A short while back, I published an article. Since November 3rd, over 106,000 people have read it. They’ve shared it with their friends, they’ve talked about in the forums, they’ve sent it via Twitter. More than 600 people have emailed me about it.

“I really needed to read this today. Dear God, I really, really needed it.

So thank you for giving people hope. And making all this “how to make money without someone handing you a paycheck” stuff make sense. Its giving people back their freedom, including mine. As a disabled kid, whom everyone has already decided is a failure, and will never make money or succeed at anything, freedom tastes pretty damn sweet. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hug.”

Sarah Lacy, smlacyart.com

“Like the girl in the letter you shared, I bought tons of courses I never even got through the first week with. They made it so complicated and overwhelming. I think that it takes someone who knows to the depth of their soul about being overwhelmed to teach and inspire without pushing people over the edge. You are that person. I know it.

So, thank you. I am grateful that I found you.”

Pamela Brackett, PamelaBrackett.com

“I have two things to tell you. For starters, your blog post was extremely touching, so much so, it made me a little teary. Isn’t it the best thing ever when you can help people?

Secondly, thank you so much for all of the non-confusing, straight-to-the-damn-point advice. I found my website in Web Designer Magazine over the weekend (huge magazine for us graphic/web design folk), and I absolutely owe it to all of your advice! I could have NEVER done it with out you.”

Renee Rist, RibbonsOfRed.com

If you haven’t already read it, here’s the article:

Why We’re Broke and How To Fix It

Take a Hummer full of average self-made millionaires. Strand them in the desert. Strip them of their money. Take away everything they own. Rob them of their connections, their networks, their families.

Ten to one they’re millionaires again in less than five years.

Can you be a millionaire in five years?

As it stands right now, probably not. So what is it that’s different about John Q. Millionaire? Why can he take his kids to Euro Disney and you can’t?

Because he depends on himself and the rest of the world depends on, well, the rest of the world.

We used to be self-reliant.

For 40,000 years of human history, we depended on ourselves. We were part of a small network of people who helped each other out, but mainly we fixed our own clothes, cooked our own meals and traded our own chickens to make our way in this world.

We were Jacks of all trades. When our roof broke, we didn’t hope we had money left on our Visa to pay a specialist to come out and fix it — we cut down a tree and went up the ladder. If the wheat crop was poor, we always had the cows. Wife took in some sewing work, husband ploughed the fields. If one thing went wrong, we didn’t cross our fingers and pray the big man down the lane would waltz in to take care of us.

Sometime around the industrial revolution, we gave the responsibility of feeding our families to a bunch of old guys in suits that cost more than our car. Or horse, as the case may have been.

Rich people came in and, as part of an income diversification strategy, decided to build some factories. We started to specialize. We became widget stampers, widget joiners, widget movers. Our self-identity became one of what we did to which widgets for eight or 10 or 12 hours a day.

Western culture became one of efficiency. How could we do it faster? How could we make it easier? How could we work it cheaper?

Then, on April Fools’ Day, 1913, Henry Ford added a conveyor belt to the whole process and generalism went to hell.

Flash forward 95 years and we live in a world of 10-page job descriptions that itemize exactly what we do — and more importantly, what we don’t do. We put cute little comic strips in our cubicles that scream “Not my department”. We do the same thing, every day, for years at a time. Optimally, we do our one thing and one thing only more efficiently than any other person in town.

And in order to ensure we have time for all of this efficiency, we have outsourced the rest of our lives to other specialists. Specialists grow our food and make our clothes and educate our children while we go be specialists for someone else.

We believed we were making things easier. Instead we were handing over every tiny scrap of personal power we had left.

Because in addition to making life soul-suckingly boring, this specialist employee system made us really, really vulnerable.

We are totally dependent on a bunch of strangers to make sure little Madison and Jacob can keep going to Baby Salsa.

We depend on everybody else standing at the conveyor belt to not screw the whole thing up, increasing company costs and decreasing employee salaries.

We depend on the dude above us, the one who kissed so much ass he got off the conveyor belt, to dole out our raises and not favor the guy next to us.

We depend on the marketing department to do a good job selling the stuff that comes off the conveyor belt.

