If I Had To Replace A $4,500/mo Income Within 6 Months, Here’s Exactly What I’d Do (You Can Do This For $8/mo)

Your roadmap to replace your 9-5 within 6 months

“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life“

Naval Ravikant

DISCLAIMER: I talk about X or twitter a lot in this article, but these principles and methods work whether you’re on linkedin, X, Substack, or Instagram (and most other platforms)

Human beings buy things because they have problems, no matter where those solutions are, if the person offering the solution speaks from a place of authority and credibility, they are likely to invest

Let’s begin by first getting this out of the way..

Your worth is NOT = to what a company is paying you for solving the same problem

On upwork the average hourly rate is $20

That means if you take 3 hours to write a sales page that increases conversion rate from 2.5% to 5%, you get paid $60

But the people who hired you just doubled their monthly income from the landing page

If the landing page was making $4000/mo, it now makes $8000/mo

Your pay? $60

And that’s exactly why you can’t treat upwork, or clients, like an employer

Because an employer will treat you like a worker ant, not a ant farm owner

If you’re freelancing, it gives you the ability to control pricing..

Which is exactly why in 6 months, you can double your old monthly income using what I’m about to show you

Put this in your head - Working with clients over the long term, will make you more money than your 9-5 ever could (but its not going to be instant)

A job keeps you in that mental state

“O, I can pay next month’s bills because I get my paycheck by doing these admin tasks every day for 30 days straight”

What this means is, as long as you keep being a little worker ant, you will be able to survive

But this article isn’t about surviving, its about thriving

Which is exactly why even if you still have a job right now, you should keep reading

Entrepreneurship is HARD, but the returns can be scaled almost infinitely

You can build a $100,000/mo business with a few thousand followers on social media (there are so many case studies on this)

At a 9-5? Never in your life will you reach that level of growth in your monthly income

You can go from making $300/mo to $100,000/mo

At your job you can stay stuck under $8000/mo

And this is applicable to anyone

Not just Americans or Europeans

No matter what country you’re in, jobs work the same

They are designed to keep the cogs in the machine running

They were never meant to help you build your ideal life

This remains true no matter where you go

Now that we got that out of the way, how are you going to replace a $4,500/mo job, within 6 months?

It might sound unrealistic, but if you do exactly what I tell you, its possible

Some things you will need experience with, so over the 6 months you will need to build up that experience

Every creator follows more or less the same path, and you can follow that path too

Let’s get into the process

Step 1 - Establish Digital Real Estate

I’m sure you’ve heard Dan Koe talk about this all the time..

But the reality is, if you’re reading this as a complete beginner, you most likely have no idea how you’re going to convert your real life situation, into digital real estate

Truth is, without experience, what are you going to sell?

The answer is experimentation and knowledge

Your real life can be converted into an authority establisher

And from authority comes ideal clients

What you need to do is take what you’ve done thus far in real life, and create a story around it

Human beings are easily interested in stories, and if you change your previous job situation into a real life situation, people will pay attention..

Not all of them (I’ve seen enough personal stories to make my eyes bleed), but you will attract people who will open doors for you

For the sake of your current situation, we’re going to work on this template for your X bio (because your bio is everything)

Where you were before - Where you are now | Your experience | How you help people with something related

Its a very simple formula, but it works

For example:

From Corporate Lapdog - Autonomous creator | Spent 6 years doing admin for 8 figure CEOs | Teaching you how to never be a slave like I was

Simple

Now you’ve established digital real estate, the next course of action is creating a product

Because without a product, what are you going to sell?

“But Ian, I’m inexperienced and have no product to sell”

Everyone has a product to sell

You can either:

1. Play on your strengths

Take your real life experience, and convert that into a product that relates to the problems people on X (or twitter) are experiencing

2. Spend 10 days studying people who are already successful, learning what they teach, then coming up with something that’s even better

If you do this, you can have a product that’s already validated within 10 days

Go on gumroad → Click on “create product” → Go on canva and create a course cover → Use the instagram square post canva template for the thumbnail of the cover → Write the sales page (offer, handle objections, guarantee , testimonial, call to action, list of problems your ideal target is experiencing, call to action, feature and benefits, testimonials, show them a bit of the course content, cta, more testimonials, cta, faq section, cta) → Publish the product

Simple. And of course, if you have no idea what I just said or what I’m talking about, its your job to go study some sales page copywriting so your conversions don’t tank when you release your product

