In this post, I’ll show you how to make some extra money online. You’ll learn exactly how to get businesses to pay you $1000/mo, recurring revenue…without the weird sales song and dance.

Why businesses?

Generally, businesses that haven’t gone bankrupt have recurring revenue, which means you can charge them every month without worrying about them disappearing. This is a more sustainable way to make some extra money online than say, being a contractor for some stranger who might not pay you.

Also, this strategy is designed so you can make extra money online and at home. Do this in your pajamas if you’d like.

This side hustle strategy really focuses on luring business owners in with a low ticket offer first, and then once you deliver some results, go ahead and selling them on a higher ticket offer.

For example, it’s much easier to upsell an existing customer than to cold call someone and ask them for $1000/mo. Once a business owner has paid you, say, $50, you can upsell them services for $200/mo, and then slowly move them up to $500/mo and $1000/mo.

High-Level Strategy To Making Extra $1,000/Mo Online

Steps to be executed:

1. For the low ticket offer, you’ll want to go to Google Maps and search for businesses near you that hasn’t claimed their business yet (but has a phone number).
2. You’ll then call each of these businesses and offer to help them claim their business on Google Maps so they get ranked higher as a legitimate business. This mean more traffic to their Maps listing, and more traffic to their business in general.
3. If they say “yes,” then you can charge them a one-time fee of whatever you want: $20, $50, $100. Keep in mind the higher you go, the less likely you’ll close a deal, and less likely you’ll upsell them anything.
4. If they agree to pay you, don’t have them go through your website to pay you. Use something that’s more trustworthy, like Venmo or Zelle or Paypal. This is because you don’t want any last-minute resistance from the business owner, thinking you’re just trying to get their credit card number or something.
5. Once you’ve helped verify their business and built rapport, you upsell them on other services like SEO or building/maintaining a website, etc.

Walkthrough Of High-Level Strategy To Make Extra Cash Online

I’ll use a specific example so I can clearly illustrate each step of the high-level strategy above.

First, Get Your Leads

First, I’ll search for thai restaurants in the Milpitas area. In my results, I found something that looks like this:

If they have “Claim this business,” you can go ahead and call ‘em and ask them if they’d like you to help out with getting them set up with Google Maps. You may explain the clear benefit of this, which is:

1. It will help their listing look more legitimate on Google, since it won’t have “Claim this business on their listing” anymore.
2. It will help customers not be confused as to whether they’re still in business. “Claim this business” really looks like a business that’s defunct on Google Maps.
3. It could help with their Maps ranking, thereby giving their business more traffic. Which means more customers for them, for very little effort. (I wouldn’t use this 3^rd point for this specific restaurant in this case as they’re ranked #1 already).

If they say “no,” to you (which will be 99% of the time), go ahead and move onto the next listing to call. Someone who says “no” fails the litmus test anyway: you don’t want clients that don’t care about how their business is presented. Someone who thinks being well-listed on Google is an irrelevant part of their business is delusional. And someone who thinks it is a relevant part of their business, but refuses to fix it for a small fee is plain stupid.

Second, Sell Business On Your Low-Ticket Offer

If they do say “yes” to you, go ahead and name your price. I recommend something low here, like $20-$25. Being greedy here won’t help because you’re not trying to earn the upfront money, you’re trying to make extra money online as recurring revenue. Whether you charge $20 or $100 upfront will not make a material difference to your net worth or cash flow.

The process of claiming a business is easy. You just click on the “Claim this business” and it’ll prompt you to create a “Google My Business” account where you can handle this business’s Map listing. You may want to modify your account type to make sure that it’s an “organization account” so that you can manage multiple listings in the same account (so you won’t have to log out and login multiple times).

Anyway, once you sign up for an account, you’ll fill in your client’s business information and it’ll send a postcard to the business address. Generally, this takes place within 1-3 weeks, so you’ll want to follow up with Google if they’re late on the letter. You’ll also want to follow up with your client 7 days after filling out this form to see if they’ve got a postcard from Google. If they did, ask them what the code is on the card and just enter it on your Google My Business (GMB) dashboard. And voila, their business has been verified and will be listed as a legitimate business on Maps. You’ve actually delivered a real result for the business.

Finally, Upsell Them So You Can Actually Make More Money Online

Phase 2 is to deliver the news with a screenshot of their business being listed on Google Maps successfully. At this point, you’ll wanna reiterate the long-term benefits of this. As you do this, you can upsell them with other services, like SEO or helping them build or enhance their website (or whatever business gaps you see – if they’re already ranked #1, but have a crap website you wouldn’t wanna recommend them SEO but rather you’d recommend them a website upgrade).

You can price this however you’d like. If you do SEO and you know how to do it, you can jump straight to $1000/mo. Or if you want to just have some cash coming in you could just do a trial of $200/mo. But if you *don’t* know how to do SEO, you should learn the basics of it so you can competently hire someone on Fiverr or Upwork (preferably the latter as you can build a longer-term relationship with contractors there) to do the SEO for your client.

