If I Needed to Make an Extra $1,000, Here's What I'd Do

00:00You know what I think is slightly ridiculous about running an online business? Every single time we want to make more money, our brains immediately go, "Ooh, what could I create? A workshop, a mini course, a new offer." And before you know it, you've spent two weeks building something, another week writing the sales page, and you still haven't made any money. Ask me how I know. But I've been trying to approach things differently lately, and with an unexpected business expense coming up in the next few weeks, I've been asking myself a very specific question: if I wanted to make an extra $1,000, what could I sell without creating something new? Let's talk about it. Are you a female business owner frustrated with battling the algorithm and looking for growth strategies that don't involve awkwardly pointing or dancing online or throwing cash at paid ads? Welcome to the Email Growth Show. I'm your host, Kylie Kelly, visibility and email marketing strategist. I grew my email list from zero to almost 10,000 [00:01:00] subscribers in less than two years, and the same is possible for you, too. Are you ready to build your email list and start making more money in your online business? Let's head into today's episode. Hey, hey, welcome back to the Email Growth Show. Okay, so last week we talked about Q4, and specifically, I told you that before you add another thing to your Q4 plan, I wanted you to look backwards. What's already working? Where's the bottleneck? Do you need more discovery? Do you need to deepen the relationship with the people already there? Or do you need to turn more of that attention and trust into revenue? And I said something in that episode that I really want you to carry into this one. Your business should have a memory. October should benefit from September. Q4 should benefit from Q3. And everything that you've spent the last however many years building should make the next stage of your business f*cking easier. So today, I want to take that idea and make it very practical. Because what if you looked [00:02:00] at your business right now and thought, "Hmm, I could really use an extra $1,000 this month"? Maybe you've had an unexpected expense. Maybe sales have been a bit quiet. Maybe you want to book a holiday. Maybe you've got a tax bill. Maybe you just want an extra $1,000 because you're running a business, and making money is kind of the point. What would you do? Because I know what a lot of us do. We create. We think, "Ooh, I could make a $27 workshop. I could make a mini course, a template, a challenge, a new service." And suddenly, the $1,000 that you wanted to make has turned into creating the thing, naming the thing, designing the thing, building the checkout, writing the sales page, creating the graphics, setting up emails, delivering it, and three weeks later, you're exhausted, and you actually haven't sold anything yet. And listen, I am saying this as somebody whose natural instinct is abso-freaking-lutely, I have an idea, let's build it. Give me Claude, Canva and a coffee, and apparently I can lose an entire day. Like, I f*cking love making [00:03:00] things. But I've been trying really hard this year to interrupt that instinct, that pattern. And instead of "what could I create to make another $1,000?", I'm trying to ask, "what do I already have that could make another $1,000?" And this is actually a live question for me. So this isn't a hypothetical episode. I've got a business trip coming up in a couple of weeks, and it's ended up costing me a little bit more than I originally expected. Nothing dramatic, we're fine, but I looked at the numbers and thought, "Okay, it would be really nice to create a little extra injection of revenue to cover some of this." And old Kylie probably would have immediately started brainstorming a product. What could I sell? What could I make? What could I run? Maybe a workshop, could I do a flash sale? And instead of all that, I've been trying to practise what I preach, because I have spent months on this podcast telling you, "Stop creating new offers. Sell what you already have. Use the assets you've already built. Let your business compound." So [00:04:00] it would be slightly embarrassing if my response was, "Oh, here's my brand new mini course that I built yesterday," right? So instead, I've been looking around my business differently, and I want to talk you through exactly how I'm approaching it. First, we start with what we already sell. This is always where I start. Before we get clever, look at the obvious stuff. What do you already sell? Courses, templates, memberships, services, intensives, workshops, audits, whatever it is. Because if you need another $1,000, you might not need anything more complicated than selling an existing offer again. If you've got a $100 product, that's just 10 sales. A $250 offer, four sales. A $500 service, two clients. We tend to immediately ask, "What can I sell?" Perhaps the question should be, "What can I sell again?" Is there something sitting there that you haven't talked about for two months? Is there something your new subscribers have never seen? Could you run one of those three-day launches that I've been talking about? [00:05:00] Could you create a reason to pay attention to an evergreen offer? That would be my first stop, and sometimes that is all you are going to need. Secondly, I want you to look for unused capacity. Let's say that you don't want to promote one of your existing products right now. The next place I'd look is your capacity. What could you do a little more of without building something from scratch? Maybe you're a coach and you've got space for two intensives this month. Maybe you're a copywriter and you've got capacity for three audits. Maybe you normally work with clients for six months, but you could offer a one-off strategy session. Maybe you've got one Friday sitting completely empty, and you could open up a VIP day. That's not creating an entire new product ecosystem. You're literally just packaging up some capacity or some white space that you already had. And importantly, I'd be looking for something that doesn't create an enormous delivery hangover. Because making an extra thousand dollars is great, but making an extra thousand dollars and then accidentally creating 40 hours of [00:06:00] work for yourself, that's a lot less exciting. So that's number two. Now number three, again, I would look at what you've already created. So let's look at your content and your