Mentoring your peers is a deeply rewarding way to diversify your income and maybe even turn it into a genuine income stream in your business.
Some thoughts on the subject:
1. People are always looking to advance in their careers.
If you are ahead of someone else in your career, you can create an offering that helps them reach your stage while meeting the economics of their current situation. A little creativity and you can make a very compelling offer for them and you.
2. You already know this stuff.
You learned it first-hand, which is far more valuable than anything you could learn about in a book. And that makes your experience valuable without needing to become some kind of “expert”. If you’re doing a thing successfully, you have the experience needed to teach it.
3. Teaching is scalable.
Your mentoring doesn’t need to be time-intensive. You can use mentoring conversations to begin the process of teaching your expertise in a more documented format. Maybe you do some free or paid webinars and add those recordings to your private library. Maybe you could write down your insights or answers to the questions you get. Eventually, your content can do much of the heavy lifting for you. It’s easily shared and distributed.
4. Your processes are valuable.
The tools you use, documents you’ve devised, methods you created—all of those are valuable to someone a step or two behind you. And they make great digital products and/or supplements to your mentorship offering.
5. Mentorship is not coaching.
It’s similar, but the onus is more on the mentee to come to you with questions, challenges, etc., and for you to provide your experience and insight into their situation. It’s less proactive on your part, though it can be as proactive as you make it. It tends to be low-stress and extremely valuable to the recipient if you invest yourself into them (and they into themselves).
6. You don’t need to make it a big deal.
If you have a social following, you can drop a mention about what you’re thinking and maybe link to a simple landing page describing who you’re seeking to help, how much it costs, and what kinds of things you do. You could make it into an entire website, but it’s usually better to just start small, put it out there, and see who takes you up on it. That’s how I got started.
Income aside, mentoring other people and seeing them succeed is by far one of the most personally rewarding things I do.
It might also be a chance for you to advise more people in a scalable and rewarding way—monetarily or otherwise.
I highly recommend it.
—kevin
P.S. I changed the pricing of the membership and simplified it a little. I’ll talk more about that next week, but if you want to grab a spot with the old pricing, just reply to this email and I’ll hook you up.