We depend on the guy who owns the conveyor belt to act in a fiscally responsible yet compassionate manner.

We depend on the public at large to keep their own conveyor belt jobs so they can afford to buy the widgets we’re cranking out so efficiently.

And if every single one of those people on whom we depend does their job the way we hope they will, we get a check every couple weeks that pays most of our bills.

That’s good, right? That makes it all worth it, doesn’t it?

How The Rich Stay Rich

The primary breadwinners among us hesitate to tell our spouse that the raise might not come through this year.

We whisper, so the kids don’t hear, that maybe our vacation has to wait.

Maybe the remodeling plan was a little ambitious.

Maybe we can make do with the old Corolla.

The stay-at-home wife tries to stretch the turkey to make a few more brown bag lunches, pastes on a smile and tells the little ones that Daddy’s doing the best he can.

The single mom tries not to cry when she tells her kids that of course she misses them when she’s at work.

She would have loved to be with them when they had chicken pox but she couldn’t afford to take the day off.

Why does this happen? Because we rely on one stream of income and construct our entire lives around the panic that it might disappear.

The rich, on the other hand, have been handily avoiding this trap for years.

Their golfing buddy the financial planner has been ensuring they diversify their investments so economic downturns don’t hurt them. The conveyor belt hysteria doesn’t affect them in the slightest.

Our paycheck can’t even send little Aidan to hockey camp. We’ve got nothing left to invest in anything, let alone a diversified portfolio.

But as the pundits so wisely explain — right after explaining that the ticket to riches is cutting back on your latte consumption — that diversification is the key to wealth, security and freedom.

As in, you’re not supposed to put all your eggs in one basket.

Would you put your family’s life savings in one stock?

Would you put little Emma’s college fund into something you don’t understand, has no guarantees, and over which you have zero control?

No? Then WHY IN HELL are you doing it with your family’s income?

Recently, in a small town in Ontario, the area’s largest employer closed its doors. Most of the town, trained only in the art and science of making canned soup, found themselves out of work.

A few thousand soup makers live in a town where nobody wants to pay them to make soup. Now all of them are going to try to find a way to apply their skill sets to other employers in the area. The competition is fierce, and their mortgages are on the line.

Except there are no other major employers in the area, least of all ones that can make use of Jerry’s 12 years of mushroom chopping experience.

Some of them will find jobs, sure, and good for them. But many others are going to have to reinvent themselves.

Reinvention is difficult enough.

Reinventing yourself, your family’s lifestyle, your social status and your skill set in an economy where everybody else is trying to do the same thing is virtually impossible.

But let’s rewind the clock a few years for our favorite mushroom chopper, Jerry.

Imagine if Jerry had found a few hours a week, when he wasn’t at the conveyor belt, to diversify the sources of his family’s income. Maybe he started a mushroom blog and now makes a few hundred bucks a month in affiliate income promoting the latest kitchen gadgets.

Perhaps his wife picked up the knitting needles and started whipping up a few shawls and baby blanket.

Maybe she found she was good at this knitting gig and started designing a few patterns in her spare time. Jerry’s family picture looks a whole lot different.

Flash forward again to the present, and Jerry’s mushroom chopping job is in jeopardy. His buddies at the conveyor belt are starting to freak out, but Jerry’s little income streams have been growing and they’ve started to add up. Jerry and his family now have options.

They have choices.

They have leverage.

They have freedom.

All because Jerry and his wife decided to turn off the CSI reruns and look into diversifying their income streams.

He didn’t have to make a big, loud proclamation that he was quitting his job at the plant. They didn’t have to spend a fortune on office space or new computers or ergonomic chairs. They didn’t need business cards that said, “We’re serious business owners, dammit.”

They just needed to diversify.

For hundreds of years, diversification has been the luxury of the rich. Now, in the wake of broad globalization and mass internet access, we have a ticket to escape from this madness. It has never been easier to connect with suppliers, clients, customers, searchers, readers, fans. If you’re reading this right now, surprise! You’re on the internet.

