#89: Monetizing My Personal Brand From Zero

Newly Released: Get my Japan guide on how to save time & money

Author

Millennial Money Veteran
June 10, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

MMV here,

I’ve been M.I.A. for almost 2 weeks working on a digital product after my Japan honeymoon. I initially thought it would take about 5 hours to complete. Oh boy was I wrong. It took much longer than that and then when I was finished, the file size was too big to upload so I reformatted the entire document to Notion. 

You may have seen a few images and screenshots of my honeymoon on my Instagram. I got a lot of messages asking me about how I was able to book a business-class flight using credit card points, what credit cards I use, where I’m staying in Japan, etc. and due to the number of requests, I decided to put all my knowledge into a digital product while the information is still fresh in my mind. 

If you want to purchase this product on how to save thousands of dollars and many hours of your life for your Japan trip, you can purchase it here. 

This is a limited time sale because I’m not a travel influencer and this kind of content isn’t really what my account is about. I want to really stick to what my core content is about which is why this is a one-time offer.

This decision made me reflect more about how I can monetize my personal brand. I knew I had to change something and throughout the years, I’ve monetized in several ways, but I want to think long-term about how I monetize.

Therefore, I’m starting back from zero.

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The Brief

Starting from Zero

I’m basically starting from zero and I’m planning to do a whole revamp on how I monetize.

I’m going to go over each revenue stream I have/had and my plans to monetize:

Paid Newsletter

Most of you probably remember that I switched from Substack to beehiiv earlier this year.

  • My newsletter has 2 tiers - a free and paid tier. Switching over the paid subscribers was complicated and using a new email platform was going to take time to get used to so I decided to just stop the paid version of the newsletter until I got comfortable with it.

  • While I wasn’t making a boatload of money off paying subscribers (~$2,000), I gave up the guaranteed money because I wanted to be able to provide high quality content and I knew there was a learning curve with the new email platform.

    The game plan: Now that I’m comfortable with this email platform, I will likely re-introduce this soon, but I want to craft the offer to make it more value to reach more people.

Consultations

And even late last year, I stopped offering consultation calls and closed my calendar. It was nice to meet people on video calls and to be able to directly help them on whatever they needed help with - from property analysis to working on their budget and strategizing to hit their goals.

  • I had 3-5 calls on average per month. Each call was $150 for an hour-long (often times, we went over).

  • Some of those calls required a moderate amount of preparation so my time spent would often be greater than 2 hours including the video call.

    The game plan: I may open this back up in the future, but it’s not a priority.

Digital Products

I still have several digital products for sale, but I don’t promote them. They’re mostly aligned to real estate, but I haven’t purchased a property since 2022 and I’ve been on steady-state mode with my own real estate portfolio.

  • Because the digital products mainly align to real estate, it doesn’t completely align with the content I put out and it’s not a focus of mine right now.

  • I also don’t make sales off these anymore and they were never significant amounts.

  • I never emphasized on selling digital products.

    The game plan: I plan to start from scratch here and offer digital products that align better to what my personal brand and content is about.

Affiliate Links

Since I stopped my paid newsletter and consultations, affiliate links have been my primary source of income for my account.

  • I’d never promote a company or service that I wouldn’t use myself and many times, I have used it, which is why I promote it.

  • Affiliate links don’t cost you anything - the price is still the same, if not better, with an affiliate promo code.

    The game plan: No changes.

Website Ads

I think I made a total of about $40 off ads since 2018 from my website.

  • I only keep the website since I sell my digital products off it and it has a good amount of posts on it.

  • I view the website as redundant since I can sell digital products off Gumroad and link it with this newsletter which is hosted on it’s own website.

  • HELP! Any suggestions would be great.

    The game plan: No changes yet.

I started my account in 2018 thinking of this as a hobby. Now in 2025, it still feels like a hobby to me because I enjoy it. If you’ve DMed me in the past, you know that I’m very responsive and it’s 100% me responding back.

I just want to be successful at it and build some sort of community around it, which is why I’m rethinking how I monetizing this account.

DM me if you have any suggestions.