How I built a $250,000/year online business with $0 (beginner's guide)

hey I'm Alex Finn and over the last 3 years I've set up an online Creator business that's making me roughly $200,000 a year I've done this primarily through Twitter through my newsletter and now YouTube in this video I'm going to walk you through every single Revenue stream I have show you how much I'm making and show you how you can set up the same Revenue stream yourself let's get into it boom over here now so my business is fairly simple the first two years I was working on it while maintaining a 9 to5 now I work on it full-time and it's a really simple business built on a really simple Creator funnel the first step of the funnel is twitteryoutube the second my newsletter the third digital products this is really simple to set up and I'm going to show you stepbystep how to do it yourself and show you each Revenue stream from each part of the funnel let's get into it so starting off

with the top of my funnel is Twitter SLX the main goal of my Twitter is to send as many people as possible from my Twitter to my newsletter where I can really get a lot of monetization done but along the way I do have several revenue streams set up in xby itself the first Revenue stream is AD Revenue so

anyone on X can start making ad Revenue just by tweeting right and the way you do that is by getting as many people as you can in the reply section your post how do you do that well the first way is by replying to everyone who replies to you if you scroll down to the reply section of my post you can see that I'm reply replying to every single person who replies to my post and the reason I do that is when I reply to them they come back to my post they see the ads in my reply section and that increases my ad Revenue just as a secondhand effect I'm also networking and building relationships but it is building my Revenue stream here and I'm making right now around $155,000 per year on xad revenue and I do this by putting out posts and then replying to everyone who replies to me so they come back and see ads on top of that I'm building content that is likely to go viral that the algorithm loves and that type of content is threads long form posts and videos as you can see here this post I made from today is actually a thread and it has 11,000 views in the first two hours which is pretty amazing because the algorithm absolutely loves threads and how you build a thread is you choose a topic and then you put out a post and then you just put multiple posts attached to it right broken down into different chapters the algorithm absolutely loves this type of content so if you're putting out content the algorithm loves and you're applying to everyone who replies to you you're going to maximize your ad revenue for me which it's not a ton but it's a good amount it's about $115,000 a year the second Revenue stream I have on X is my

subscribers I have about 200 subscribers at the moment paying me $9 a month so roughly around $20,000 per year and I did this buy again reply guy I reply to everyone who replies to me they build relationships eventually people want to convert and become subscribers then on top of that I'm creating tons of subscriber content so I'm putting out a subscriber only video every single day and I'm doing a subscriber only space which you can see down here once a week and in this space I'm just hanging out and talking to my subscribers if you do this if you build relationships and build good subscriber content you're going to start to attract a lot of subscribers so those are my two revenue streams on X then I push people to my newsletter where I have way more revenue streams set up let's take a look at that the next step of my funnel is my newsletter everyone who is serious about building an online business needs a newsletter Point Blank there's no option to it you need to have one it is the most valuable most monetizable asset you possibly can have and it's free to set up you literally have nothing to lose it will supercharge your business if you're watching this right now you need to set up a news newl where did I set up my newsletter you got a lot of options some people do substack some people do beehive I like beehive for me it has the best marketing tools it is the easiest to use and they seem to be shipping the fastest I used substack for a while but they didn't seem to be shipping new functionality over the couple years I was using them beehive seems to be constantly updating so I like beehive but what's great about a newsletter is there are so many ways to monetize so for me I have a couple Main monetization strategies with my newsletter that is through sponsorships

and that is through a premium newsletter those two combined are making me roughly $50,000 per year about half of that with sponsorships the premium newsletter sponsorships are simple if you're using Twitter at the moment and you're advertising your newsletter people will eventually reach out to you and ask you to sponsor your newsletter as my newsletter grew and I was talking about it on X people went oh hey can I my project be a part of your newsletter can we sponsor it really simple strategy here I said yep $300 and I'll let you in and then as people started accepting I'd slowly raise the price from 300 to 400 to 500 to where I'm at now which is roughly $1,200 for 30,000 subscribers so you want to start the newsletter for the sponsorships and then on top of that I have a premium newsletter so every couple weeks I send out a premium newsletter uh that talks about AI that talks about technology it talks about entrepreneurship you can see my different articles here and that I charge $10 a month for and you can get those bonus newsletters as well every week I send out one free newsletter and then I send out a paid one the free one is what's going to push people to your different products which I'll go into in a second but it'll also push people to your premium newsletter so that's accounting for a decent chunk of my yearly Revenue as well but where the revenue really starts to come in is through the digital products that's the third step in my funnel and again that's powered by the newsletter as well the newsletter is the single best place to sell products and services it's where people expect to be sold to when people open a newslet they're expecting to be sold software or a course or a product or something like that that's where I'm able to push my products to my 30,000 subscribers so one thing you see here is

