The 5 Secrets to making a TON of Money

What's up, you guys? It's Graham Years.

So, when it comes to learning how to make more money, I've noticed a few major differences between the people who make a normal average income and the people who end up making a ton of money. And when I talk about a ton of money, I'm not talking about like a hundred grand a year or two hundred thousand dollars a year or like five hundred thousand dollars a year. I'm talking about if you want to make more than five hundred thousand dollars per year, these are some of the concepts that you should immediately begin to implement. Like, start doing these things right now! Basically, as soon as you're done smashing that like button and finishing the video, start thinking to yourself how you can implement these things in your own life and business as well.

And I say this as someone who went from making like nine dollars an hour doing data entry over ten years ago to now being able to pull in over twenty-five hundred dollars a day while working fewer hours than what I was working back then. I did all of this by watching and studying what other people were doing around me. And yes, by the way, I realized that this sounds a little bit sales pitchy so far, like I'm trying to pitch you on some weird MLM or some like new timeshare that no one has heard about before, like BitConnect or something like that. I promise you guys, there's no sales pitch in this video. I'm not trying to sell you anything. All I ask, though, in return, the only repayment, the only payment I really ask, is that you hit the like button and comment anything down below for the almighty YouTube algorithm engagement, 'cause that does help.

And with that said, let's get into the video. The first and biggest piece of advice that I found when learning these concepts is: only listen to the people who make the money that you want to make. Now let me repeat that again because that is easily the most important part of this entire video. So, let me say it again, if you missed that: only listen to the people who make the money that you want to make and have the lifestyle that you want to have.

This advice sounds so simple, but so many people just don't pay any attention to it. Instead, most people are taking their financial and career advice from someone who's already drowning in debt and doesn't know how to properly manage a credit card, or they're taking their career advice from someone who's making $40,000 a year in a job they absolutely hate who is telling them, "Don't start a business because it's too competitive and you can fail." Or, they're taking advice from someone who told them it's a good idea to invest in BitConnect.

The reality is that if you want their lifestyle and income, then go ahead and take their advice because that's what you're going to get. And when it comes to making more money, you must listen to the people who are already making the money that you want to make. If you want to make $50,000 per month, then go ahead and listen to the person who's making $50,000 a month. You want to make a million dollars a year? Well, go ahead and listen to the person who's making a million dollars a year, even if they're in a different niche than you or they're running a completely separate business. It doesn't matter.

I promise you guys, there are commonalities between these people and their businesses that you can implement in your own life. For example, let's take our good old friend and pal, Tai Lopez. Now, even though I love to poke fun at him satirically, I have nothing but mad respect for what he does. You can't deny that when it comes to online advertising, he is really one of the best out there. Take a very close look at what he's doing and, whether or not you agree with it, figure out why it works so well and why it's so effective. Look at his sales funnels, look at his emails, look at his website. None of these are done by mistake; these are all done very strategically with a purpose and that purpose is because it works so well.

There's been so much testing done behind the scenes to perfect these into working as well as they do. And that then brings me into my second point, and that is: don't reinvent the wheel. This is probably one of my biggest hurdles as well. It sounds almost like I'm saying "turtles." This is one of my biggest hurdles as well. This hurdle comes from an age of hurdles. That was one of my biggest hurdles because I really felt that in order to stand out, I really had to do something different and go against the grain when it came to making YouTube videos or doing just about anything. I felt like I almost had a bit of a rebellious notion when it came to that because I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing just because I wanted to be different.

I really believed that I had to take different actions if I wanted to get better results than everybody else. And in some ways, that was true. I had much better results as a real estate agent because I started off really young, at the age of 18, and that really helped make me stand out against the crowd. I also ended up getting much better results on YouTube by simply giving out free information for everyone to watch, and not making every video a sales pitch for a Shopify course. But beyond a certain point, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel when there are already proven strategies out there that will consistently work.

This is exactly why we have books out there from people who have already done exactly what you want to do. This is why you could literally go to someone's sales page, copy the exact same format in a way that suits your own business, and get nearly identical results because they have already figured out what works. For example, here's a tip for everyone out there who wants to make any sort of financial-based YouTube videos: go to my top 30 videos, copy the topics, and just make your own version of them. Go ahead and do that and enjoy because when I'm out of YouTube topic ideas, I will search through other channels and get inspiration from their topics and simply make my own version of them.