If you’re scanning this post, please read this:

IttyBiz has made over $176,000 this year through six different types of income streams. In Part Two of this series, I’m going to explain to you how we did it. In Part Three, I’m going to tell you how I helped a client of mine do it, somebody who went from bumming around grad school to charging $500 an hour consulting. In Part Four, I’m going to show you a little piece of the product I’ve got coming out that will teach you how to do this for your own family.

Whether you’re a single parent, a cubicle dweller, an online business owner, a stay-at-home parent or just some dude looking to finally pay off your Visa, there is still time to take back your power.

Next Christmas could look a whole lot different.

***

I followed that up with some other lessons and ideas for people who are overwhelmed and confused by making money on the internet.

Nice people. Normal people. Ordinary people.

People with kids and parents and jobs and responsibilities.

This is the video where I explained how this website made $176,000 in the first ten months of this year. You can click play to watch it now.

Next up is an interview with Clay Collins, one of my old clients, who has gone on to rock the world of income streams.

I first started working with Clay Collins (the case study in the lesson) earlier this year. He had a very young blog on personal development and wanted help getting new subscribers and monetizing his website. Now he’s… well, I’ll let you hear for yourself. Suffice it to say he’s doing pretty awesome.

Click the “Play” button to hear the audio. (That’s the little grey triangle in the red box on the right.)

There are a couple of dirty words in this so you might want to put some headphones in if you have toddlers around. (It’s not bad, I promise. Clay just gets excited — it’s part of his charm.)

In this lesson we talk about:

- How Clay went from the world’s most repetitive and boring job to where he is today.

- How he went from having a lot of different MARKETS to a few markets with lots of different INCOME STREAMS (Hint: it’s way easier that way)

- How he chose his 3 consulting niches

- How he uses affiliate marketing to get paid to test a potential ebook or info-product market

- How he reorganized his business to incorporate his move to a different state so he could spend two months with his grandfather (who has Alzheimer’s)

Near the end of the lesson, he gives his advice to people who are new to income streams, including ways to maximize your revenue without impacting your readers’ or customers’ experience. He talks about how to “get jiggy with business” (no, I did not make that up) for people who aren’t business types, how to find mastermind groups, and how to network without being sleazy.

So what does all this mean to you?

Online Business School is a 6 module home study course on how to use six most reliable internet income streams to secure your family’s bottom line.

They include:

Consulting and coaching, or selling the contents of your brain

Coaches and consultants have different marketing needs than regular service providers. Generally speaking, there isn’t a tangible product at the end. Creating a coaching or consulting business isn’t hard, but it takes some marketing savvy to convince people to pay you more than they make in a day for only an hour of your time.

If you get JUST ONE COACHING CLIENT, this course will have paid for itself.

Providing services like freelance writing or design

In this online climate, with competition coming out of the woodwork, it can be disheartening running a service based business. Offshore companies are quoting prices that are one tenth of what you need to live off, and it’s easy to think you’ll never be able to compete with that. This section of the course teaches you how to position yourself and your service as indispensable and unique to your specific target demographic.

If you get JUST ONE EXTRA GIG, this course will have paid for itself.

Selling physical stuff, the type of thing people sold before the internet even existed.

Maybe you dream of making a living selling things you’ve made with your own hands. Maybe your market isn’t tech savvy and needs to know you’re shipping them something real, not just a download. Either way, selling physical products in an online environment is different than selling them in the real world, and different than the old school marketing textbooks will teach. This section teaches you how to sell things that people can actually hold in their hands.

If you make a HANDFUL OF EXTRA SALES, this course will have paid for itself.

Selling ebooks and downloads that don’t suck

Everybody wants to sell ebooks, and who can blame them? They have all the great features of real books, but you make a boatload more money and you don’t have to wait for a publisher. The same is true for downloadable audio and video. But with everyone trying to sell downloads, it’s easy to think the market is saturated. Nuh-uh. You just have to do it right.

If you sell just five copies of your ebook, this course it will have paid for itself.

Creating tiny websites for not-so-tiny profits

For people with varied interests, creating smaller niche websites is a great way to make a living on the internet without committing to something for life. Through reliable advertising and promotion methods, a handful of niche websites can make a LOT of money. But for every successful niche marketer, there are dozens of frustrated ones. This section teaches you how to be one of the success stories.