my community I'm selling my private community Through My newsletter as well my private Community is making me about $70,000 a year and so in each one of my newsletters I'm pushing one of those products in this one it is the community and a community is really easy to set up I do mine through Circle there are several other platforms you can use including Discord I did before I really like Circle that's the one I would recommend set up a community through there offer some sort of services through your community I put different educational videos I talk to my community members there I do weekly calls but this is a really good way to monetize as well ALS Alo through my newsletter I'll push Consulting so I do

social media Consulting if you have any sort of skill set that you're decently to grade at someone will pay you to help them out someone is a step or two behind you in every single way that will pay you to help them out with that specific skill for me I'm really good at content creation so I have people who pay me for my Consulting around their social media and so I'll put in here in some of my newsletters towards the bottom instead of talking about my community or a course I'll offer Consulting so because I'm good at social media I offer social media Consulting but for you maybe you're good at programming you offer programming Consulting if you have no skill sets then learn a skill set the internet has tons of free resources you can go online spend a few months learning a skill and then have a skill you can monetize so think about what your strongest skill is and then offer that in your newsletter as a Consulting service same pricing strategy as newsletter sponsorships I start off the price low where I'm selling my services for $50 to $100 an hour and then I slowly raise it as I get more and more demand and get better at what I'm doing and that Consulting again is making me about $770,000 per year next I have

courses are making me about $50,000 per year again the same thing as Consulting if you have a skill that you're pretty good at you can monetize it whether it's through consulting or whether it's through digital products like courses again I'm really good at content creation and so social media and so I built a course around that I use kajabi for my courses uh for me it was just the easiest to use the easiest setup it's a little bit pricier but for me that's the one I enjoyed so I recommend kajabi link below if you want to use that just take any of these skills you're really good at create videos around those skills and then put them into a course you can sell them for any price uh I put a ton of work into my courses so I put them for about $300 a course but courses again are another great way to monetize the skill sets you have and the best part is because you have a newsletter you can launch it and sell it with every single newsletter you put out the more newsletters you can sell your product so what you can see here is one of the ads I put out when I launched my course if you have a newsletter set up it is so easy to sell online products it's too easy again if you don't have a newsletter set up yet you need to get one right now it is the best tool you can have for your online business so Consulting my community and courses are the three digital products I sell I'm going to eventually get into building software because I'm a programmer at heart but the last online Revenue stream I have is the affiliate links in my

newsletter and what you can see here is one of those affiliate links I have choose some sort of software a tool that relates to your special skill set almost every single tool on the Internet is going to have affiliate links and then post them in your newsletter again your newsletter is the best selling tool you can have with every person that opens up your newsletter you're going to get a couple clicks of people that want to use that software which will give you a couple bucks that builds up over time for me I'm getting around $15,000 per year off the affiliate links it's not a ton but when combined with all my other revenue streams now I'm building a really healthy online business so that's how my current business is set up there's a lot of ways to monetize no matter which platform you're on at the end of the day though the newsletter is going to be the most valuable component of any online digital business so get that set up think about your funnel think about what you want at the top of your funnel for me that's Twitter and YouTube the middle which is my newsletter and in the end what products you're selling for me that's my community it's my courses it's my Consulting set that funnel up get as many people as you can through the top of that funnel with your content on your different platforms and the rest of it just kind of works itself up but the number one thing you want to do right now set up your newsletter then set up your social media platform like Twitter or YouTube if this was at all helpful leave a like subscribe if you want share your newsletter in the comments below would love to subscribe to it as well see you in the next video