IP, your intellectual property, and I think this is one we overlook all of the freaking time. What have you already made? Have you taught a workshop that people loved? Could you sell the replay? Have you got three trainings that could become a bundle? Have you got some templates sitting inside a bigger program that could work as a standalone product? Have you got a framework that people always ask you about? Have you got a mini course that you haven't mentioned for six months? Have you got something that you've basically forgotten exists? Because we create so much intellectual property in online business, especially if you're growing your email list through collaborations. Think of the podcasts you've been on. Think of the summits that you've spoken at. Think of the bundle products that you've created. You could leverage any of that to help you create additional income. Because normally what happens is we move on so quickly that half of it just sits there on our [00:07:00] Google Drive. And you don't necessarily need to make more. You might just need to package up what you've already made a little bit differently. Put it in some different wrapping paper. Now, number four, I want you to look at the audience that you've built. This is where I think it gets really interesting, because one of the most valuable things that you've built in your business might not be a product or a service at all. It might be distribution: your email list, your podcast, your community, your website traffic, your network, the relationships that you've built. And I want to be very careful here, because I am not saying, "Great, Kylie says I should start selling access to my audience to anyone who'll pay me." Please, please, please don't do that. Audience trust is worth far more than a quick thousand dollars. But if you have spent years building an audience around a specific topic, there may be ways to monetise that asset that genuinely benefit the audience as well. Affiliate partnerships are an obvious one. Sponsorships, partner workshops, paid newsletter placements if that's appropriate for [00:08:00] your business. And this is actually the area I've been looking at in my own business for this additional thousand dollars, because I've realised I have an asset that I've spent years building that I've never really thought about in this particular way. Dun, dun, dun. That is this podcast. And the idea is really simple. You don't need to start your own podcast to have a podcast episode. I have the Email Growth Show. I've been publishing this show since 2020. I have an established audience. I have an email list that I promote new episodes to, and I also have guest episode slots that I need to fill. Specifically, I've got space in November, December and January. So instead of me finding three people, scheduling the interviews, coordinating times, recording them, editing them, all the things, what if I opened these spots up differently? What if an expert who has something genuinely useful to teach you could essentially borrow my podcast? They could record a 15 to 20-minute [00:09:00] episode. They send me the audio. I personally record the introduction and the outro. We produce it. We publish it as a guest episode of the Email Growth Show. We include their links and information, and because it's that week's episode, it gets promoted to my email list just like my normal episodes do. So they get an evergreen authority asset and exposure to a new audience. You get a genuinely useful episode from someone with expertise I think you'll actually benefit from, and I generate some additional revenue from an asset I've already spent years building. That is the experiment. And notice what I didn't have to do. I didn't have to create. I didn't start another podcast. I didn't create a course teaching podcasting. I didn't make a 37-page workbook. The podcast already exists. The listeners, the email list, the publishing system, the guest spots, all of that already exists. I'm looking at something I already have and asking whether there's another way for it to create value. That's [00:10:00] it. And whether the Borrow My Podcast idea sells out or completely tanks, I'm going to learn something, which by the way, I will absolutely report back to you, because you know I love turning my business experiments into podcast episodes. Now, I'm using my podcast because that's an asset that I have. Your asset might look different to mine. You don't need a podcast. Your version could be completely different. Maybe you've built a really engaged community. Could you bring in a paid partner to teach something genuinely useful? Maybe you have an email list with a very defined audience. Could you work with aligned affiliate partners? Maybe you've developed an amazing framework. Could that become an intensive? Maybe you have a popular blog. Could there be an appropriate sponsorship opportunity there? Maybe you have an audience of local businesses. Could somebody sponsor your newsletter? Maybe you've got a course with an implementation piece people constantly ask you to help with. Could you sell a limited number of get-it-done week sessions? [00:11:00] Maybe you've run 20 workshops over the last three years, and they're sitting in Google Drive gathering digital dust. Could you package the best five together into a bundle? You don't have to copy my idea with the podcast. I want you to copy the question: "What have I already built that has value?" Now, there's one more category that I would look at if I wanted to make $1,000 pretty quickly: your skills. Not everything needs to become a scalable course. Saying that to myself. Sometimes the fastest route to cash is, "I know how to do this. You need it done? Pay me and I'll help you." It gets to be that simple. That is completely allowed. Maybe you've spent the last five years learning email marketing. Could you do two $500 audits? Maybe you're amazing at setting up automations. Could you offer three spots where you do it for them? Maybe you're a designer, a strategist. Maybe you're great at AI. Maybe you could fix somebody's funnel in two hours. You don't necessarily have to turn that skill into the ultimate funnel [00:12:00] fixing academy. You can just help somebody get it done, especially if we're talking about a short-term cash injection rather than building your entire long-term business model. And then just do the maths backwards. If you want an extra $1,000, I don't want to accidentally create a plan that needs me to make 200 sales. I want to work backwards. So what could