You will not get rich renting out your time, and passive income doesn’t exist.

I am addicted to making money online.

And not in some scammy, buy-my-course kind of way either. I have no get-rich-quick scheme for you, multilevel marketing opportunity, or promise to be an ‘entrepreneur.’

But once I started to make an online income, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Through the internet and platform economy, the opportunities to monetize yourself are endless.

Your ideas, lifestyle, passions, and interests can be monetized. It will take work to build an audience and effort to develop your skills, but the potential upside is unbounded. There is a market for every niche.

I’ve just turned 26 years old, and my goal is to completely financially independent by the age of 36. That’s a 10-year run-way. I don’t plan to retire or quit my job. I actually really like my work. But you know what I love more than my job? Freedom.

Freedom to quit my job and start a family. Freedom to control my time. Freedom to what I want, when I want with who I want.

I plan to do this by:

• Having a 40-50% savings rate from my 9–5 job

• Aggressively investing in low-cost index funds

• Building multiple sources of scalable income

The last one is the most important and topic of this article.

Scalable income is like passive income without the promise of no work. There is no free lunch in life, and passive income is a myth. Every source of income requires the exchange of value or capital. Period.

You won’t get financial success through making money in your day job. You need to have multiple streams of income that are not reliant on you trading your time for money.

Traditional vs. Scalable Income

Traditional income is easy to get but difficult to scale. Here’s why:

• Traditional income is usually from a 9–5 job. Your output is tied closely to your input.

• You can only expect a periodic raise from 1–10% per year but rarely more than that.

• Traditional incomes operate more like a bond than stock, retaining their value at a consistent yearly rate but unlikely to skyrocket.

• You trade your time for money. There is only so much time in a day you can trade for money.

• You are usually controlled by a boss, and the panopticon of accountability inbuilt into most modern offices (even virtual ones)

Examples of traditional income include:

• Most 9–5 jobs (not including commission-based jobs)

Scalable income is hard to get but easy to scale. Here’s why:

• The cost of creation is fixed, not variable. This means whether you make $1 or $100 million, your costs are the same.

• Low to no capital requirements (i.e., writing online means you only need a laptop and internet, which you usually already own).

• You trade value (not time) for money. You can create one valuable thing and have people pay for or consume it multiple times, even while you sleep.

• There is no limit to revenue. Your revenue can theoretically increase from 1%–1000% in a given year. I’ve experienced 100% growth in many scalable incomes over the past couple of years.

• Platform automation. The cost and effort of distribution have been automated for you. All you need to do is create.

• Distributed economy. Rather than relying on a sole organization, you generally engage with a community of supporters or an online network of people.

Examples of scalable income include:

• Working in sales for a commission

• Writing articles on Medium

• Making videos on YouTube

• Membership-based newsletter via Substack

• Creating and selling an online course on SkillShare

• Buying dividend shares or Index Funds

• And for those 18+ people, making an OnlyFans account

This sounds great, Michael. Sign me up for some scalable income! But remember what I said at the start. It will require a lot of work to build an audience in order to monetize your work.

As Ben Le Fort warns:

Scalable income means you are not guaranteed to make a dime, but there is no limit on your earning potential.

Scalable income requires a large upfront investment of time and energy. But once you’ve established yourself with the right systems, you can automate a large amount of the work.

Principles to Leverage Scalable Income:

I’ve been studying how to leverage scalable income. Here are some things I’ve learned:

1. Understand This Rule

I started reading books to help me write better.

Then I started writing on Medium and online platforms to help me understand my books better.

Now I make enough money from writing online that it can entirely fund my monthly purchase of new books.

These new books will help me write better Medium articles.

Moral of the story:

1. You can leverage the internet to monetize any hobbies or passions you might have.

2. You can then write a blog, record a podcast or YouTube video to document that experience, and monetize that content as well.

Influencer Shelby Church does this perfectly:

• She had one of her YouTube videos go viral and get over 1,000,000 views.

• She then wrote a Medium article about how much YouTube paid her for those 1,000,000 views.

• She then made a YouTube video about how much Medium paid her for her viral article about her original viral YouTube video.

And on and on, the infinite monetization loop continues.

2. Learn to Detach Your Value From Time

We have a factory model of making money, where every hour of input equates to an hour of output. I work as a consultant, and we still bill clients by the hour.

This is fine for your 9–5 job but not for your scalable income.

The internet means that input and output are no longer as closely related. You can produce a digital asset or piece of content once, and it can keep producing an income long after you’ve moved onto another project.

For instance, I made about $100 per month from Medium. Whilst not enough to retire, I can rapidly scale this income to $1,000 or $10,000 if I had enough time to write and develop my skills.

I am 26 now, and by 36, I want to stop trading my time for money. Or if I do, it is a very loose arrangement. I plan to have kids and a family at this age, and I want the freedom to spend lots of time with my young family.

By 45, I am going to outright refuse my time for money, and by 55, I’ll just do things because they are fun or interesting. The value I create will not be attached to the number of hours I put in.

By productizing myself through Medium, podcasting, and social media, I can leverage my brand to charge whatever I want to charge.

3. Utilize The Zero Marginal Cost of Replication

This is a fancy way of saying that creating copies of things is now very cheap. Back in the day, knowledge was scarce. Books were expensive and rare to find. Teachers were gatekeepers to knowledge.

The internet changed all of this. It allows you to do two things:

• Transmit digital abundance — you can create one podcast and distribute it to the world. Previously, I would have had to convince someone to let me on their radio show or burn copies of my podcast onto a CD and manually give it to people.

• Communicate and trade scarcity — This is how most cryptocurrencies currently operate. You’ve got a limited amount of digital coins that can be mined and sold. People buy it as a hedge against inflation and central banks printing money.

Summary

Scalable income is the path to wealth and also having a lot of fun. We are living in a new economy where you can leverage communication technology and the internet for your benefit.

You can monetize any idea, thoughts, or passions you have through the platform economy. There are few barriers to entry. Only grit, persistence, and creativity are standing between you and your future wealth.

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