How I built six income streams

Find Your Superpower newsletter 072

Read time: 10 minutes

Topics covered: Income diversification, entrepreneurship, small business owner

It has been a terrific August birthday month for me, and I have been busy running lots of public workshops.

I would like to congratulate not one, not two, not three… but ten (!) winners of our 30-day LinkedIn challenge, which we announced at a free public branding workshop on Thursday.

Now that two-thirds of the year has officially passed, I am shifting into end-of-year mode. I am busy working on my top-secret event taking place on 21 November 2024, which all my energy is invested into (have you saved the date yet?).

Cohort 4 of my bootcamp is now 80% full, and we are sailing towards the finish line. I strongly urge you to join us now, as the next LinkedIn bootcamp will be around eight months away, and our bootcamp price will go up in 2025.

In September, my newsletter content will focus on business strategy and income diversification.

After receiving many sweet emails and DMs from you last week sharing with me how much you enjoyed reading my analytical post about videos on LinkedIn, I have decided to reward you with even more valuable content.

Content that I have never publicly discussed before.

You could scroll back 71 newsletters and 1,600 posts to confirm this, but for the first time ever, I will be revealing the six income streams that I have slowly built up as a content creator.

I have never discussed my income diversification strategy before, partly because as a newbie content creator and entrepreneur, I didn’t feel confident enough to share them with you. What if the gigs suddenly disappeared, right? What if I lost an entire stream of income?

I didn’t want to jinx it.

But now that I’ve adopted the abundance mindset, those fears have disappeared. Whatever leaves, will leave. Whatever comes, will come. I think that I sleep better at night.

Before I begin this discussion on income diversification, I must issue two important disclaimers about how this conversation will go:

1. This newsletter is NOT about hustle culture. Instead, it is a powerful mindset shift about the future of work. In the past, we prioritized finding one client (AKA one job and one employer). The idea of creating multiple income streams and working with multiple clients requires a mindset shift that not everyone is comfortable with. That said, if you open your mind to new ideas and ways of working, the world will reward you for it.
2. Having X income streams does NOT mean you work X times as hard. This is not literally about having X jobs. This is about having one or two powerful skillsets that you apply and monetize in X ways. Just imagine a bowl of noodles which you eat in different ways: fried noodles, noodle soup, spicy noodles, cold soba noodles served on ice cubes. I would be disappointed if you interpreted this newsletter as me asking you to get X jobs.

We good?

OK let’s begin.

Income diversification step 1: start an agency

Since I left my academic faculty position in 2018, I have run a media and communications agency as its CEO. For those of you who know me from that era, I am a magazine publisher and my titles include Asian Scientist Magazine and Supercomputing Asia.

It was a huge learning curve for me as an academic with no understanding of P&L and business development.

Today, I run a team of nearly 20 pax, with 30-40 freelancers scattered around the world. My clients include government, MNC and academic clients, and some of them have followed me since I was a freelancer, circa 2011. If you include my freelance science journalism work from a long time ago, I have been doing this for more than 13 years.

Science journalism and publishing used to represent 100% of my income.

Pros: Monthly income, creative work, amazing teammates

Cons: Print publishing in decline, generative AI content on the upswing, not easily scalable

Income diversification step 2: industry moderator

Now that I had become an agency owner, I started running my own events.

Organizing events represented a massive learning curve as running an event is not something you can “do on the side.” In 2018, we threw 14 events in total, drawing sold-out crowds that filled 300-pax auditoriums, to intimate gatherings at the 1880 members club with Nobel laureate Sir Richard Roberts.

Because we didn’t have an emcee and moderator budget, I often moderated these industry panels myself. Other event organizers started noticing, and they would invite me to help them moderate their industry events.

The key point of all of the above is that my moderating and emceeing work was done for free. And I know many of you are still stuck in this zone, where you can’t seem to break away from speaking for free to getting paid to speak.

Even asking for US$500 seems like a lot of money.

I fully empathize with you as I was there before.

And with that, we have come to the end of my first-ever newsletter on income diversification!

I hope that you enjoyed reading my very special newsletter.

I will be dissecting some of these income streams in future newsletters, and also sharing with you my top-secret pricing strategies for how I expanded these income streams or increased my rates.

If you liked this newsletter, or if you have a question that I could answer in a future newsletter, please leave me a DM on LinkedIn.

Please let me know what you think.

Data is the new oil!

Thanks for reading issue 072 of my weekly Find Your Superpower newsletter.

For those of you who are new to my newsletter, Find Your Superpower is subscribed to by 40,000+ people, and discusses the following three goals: (1) Making a career transition, (2) Professional branding on LinkedIn, and (3) Reinventing ourselves for the future of work.

PS: Follow our new Find Your Superpower LinkedIn page!

PPS: Cohort 4 of our bootcamp is now 80% full. Let’s work on your LinkedIn account before 2024 ends!