For example, take my "I Quit My Nine-to-Five" video. That video was inspired by Minority Mindset, who gave me the idea to make one about my own experience. Or what about my video about how I save a hundred percent of my income? Well, that video was inspired by the almighty Beat the Bush. He did a video on that and I simply made my own version about how I was able to do it. Or even the video I did about my six income sources. That video was inspired by Ryan Scribner, and I have a feeling that Ryan Scribner’s video idea was probably inspired by Jeff Rose's video idea about his seven income sources.

So basically, YouTube just becomes this cluster of ideas that we can all pick and choose from and just give our own takes on them. Now of course I never actually directly copy their video; in fact, most of them I never even watch their video because I don't want to be influenced by anything they had to say. I simply take the topic idea and get my own perspective on it. And if I see that topic did well for them, chances are it's gonna do well for me as well. And then I will just do my own take on this. This takes all the guesswork out of trying to figure out what people want to see more of and what people really want to watch.

The same could also be said about me working as a real estate agent. In the beginning, I wanted to be different and I was totally against email marketing. I really felt that it was so cheesy and I didn't want to be a part of it, and I didn't want to do it. But I started noticing that the agents who were making millions of dollars per year were all doing email marketing. I decided to put my ego aside and I figured if they're all doing it, it must work. It must be effective. So I'm going to try it as well.

And no joke, just by doing this and putting all my previous contacts in an email list on MailChimp and sending them an email once a month, I've been able to make an extra $100,000 per year in commissions as a real estate agent just by hitting that list consistently. So again, don't reinvent the wheel. Do what works, follow the formula, and listen to the people who are making the money that you want to make.

Now the third thing is to make sure whatever you do is scalable. This is something I really discovered over the last year and this is something I wish I had learned a long time ago. This is actually one of those things I wish I could tell myself like a decade ago because now I finally see the light, if that makes sense.

Now, prior to learning this, I was pretty much capped out in making about $350,000 per year as a real estate agent because I didn't know how to scale. And that sounds very strange to say that you're capped out making $350,000 per year as a real estate agent, but trust me, when you're making $350,000 a year, you see people making $350,000 a month and you think to yourself, "What am I doing wrong?" And the answer to this isn't really with what you're doing; it's usually with what you're not doing, and that's with putting systems in place to scale your business up regardless of how many hours you work.

For example, as a real estate agent, beyond a certain point, if you want to start making more money, it's inevitable that you will need a team. There's really only so much you can do on your own. There are only so many listings you can show, there are only so many buyers you can show, and there are only 24 hours in a day before you physically can't do any more to make any more money. The same goes with just about anything you do. If something works, it needs to be scalable.

It sounds really crazy to say this and you won't believe it until you actually see this firsthand, but it's really got to be just as easy to make $250,000 a year as it is to make $250,000 a month. And some of the people I know personally who went from making $100,000 per year to now making over $5 million dollars per year are not working more hours. They’re not busier than they once were. They’re working the same as they were making $100,000 per year, except they figured out how to scale their business. They figured out how they can reach 100,000 people with the same amount of work it took to reach ten people.

YouTube is really the perfect example of this. Let's just say, in the past, as a real estate agent, I'd have to meet about 150 people to make one sale. Well, guess what? I take the time to make one video on YouTube for one person, and that could be viewed by a hundred thousand different people. Then let’s say of those people, five hundred of those are in Los Angeles, and of this five hundred people maybe two or three want to use me as a real estate agent. But now guess what? If I'm getting a hundred thousand views every single day, that's several people every single day that want me to work with them as a real estate agent.

And if you guys think that's far-fetched, just go through my email. There's at least one to two people every single day asking me to be their real estate agent. It is absolutely overwhelming. But that goes to show you that if I were to build out the team and really pursue that, that is absolute scalability in action—that I can reach a hundred thousand people in the same amount of time that it takes me to reach one person.

So just think to yourself with any business you want to do how you're able to scale that business exponentially without working more hours. So that then brings me to number four, and this sounds super cheesy and everyone says this, but it's very, very true, and that is to do what you love.