If you don’t feel confident and only want to charge $100/mo, make sure your hiring costs cover it. There’s no rush to squeeze $1000/mo out of a business owner because as you deliver SEO results, you can always go back and ask them for an additional $150/mo for upgrading and maintaining their website, or other services. Likewise, as you get more and more clients, you can increase your pricing.

This isn’t a race and the speed at which you want to make extra money online is up to you. Just know that if you go too fast, you might not be making any extra money. And if you charge “too low” upfront, you can eventually increase your pricing and be earning more extra money anyway.

If your SEO contractor does not deliver the results (usually within 3-6 months) and your client fires you, you don’t lose anything since your client paid for your contractor. But if you do get fired, you should absolutely do a post-mortem and see why exactly your contractor was not able to deliver the results for the SEO.

Sweeten The Deal With This Gray-Hat Method

Upselling is key to making extra money online with this strategy. Without the upsell, you’ll only end up making $25 online which isn’t great. Maybe you’re still not confident upselling your potential client. I’m about to show you a way to peacock yourself to ‘deliver value’ (you won’t actually deliver value, so the below is purely a marketing tactic) for your client. With this, you can show the business owner the exact result you can get them and “wow” them to maximize your chances of landing the upsell.

High-level: You’re going to optimize a long-tail keyword that nobody will search for on YouTube and show them that you can rank their business as #1.

Detailed Explanation

First, you’ll need to do some quick keyword research. Type in a longtail keyword relating to your business and make sure that there are 0 search results. For me, I picked: “best thai restaurant in the milpitas area” as my long-tail keyword and there were 0 search results. Make sure to wrap the keywords in quotes, so Google is trying to match that exact sequence of words.

Once you find the relevant longtail keyword you want to optimize for, go ahead and sign up for a YouTube account if you don’t already have one.

Then, slap together a crappy video with some stock videos (you can buy them, or you can use a service like invideo.io where you get free stock videos – disclaimer: I get money to run this site if you pay invideo with my affiliate link). After your video is done, upload it on YouTube where both the title and the description has your longtail keyword in it. For example:

Though instead of “ruby thai kitchen” or some other sloppy-ass description, you’ll probably want to write a quick paragraph about how good their business is so you can “WOW” them when you present this to them. I just did a very short/sloppy example above because this is just an example and I’m not trying to win any business with this. But as you write your better and longer example, make sure that the longtail keyword goes first in the description, since Google weighs the first few words a lot.

Now that all this work is done, go take an hour break. After your break, simply go back to Google and search for the longtail keyword, with quotes, in the video tab:

You’ll notice that the YouTube video you’ve uploaded is now ranking only after 36 minutes (you’ll also notice I’ve uploaded this on a defunct YouTube account, Fun Finds Genie) – in another screenshot below, you’ll notice it got ranked within 23 minutes. It doesn’t take that for Google to re-index YouTube videos generally (could be instant, could be 15 minutes).

But OK, big whoop, 1 out of 1 result. Who cares?

Here’s the magic, Google the same term, now without the quotes.

With this screenshot, you can now take it to the bank (figuratively, not literally, since the business needs to pay you first).

As you’re doing your upsell presentation, you can throw this in as a “WOW” factor and tell them to google the term themselves. They’ll see that you’ve provided value upfront and ranked their business for them to #1 on video. Tell them to click on the video and read the description. And then tell them this is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do for them.

Now that they’ve seen the real thing, and you’ve helped them with their GMB listing, they are much more likely to trust you as a legit marketer as opposed to some Charlatan that says a lot of shit without much promise.

Since this strategy doesn’t take a ton of time, I highly recommend you use this trick as a way on your upsell call with the client so you increase your chances of making extra money online.

Conclusion

In this post, I’ve laid out the pathway of exactly how to get businesses in bed with you, and how you could slowly (or quickly) upsell them to $1000/mo services.

The most important thing is to actually provide value. If you can’t provide value and you “trick” businesses in paying you $1000/mo for 3 months, it ultimately won’t make a real difference in your life. Results are all that matters, and you 100% absolutely must deliver results. It’s the only way to be sustainable with this business.

But anyway, I ended up not continuing this strategy because I personally don’t like dealing with clients. I also don’t enjoy cold calling at all. And I don’t enjoy being rejected as I have a weak ego.

I personally refer to work on something where I can get where I’m going faster (with the tradeoff of more money invested). For example, I’m willing to pay $100/day on ads to test out an e-commerce product. 200 customers might visit my website and ‘reject’ me but I only need to setup the website and run the ad once. Conversely, to find 200 business owners not listed on GMB, call all of them, and then get rejected by most of them will take many, many, many hours.

All that said though, this is a side hustle you might consider if you want to go the ‘sweat equity’ route and don’t have a ton of money to burn to start a business.

P.S.: This is a new blog and if you’ve found this helpful at all, it would mean the world to me if you were to share this post to someone that you think this post might benefit. It would also be immensely helpful to me if you could give me any feedback on the content at hello@goodmoneygoodlife.com