Make More Money: How Marketers Can Earn More From their 9-5 Right Now

What up marketers, and welcome to Adam’s Letter, a weekly column sharing strategies, career advice, and practical ideas for tomorrow’s CMOs. Thank you to the 614 who joined the community. If someone sent this to you - please subscribe below. You can also listen to this issue HERE :

Your 9-5 job is your best revenue asset.

Wait, wait…Before you say “duh” and click out…let me explain:

We’ve evolved past the days of believing a W2 is the only way to make money. But it goes beyond that.

In addition to your salary, your 9-5 can be the inspiration source for future revenue streams you build for yourself.

Conversely, building other revenue streams will improve your performance at a 9-5 job.

They go hand in hand. 🤝 

Last week we talked about defending our jobs and budgets. This week, we’re heading in the opposite direction.

In the words of my close personal friend, George Washington, “The best defense, is a great o-ffense.”

Today, we’ll outline 3 questions to ask on your way to building new revenue streams from your 9-5:

• Identify WHAT unique tools or skills you have because of my 9-5

• Decide WHO else would benefit from that tool or skill?

• Understand HOW can I give them access to that tool or skill?

If you’ve been in the marketing game for any amount of time, you’ve learned from someone else who is using this strategy. Some of my favorites include Justin Gordon, Amanda Goetz, Justin Welsh, and Dave Gerhardt.

Each of these folks took their core 9-5 skills (ex.: marketing to VCs, building online brands, supporting B2B execs, etc.), and turned them into personal revenue streams.

Here’s how you can do the same.

What unique skills or tools can I offer (find your genius)?

There are likely dozens of things you do daily without thinking twice. There’s gold in them thar hills.

Some of the best places to look for new product ideas are:

• What tools do you use daily that have a learning curve to them? (e.g. hubspot, tenstreet, clickup, quickbooks, etc.)

• What strategies do you intuitively use that others in the industry may want to know (e.g. a driver recruiting playbook)

• What ideas have you come to understand that your friends think you’re crazy for (e.g. creating multiple streams of income from your 9-5) 😁 

Take a minute and list out as many examples under each of these buckets.

Don’t keep reading - actually pause and do that 👆️.

Then begin circling the ones that hold the most value. Here’s how you can determine which are the most valuable:

• Google search for the idea - how many results show up?

• Same thing on youtube - are lots of people looking for this?

• Text 1-2 friends of yours in the industry. do they know how to use it? or do they want to know?

When you get a couple of “yes’s” in a row - you’re onto something.

Who else would benefit from my knowledge?

Ok, so now you’ve got your product idea.

Who are you going to send it to?

Don’t overthink this. Whatever friends you texted earlier to validate the idea are probably a good starting point.

Another place to start is thinking of yourself from 12-24 months ago. This is an idea I learned when working with Justin Welsh.

Justin has built a $5m/year one-person business by teaching others the things he wanted to learn 12-24 months ago. You can do the same.

Think practically about where you were 24 months ago, and what your main challenges were. Now sketch them out as if you’re talking to someone else. Like this:

• What was the main problem?

• What were your options for solving the problem?

• What options failed - did any good stories come out of that?

• What options succeeded - how did you stumble on them?

• What takeaways can someone else use to skip the mistakes you made along the way?

Now you’re helping personalize the product area you identified in step 1, and you're niche-ing down exactly who your target audience should be for this product.

The other thing you should do at this stage: tell anyone and everyone.

Spend as much time as you can bouncing the idea off of other people you think fit the target demo. Even if they don’t exactly fit it - try it on them too.

You’ll do a couple of things in doing so:

• Validate the idea is valuable

• Understand how to message it to communicate the value

• Discover where your target audience is hanging out and having similar conversations

This is a key step so many skip early on. It’s more fun to create or ideate and just toss it out into the ether.

You can do that, but will probably fail. Spend the time doing the homework to find out who your audience is and where they hang out. Thank me later.

How can I give them access?

Ok, so we’ve got who and what. Now how do we deliver the goods?

This is the part that will vary the most depending on what it is you’re actually delivering. Here’s the best advice I could give you though: keep it simple.

Our tendency as marketers is to feel as if we need to have all of the boxes checked. The personas created. The strategies mapped. The objectives ready to measure.

All of that is important and good.

But the more important step right now is to create access so we can see if there is really an appetite for the product for the audiences we identified.

The key here is to think free.

We want to validate as quickly as possible with as little cost as possible. This way, you won’t continue on a course that isn’t working just because you’ve made an investment in it.

As Sam Parr says, buying a domain or spending money without knowing you can earn a dollar back is “loser behavior.”

Obviously, a lot of this depends on what it is you create. But here are the places I’d start in distributing your product or content to a new audience:

• LinkedIn newsletters: the platform is giving significant organic reach and you can leverage existing networks (I’m doing it right now)

• Vertical video series: same idea with organic reach, the audiences you can build on Tiktok, Meta, and Youtube are unparalleled for the effort required.

• Simple email: of course, you can sign up for a newsletter platform like this one (I like Beehiiv), but you can also start by simply sending out your initial versions to a group of folks you’ve identified as interested.

• Gumroad: If your idea is something that should be downloaded, you could make it available on Gumroad. I’m not saying you should, though. Just remember, asking for a dollar right now probably limits your ability to ask for 10 later. Making the info available in exchange for an email subscription is more valuable at this stage.

• Threads: ok, chill with the eye-roll. Platform launches are always opportunities for land grabs. Zuck got 30 million users in 2 days. It’s worth toying with.

There are a bunch of other places you can put the output of your creativity. The point is to make it as accessible as quickly and cheaply as possible. Once you’ve received positive affirmation from the market that your thing is valuable, you can always upgrade.

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The last thing to remember is that this entire exercise will benefit your 9-5 skills as well. There is a tendency among marketers to always be consulting or advising other people’s brands. Building something will give you first-hand experience with the product, operations, pricing, and distribution struggles that a business operator faces daily.

You’ll have deeper empathy for your counterparts in the business and will be able to better serve them from the marketing function moving forward.

If you enjoyed this issue please share it with 1 friend, or reply and tell me what your side-hustle is! 🛠️