How To Make Money in 2024 by Finding the Wave

So I did a poll on Instagram last night, and the results were intriguing.

The question: Which content are you most excited to see from me in 2024?

1. How to Make Money

2. Personal Branding

3. Networking & Relationships

4. Health

Here were the results:

And since personal branding is linked to making money it would appear that basically 70% of my audience wants topics related to making money.

This means: I’m prepared to make a lot more content around making money.

Here are my areas of expertise when it comes to making money:

• Persuasion, Sales, Influence

• Personal Branding & Product Branding

• True No Code Building

• Content Creation

• Consulting & Info Products

Here is what I will not personally be talking about:

• Agencies

• Dropshipping

• Trading

• Crypto

I believe these models are still relevant in 2024, and so I’ll be bringing on guest experts from within my network to discuss these opportunities.

My podcast room is almost completed & ready to run:

I’ll get on all the guru’s for ecom & crypto you never heard of. The ones that don’t have brands.

That’s the mission of the podcast really is to interview people & get the insights and stories from people who aren’t selling a course. The ones who just did it. I’ll have on my course friends too of course. But I’ve personally gleaned many insights from friends outside the course space.

Anyway, for now, I wanted to give you some introductory insights as to how I view making money in 2024.

THE HORMETIC ORDER

I believe that the first thing you need to look at lines up with what Hormozi talks about and that’s to focus on these variables in this order:

1. Find a Starving Market

2. Sell a $100mm Offer

3. Improve your Sales and Persuasion Skills

THE STARVING MARKET

This order is crucial. The reason is this - even if your offer and product sucks and you suck as sales and persuasion, you can still make money if you’re in a starving market.

For example, you’re running a marathon and haven’t drunk any water for hours. Then near the last mile, you run across a water stand. But it’s shitty tap water with a little dirt in it. And the guy selling it wants $10 per cup. And he’s kind of annoying and smells bad.

You would still buy the water.

So first off, whatever business you’re in or considered going in, it’s like - very crucial to make sure you’re attacking the most starving market possible.

To be clear however, the most starving markets usually follow external trend lines. For example, during the 2020-2022 pandemic, my friend Felix made hundreds of millions of dollars by launching a C19 testing clinic.

Similar businesses selling PPE (masks and stuff) also raked in massive profits. But those circumstances are relatively rare.

Crypto during a bull run is also a starving market. People just want exciting shit to throw money at. My friend made $200,000 in 5 minutes after launching an ‘on chain record label’.

Test things. When you’re in the right market, it will feel like surfing the most perfect wave.

As opposed to being in an overly saturated market… where your business feels more like this:

Like, no matter how good you are at sales & how amazing your product is. If it’s like this, you’re not catching a big wave.

Make sense?

So - focus on finding a big wave, or as big a wave as you can… where there’s not that many surfers…

And if there’s no big waves, and all the beaches are crowded, then you’d better dial in on the $100mm offer. AKA - get an electric, flying surf board that makes surfing fun because you can fly over everyone under you trying to catch the small waves. And you easily stand out.

And if you don’t have a flying surf board, you just need to be really fucking good at surfing.

Are you catching my drift?

So focus on that order. Look where no one else is. Then build offer extremely good. And sell the fuck out of it.

Or to keep to my analogy. Find a beach with gigantic waves, that no one knows about, get an electric flying surf board, and surf every single day.

Tbh, this should be thought provoking enough for you to go analyze your 2024 business plans.

Investing

Now, this also applies if you’d just like to be an investor.

As an investor, you want to basically find the best surfer, with the best equipment at the beach few people know about.

My friend Daniel, Crypto Dan is very good at this when it comes to spotting crypto projects that will 50 - 400x. He finds the project the fewest people know about, looks at key fundamentals, and the parks his money there. A few months later, the project blows up as other investors look to add their money to the pot. When the beach is full, that’s when Dan cashes out.

Dan and I are going to be doing some live calls about investing in crypto soon so be on the lookout for that on my IG story.

This post is mainly about business, so I’ll get back to that now but just thought it made too much sense not to include section here on investing.

THE $100mm OFFER

The best book hands down is of course Hormozi’s $100mm offer.

What I’d like to offer you is a gift.

I made a GPT that is trained on the entire transcript of $100mm offer.

You can interact with it to help you come up with your perfect $100mm offer.

I hope you like it.

Click here to access the Hormozi GPT for free.

& btw his book is in the public domain so I’m sure he’d be more than happy about me distributing this.

I’d also like to give you my insight on offer creation.

SALES, POWER, INFLUENCE

This is where the personal brand becomes increasingly relevant.

The stronger your personal brand & persuasion skill, the more likely people will choose you to buy from than others in the market. No one can replicate you, because you’re 1 of a kind.

I posted this the other day, a quote from Niccoló Machiavelli:

Basically this means, if you can build a strong personal brand, and gain the affection of thousands of people, you will always be protected no matter what.

You can have a piece of shit offer. In a piece of shit crowded market. And people will buy it from you jsut because they want to support you.

I get messages like this from time to time:

I find myself doing it as well. There’s this subscription program I bought from a creator I really like. I don’t even remember the last time I logged in. It’s $100 a month. But I like his free content, and want to see him win. So I’m happy every time that money leaves my account.

That’s the way it goes when you have a strong personal brand & when you master power and influence.

BUILDING A FORTRESS

Here i’d like to provide some insights into building a fortress, that is, a powerful online brand from which thousands of people will love you and want to support you in any way they can.

This is the type of audience that will show up to an event that you post about. They’ll buy any product you put out. They’ll talk about you positively to their friends. They’ll comment and share your posts on their stories.

