I got this question the other day.
A reader of the One-Person Business Success newsletter said he was making about $200 per month now and wanted to know when he should expect the big bucks.
So, let’s unpack this.
Secret To Success: Timeframes
Let’s see what successful people say about the online business timeframe.
Tim Denning says anyone can build a 6-figure newsletter within 18 months. He also says he’s seen it happen multiple times. I like Tim, and I believe him.
Eve Arnold, who made $16K this June (on Medium + selling a digital product), says it took her 3 years to start having $10K+ months.
My first 6-figure year was my 9th year of starting a one-person business. God, I’m a snail.
To sum up, here’s how long success takes: 18 months — Indefinitely
How to speed up the process?
If you’re impatient and you’re wondering how to be among the 18-month success stories (or maybe even the very few who make it faster), here are a few ways to speed up success:
Write a lot (or post a lot of content). This means different things to different people but write as much as you realistically can.
Be everywhere. Well, not necessarily everywhere. I never quite got Instagram, but I am on LinkedIn, X, Medium, and Substack. So be almost everywhere.
Invest in courses by top creators. They’ll pump you up, you’ll join interesting communities, and, of course, you’ll learn strategies it would take you years to come up with on your own.
Work through the bad days. When it seems like it’s never going to work. When your earnings are actually going down. When nothing is happening. Work through this.
Seek & read success stories. Solopreneurship is lonely. Imagine how much different it would feel if we all worked in a shared office and you heard success stories daily. Well, we can’t have that, but people love to share successes online, so when you feel down, read a success story to get back up.
Peek Behind The Curtain
In the part of the newsletter, I share a bit about how my week is going so you can see you’re not the only one who’s struggling.
Latest Success:
I was so disappointed with Medium over the last few days that I consider receiving their latest e-mail a personal success. I felt so relieved. Here’s a snippet of what they said:
“We recently discovered organized fraudulent activity impacting payments for some Partner Program writers, and want to inform you about it and let you know what we are doing to protect authors from being affected.
You may have seen a decrease in earnings starting around September 25th through the first few days of October. During this time, we discovered significant fraudulent activity from a small number of accounts targeting our program to specifically divert funds. Our team has suspended these users.
To be clear: This was fraudulent activity at scale, specifically prohibited on our platform.
We will be re-calculating and applying earning adjustments to all writers that were affected by the activity of the fraudulent accounts. If your account was impacted, you will see a credit on your October earnings report by the end of this month.”
I did see a massive drop in earnings at the beginning of October, so let’s see what will be adjusted at the end of October.
New thing I’m trying:
I’ve been more active on Substack lately, and I love how collaborative it is once you get into it. If you hit the “Explore” button in your menu, you’ll get recommendations, or you can search for people/newsletters by typing a keyword in the search bar.
It’s how I found a few Medium writers & freelancers and now we’re swapping recommendations. Collaboration is key on any platform, so collaborate.
Latest Failure:
I’ve been trying to post my novel on Radish since forever, and I still haven’t done it. They need a 30-page sample, which is about 10K words. So I’ve been editing the first 10K words of my novel for over 2 weeks.
Sometimes, my lack of confidence is delaying my actions, hence my results. At least I’m aware of it. Should be able to send this in today—and let’s see what happens.
How long have you been trying to make money online? Are you satisfied with your progress?
Let’s chat!
Sending you a truckload of patience,
Maya