How to Monetize Your Mind

A step by step guide to building a $100,000 business in 12 months

You can turn your mind into money.

You can take a hobby, experience from your career, ideas you’re curious about, or skills you have and turn them into a business.

But there’s a right and wrong way to do it.

If you do it the wrong way, you can end up like most creators and would be online business owners who have audiences but don’t have businesses.

If you do it the right way, you can get paid, have the freedom to live the life you want, and do something you enjoy all at the same time.

The Profit Trifecta

You need all of these pieces to have the foundation for a business you enjoy running and makes lots of money:

A skill or body of knowledge you enjoy: Whether you’re writing, helping people with their fitness, or editing videos, you have to enjoy what you’re doing or it won’t work.

Attention: Whether it’s building an audience organically, running ads, or reaching out to people via email, there has to be a group of people that’s interested in what you do

A marketplace: You can build an audience of people who enjoy learning about your topic, but don’t want to pay you for help implementing it. Or you can offer a product or service you enjoy making, but nobody wants to buy.

I see this happen all the time.

A creator builds a huge audience about a vague topic like mindset, only to realize mindset isn’t something tangible enough to charge money for (unless you know how to position it).

You have to have all three.

Let me give you the roadmap so you know exactly what to build.

Start With Either One of These

These are the two best business models for beginners.

You can either do the following:

• Done for you services (B2B): Provide a skill that helps other businesses make money like copywriting, video editing, or Facebook Ads.

• One-on-one coaching: Teach people something you have expertise in that they’re willing to pay for.

Become a coach if you already have knowledge people want to pay for or get a coaching certification that teaches you how to help clients.

If you don’t already have something to teach people, start with a done-for-you service and sell it to other businesses.

Here’s a quick skill inventory you can use to make your decision:

Ask these questions:

• What do you find easy that others find difficult?

• What problems have you solved for yourself that others want to learn?

• What skills have you developed in your career?

• What kind of content do you like to consume?

• What have other people told you you’re good at?

• What business idea have you already thought about starting? (This is probably the real answer)

If you like to write, build a writing business.

If you’re passionate about fitness, become a fitness coach.

Savvy with your finances? Teach people how to save and invest.

If you take the time to answer these questions and go through the rest of this guide, you’ll find something that works.

The Three Core Desires You Must Tap Into For Coaching Businesses

If you run a coaching business, you have to choose from one of these three core desires:

• Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

But that’s not enough.

You have to pick a niche.

I don’t care what the other gurus are telling you. They tell you that ‘you are the niche’ because they are trying to sell you something.

They know you have’ niche commitment issues,’ so they’re telling you what you want to hear to get you to open your wallet. Full stop.

If you want to waste years of your life, create content about random topics and try every service under the sun. If you want to make serious cash, pick a niche.

Here’s how.

You have to go deeper than the three core desires because there’s too much competition if you call yourself a ‘health coach.’

Pick a sub-market of one of the three core desires.

Health has sub-markets like:

• Nutrition

• Weight Loss

• Strength Training

Relationships have sub-markets like:

• Dating

• Marriage

• Parenting

Wealth has sub-markets like:

• Sales

• Real estate

• E-commerce

When you choose a sub-category, you face less competition, but it’s still not enough.

Pick your niche.

Each sub-market has niches underneath it. If you pick a niche, you build a business that lets you earn money without needing a huge audience.

The more your audience feels like your product or service is just for them, the more likely they are to pay you for help and they’ll pay you premium prices.

Take a look at these niche examples.

Nutrition niches:

• Keto diet

• Plant-based diet

• Gut health

Sales niches:

• Remote high-ticket sales

• Solar sales

• Tech sales

Dating niches:

• Single-parent dating

• Dating for busy executives

• Christian dating

“The riches are in the niches.”

I know what you might be thinking…

“What if I still don’t know what niche to pick?

“What if I don’t want to box myself in?”

The skill inventory will guide you, but here’s my brutally honest answer.

Grow up.

If you want to be in nicheless limbo the rest of your life go ahead, but if you want to make money put on your big boy or girl pants and commit to something.

Your niche can evolve. You can pivot down the road. But if you never get any traction in the first place you’ll stay stuck in the same spot for years. I see it happen all the time. Don’t be this person.

