It’s the ultimate goal for any new online marketer: Can you earn $100,000 a year while working only 10 hours a week? The answer is yes! And no. Because frankly it depends on a lot of different factors.

Before I get started, let me make this one thing perfectly clear: In the beginning before you are making any real money, you may need to work hard. Very hard. 

And if you are brand new to marketing then I can tell you that as much as 90% of your time might be spent on activities that don’t directly make you a cent. But you will be learning what works and what doesn’t, and if you continue on then that education will be worth a fortune to you.

If you quit, well, then you’ve wasted your time. So far, I’m going to guess that I haven’t told you anything you don’t already know, but maybe it’s something you needed to hear again.

Starting a business is like starting a train with a hundred loaded cars on it. It takes extreme energy to get that train moving forward. In the beginning someone could walk on their hands faster than that train is moving. But give it a little time and pretty soon it’s racing down the track, an almost unstoppable force that requires only a minimum of steering and guidance to continue journeying forward. 

Yes, it is entirely possible to earn six figures working 10 hours per week. But you’ve got to lay the tracks, first. 

For example, let’s say you take a month to research exactly what prospects want to buy along with creating the product they want. The second month is devoted to building your sales funnel and testing and tweaking your advertising to bring in prospects that convert like clockwork.

That might take 40 hours a week for those two months, give or take, but once you’ve got the system up and running then 10 hours a week might be plenty to keep things going, especially if you outsource your customer service.

This kind of money in this timeframe is an ambitious goal that requires a strategic and disciplined approach. My advice is to focus on earning $100 per week first. From there, increase the goal to $1,000 a month. You see where this is going. It can be easier to go from $1,000 a month to $100K a year than it is to get to that initial $1,000 a month. 

It’s the train again, taking a ton of energy to get that thing moving.

I’ve made a list of things you will likely need to do to build your business marketing information products online.

Read it over and see if this is something you want to do. If so, make a commitment to reach that $1,000 a month mark in the time frame you choose, and then get started. When you reach that first goal, you already know what your second goal will be: Six Figures a year on 10 hours per week. 

1: Find a super profitable niche - Identify a specific niche where people are spending plenty of money. Best case scenario, you create the solution to a problem people are dying to solve. This step sounds so easy. Maybe it is. Pay attention to what people say they wish they had. What frustrates them? What do they wish they knew?

2: Build your brand - Create a strong personal brand by developing a website, social media presence, and other digital assets that showcase your skills and expertise. When prospects are considering making a purchase, they are reassured to find your positive presence online in multiple locations.

In the beginning focus on your website and one social media presence – the one where your customer are most likely to be found. You can add more social media accounts later on if it makes sense. 

3: Ready fire aim – Create a minimum viable product and find out if real customers want to buy it. For example, if you’re creating a course, get real customers onboard and create the prototype with them on live calls, using their feedback to improve your course. 

4: Automate and outsource - Look for ways to automate and outsource repetitive tasks and delegate work to virtual assistants or freelancers. This gives you more time to focus on high-value activities that drive revenue. Don’t neglect this step because without it, you will be working far more than those 10 hours we talked about.

5: Leverage partnerships - Develop partnerships with other marketers, affiliates and influencers in your niche to extend your reach, get more sales and collaborate on joint ventures. This isn’t difficult in most niches since it simply takes being a friend, helping them when you can, building a relationship and eventually taking it to the next step of partnering in some way. 

6: Experiment and test - Continuously test and refine your strategies to improve your results and increase your return on investment. If your sales funnel is paying you $1.50 for every dollar you spend on advertising, it’s easy to think you’re done and now it’s time to relax and let the money pour in. But what if you could make $3.00 for every dollar you spend? Keep tweaking and testing to find out. Become an expert at this or outsource it to someone else who already knows how to do it.

7: Watch your time – 80% of your income will come from 20% of your activities. Find out what’s making the money and what’s wasting your time. Do more of the money-making stuff and cut out the rest if you can.

Earning $100,000 a year in online marketing while working only 10 hours a week will likely require significant work up front but eventually, in six months or a year, you might be at the six figure mark. Or it might take you significantly longer, but that’s okay, too. 

And if you don’t succeed the first time, use what you’ve learned to keep trying until you succeed. The fact is that most people don’t succeed in a big way the first time out of the gate. But those folks who go on to earn six and seven figures in online marketing are the ones who kept trying until they succeeded.

We’re all on our own journeys. That overnight success you read about likely took years to get to where they are. 

In yoga they say that your practice ends at the edges of your mat. This simply means don’t worry about what others appear to be doing. Sure, maybe they can touch the bottom of their foot to the top of their head, but they’ve been doing yoga for 20 years. Your only true competition is yourself, to be 1% better today than you were yesterday.

Focus on building and automating your information business and it will simply be a matter of time before you reach your goals.