hybrid personal brand route, and this is powerful whether you want to stay employed or start a business. Traditional personal branding advice says just be authentic and post consistently. That's like saying just be good at basketball to someone who wants to join the NBA. It's not actionable. Now, the difference between a hybrid personal brand and a personal brand, what makes it a hybrid personal brand is that it combines the scalability of something like YouTube automation, where you basically outsource the work to other people, or you have AI or processes taking care of most of the work, but the authenticity of personal branding. And you can achieve this if you learn how to efficiently use AI systems. So instead of trading your time for money as an employee, you start creating systems that work while you sleep. And no, I'm not talking about creating some generic AI content slop. I'm talking about utilizing AI to do 10 times the amount of work that you would have been able to do on your own, and making it completely genuine when you use AI in the right way. And this is exactly what I teach my clients how to do, which is why they've had an insane amount of success. Now, with your personal brand, there's many different ways to monetize. First of all, you can make money from AdSense itself, right? AdSense is the money you make when ads show up on your videos. So just as an example, I've made over $1.5 million in AdSense. There's months where I've done around $75,000 in AdSense alone, but there's other ways of monetizing your channel that are way better. For instance, an easy one is simply promoting affiliate links. This is where you promote a product or service that you think is really good, and if they end up buying, you get a small percentage. So just as an example, when I talked about course careers earlier, and also the digital marketing course, if you take their free training and you end up buying their full course, I will get a small percentage of that. So that's an example of affiliate marketing. You can also do sponsorships where you basically create dedicated videos for products or services. I don't do that very often, but I have worked with Coursera in the past, and I've had a really good sponsorship relationship with them. And then of course, you can create your own products and services. And this is what most of my clients that make it to seven and eight figures a year do. They create their own products and services, and therefore they are able to have more control and keep more of the profits. But it's typically a good idea to start off with affiliate marketing. And if you're just trying to make it to 10K per month, you can easily get there from AdSense and affiliate marketing alone. However, if you wanna do one-on-one coaching, that could be another really good way to make a ton of money, even with a tiny channel. Now, one reason why I highly recommend creating a personal brand is it's so synergistic with any business you choose to go into. Just as an example, look at all the success that Elon Musk has had with his personal brand. He's literally the richest person in the world because of his personal brand. And he's launched like 17 different companies from his personal brand. And his personal brand is largely the reason why the companies did so well. Now, realistically speaking, is he running all 17 of his companies? No, of course not. He hires highly competent CEOs to run those companies for him. And those people are attracted to him because of his massive personal brand that he's built. And he's an extreme example, but there's tons of miniature personal brands that are absolutely crushing it and making millions of dollars a year, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on YouTube. Now, another reason why I think the personal brand route is the way to go is because if you have a business idea, chances are your first five or 10 business ideas are going to fail. But if you promote them with a personal brand channel, you can easily just pivot until you find something that actually works rather than having to start over from scratch. So your personal brand basically grows and evolves and changes with you, while you, as a human being, grow, evolve, and change over time. So if you wanna change niches, for instance, you can do that if you have a personal brand. Now, you might be thinking, Shane, I love personal branding, but I don't wanna show my face. Well, one of my clients, Wiz of Ecom, for instance, actually started off with an animated avatar. So he still had a personal brand, but he was just showing himself in avatar mode. And then eventually, he decided to do a face reveal. And then eventually, he decided to switch to an actual in-person personal brand. He did a face reveal, and he's absolutely crushing it with his channel, making over $100,000 a month with his channel and his business. And the next reason why I love personal branding as kind of like entrepreneurship with training wheels is there's so many different directions you can go. You can choose to just use it to get better jobs and use it to network. You can use it to make a little bit of money on the side, like as a side hustle, or you can use it to launch a full-blown business. It's super, super flexible, right? And nobody really knows what their future holds. You might be thinking, now, I don't really wanna start a business. I just wanna use it to get a better job. And then five years down the line, you might change your mind. But either way, personal branding is insanely useful. And one thing you can do is you can create content on YouTube and then repost it to Twitter and LinkedIn, which are great places to network, great places to get better jobs, and great places to launch products and services and make money. Now, additionally, if you want help launching your personal brand, if you wanna save yourself thousands of hours of time and effort and thousands of dollars, I have a coaching program. It's called Content Growth Engine, and we help people grow and make money on YouTube. And the three pillars of content creation are getting views, monetizing those views effectively, and then saving time by actually automating your business, right? Making sure that you're not spending all your time like a chicken with its head cut off, just running around doing things all day, right? You do not wanna end up on the content hamster wheel. So you design your YouTube channel and your content creation process in a certain way where it's sustainable and it doesn't take up all of your time. So if you want a free strategy session where we figure out where you are now, where you wanna be, we make a plan to get there, and we see if we're a good fit to work together or not, then book a call down the description and the pin comment below. This strategy session will be the most valuable 45 minutes when it comes to learning about YouTube and personal branding that you spend this year. So do not miss out on it because it might not be available forever. So check the link in the description and the pin comment below to see if it's available now. And additionally, if you wanna see a case study from one of my clients, Josh, who we help scale all the way up to $180,000 a month, then you can see that by clicking right here.