How to Make Your First 1 Million Dollars in 2023

01Be in the top 1% of a lucrative profession

Shocking right?! Be really good at a job that pays really well!

It is super easy to become a millionaire if you know what you’re doing and you’re specialized.

Doctors, Lawyers, & Upper management in the US and Europe earn on average over 150,000 dollars per year. If you’re really good at what you do and hyper specialized you can double or even triple that amount.

The highest paying job with the lowest barriers of entry is SALES. If you know how to sell, you can make a ton of money no matter where you find yourself.

Compared to doctors and lawyers, the 1% of sales people earn north of 250,000 dollars per year, which will have them pass the million dollar mark in just 4 years.

Not to mention that selling is an incredibly valuable skill for all the strategies we will discuss throughout this article. We will also write on the best books on selling sometime soon, but if you want to start today, we recommend you pick up The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone or The Sales Bible by Jeffrey Gitomer. You can get 1 of them for free as an audiobook when you sign up at alux.com/freebook

Speaking of books:

02Write several books that sell ok

The trap many people fall is that they think you need to write the next Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey in order to get rich from books. The likelihood of you knocking it out of the park is incredibly low, that said, getting to 1 million dollars from writing books is a pretty doable job if you find the right angle and an audience willing to purchase.

Few people know this, but in order to become a New York Times best-selling author you only need to sell around 10,000 books, it can even be as low as 5,000 books if you’ve been on the list before.

If your writing is good, just keep putting out more and more books, until one of them is a hit.

There are plenty of examples of people who did it this way, but our favorite is by far Amanda Hocking. You probably have no idea who she is. She’s been rejected by almost every single publisher in the game, none of her novels were given a shot, she was broke, but really wanted to go to a Muppets convention but she needed the money for gas in order to drive to the event.
In order to make some the 300 dollars she needed she self-published her novels on kindle. 1 month later she had made over 20,000 dollars, so she added all her novels up there. 20 months into it, she’s made over 2.5 million dollars from books which were not good enough to be picked up by a publisher.

Pro tip: If you have a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, any form of audience, people will want to support your efforts and are even willing to pre-order your work just to share the journey with you.

03License a patent or trademark to a big company

Another creative way to add value to the world is by being an inventor, designer or engineer. If you can figure out a way to solve a problem better that what’s out there already, you could be sitting on a goldmine.

A great example of this is Lonnie Johnson, again , you probably have no idea who he is, but you’ve probably heard of the super soaker. While toying around — pun intended — he created this cool toy but didn’t have the skills to create an entire company, produce, market and sell individual products so he licensed the technology to a company called Hasbro. He got paid a 3% royalty out of the price of every unit sold making over 100 million dollars from this deal alone. He now has 80 patents and a net worth of over 350 million.

Pro Tip: We know patents are expensive, but there are certain ways to protect yourself even without having an international issued patent.

What you need to do, is to document how your invention works in extreme details, have that in writing and burned onto a cd or USB drive and mail it in a sealed envelope to yourself. When the envelope arrives back it should contain the date and stamp of a governmental institution. Never break the seal. If it comes to it, this is your undeniable proof that you were the first one to figure this out and rights should be awarded to you in a patent case or at least end up in a highly lucrative settlement.

04Start a dropshipping company under your own label

For those of you who have no idea what dropshipping is, it’s a very fun and interesting business model, where you find a supplier — someone who can create, package and deliver a product on your behalf.

Your job is to bring in the sales. Here’s how it goes.

Let say you found a supplier who can package and deliver weight loss tea from china for $5 per package.

You now set up a website where you sell that exact product for 20 dollars a piece. When the order comes in, you send over the $5 to the supplier with the details from the order, who takes care of everything and delivers the item to the buyer on your behalf, yourself keeping the remaining 15 dollars. Cha-Ching! Profit!

We didn’t choose weight loss tea by accident, we’ve actually studied and analyzed the success a young entrepreneur named Gretta van Riel had in this space. She’s the one who started the entire Instagram model fitness tea phenomenon. 6 months into her business she was bringing in over half a million dollars per month. If that number shocks you, you might want to read up on her, since she’s one of our personal heroes. During new product launches she made over 1 million dollars in a single day, just to let you know that these kind of numbers are possible.

