It’s simpler than it sounds, and you can do it too, all while working from the comfort of your own home. No tricks and no scams!


I’ve been working in internet marketing for a decade and a half. During that time, I think I’ve heard it all when it comes to people asking the question: “How can I make money online?” So many times, across social media, online forums, and even among people I know and meet in person, I’ve heard people ask some variation of: “How can I find a way to make money online/on the internet/working from home?”

This has always been extremely annoying to me. Not so much because the question itself is so bad because it isn’t. Technically, “How can I make money working from home?” is a perfectly fair question. But people are almost never just asking that question. In my observation, most times, people are actually wondering: “How can I make money from home, with no skills, with no equipment, with no investment, and with as little effort as possible?” That is an entirely different question.

So here’s my honest answer to that: you can’t. Please, stop trying. Stop even thinking that it’s possible.

The only people who make money working from home in their underwear with as little work as possible are people selling online courses with titles like “How to Make Money Working From Home in Your Underwear With as Little Work as Possible.” That’s it. Those people are freakin’ rich because there’s an endless supply of people willing to shell out $49.99, $79.99, or $259.99 for an online course that has vague promises of a more prosperous future for you—yes, you—in just seven easy lessons.

There are SO many business books on topics like this, it’s truly bizarre. I think much of the current craze was fueled by that horrible book The Four-Hour Workweek that came out in 2007. I’m not just being hateful: I’ve read the book. Twice. It had some good ideas about automation, prioritizing your efforts, maximizing your productivity, and finding other people to do the small, tedious, repeatable tasks that suck up your time but don’t really require you to do them.

But just looking at the book’s subtitle gives away its ridiculous premise: “Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.”

Ugh.

It’s almost sickening how clearly it’s pandering to the audience that is thinking, hoping—praying—they can just find a way to click a few buttons on a computer, set up an online storefront to sell diet pills that don’t work, staffed by underpaid laborers from the Phillippines, with drop-shipping from a fulfillment center they’ve never even seen, somewhere in another state they’ve never even been to.

Really, who wouldn’t want to do that? Who wouldn’t want to just lean back on a beach chair in St. Croix, sipping on boat drinks and watching as thousands of dollars just slide effortlessly into their bank accounts? That sounds amazing. That sounds sexy.

But guess what? I’ve never met a single person in my life who has actually done this.

I HAVE met a few people who can lean back on a beach chair in St. Croix, sipping on boat drinks, watching as thousands of dollars just slide into their bank accounts. But none of it was effortless; it took years of hard, sometimes miserable, and oftentimes very lonely work.

W-O-R-K.

One problem is that authors of books about “joining the ‘new rich’” can pitch their system/product/course/book/class by showing off the life they live now and say, “See? Look at how I live! Don’t you want to be like me?” It’s easy to get sucked into thinking, “Wow, yeah, it must be that simple. All I have to do is pay him, and do what he tells me, then I’ll be rich like him.”

To quote the Canadians, “Sorry, no.” It doesn’t work that way. You can’t shortcut the process.

So how does one make $10,000 a day working from home? I’ll give you the answer right here, right now.

Here’s the answer: good, old-fashioned, hard work. Period.

Just to prove I’m not just being a jerk, I’ll fulfill the promise I made in the title of this article and tell you about “how I make $10,000 per day working from home.” Here’s the secret I used that you can replicate for yourself:

  1. Find a need
  2. Fill it
  3. Charge a good price for it
  4. Take good care of your clients
  5. Ask them for referrals
  6. Rinse; repeat

On a basic level, that’s it. Seriously. It’s just that simple. Notice: I’m not saying that it’s easy. Easy and simple are very different.

By the way, this is true across just about any industry. In my case, I spent many years learning web design, web development, and digital marketing. That meant many long, painful, boring, lonely nights doing research online, teaching myself skills, and asking people I knew, “How do I do this?” It meant a lot of lost sleep, a lot of mistakes, a lot of trial and error, and, above all, a lot of confusion, frustration, and misery. And eventually, I figured out how to make it work.

It is true: sometimes, I do make $10,000 per day working from home. But it is also true that sometimes, I make $0 per day working from home. Heck, I’ve sometimes gone a week, 10 days, or even two weeks without making a single dollar. That’s all part of the package: ask any freelancer or solopreneur.

Or ask any company founder, honestly. If they were still alive, you could ask the founders of Safeway, Shell, Google, Wal-Mart, Volkswagen, or Apple. No matter how successful they are today, at one point, they were just an idea, with a few people putting in the hard work of (as I mentioned): finding a need, filling it, charging a good price for it, taking good care of their clients, asking them for referrals, rinsing and repeating. None of it comes with any guarantees for you and me now, nor for those founders back then.

So… that’s how you make $10, or $100, or $10,000 a day, working from home or working from anywhere else for that matter. Just do the work. Stop trying to shortcut the process.

Most of all, PLEASE—for Pete’s Sake—stop buying eBooks, listening to podcasts, or clicking on articles with titles like “How I Make $10,000 Per Day Working From Home.”