Create Multiple Streams of Income with Josh Summers

Blogs need to change to become media companies if they are going to keep up as technology progresses. In order to learn how to create multiple streams of income, you need to really look at who you are going to reach.

Today, I am excited to have Josh Summers on the podcast. He has 16 websites and has multiple streams of income.

Not only that, he travels the world and is currently working as a volunteer at a non-governmental organization (NGO), in China, because he has money coming in from his businesses. Like Josh, you can be successfully unemployed.

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How Josh Makes Money Without Having a Job

For the longest time, Josh called himself a blogger, but he made a shift in the past year. Now he describes it as he has multiple streams of income.

Josh has five other people that work with him, mostly freelancers, and they put out physical books, websites, podcasts, and different forms of media, providing services to different types of audiences.

Over the past ten years, it has been a great learning experience for Josh and he has had a lot of fun.

What Josh Was Doing Before and How He Became Successfully Unemployed

In 2010, Josh got his first “real job”. He worked in a sales job in a for-profit company that helped non-profits raise money.

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Through that experience, Josh started to come into his own. He realized he had an entrepreneurial spirit and he wanted to try things on his own. He knew he was efficient at what he did and he had ideas that his bosses weren’t interested in hearing.

Josh remembers one day being called into his boss’s office and they told him they were eliminating his position. He felt ready to go, but it was a leap, because he didn’t have a side hustle or another business. However, he did have a wife who was willing to try another adventure with him.

Josh and his wife lived overseas in the past and there was an opportunity for them to go again. This time, they had to get some help, but they were able to go overseas and it allowed them to serve with an NGO.

During that time, Josh started to keep a blog and that’s where his multiple streams of income was born.

How You Can Travel Like Josh

Most people make the mistake of wanting to do a diary online, where you journal your process. This has to do with anything, whether you are dealing with travel, finance, or other topics.

Although this makes sense for a lot of people, Josh found that you need to plan and be strategic about it.

If you want to write about travel, as you prepare for your own journey, he recommends that you document like crazy the questions you are running into. Especially those things you are having a difficult time finding, and document the books or resources you are using.

Figure out what it is that you actually need, what companies you are using, and where you are spending money.

Instead of posting pictures of your trip and hoping someone reads your post, think about how you traveled. A lot of people think you need to be an expert at something, in order to gain traction online, but that is not true.

When Josh and his wife were living overseas, he had all of his mail sent to his parents’ house. One day, his dad asked him to find another place to send his mail, because he didn’t want to accept it and forward it on anymore.

Josh spent about a week researching his options, he landed on a good resource, he used it, and he liked it.

He took all of that research and turned it into a 2,000 to 3,000 word blog post, and it has been useful to many people.

He figured out what they needed and it was a recipe for success. It was one of Josh’s most successful posts.

Watch the full episode here:

When Starting a Business, Josh Recommends Starting Small

When talking with others, Josh always cautions about not diving in too much financially, because there are so many ways to start out low cost or free.

Josh uses a tool called ConvertKit for his email, but it costs money. You can use a free version of mailchimp until you reach a certain level. There are $5.00 hosting plans.

Josh spends more on his, because he is at the point where he wants premium hosting for his hundreds of thousands of visitors.

If there is something free you can start with, do it.

You can start with a WordPress website and use that as a testing ground. You can eventually move that somewhere else if you need to, but start small and learn as you go.

How to Jump from a Blog to Multiple Streams of Income

The biggest thing Josh has learned over the years is patience. Success doesn’t happen overnight.

There are ways to jumpstart success, like paying for advertising, but unless you really know what you are doing and have optimized your conversion rates on your website, the best thing you can do is be consistent and patient.

Patience allows you to grow professionally and learn what you are doing. It also gives time for Google, Facebook, or other algorithms to pick up your stuff and realize it is quality.

When it Comes to the Number of Blog Posts, There is no Right or Wrong Answer

A couple websites Josh has he started from scratch. On one site, he started with one blog post and it now has over 150 posts.

Those posts are well thought out and generate about 300,000 visits a month.

On another site Josh started at the beginning of the year, he and his team created a lot of the base content and the landing pages, because they knew what they wanted.

They are going to launch it and use the blog to generate a little more daily traffic.

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Most importantly, the content needs to be of value and answer a question, problem, or need.

If it is just you trying to write 300 words, because that was your daily quota, it probably won’t do too much good for you in the long run.

When you are Scaling Your Business, Hire Other People to Write for You

Hiring others to write good, quality content is a good way to scale your business, and it doesn’t cost that much.

There are a lot of people who are willing to write, in order to get in front of your audience. There are also a lot of scammers that want to find their way onto your blog. It took Josh a while before he got to this point.

Dustin has four blogs himself and he now has other people who write for him. He tells them what articles to write, what keywords to go after, and he gives them the framework so they can fill in the guts.

In the beginning, Josh thought his success, his secret sauce, was because he was an amazing writer, but he has seen some really bad writing reach the top of Google rankings. Even if you aren’t an English major, you still have an opportunity to make an impact online.

Josh has a template, where he puts the title of what he is looking for, and an alternate title, the keywords he is looking for, and then he gives them an outline. A lot of writers like to write free form, but, online, people like to see headings and they like to scroll.