If you create JUST ONE TINY WEBSITE that makes even five dollars a day, this course will have paid for itself.

And my personal favorite, affiliate marketing without becoming a sleazebag.

People think affiliate marketing is the easiest (and sometimes sleaziest) way to make money on the internet, and it can be both. But there’s a fine balance between not selling enough and selling too much. Add to that the enormous variety of products to choose from and you’ve got a recipe for confusion. IttyBiz makes a LOT of money from affiliate marketing and I’m going to show you how.

If you recommend a product to JUST THREE PEOPLE, this course will have paid for itself.

Now imagine what you could do if you used 2 or three of the modules.

I personally make money with each and every one of these income streams, so I can actually speak with some level of smartness.

Now I understand that you don’t know me very well yet and that buying things on the internet is kind of a scary thing to do. To give you an idea of the kind of course you’re buying, I want to give you a sample.

This is the full audio module from the Niche Websites module of the course. It’s a little under 40 minutes long, and it’s one of the two lessons that comes with this module of your course. You can just click the play button and it will start, and it’s completely toddler friendly.

And then there are the bonuses.

I think it’s a law that every sales page on the internet has to have a list of useless bonuses as long as your arm. We’ve got bonuses, sure. We don’t want to have our internet marketing license revoked. But they’re not useless. They’re AWESOME.

World class time management coach Dave Navarro teaches you how to find the time in your very busy day to make this whole thing work. You get the two whole sections of 30 Hours A Day to get you well on your way to more time, more freedom, and more money.

Media darling Havi Brooks calms you right down with two audio recordings designed to help you find a peaceful place in the midst of all this financial uncertainty, worry and fear. Havi is booked solid until who knows when, so grab these perfectly bite-sized flashes of calm.

Online writing experts and all around cool dudes James Chartrand and Harrison McLeod are just HANDING YOU their Writing For The Web. Whether you don’t want to hire someone to write your own website copy, you’re doing some writing for niche sites, or you want to start your own freelance writing biz, you NEED this book.

Having blogged since the invention of the internet, Michael Martine knows a LOT about SEO. His new guide, SEO-Nomicon: SEO Magic for Wordpress gives you the insider tips on getting serious traffic without paying for a stupid, expensive guide.

Internet marketing rockstar Josh Hohman has achieved quite a feat. He’s making a killing in Internet Marketing and niche sites, but he’s not a dirtbag. In fact, he’s a very nice father of a 2-year-old munchkin, making his living being a work from home daddy. He’s given us his Fool-Proof Niche Control Using Silos which is kind of like my niche websites module except it’s on steroids.

And if that’s not enough, I’m throwing in a couple of cool things from IttyBiz:

You get my own personal Rolodex of the products and services and websites that are making IttyBiz run smoothly. When you start getting into the kind of income streams we’re into, you need to know what products work and what products just make more work for you. We’re giving you the inside scoop on the best of the best.

And, probably my favorite part of all, you get the Emergency Money Plan. This is a very special section because we live in very special times. This is for when you have no money and it’s an absolute emergency. You have no start-up capital and you need to pay rent by the first and you don’t have a clue what to do. This basically gives you five different ways to make a thousand bucks by the end of the month without doing anything dirty or illegal. Just five outside-the-box ways to buy groceries when you’re really, really broke.

I understand that you might be reluctant, which is why I’m giving you the same 100% money back, zero pain in the ass factor guarantee that I give for all my IttyBiz stuff. Except it’s going to be even better.

Because income streams are scary and because you might think you can’t do it and because I know you’re probably worried and hopeful at the same time, here’s what we’re going to do.

The Knock Your Socks Off Guarantee

If, having gone through Online Business School, you are not absolutely certain you can create a better living on this crazy thing we call the World Wide Web, you have two choices.

I’ll give you your money back without being a pain in the ass about it. OR I’ll personally coach you through it so that you have a plan of action that will work for you. Whatever you like, phone, instant messenger, email. Whatever you need to make this work. And you can go whichever way.

All that for $397.

Click the button below to get started.

By Naomi Dunford