How do you do this? How have I done this? And what have I focused on?

Let me break down some of the secrets.

In order to build my fortress, I focus on the following key principles:

1. Volume of Content

2. Being a Source of Positive Emotions

3. Optics of Wealth & Status

4. Storytelling

5. Displaying Relatability & Humility

Volume of Content

If you’re curious about the 80/20 principle, the most important piece of all of these is #1, Volume of content.

If you put out a massive volume of content, regardless of everything else, that alone will propel you into the state of flow from which all attractive creation emerges.

Every day, my aim is to optimize my day to put out the most high quality & quantity that I can possibly manage.

I also want to make sure that in this world of ai and automation, I’m remaining as authentic and real in every post possible. This is partly why I’ve stopped redistributing tons of content across tons of idfferent accounts.

I want you to feel me in my posts. U see what I mean?

I want to grace each post and each line I write with the presence of Arlin. So that when you’re reading it, it’s not some regurgitated bull shit I’m posting to get clicks. It feels authentic. It feels almost as if I’m write there with you, on a couch, sipping a coffee and sharing with you my thoughts, or some piece of art in person.

That is some sauce right there.

This is why I have such a strong audience, and why if you see creators with millions of followers but clearly not as engaged an audience - it’s because the content is optimized for virality and not for connection building.

I optimize for connection building, 1:1. The posts are so good, you might be tempted to reshare the thoughts with a friend, or reshare it on your story. But to an extent, my posts also feel so good you kind of want to keep it to yourself. And then occasionally a post will go viral and bring in a bunch of new eye balls will roll in. And you’ll feel like damn, I liked Arlin when it felt like it was just me and him and not all these other people know about it.

Being a Source of Positive Emotions

The next thing I focus on is being a source of positive emotions.

As the old Dale Carnegie “How To Win Friends and Influence People” story goes, a mans best friend is a dog.

Why?

Because a dog’s soul purpose in life is to make their owner happy.

When you get home, they are waiting there for you panting and smiling. They lick you and love you and that’s it.

They have no stresses, no problems, no drama.

All they do is jump on you, look cute, exercise with you, and sometimes even protect you.

So that’s basically what I aim to do with my content.

Every time i show up in your feed, or in your inbox, I’m like a puppy.

You know when Arlin posts, it’s going to make you feel good.

On the other side of a piece of Arlin content is Happiness, Inspiration, Entertainment, and sometimes even Enlightenment.

Light.

And so, people will forever want to click on my shits.

Optics of Wealth & Status

The art of the subtle flex is mastered by few, and botched by many.

But it’s actually important to master when it comes to getting people to actually care about what you’re saying or doing.

After all, if you’re not in a position of status or wealth in some way, like, if you’re among the sea of the average, or poor, not many people going to care about you.

You have to position yourself in some distinguished way optically.

My most successful friends are masters of optics.

You’d be very surprised at how much time behind the scenes is spent on the composition of their image online. How important attention to detail is.

I actually somewhat randomly attended a department meeting for my friend’s sales team. My friend makes over a million a month and this call was with some of his many appointment setters and a large portion of the call was about presentation and brand image.

Brand image is so key, it’s hard to understate just how important it is.

This topic of displaying status and wealth and branding yourself on instagram has been covered in depth in my course Instagram engineering, which you can sign up for $27/month here.

I should note, what is as important as what you post and how you post it, is what you do not post. Instagram engineering covers this heavily.

Storytelling

Humans have been hooked on the art of stories for thousands of years.

The reason that the ancient religions are still around today is because of the strength of the myriad of stories found within them.

Master story telling and you master human emotion, master power & influence.

If you suck at story telling you are like that guy who sitting around the camp fire sucks the energy out of everyone’s soul.

I mean, tbh, we’ve all done it.

Everyone having a great time, then you come in with a story you think is a banger, but it just doesn’t hook everyone like you think it will.

And then there’s awkward silence.

And someone tries to bring back the energy that there was before you ruined it. But it’s just gone. Best option at this point is to just poke fun at yourself for how bad the story was, “it went over better in my head. I’m a fucking idiot. Sorry guys. Nvm.”

But, on the flip side, the master brings everyone closer. The master imprints their story and emotional anchor into the minds of everyone fortunate enough to listen. You never forget the master storyteller.

Relatability & Humility

The “I was once just like you” vibe is the ultimate cherry on top when you have everything else mastered.

It cuts right through the soul to your audience.

The prince who was once a peasant. The millionaire who built it up from the slums. He deserves every penny he made, and he forever has the hunger and grit in his step because he remembers what it’s like to go to bed hungry.

A wise mentor of mine once said, “leaders lead with vulnerability”. And this is as much a noble and courageous step as it is a strategic move to win the affection of your people.

Watch your favorite creators.

Notice each time they remind you of the times they were eating shit.

“Here’s the home i grew up in as a kid.” (insert picture of a cardboard box-esque house)

“I remember the nights I would hear my single mom would cry herself to sleep in agony when she was working 3 shifts to put food on our table.”

“Wasn’t long ago I was working as a bus boy at a diner making $6 per hour.”

No one has much respect or admiration for the billionaire’s son. But even if you are a bilionaires son, there’s ways to appear relatable and humble. “Yes my daddy did charter me around the world with my family, but he made it clear in my mind that I was broke, and he was rich. I had to earn every penny. The only thing he gave me was wisdom.”

More To Come…

I hope this intro post for 2024 on making money sparked some ideas for you. I’ll do my best to offer more insights in the future, as I demonstrate all the principles above.

Often the best teaching is just in watching the doing. So I’ll continue acting on all of this.

More sauce to come,

-Arlin