Josh’s website is very scrollable. There is a lot of bold text and bulleted information that makes it easy for someone to find what they need and be done.

How Josh Decides When a Website is Done and How He Assures Quality

Josh’s Multiple Streams of Income houses 16 sites, but he is actively involved in three or four of them.

Josh doesn’t necessarily recommend scaling up to as many sites as he has. He has friends that have one website and they do really well with just one.

There were a couple topics Josh wrote about on different sites and he found himself getting bored. Another site he turned into a book, but he realized that was the end of the website.

Once you write the piece of content, that is only half the battle. The other half is getting it marketed and getting it out there.

Josh likes to look at the content as if he is the consumer. He wants to click the links and make sure they work.

He forced himself to share his blog posts with his personal network on Facebook. Doing so brings another level of scrutiny, and if he wasn’t willing to share it, he wasn’t ready to post it.

Josh Had to Figure Out His Online Identity to Move His Business Forward

In the beginning, Josh’s website was the definition of a side hustle and something he enjoyed doing. He had one website that was successful and when he sold it, he was able to pay off his house.

Prior to the sale, Josh remembers sitting down with a mentor of his. His mentor recommended selling the website and Josh was hesitant, because it brought in income. The website was about guitars.

After talking it through, Josh realized that he liked playing the guitar, but he didn’t like writing about it. His mentor told him that as long as Josh had that website, it was taking up brain space, even if someone else was writing content for him.

Josh’s mentor recommended that he figure out his identity online and go after that and shed anything else that doesn’t fit into it.

Many people are going after what they see as a very profitable niche that can grow fast, as opposed to something that fits in with their identity.

Josh has a sign that says, “What is your identity”. That is the core of what he builds his business on. Josh is a believing Christian who wants to use the skills he has to impact globally. If what he is doing in his business is not achieving that goal, he doesn’t care how profitable it is, he wants to pivot in some way.

Publishing and Promoting a Book is Easier Than Ever

With the advent of Amazon, Josh says it is embarrassingly easy to write and sell a book. The hardest part of writing a book is not getting it published, the hardest part is writing the book.

Josh has published two books now. Print versions of his books versus digital or Kindle books sell three or four to one. The digital version is half the price and people still would rather have the print version.

Josh has sold books in India, Australia, and the U.K. through Amazon.

Thoughts About Having a Personality-Driven Site Versus a Generic Site

Josh personally advocates for a personality-driven site versus a generic site. When you are opening an email from a person, it makes a bigger impact than one from a company.

Over 10 years, Josh built an audience that followed his family’s journey in a remote part of China that was so unique nobody else was there. That provided a hook for readers to find out what was happening out there.

Once they left that part of China, Josh received messages from people who said they enjoyed following his journey and others who were from that area that left.

Infusing your personality into your site is the fastest way to grow an audience. If you think you can’t do this because it seems silly, you need to ask yourself if that brand fits with your identity. If it doesn’t, it is not going to work. At that point, Josh would reconsider the brand altogether.

If you can’t infuse your personality into that brand and make it better, with your passion and your drive, to Josh that is a red flag that it doesn’t align with your identity.

How Josh Juggles So Many Sites

It took Josh a long time to get to this point. He doesn’t actively run all 16 websites, there are some that are static and not updated.

Josh actively updates about four or five sites and it is a chore. The fact that he has a team and these are established sites really helps. He doesn’t need to write a new piece of content for every single brand.

Josh has an editorial calendar for each of the sites that gives him a little bit of security around his schedule and how he needs to break out his time.

On Tuesdays, he publishes a new piece of content, whereas Mondays and Wednesdays are always a refresh. Josh has a content manager who helps him with the refresh, so all he needs to do is look over what the manager did, answer any questions from him, and schedule it.

On one website, he has a piece of content that is published everyday, but it is not always new. A lot of times it is updating old content and Josh is a big advocate of this.

Something you wrote two or three years ago is not going to be up to the same best practices both from a writing standpoint or an SEO standpoint. Things change all the time and updating old content has taken Josh a lot of time, but it has reaped a lot of rewards.

Rapid Fire Round of Questions

Get Started and Learn as You Go

There are going to be plenty of mental barriers. There are questions of starting an LLC, hiring a lawyer or an accountant, and the more you can put those to the side, the better off you will be.

You don’t need to have a legal entity to get started. All of this stuff can come later. These are things you can learn and as long as you are willing to continue that learning process as you go along.

The Advice Josh Would Give to His Younger Self

Josh would tell his younger self the sooner you get started on anything, the better. Whether it is learning an instrument, learning a skill, or investing, the sooner you start, the better it will end up.

The Advice Josh Would Give to Anyone Who Wanted to Become Successfully Unemployed

Josh thinks the biggest change he has made recently is thinking that his business is there to fund his ability to do ministry and work with an NGO, even though they are two separate things.

It is a difficult and maybe a wrong way to think about it, but his business is a part of Josh’s identity. It is something he wants to be an outpouring of the way he wants to give.

Instead of Josh saying he has a business and now he is going to volunteer, he asks how can he use the skills he gained in his business to consult with the non-profits and NGOs he is working with.

Josh is trying to find ways to combine both of these things to make it a seamless part of who he is.