It took 6 months before I made my first $1 from YouTube.

Those 6 months were brutal. The only people that were watching my videos was my mom and dad. And the entire process just felt like a waste of time.

There were many times that I just wanted to call it quits and to focus on something that made me more money for the time I was putting into it. But luckily, I continued to pump out more and more videos.

After a year of consistently publishing 2-3 videos a week, I now make an extra $50-$80/day simply by the ads that run before my video is played.

The reason why I love this online business idea is because these videos will last forever. And the views that I receive on a daily basis still remain consistent even if I don’t post videos for a while.

Here is how this business idea makes money:

Google pays you to run ads on your videos
Affiliate sales by recommending products in the description
Driving the traffic to your blog (most recommended)
Once you have a good amount of videos up, YouTube can provide constant flow of traffic to your affiliate offers and products or services. Its this constant flow that gives you the ability to make money in your sleep.

Here’s how I got started:

Research the niche that you want to get into
Find videos with high views and low subscribers
Make 10-15 videos about those similar topics
Once you have those corner stone videos getting views from being shown in the related videos on the similar videos you modeled, consistently pump out at least 2-3 videos a week
Watch your subscribers slowly grow over time
This is the exact process I used to go from zero subscribers to now around 250-500 subscribers a day.

Well for one, when people are viewing your YouTube videos, you technically do not own any of those viewers; YouTube does. In most cases it’s no problem, but all it takes is one mistake with YouTube’s terms & conditions and you’re out of a business.

Blogging is different. You are the one that owns all the traffic that comes to your site. Meaning you will always be in business as long as you focus on providing value.

I didn’t start focusing on this business idea until the beginning of 2017.

All I regret is one thing: I wish I would have started sooner.

Not only has blogging allowed me to help impact more people, it has also given me the ability to showcase all of my best resources for teaching people how to make money online in one place.

When I first started blogging, I was not computer savvy at all and had no idea how to create a blog. But luckily, Bluehost (the hosting service that mikevestil.com was initially built on) helped guide me throughout the entire process, and I had my blog up and running in no more than 10 minutes.

Once I had enough content, I went over to Kindle and uploaded all of the content on there. I then went to Fiverr.com and had someone make me a book cover for only $5. That was the birth of The Lazy Man’s Guide to Living the Good Life.

One of the benefits of creating a blog is that you can monetize all the material on it in a more organized fashion in the form of a book.

For those that love the 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, all that book was was a compilation of all of the old blog posts on Tim Ferris’ blog.

I ended up following his footsteps.

Even though my sales suck compare to the 4 Hour Work Week, I am still able to get an extra $100 – $200/ month profit without investing any more time into it.

Most people would see this as pennies compared to the other money making ideas out there, but the power of writing books is that it will exist forever.

This is income that has consistently been coming in and it’s not going anywhere.

And ever since I moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand to focus on my YouTube channel and my journey towards financial freedom, it’s enough to pay for my fully furnished apartment while I run around Asia building my personal brand.

Here is the action steps you can do to get started:

Create a blog
Document your entire journey to building your first online business from any of these ideas on this blog post
Naturally people will find you from the search engines and begin following your story
After you get your first major success, package all of your blog posts into an eBook and paperback book for free on Amazon Kindle
The visitors of your blog will naturally see your book
They will end up buying it because of the value and inspiration that you have already provided to them
I never thought in a million years that I would become “an author.” I was a C+ writer in high school at best. But there is this crazy feeling you get once you finish a book. You begin to realize that the book will last forever long after you’re gone. And that it has the power to impact millions, leaving a legacy that you can be proud of.

The only question now is what legacy will you be leaving behind when you are gone?

I remember when I got my first thank you email or snapchat message of how my free content on my blog and YouTube channel had helped someone make their first $100 online. It was mind blowing. I didn’t know how much of an impact I was actually having on people.

And these people that you have helped get initial success..

They will want more.

When I first got to this point, I tried helping everyone one on one as much as I could. But as my brand grew, I started to lose my time because I couldn’t help thousands of people personally every single day.

So to make things easier for myself and for everyone else, I ended up making a course. I realized that every single person I taught, I taught the exact same thing. So if I could organize them all into a video screen share tutorial, then it would give me the ability to impact more people.

For example for me, people wanted to know the exact softwares I was using to run my business.

The two major ones that I use are Shopify for anything eCommerce related and Clickfunnels for anything sales funnels related.

And since these two had affiliate programs, I would get a commission whenever I would recommend these products.

I would have recommended these products regardless. But with affiliate marketing, I get paid to share the products that I personally love using.

Plain and simple.

Product sales funnels have these things called up sells, down sells, cross sells, all of these increase the lifetime value of a customer.

I highly recommend product sales funnels because they are the most efficient in making high revenues with low spend on advertising.