10 alternative ways to make an income

Or how hyping myself has opened doors to other revenue streams

Hiya 🌊! I’m Lucy from Hype Yourself. I chat about self-promotion and creative living to earn an income from your expertise or passion. Subscribe to hear from me every Sunday.

Image made in Adobe Express

Hiya 🌊,

One of the reasons I set up Hype Yourself on Substack, is to share what I have learnt on my journey from agency owner to solopreneurship.

The only business blueprint you tend to see for “insert business service niche” agency owners is to scale and sell.

I believe you can be ambitious without having to only being growing your business to sell it.

Only when I started to hype myself and raise my profile did I discover how I could earn an income from sharing my expertise.

My way of leaving the world a better place is to help cheerlead the independents and good businesses to get out there.

But I also love to walk my talk and share best practices from my own experience, even if I get jealous later on of others' success when I perceive them to leapfrog me.

This article explores some of the things I’ve done, and I hope they inspire some of you to look at adding other revenue streams with your expertise.

Anything missing from the list? Want to ask me anything?

I’ll meet you in the comments…

Keep on hyping

Lucy x

1. Products

The original inspiration for this Substack was my PR prompt cards.

Initially, they were a product I created with my children's cofounder to announce his setting up a branding division and showcase his design skills.

The first mockup of the 52 PR Tips

They made great gifts for journalists and small business influencers.

It created social media buzz and set me apart from my competitive set. There were not that many service-based business owners who had tangible products.

It also allowed me to try product placement pages in traditional media, and this method secured me a few press articles.

I wanted to recycle the content and had planned to share one of these cards a fortnight. It evolved quite naturally from that starting point.

I’ve still got stock to sell in my office, but I'm waiting to finish navigating maternity leave and Brexit/France postage situation before I get them up and running again.

Do you want to grab a pack? If so, could you drop me a line in the comments? Maybe I need to set up a waitlist 🧐.

2. External workshops

Teaching my expertise is one of my favourite things to do.

I have had to do a lot of training, so that is not death by PowerPoint. For some tips on best practices on this, check this Hype Yourself members resource :

REPLAY: How to make better workshops

I teach for universities, creative accelerators and brands.

The fee varies and is often set by the organisations themselves. I typically charge less for social enterprises than more prominent brands.

The first external workshop opportunities came from people recommending or booking me after seeing me talk at a Courier Live event at the Barbican in London.

I’ve been paid between £350-5,000 for this work.

3. Internal workshops

At the moment, what I would define as internal workshops would be just for my Hype Yourself membership because I am on maternity leave.

Historically, I have run many free workshops to grow my profile, test out content while refining what works, and promote my books.

Surprisingly, I’ve landed a lot of corporate work from people who attended for free to see what I was about.

When I did charge for stand-alone workshops, it would range between £50-300 a ticket.

Today, I host one live session with an expert a month. This makes an annual membership with the 40% discount an absolute bargain (just saying😉).

4. Online courses

I’m ashamed to say I got swept up in the online course boom during the pandemic.

It was for the wrong reasons.

I needed this article by

Alisha Robertson

Issue #77: Choosing a business model that supports your capacity

I never fully clicked with online courses.

I struggled to fit in a live & community element, which I felt was perfect, but I think Substack does well.

I’ve switched out online courses for Substack. My membership feels like an ongoing live course with an evolving syllabus and opportunity for feedback.

The only online course I have now is with Domestika.

5. Book sales

I didn’t get an advance for my book.

I won my book deal through a Practical Inspiration Publishing proposal writing challenge.

There is a direct correlation between the sales and reviews of my first book, which I pushed hard, and the energy I gave to the second.

Because I co-wrote my second book, I thought it would be easier because there would be two of us selling it, but it was almost harder because we both expected the other to do the heavy lifting.

My mantra for book sales is #alwayslaunching. I am still looking at ways to promote my book. I’ve made close to £15,000 from both books over the last four years.

More importantly, it has also opened doors to many other lucrative opportunities.

This is a free to read on everything I know about launching books:

Borrow my non-fiction book launch blueprint

6. Speaker fees

This is not an overnight income stream (or it wasn’t for me, at least). I started off doing a lot of talks for free.

I put together a panel talk for General Assembly in London and invited the journalists with whom I wanted to build better relationships.

One of them worked for Courier Magazine and put my name forward when they were looking for someone to talk about PR, which is how I secured my first paid speaking gig.

After six months, I started to secure between £300–500.

After four years, I have started earning £3000–5000.

If you want to learn more about speaking, check this Hype Yourself members resource:

REPLAY: How to get paid for public speaking

7. Brands

Like many of the workstreams mentioned above, my brand work started for free.

I started shouting out brands I was genuinely a fan of and whose values matched mine.

To date, I’ve been lucky in that the brand partnerships have always come to me rather than me going looking for them.

I have historically been very active on Instagram and offer free advice & tips there.

I was not focused on direct sales but on brand building, which is an invaluable long-term sales-driving activity.

I am now a global ambassador for Adobe Express, an amazing programme.

I’ve flown to LA, upskilled in creative ways, and love using the product.

Without this, I would not have been invited to Chris Do’s podcast, which was one of my biggest invitations to date.

8. Affiliates/referrals

Now that I've been in the game for a while, I’m wiser about who I will or won’t recommend.

I try to go less for the popular kids at school and for products or services I genuinely use and have purchased.

This is still quite a new area for me, but particularly, tech start-ups pay well for affiliate schemes.

I have made several hundred pounds each from recommending Copy.Ai and the Practical Inspiration book proposal challenge I mentioned in point 5.

9. PR mentoring

I’ve steadily increased my fees for this.

You are not paying for an hour of my time but for my two decades of experience in PR, from large agencies to small businesses.

I’ve also taught thousands of students through accelerators, universities, and business schools and worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs.

I pushed the PR mentoring hours quite heavily before maternity leave, but I take them on request these days.

10. Substack

I’ve written extensively about how I grew that as a paid income here.

In reality, this is now my sole focus as I am in that in-between bit—not really on maternity leave but only back at work two days a week—nameless.

I am giving myself until September 2026 to try and replace my agency salary.

I am not taking on any client work, and instead, I have 380 “clients” in my paid membership.

Borrow everything I know about growing a newsletter

I did actually test out writing on Medium before I came here. I wrote about 100 articles there before I came here.

Today, my main priority is my Substack.

Historically, I’ve only had time to write it. Now that I am getting some allocated hours per week, I intend to start ramping up my promotion.

The rest of my income right now is made up of

• Book sales Hype Yourself or Brand Yourself.

• One-to-one mentoring sessions.

• Workshops for university, accelerator membership or in-house team.

• I also work for Adobe Express as a global ambassador and as a Domestika instructor.

Any more for any more? Questions and comments are open to everyone this week as a seasonal treat.

Is this helpful? Fancy giving me a little restack?