Pick a niche and run with it for 90 days.

DFY Services: Find Your Profitable Skill

You can get a done-for-you service business up and running in 60 days or less with zero experience if you’re diligent and execute fast.

There is a long list of skills that you can use to help businesses make more money.

Some examples:

• Facebook Ads

• SEO

• Copywriting

• Video Editing

• Conversion Rate Optimization

• Email marketing

• Lead generation (cold email)

• Ghostwriting

To stand out and sell with ease, niche down.

Take copywriting for example.

Most copywriters have no real way of differentiating themselves from the competition, which is why 99 percent of ‘copywriters’ are broke.

This takes some investigation to sort yourself (big boy pants), but you want to think of a way to become a specialist at a narrow set of deliverables or serve a specific market —better yet do both.

Example: I have an acquaintance named Jeff Felton. He does email marketing, but he only does the welcome sequence.

He’s the welcome sequence guy.

As far as I know, he’s the only one I see on X who only does that one skill. Guess who people come to when they want their welcome sequence done?

Another example: This company did photography for physical product companies. For some reason, a large number of companies that sold bottled products started to come their way.

Eventually, they only took pictures of bottles.

If you were a company with bottled products that wanted pictures, would you go to them or a photographer who took pictures of everything?

One of the two has to be narrowed down, the what or the who, or else you’ll face ruthless competition.

Let’s look at these examples again and niche them down:

• Facebook Ads — Facebook ads for Gym Owners

• SEO — e-commerce SEO

• Copywriting — sales funnels for high-ticket info products

• Video Editing — Short-form video editing

• Conversion Rate Optimization — CRO for SaaS

• Email marketing — welcome sequences

• Lead generation (cold email) — Lead gen for real estate agents

• Ghostwriting — ghostwriting for climate tech founders with series A funding

Pick a broad-level category that matches your skillset and figure out the narrow what and who down the road because, in the beginning, you can get your way to $10K through brute force by reaching out to as many businesses as possible.

Use the Nightmare Protocol To Get Good at a Skill Scary Fast

Two weeks from now, you can be good enough at a skill to charge money for it if you follow the ‘nightmare protocol.’

It’s called the nightmare protocol because it’s grueling. It requires you to focus and block out the noise. You won’t want to do it. Most of you won’t do it. But if you do it, you’ll be in a position to get rich a hell of a lot quicker than everyone else.

The nightmare protocol is a two-week stretch where you do nothing else but lock yourself in a room and study a profitable skill.

Nightmare protocol rules — you are only allowed to do the following:

• Go to work

• Sleep

• Exercise

• Study your profitable skill

This means you will spend zero time:

• Watching T.V.

• Going on social media

• Hanging out with friends

• ANYTHING that’s not on the list above

I first heard of the nightmare protocol from an entrepreneur named Alex Becker who recently sold one of his companies for $100,000,000.

I watched a video once where he said that if you’re young and single you should move away from all of your friends and rent an apartment that only has a bed and a computer. No T.V. No game console. Nothing.

This is what he did to get his first business off the ground.

Maybe you can’t do that because you had kids or some circumstance that prevents it, but here’s the point…

You have to eliminate distractions from your life if you want to have a business. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You’ll have to sacrifice things you enjoy for this to work.

Now for the protocol.

Type your desired skill into YouTube search — “How to become a copywriter.”

Pick one of those 4 hour long tutorials. Watch the video from start to finish. As you’re watching the video, questions will pop into your head. Write all of them down.

Take your list of questions, start at the top, and type your first question into YouTube search and watch that video.

When you’re watching that video, write down all of the questions that pop up again.

Repeat this process until you run out of questions. You’re now competent enough to charge money for your skill.

I’ve been a creator and business for almost a decade. The bar for competence is a lot lower than you think.

Most people don’t try. They don’t do even close to what’s required. Not even in the same universe. If you are simply not horrible at the skill you want to sell you’ll do just fine.

The nightmare protocol will get you started, but it takes about 100 hours of study for a done-for-you service skill to get sharp enough to command serious rates.

• 2 hours of daily study means it’ll take you 50 days —less than two months.

• 3 hours of daily study means it’ll take you 33 days—about a month.

• 4 hours of daily study means it’ll take you 25 days —less than a month.