You know how Kylie Jenner is a billionaire now? She’s been using the dropshipping model as well. She owns 100% of the company and only has 6 employees. All production & fulfillment is outsources to a different company.

Also speaking of Kylie Jenner, make sure you check:

05Start a small business and keep growing

Although most of the ideas mentioned on this list are super-specific, the way most people end up millionaires is by creating a small business and growing it. We know it sounds a tad more general, but this comprises the hustler mindset which is focused on growth.

Starting a new business is always difficult but the path is more or less the same no matter which business you choose. It all starts with solving a problem, figuring out how to get paid and then bringing in people so that you can focus on what it important for the business to grow.

Everyone has a couple of business ideas in their heads, it’s just a matter of implementation.

Although that might sound overwhelming, the process is pretty straightforward and simple.

That’s why we’ve wrote an article called — “15 things to know when starting a business”! If you’re planning on starting your first business, there probably isn’t a more important article to read than this one!

06Aggressively save money and put it in index funds for several years

You need to understand the power of the compound interest and use it to get rich.
Someone might say it’s the most important mathematical discovery in the world! And by someone we mean Albert Einstein, who numerous times referred to it as

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.

If you understand money and investment funds, you know that 7% annual return is easily do-able.

Now it’s a matter of just how much money you can save. Traditional strategies go like these: If you’re able to save 10% of your yearly income and let say you earn 50,000 dollars per year, it will take you 40 years to get to a million dollars saved. But who wants to be a millionaire when they’re old?! That’s not the ALUX way?!

It gets a lot more interesting if you are able to play around with those numbers. You should try to increase all 3 most important variables:

1. The amount of money you earn
2. The amount of money you are able to put aside
3. The return on your investment

While the first 2 depend on your own choices, the 3rd one on the other hand is pretty straight forward.

For example, the first thing we would do, is take the money out of a 7% mutual fund and put it in an index fund like the S&P 500. For those of you new to this, the S&P 500 is a fund made out of the top 500 companies in the US. If a company is not performing well, it’s being taken out and replaced by a new worthy company. For the past 90 years, the S&P 500 generated an average of 10% yearly return.

Although we are not sponsored by them we would recommend you look into Vanguard and Robinhood.

If you are not the entrepreneurial type, meaning you’re not sure how to create a multi-million dollar company by selling products or services, there’s this really great book by Tony Robins called MONEY: Master the game! Which we can’t recommend enough. It’s the book we gift our friends on how to get rich is the safest way possible.

You can even get the audiobook for free if you sign up at alux.com/freebook

07Do an ICO

For the past couple of years, crypto has been the wild-wild west of money. The amount of people who go really rich really fast on crypto has been astonishing to us.

For those not familiar with the crypto terminology, ?Initial Coin Offerings also known as ICOs are an alternative form of crowdfunding, where a company issues tokens at a discounted price so they can use the early funding to create a digital service which will run on said tokens. If the product is successful, your initial tokens could skyrocket in value based on the demand for them.

We would not actually recommend investing in other people’s ICOs unless you know them to be trustworthy and have a solid team behind them. Instead, create your own blockchain based company and seek private investors to back it up. Only after the product has gain some traction you should be ready of your own ICO where you open it to the public as early investors.

Every single type of financial related service is getting disrupted by blockchain, your goal is to find where you fit in this cluster of new services.

No matter what your stance on Bitcoin and Ethereum is, blockchain is here to stay and we would actually recommend you start teaching yourself more and more about the industry if you want to make sense of the future.

08Purchase a franchise and make it really successful

If you’re not the creative type, a franchise is a simple and lucrative way to get yourself into a business, because somebody else has already optimized it for you, you just need to make sure things keep on moving the way they should.

A franchise for those of you who don’t know is where a company creates a lucrative business with an already established brand that’s made out of a simplified system which can be duplicated over and over again. Think McDonalds or Starbucks.