I sell that means I just need two or three yeses, maybe five? Because if the goal is relatively quick revenue, I'd rather find something with enough value that I don't need enormous volume. This is why I wouldn't automatically reach for a $9 template. If I sell something at 500 bucks, I just need two people. $250, I need four. $100, I need 10. None of those are better than each other. They just require very different amounts of traffic and selling. So if you already have an audience, you already have some trust, and you need cash pretty quickly, I would look at what I can create the most genuine value with, without [00:13:00] needing hundreds of transactions. Now, as I start to wrap this up, I do want to say what I wouldn't do, because I think this part matters as well. I wouldn't panic. I wouldn't slap together something random just because I need money. I wouldn't sell access to my audience to somebody completely misaligned. When I release these Borrow My Podcast spots, if somebody pays and I'm like, "That's a hard no," I'll just be refunding them. Like I said before, the trust that you have in me listening to this podcast means more than anything else. I also wouldn't massively discount something valuable just because I want quick cash. I wouldn't take on a client I know is going to make me f*cking miserable, and I wouldn't create an offer that's going to cost me more in time and energy than the extra 1K is worth, because there's a difference between creating a strategic cash injection and borrowing money from your future capacity. Let me say that again. There's a difference between creating a strategic cash injection and borrowing money from your future [00:14:00] capacity. So if I make $1,000 today, but I commit myself to 30 hours of work next month when I'm already busy, I've just created a different problem. So I'd be looking for leverage. Again: existing offers, existing assets, existing capacity, existing intellectual property, existing audience, existing skills, existing value. This is also why building assets matters. This is the bigger lesson underneath all of this. This is why I keep banging on about building assets in your business. An email list is an asset. A podcast is an asset. A good offer is an asset. A library of content is an asset. A framework, a network, a community, a reputation, they are all assets. The more of those that you build over time, the more options you have. When I was first starting this business, I could not have said, "Oh, I'm going to open up three spots on my established podcast and promote them to my email audience." I didn't have those things. I have spent [00:15:00] years building them, and now, thankfully, they give me options. This is what I mean when I say that your business should get easier because of what you've already built. Not easy, but easier. You're not starting from zero every time that you want to make money. So here is what I want you to do, my loves. Imagine, whether you actually need money or not, that you needed to make an extra thousand dollars in the next thirty days, but there's one rule: you are not allowed to create a brand-new product. What would you do? Look at what you already sell, any unused capacity or white space that you have in your calendar, your existing content and intellectual property, your audience and distribution, your skills, and ask yourself, "Where is there already value in my business that I'm just not fully using?" Then I want you to do the maths. What could you sell? At what price? How many yeses would you need? And what's the simplest way to put that opportunity in front of the right people? You might be surprised by what you find.

16:00And because I'm:very much practising what I'm preaching, if you are listening to this thinking, "Wait, I actually would like to borrow Kylie's podcast," I'm opening up just three partner spots for the Email Growth Show. One for November, one for December, and one for January. You'll record a short solo episode teaching something genuinely valuable and relevant to this audience. You'll send me the audio, then I will personally introduce you, record the outro, and get everything produced and published here on the Email Growth Show. Your details and links will be in the show notes, and your episode will be promoted to my full email list, just like my normal weekly podcast episodes are. You do not need to start a podcast. You do not need to maintain one. You do not need to coordinate an interview time with me. You bring the expertise, and I will lend you the platform. Now, because this is my audience, and protecting the trust that I have built with you is incredibly freaking important to me, I'm not opening these spots up to absolutely anybody. Your [00:17:00] topic and business need to genuinely be a good fit. So if you are interested, I'll put the details in the show notes. There are only three spots, because like I said, there are only three episodes that I'm opening up, and this is an experiment. If it works, maybe I'll do it again. If it doesn't, you will almost certainly hear an episode called "I Tried Selling Spots on My Podcast and Nobody Bought Them." Either way, we learn something. We're either winning or we're learning, right? So that is my challenge for you this week. Do not ask, "What can I create to make more money?" I want you to ask, "What have I already created that could make more money?" What have you built? What do you know? Who do you serve? What assets are sitting there quietly doing one job when maybe they could do two? Because I really don't think the answer to every revenue problem is another new product. Sometimes the money is sitting inside the business that you've already built. You just haven't packaged it up yet, and that is exactly what I'm experimenting with right now. I will report back, my loves, of course, and tell [00:18:00] you what happens. Okay, I hope you're doing well. Thank you again for being here, and I will see you next week. Bye for now. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Email Growth Show. I hope you found valuable insights into the next steps you can take to grow your email list and boost your business without relying on social media or paid ads. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show and share it with others. Your feedback helps me reach more female entrepreneurs just like you, who are ready to say goodbye to social media and leverage email marketing to grow their business and make a bigger impact. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.