Just google “best copywriting books of all time”, start learning

You can get them for free since most of the best ones are old

Now you have a good bio, and a product

The next course of action is to turn the product into a lead magnet

You need a freebie that touches upon the subject material of your product, but doesn’t give too much away, so people are incentivized to upgrade from the free lead magnet to the product you just created

You can repurpose a bit from the product to do this

Now you have a lead magnet, a product, and a good bio

Just go to canva, select the “twitter header” template, write down a bit of what you do, put that in your profile, and BOOM! You’ve got an entire brand setup

2 - Upgrade To A Value Ladder

Now your best course of action would be to do a DWY or DFY service

But since I’m assuming you’re a beginner, you’re going to do neither of those

You’re doing a TWY service

Meaning you consult people on solving problems

By now you’ve already learned how to solve multiple of your own problems, so helping other people solving their problems is a no brainer

Start with a $50 consultation fee, scale it up to $300

If a person finds your help valuable, and they enjoy working with you, upsell them a $200/mo consultant package (and its your job to keep learning so you stay ahead of them)

Send 20 DMs to ideal prospects on a daily basis, and by the end of 30-45 days you’ll have closed 10 clients at $200/mo

That’s $2000/mo you’re making

This assumes you know how to do DM sales (I teach you that in my program)

Okay so now you’re making $2000/mo, the next course of action is assuming one VITAL thing → That every consultation and conversation you’ve had this far, has been tracked

Because if you track every conversation you’ve had thus far, and you recorded every consultation.. You have a lot of problems you know your clients have

This means you can take those problems, find or write down the solutions, turn them into course modules, put them down in a notion library, put a price tag on it, and sell it as a $500 product

Now you have a curriculum

So every time someone has a consultation level problem, you charge them a $300 consultation fee (and you use your testimonials from all the consultations you’ve done thus far to justify your pricing), but if they struggle with the more advanced problems you offer them access to the curriculum for $500

If they go through the whole curriculum, and they love it, you upsell them a $600/mo mentorship package

Remember, the more money someone pays you, the more they trust you, and the more money they are willing to pay you

If you get someone who’s already paid you $300-$500 great results, then they won’t even be phased when you say they can work with you for as long as they want, as long as they pay pay you $600/mo

So let’s say by now you have ten $200/mo clients

That’s $2000/mo

Assuming you get at least 6 people who want the curriculum per month (you’re sending 600 DMs a month), that’s $3000/mo

Now you’re making $5000/mo

If only 1 of those want to work with you long term (it will likely be more than 1), then you are making $5,600/mo

And from there you just close more $200/mo clients, more $500 high ticket customers, and enroll more $600/mo mentorship clients

You can also upgrade people from $200/mo consultations to $600/mo mentorship without giving them the high ticket product

This is all about testing

You’ll spend about 60 days perfecting this process

Once you’re done, you’ll know the best way to get someone all the way to the $600/mo mentorship package

From there you can scale as high as you want, rebuild the curriculum, gather more case studies, hire a VA, go all the way to $15,000/mo if you want

3 - The Audience

And while you’re doing all of this, you need to build an audience

That means 30 comments a day under creators who have the audience you want, and 3 posts a day to establish authority, show your personality, and build trust with your audience

By the end of 6 months you could easily have over 2000 followers, and when you promote a product under your posts, you will get people buying it or booking calls with you

Comment ratio remains the same on X, Substack, and Linkedin

Find a balance so you don’t burn yourself out

You can either do all your comments on one platform, or split them between platforms (or if you can, do 15-30 comments for every platform)

By the end, you want to use your audience to bring you sales and clients (but that’s part of the long term plan)

While you’re doing all of that, you need to build a newsletter or email list

Send emails either daily, or weekly

Do this starting from day 1

By the end of 18 months you will have a hungry buying audience, and all you have to do is show up every day

4 - The Timeline

1 - Bio

2 - Product

3 - Value ladder

4 - Build an audience AND a newsletter, while you do all of that

PS:

I’ll be real with you for a second, if you’re going to take what I wrote down here seriously, you’re going to need help

Because right now you lack the experience, skills, and knowledge to get where you want to be

If you really only have 6 months to pull this off, OR you want to reach $4,500/mo as fast as possible (without the problems you will experience doing it alone), then I have an opportunity for you

I have a program where I teach you all the required skills, and help you get to your goal.

I hold your hand through the whole process

I’ve built 2 agencies, did over 5 figures in revenue online (as one person), and I’ve been marketing + selling online for 3 years

You can either work with me directly for the next 3 months, and get where you want to be, or spend the next 6-18 months “figuring things out”

Your call