So how does this work? You reach out to the company with the aim of buying a franchise. There are two types of costs you need to know about. A standard franchise fee and a percentage of the business you’re generating. In exchange for this money, they company provides all the tools you need to get the business up and running.

You can find profitable franchises starting as low as 10,000 dollars but depending on what you’re looking for there are obviously more expensive options.

For example a Dunking Donuts franchise fee is between 40,000 and 90,000 dollars depending on location. But that’s not all. The company requires you have at least 250,000 dollars in liquid assets just to make sure you can keep the thing running.

It’s up to you to find the right franchise for your geography and budget.

09Create a subscription service where 1000 people pay $83 per month

Ok, it’s time we introduced you to what is called Millionaire-Math.

Which means, in how many ways you can get to 1 million dollars in a year?

Off the top of our heads considering subscription services you have:

5,000 people pay you $17 per month for 12 months
2,000 people pay you $42 per month for 12 months
1,000 people pay you $83 per month for 12 months
500 people pay you $167 per month for 12 months
300 people pay you $278 per month for 12 months
… you get the point.

All of these will get you to the 7 figure promise land.

That’s why everybody is doing subscription services these days and you’ve seen the popularity of the likes of Netflix, Tidal and Apple Music increase.

Just to put things into perspective, as of 2018, Netflix has 125 million subscribed users to its service with a minimum of 7.99 per month. In 2017 they did over 11 billion dollars in revenue.

It’s always shocking to us how many people never do the math on these things.

Once you realize the type of numbers you need to be making it’s a pretty straightforward game to play, it’s all about finding a service people are willing to pay and stick around for.

10Work for someone who’s a multi-millionaire

Or even better, work for someone who’s a billionaire!

The quickest way to making your first million dollars is to work directly for someone who’s made a billion dollars.

Rich people value time above everything else and they really value people who are able to save them time.

The way to do this is to find someone who’s incredibly wealthy and help him either save time or make more money. Either way, you’ll find that their generosity is directly proportional to the value you bring into their lives.

Before you get a shot at this, it is important to know that you should already have a trust based relationship with the wealthy individual.

The last thing you want to do, and we can’t stress this enough, is to spam the hell out of people with how you have this idea which will change the world. Believe it or not, even we get at least 100 emails like these every month, which we will never reply to.

When most people think of multi-millionaires, they usually envision entrepreneurs starting companies, but the truth is, roughly 1 in 5 millionaires work for someone else and that’s how they got rich.

If you think about it, you are more likely to become a millionaire by working for a wealthy individual than becoming a millionaire by starting your own business.

If this is your plan, we recommend you find yourself a mentor. These people are open to helping you grow. They provide guidance and opportunities which you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. If they trust you enough, they will bring you into their organizations and make sure you’re being taken care of.

11Go viral on YouTube

Who would’ve thought that going viral on YouTube could make you a millionaire?! This all changed in the last couple of years.

It obviously depends on the type of video, if it’s advertiser friendly and who is watching the video, but a ballpark figure would be somewhere between 500 million and a billion views.

For example Gangam style alone made PSY over 8 million dollars. It’s not all YouTube advertising alone, but the exposure got him plenty of extra opportunities and PSY is still cashing in big. Believe it or not, that video is still making him decent money today.

You also have large creators leveraging their YouTube fame to create additional revenue sources like the Paul brothers do with their Merch lines or how Jeffree Star did with his makeup line.

YouTube is the new TV, that’s why we’re here ourselves.

12Have a blog that gets over 41 million views per month

Speaking of advertising, having a popular blog can still make you a multi-millionaire.

When we started out, Alux.com was focused on publishing articles on luxury topics and we still get a lot of visitors to those articles.

One of the people we’ve been following closely in this space was Scott DeLong, the creator of ViralNova. For those of you who don’t know the website, he’s been at the forefront of viral articles distributed through facebook. Very similar to what buzzfeed used to do — and to be honest still does.