You’re a lot closer than you think. You just need to master your mindset.

It doesn’t take that much literal time to learn profitable skills. But we waste so much time procrastinating, switching niches, switching business models, and chasing shiny objects that those 100 hours take years instead of months to acquire.

Execution shrinks time. You can go from $0 to $100,000 in a year if you start with the nightmare protocol and never stop learning.

Products and Services Aren’t Enough: You Need an Offer

Now that you have a body of knowledge or a skill to sell to people you need to turn what you do, the service, into an offer.

Here’s the number one thing you must burn in your brain if you want to sign clients.

Don’t sell what you do.

Sell what your product or service does.

• Don’t sell fitness coaching. Sell Abs.

• Don’t sell copywriting. Sell conversions that lead to sales.

• Don’t sell relationship coaching. Sell a happy marriage.

When you’re selling, you must understand — your prospect is in pain. They want to move away from that pain into a state of pleasure.

Your offer is the bridge that fills the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Here are some components of your offer to think about:

• Promise: What is the outcome they will get in exchange for the money?

• Timeframe: How long will it take to get the outcome?

• Pricing: How much does it cost?

• Urgency/Scarcity: Why should they buy this now as opposed to later?

Bad offer: I’ll write ‘copy’ for you

Good offer: I’ll book you 20 qualified sales calls per month on a pay-per-call basis with a done-for-you sales funnel

Bad offer: Career Coaching

Good offer: Land a FAANG job in 6 months or less

Bad offer: Dating coaching

Good offer: I’ll help you get 10 first dates with quality matches in the next 6 weeks

When it comes to pricing, start no lower than $1,000/month. $1,000/mo creates enough cash flow to help you reach your income goals without needing a ton of people to say yes.

Selling low-ticket products like e-books and $47-97 courses, or $5 substack subscriptions, requires you to get tons of people to say yes.

Urgency/scarcity: You need to give people a reason to act now or else they won’t. This is why it’s smart to cap how many clients you take each month and add some sort of reason to act now like a price raise after you sign your next batch of clients.

The Only Four Ways to Sign Clients

There are only four ways to get attention that you can convert into clients.

• You can produce one-to-many content for free (organic traffic)

• You can produce one-to-many content by paying for advertisements (cold traffic)

• You can reach out 1 on 1 to people who know you, follow you, and like your content (warm outreach)

• You can reach out 1 on 1 to people who don’t know you (cold outreach)

Every single one of these methods works. Cold outreach works great for done for you services.

Organic content + warm outreach is the best combination for coaching.

If you know how to run ads profitably it’s a license to print money.

Long story short you need a way to turn attention into money.

Here’s the model I teach students in my mastermind:

• Create content that targets your ideal client profile (ICP)

• Do warm outreach to people in your audience to book sales calls

• Close them on sales calls

• (Supplemental) You can sprinkle in cold outreach if you have zero audience

It works amazingly well.

One of my students, Lorwen, an anxiety relief coach, just did $12K in a month less than a year after she started working with me and had just 7 followers and zero revenue:

Mandy, a career coach, did $11,000 in sales the first month and has closed more than a dozen clients at $3K a piece:

Ryan, a video marketer, has done $26,000 in 3 months:

Cade, a managing director at an accounting firm turned fractional CFO for businesses, just landed his first client for $3,500 building business systems :

None of these students started with a big audience. Some had zero sales and marketing experience. All of them just followed this simple process that works.

Final Thoughts

Business success is a lot closer than you think.

Wake up early. Cut the distractions. Lock-in.

It takes just two hours a day to make this process work.

Business isn’t easy. But it’s not complicated. The steps required are simple, but the execution is tough.

You have the knowledge, skill set, and IQ to do it. The real key to success in business?

Learn how to regulate your emotions, tolerate stress, develop discipline, and build mental toughness.

I can teach anyone the tangibles. I can even help you with the intangibles. But I can’t do the work for you.

If you’re ready to take the next step and grow your revenue by $5,000 per month or more in the next six months…

Book a strategy session with me at the button below:

We’ll talk about your business goals, where you’re at currently, and the roadblocks that are preventing you from hitting your income target.

If you’re a good fit, I will put together a plan to build your business and invite you to work with me to implement it.