The first time I ever got paid to speak, the check was $250, and I thought that was a lot of money. What I didn’t expect was the part that came after, because people who heard me speak that day turned around and hired me. I sat in my car doing the math twice, because that one hour had just brought me more revenue than months of posting on social media had, and social media had eaten a lot more of my life to do a lot less for me comparatively.
That was the moment the whole ‘marketing’ thing flipped for me. I had been marketing my business the way everybody said to market it, which is to say I was doing it for free, constantly, and calling that a ‘sales strategy’.
Okay, so let’s be real about what free marketing actually costs:
Free marketing is the most expensive marketing you will ever run.
It doesn’t take money out of your account, which is why it feels free, and that’s exactly the trick. It takes hours instead, and hours are the one input you cannot buy more of. When you spend a full workday every week making content that pays you nothing on the back end for your hours spent, you haven’t saved money; you’ve paid for that channel in the only currency you can’t replace.
In fifteen years of working with over 1,500 entrepreneurs, I’ve watched at a minimum 20% of the free marketing they do never return a single dollar. For most of them, it’s closer to half. So half the hours, gone, every week, forever.
And I know why you keep doing it anyway, because I did it too. Free marketing feels productive. And everyone says “content is king” and “you just gotta get more visible”. It’s the one lever you can pull entirely by yourself with nobody’s permission, and nobody can reject you from posting.
Real talk though, feeling productive and being paid are two very different experiences, and you know which one you signed up for.
Here’s my own hard pass on this, and it just might surprise you. For the last 3 or so years, I didn’t use social media for my sales strategy because I was getting paid to market from stages and I could not justify the hours social was going to take from me. I’m on it now, on purpose, because I’m speaking less this season and I want to build this Substack via Instagram, and I actually really miss talking to people in my DMs (btw here’s a nudge to send me a DM and say hi!). That’s a choice with an intention behind it, which is different from just posting because everyone told you to.
So a few years ago I started building my business around a different question. The question stopped being how do I market this, and became how do I get paid while I market this. Once you start looking for it, the options are everywhere, and most entrepreneurs are sitting on two or three of them without realizing it.
There’s a second reason this matters more now than it did years ago. Every one of these channels puts a real human in front of other humans, and as AI gets better at generating content, emails, and video, the human part is the part that gets scarce and expensive. I’ll come back to that at the end, because that’s where it hits hardest.
Real talk though, these are not created equal, so I ranked them for you!
The test something has to pass:
Before the list, here’s the filter I ran everything through, because otherwise this turns into a generic “ways to make money” post and that ain’t it, friend.
It only counts if the act of getting paid is itself the marketing.
That means the thing that puts money in your account has to be the same thing that puts your business in front of the right people. If those are two separate activities, then your entire marketing strategy may just be built on hope.
This is why affiliate income is not on the list, and I know that’s going to bug some of you. I run affiliate partnerships, and I like them; they pay well, and they’re low effort. They just fail the test because I don’t get paid to actually market them; I market them for free, and then I get paid from them. That’s still good scalable income, and I’ll take it; it’s just doing a different job than marketing.
Same reason most straight sponsorship deals don’t make the cut. If the money is coming to you for pointing attention somewhere else, it’s revenue, and revenue is great; it’s just doing a different job, and this post is how you can get paid to market and sell more on the backend. So you make money upfront and on the backend, yay!
Everything below passes my filters!
How the ranking works:
I ranked these by effort against speed of return, because you typically don’t have a shortage of ideas, but you most likely have a shortage of hours, right?! So, every single one of these is a good thing to do, but the ones at the top of the list (ranked at the bottom) take longer to pay you back, and the ones at the bottom of this list (ranked at the top) can move money in the same month you start.
We’re counting down from eleven to one, so the fastest payback is at the end.
11. YouTube AdSense
You build a channel, the channel markets your business, and YouTube pays you a slice of the ad revenue on top of it.
The upside on this one is amazing, but let me be fair to it before I tell you why it’s last. I have clients pulling $2,000 and more a month from AdSense right now, and that money arrives whether or not anyone clicked through to hire them. With this strategy, your best videos keep earning years after you upload them, which is the closest thing to genuinely passive marketing income that exists. If video is already your channel, turning on monetization is free money, so what are you waiting for?!
The cost with this one is time, and a lot of it. Early AdSense revenue is super low, like single digits a month for a long stretch before the numbers get good at all, and the production load per video is heavier than almost anything else on this list.
Pays: a few dollars a month early, $2,000 or more a month once the library compounds
Costs you: the highest ongoing production hours of anything here, plus a long runway before it’s worth anything
Do it if: you’re already committed to YouTube as a marketing channel, and you’re playing a multi-year game
10. Facebook creator payouts
Facebook is now paying creators to post on their pages, which means the content you were already making to market your business can carry a payment attached to it.
Here’s my read on it: it’s still social media, rented ground, so you don’t set the terms, you don’t set the rates, and platform payout programs have a long history of getting generous and then getting quiet right when people start depending on them. If you’re already posting to a Facebook page, absolutely turn it on, because free money layered onto work you’re already doing is a rare and good thing. Just don’t change a single thing about your business to chase it and throw all your eggs into one basket.
9. Sponsored podcasting
You host a show, your audience gets nurtured by hearing you think out loud every week, and brands pay you to be there.
When this works, it goes hard! Podcast sponsorship money runs anywhere from $500 to $15,000 a month depending on your downloads and your niche, and a podcast is one of the highest-trust nurture channels that exists. People let you into their ears for forty minutes at a time, and that intimacy converts crazy high. And once the sponsor income covers your production costs and your time, you are being paid to run your own nurture sequence.
The catch is sequencing, though. Sponsors show up after you have the audience, not before, so this is a reward for work you already did. Podcasting is also genuinely heavy to produce, and a lot of people start one, run out of gas a few months in, and end up with a graveyard sitting in their feed.
Pays: $500 to $15,000 a month with an established show, zero before that
Costs you: significant weekly production time, plus a long runway before sponsors appear
Do it if: you already have a show with real download numbers, or you’re committed to eighteen months of one
The rest of this list is where the math actually flips. Numbers eight through one pay back faster, and number one is the one I’ve personally stacked into five figures from a single hour of work. Here’s all of it.