Most of the country – indeed most of the world – is homebound right now due to the Coronavirus. Some people can continue to work from home, but others are not so fortunate. This problem can even be what an entrepreneur is currently facing. He or she is used to getting out and meeting people as part of what they do. They might also be on the road to becoming an influencer, which means getting their name, brand, and message out to their tribe while working at attracting a wider audience. Having to be mostly confined to the house can bring someone a great deal of angst and frustration.
I ran into this same problem several years ago, but not because of a pandemic. I slipped and fell in the rain. I landed so hard on my shoulder that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t make my shoulder right again. To put it in 21st-century terms, the doctors couldn’t operate because of the complexity of the injury, and the best I could do was wait for a very long and painful time for it to heal. This meant confinement to an armchair at home and not being able to do much for myself for quite a while. I feared for my business and losing the valuable network of clients and contacts I had made up to that point.
After going through a period of depression, I did have an epiphany that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to solve anything. It only made me and anyone who dared enter my orbit unhappy. With great mindfulness, I flipped a switch and applied myself to whatever positive I could get out of the situation. A great benefit of changing my mindset is that the people I worried about losing embraced me and were a tremendous help. In this day of email, various social media, and good old-fashioned phone calls, you can still build and enhance relationships even if seated at home. That realization helped propel me to think differently and discover three ways to continue doing my work, serve my clients and bring in new ones, and to bring in money.
Group Mastermind – A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring group where members come together to discuss and solve their issues with advice and participation from the other group members. While this might sound like something that came of age with the internet and social media, the idea first came to light in the book, The Law of Success, published in 1925 by Napoleon Hill. He went on to describe the concept more fully in his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich. Hill presented the Master Mind idea as two or more people coming together in harmony to solve problems.
You can undoubtedly design, market, and run such a concept from your home. Participants pay a fee to join your group, and you have the responsibility of running the group in any number of ways. Some people do it with an interactive website that allows for video conferences and active participation by the participants. One person I know does a bi-weekly phone call with those that signed up with her program. The key is to create a community that gets something from their involvement with your mastermind course or community.
Automated Online Courses – Developing an online course for one or more of the skills you specialize in is an easy way to provide a paid service for others. Here, the depth and scope of the online course is only limited by your imagination. It could be one two-hour course or a ten-part training that those purchasing the course will extract valuable information and insight from your instruction. As with all of these ideas, the quality of your course will sell your service, as well as get more participants through word-of-mouth. Something that might be a positive for some people who take on this idea is that once you design and market the course, you are pretty much done. It doesn’t require constant interaction on your part, as does the Mastermind course. In fact, it allows you to do both things and gives you some cross-marketing leverage.
Write a Book – You know that book you always wanted to write? Now’s the time! If you are already an author, increase your repertoire. This was the first project I seized on when I was convalescing, and it launched me to a facet of my career where I have published a wide variety of books, many of them becoming bestsellers. A book gives you a jumping-off point to promote yourself in print, across social media platforms, on the radio, TV, and, when we are allowed to hold them again, speaking engagements. There is nothing like a book to be the lynchpin to varied avenues of success as well as bringing in some income now.
The great thing about these three revenue streams is that you can continue them when we are once more released into the wild. One can help you in the marketing of the other two and vice versa. Indeed, these should be things you are doing anyway in your profession. They all lead to increasing your profile and letting more people know what you do. So, which one are you going to start with? After all, one can only binge so many shows on Netflix!