If there's any commonality that I've noticed between the people who make a ton of money and who are not only successful in making money but also by being personally fulfilled by what they do, it is this: they all love what they do. I'm another example of this as well. I feel that a lot of the reason why I've done so well in real estate sales or YouTube or just about anything I've really pursued is because I really love what I do. For me, working as a real estate agent never once felt like a job. It felt like I can go and hang out with friends all day, see some insanely cool homes, and get paid for it.

It felt, to me, more like having fun and working a hobby than it did ever working a job. The same with investing in real estate. It never felt like a chore to me. It never felt like a job to me. To me, it was more like a game of strategy—where you can go and find the best undervalued property and then put your own finishing touches on it and your own personality in the home and make it your own and then make a profit off it. I mean, it was just absolutely amazing that you can actually go and make money by doing something that wasn't really conventionally work.

The same with making YouTube videos. I had very few friends who I could go and talk personal finance with outside of like Reddit. And no joke, back then, we'd have Reddit personal finance meetups, like no joke. So I figured I would make YouTube videos and talk about all the financial topics that I didn't have any friends in person to talk with about those things, and now look at this—now we've got like over three hundred and ten thousand friends all on YouTube who enjoy personal finance topics and we can all just shoot the... talk about personal finance. How cool is that?

Oh, and now I can make over like thirty or forty thousand dollars a month posting YouTube videos talking about personal finance. Mind-blowing! Come on, that’s stupid. That is mind-blowingly stupid, but it's cool at the same time. The commonality between all of this, though, is that I've thoroughly enjoyed everything that I'm doing and I don't feel complete unless I'm doing these things. Like, when I took a little bit over a week off recently, I started feeling depressed. I started feeling sluggish. I didn't feel myself because I wanted to go and make YouTube videos. I wanted to go and like start working more, and that stuff just invigorates me and I really enjoy it.

Trust me when I say this: if you don't have a similar feeling about what you're doing, it's going to be hell trying to achieve any sort of similar results. When you really enjoy what you're doing, it makes it that much easier to get through all the times when you're not making any money, the times where you're working really long hours, or the times where you just feel completely stuck. Those moments don't matter whatsoever when you're having fun with what you're doing.

And if it never really feels like work to begin with, otherwise what ends up happening is that you're gonna come up to a roadblock, you're gonna get frustrated with it, and then the fifth time that happens, you're gonna decide it's not for me; it's not worth the hassle. Then you're gonna go and start something else and start that brand new from scratch. But unless you love what you're doing, the exact same thing is gonna happen again, so find something that you actually really enjoy first and then build off from that.

And then finally, number five, and this one I feel like ties it all together, is just have patience. None of this happens overnight. Like, I've never really described this concept before in any of my videos and this is really just a theory I'm putting out there, but I really have the theory of it—almost everything I've done has had almost, almost of like a five-year delay. I don't really see the full benefit of what I'm doing until five years later. For example, working as a real estate agent, it took me about five years in the business to start making over $250,000 per year while working less hours than when I was making $100,000 per year.

Also, my real estate investments did exceptionally well five years after I bought them, and this is five years later after people were telling me I made a huge mistake by buying in San Bernardino and that's a really bad area. Well, I mean guess what? It took five years and they're all wrong. And I have a feeling too that YouTube will probably hit its peak in successfulness—at least for my channel—and probably about five years. And hopefully, I go way longer than five years. I mean, I love for this to last a lifetime.

So anyway, it seems like everything I do really comes in waves of like every five years or so that I really start to see the payoff; it's just it's all five years down the line. For you, it might take you a year or two years or five years or ten years, whatever it might be. But the whole purpose of this is really just to have patience and also keep at it because it will pay off to see the end results.

So, as always, you guys, thank you so much for watching. But really quick before you click out: make sure if you haven't already to gently smash that like button, smash that subscribe button because I post three videos a week, and also smash that notification bell very gently so you don't smash your phone so you could be a part of the notification squad. And YouTube will sometimes notify you when I post a video; they've been a little bit better about that lately. But anyway, just click it anyway because I greatly appreciate it. Also, feel free to add me on Instagram. I post there pretty much daily so if you want to be a part of it there, feel free to add me there. Thank you again for watching, and until next time!