Self-publishing a book is one way to make money from home. If you have your own website, you can sell the book there. You can sell your book via your social media platforms. Or you can also sell your book via Amazon and other established online book platforms.

As someone who has self-published his own book about severance negotiations, I’m considering self-publishing a whole series of books. I figure, if we’re going to be stuck at home forever, we might as well create more products for online consumption.

My book was originally published in 2012 and is available exclusively on the Financial Samurai platform. Since publication it has gone through four iterations and is updated for the new decade. After almost eight years, the book has generated around $250,000 in profits.

If I hadn’t slacked off, I could have self-published one book a year since 2012. If each book sold as much as my severance negotiation book, I would have made more than $1,000,000 by now. It’s too bad so much hard work is required to make money nowadays.

In this post, I’d like to compare and contrast the benefits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing. I’ll also delve more into how much you can make writing a book. I’m assuming we’re all trying to figure out more ways to make money from home.

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us one thing in business, it’s that if you have a business that can’t be shut down you will outperform. In some cases, you might even thrive as we heard from one online business seller of nutrition and home exercise equipment.

The forced lockdowns by our governors and mayors have decimated local businesses like restaurants, gyms, retail stores, and dental practices. Meanwhile, the coronavirus has upended the travel, hospitality, and entertainment industries even if these industries were allowed to open. As a result, unemployment reached a record high.

The value of a business can be calculated by the net present value of its future cash flow. The value of a business can also be calculated based on a multiple of revenue, operating profit, or net profit.

All else being equal, if your business’s earnings are more certain, your valuation multiple goes up and vice versa.

I’m formulating a plan for another online business during this latest recession and I’m absolutely pumped there is now such a huge tailwind!

Updated on May 22, 2020

Starting a business changed my life for the better. But I dilly dallied for a couple years before starting Financial Samurai in 2009 because I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to commit to a long term plan. I remember hearing that it takes 10 years to become an expert in anything, and I didn’t want to start something if I wasn’t going to follow through. When the financial crisis hit I figured it was now or never.

Now that I’m 10+ years in, there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not thankful for having this site. I understand that a lot of you will say that you don’t have a good business idea or don’t have a clue as to how to start. The reality is I had no business idea either.

But now, things are so much better than having a day job – 90% less stress and 100% more income. The key is to just launch and then figure things out as you go. You can afford to do so nowadays because the cost to launch and maintain is so cheap. Good luck trying to figure things out when you have to pay $5,000+ a month in rent to run a retail store or restaurant!

Let’s look at the top 10 benefits of owning your own business in Part I of this two part series.

I’ve been blogging consistently since 2009. It’s been a long and awesome road. Here’s a post I wish I read when I just started.

It took me 20 years to build a portfolio that generates over $250,000 a year in passive and semi-passive income. It took only five years to build the same income blogging. Why?

1) Low barriers to entry. Depending on where and when you buy, you need $1 – $2M in capital to generate $50,000 in net operating income with property here in San Francisco. It takes at least $1M in capital to generate $20,000 a year in dividend income from the S&P 500 index. With both asset classes, you can also lose principal. With blogging, it costs as little as $2.95/month to run a website and you get a domain name for free. If things don’t work out, all you’ve lost is your time and a minimal amount of money.

2) Enormous demand curve. Financial Samurai can theoretically reach three billion people online through search engines, word of mouth, organic promotion, and advertising. If that happens, I’ll be worth billions and I’ll take each of you out to a steak dinner! However, in real estate, you can only lock in one set of tenants and raise the rent once a year. In the stock market, you are a passive investor with no control over dividend payouts or other strategic management decisions. With a retail store, you can only capture your neighborhood traffic. The internet is growing in usage and size every day.

3) Operating leverage. Because costs are generally fixed (hosting and domain registration), operating profits soar the more traffic and revenue you get. It’s not uncommon to earn 70%+ operating profit margins as a professional blogger, depending on how much you pay yourself. Very few businesses can compare.

Now that I’ve convinced you pro blogging is the best profession on Earth, perhaps you’re interested in knowing how much you can actually make? Before we get to the money, let me first highlight the types of people most suitable for succeeding as a professional blogger.

Updated for 2020 coronavirus time

Making money is all about identifying opportunity and doing everything possible to succeed until that window of opportunity closes. But most people are too afraid to take any major risks. Why should we when we have the luxury of employment to keep us comfortably numb.

The two most common people who take risks are: 1) those who start with little or nothing, and who therefore have little or nothing to lose, and 2) those who come from rich families and who also don’t have anything to lose. When your name is William Henry Gates III, you’re not exactly going to starve on the streets if you drop out of college.

For those of us in the middle class, we only make a change once we’re agitated enough to take action. For me, I decided I had enough of banking after 13 years because the correlation between reward and performance broke down after the financial crisis.

After 10+ years of writing online and 13 years of researching every single industry for my job in finance, this post will identify reasons why blogging could very well be the best business in the world that anybody can start. The internet, after all, will be a lifelong trend.