He started ViralNova in 2014 and sold it 1 and a half years later for reportedly 100 million dollars. During November and December he was already generating over 1 million dollars per month from advertising revenue.

Out of everything we mentioned on this list, getting to over 40 million readers per month on your blog is probably the most difficult one to do, unless you’re able to do what Scott did and ride a new wave which people haven’t figured out yet.

13Make an app that a million people use

There are still a ton of money to be made with apps, if you know what you’re doing and can actually offer a valuable service.

The problem with apps is that unless the user feels the need to return to the app on a frequent basis, you’ve already lost.

The app ecosystem has evolved in the past couple of years. From candycrush making almost 1 million dollars per day at their peak, to meditation app “Calm” who’s just recently been valued at 250 million dollars, to now fortnite surpassing 1 billion dollars in just 3 months through in-app purchases.

The secret to most apps has been the ability to bring in additional revenue within the app. Depending on how much revenue you can extract from every single user the road to the first million dollars can be shorter than expected if the customers find value in what you’re offering.

If you really want to score big with apps, there’s a book which we recommend called: how to build a billion dollar app, by the guy who created candycrush in which they breakdown how to conceptualize and scale this kind of project. You’ll find a link to the book in the description or get the audiobook for free when you sign up at alux.com/freebook

14Get over 100,000 twitch subscribers

Live streaming is going mainstream and some might even say it already has. You have the likes of Ninja who are spearheading this moment generating between 500 thousand and 1 million dollars every month from streaming alone.

For those of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, twitch is a platform which allows users to broadcast themselves in real time. This type of technology has been quickly adopted by gamers who broadcast themselves playing video games. All good?

So how do they make money? There are multiple revenue streams here, the main one being paid subscription. There are different tiers of subscribers on twitch: $4.99, $9.99 and $24.00, this amount being split between the streamer and the platform.

In addition to the paid subscription, viewers can donate money directly to the streamer in order to show support.

And then there’s the good old finding a big sponsor who’s paying a streamer to endorse their product, like the type of deal previously mentioned Ninja has with Red Bull.

The ballpark figure to shoot for is 100,000 paid subscribers, but you can get to a million dollars with less than 50,000 if they’re generous enough.

15Buy — Flip — Repeat

This is the fundamental rule of hustling and one of the most common ways to make some more money.

This is what commerce was built on and it’s capitalism in its purest form. Find something you can purchase at one price and then sell it for more to someone who is willing to pay a premium for it.

This buy-flip-repeat strategy has taken many forms throughout the year and we’re always excited to see it evolve depending on how the culture is changing.

Our favorite story is the one revolving around 16 years old Benjamin Kicks, who’s making over 1 million dollars per year, reselling sneakers. Sneaker culture is big and people are willing to pay good money to get their hands on anything that’s exclusive — like how people are paying $500 for bricks that have the supreme logo on them.

Back to Ben! In the sneaker space, everybody knows Ben — Business Is Boomin’

He started out when his mom bought him a pair of sneakers which he sold to a classmate for almost double what he paid for. He then went ahead and started buying more. A few months pass by and celebrities are looking to get their hands on the type of sneakers this kid has, so they reach out. Next thing you know he’s selling sneakers to DJ Khaled, French Montana, Future & more. The most expensive pair of sneakers he sold was for 20,000 dollars and now he has an entire operation for reselling sneakers.

People do this in different markets, buying — fixing — flipping cars, houses, antiques, you name it.
It’s all about understanding how much some people are willing to pay for something and getting it for less than that.

BONUS POINT (for sticking with us till the end)

16Come Up With An Original Crazy Idea That It Might Just Work

If those ideas previously mentioned are pretty straight forward, this time we’re encouraging you guys to look waaay outside the box and let your creativity free. Who knows what might come out?

There’s this guy who made 15 Million Dollars selling rock’s as pets to people.

Another who made 1 million dollars by selling pixels on his website for 1 million dollars each.

A women became a multi billionaire by selling sunglasses for dogs.

And some guys would send a message on a potato on your behalf.

The world is filled with crazy stories and we hope this list sparked an idea inside of you.