Stop relying solely on your salary! 9 steps to financial freedom for ordinary people.

Original text: hooeem

Compiled by: Yuliya, PANews

If you're tired of the 9-to-5 grind and don't know how to break free from it, then this article is for you. This isn't about cryptocurrency or get-rich-quick scams; it's a real guide to financial freedom.

From how to turn your job into a springboard, to finding your passion, to mastering the attention economy, building communities, achieving diversified monetization, and making smart investments, this article will provide you with a clear path to go from ordinary to extraordinary.

1. Work

Believe it or not, young people need money to maintain a basic standard of living, such as food and shelter. Work is not a constraint, but rather a boost to financial freedom. If you can't stick to a 9-to-5 job, you may lack the motivation to achieve financial freedom, let alone accumulate enough income.

A 9-to-5 job is not just a means of making a living, but also a way to create more possibilities for the "5-9" time slot after work . Rather than working yourself to the bone until retirement only to find your health compromised and unable to enjoy life, it's better to strive for personal goals while you're young, energetic, and have fewer responsibilities. Although the process may be challenging, it is precisely this present effort that paves the way for a better future and a brighter life.

2. Luck (an optional accelerator)

If you are lucky enough to have family support when you are young and live at a lower cost, you will accumulate wealth more quickly.

• Make good use of your strengths: This isn't a prerequisite for success, but if you're lucky enough to have them, it means you've been dealt a better hand than others . Don't feel guilty about it; use it without reservation.
• Turn adversity into motivation: If you are not so lucky, then turn the "bad hand" in your hand into powerful fuel to motivate you to move forward.

3. Enthusiasm

What is your passion? What do you truly love and understand? This is the core of your career.

• Find your creative inspiration: Think deeply about the themes you'd like to create about every day. It could be football, fashion, movies, cryptocurrency, economics, travel, food—anything.
• Find the intersection: If your passion is unclear, list all the things you like and look for common ground. For example, someone might like AI, cryptocurrency, robotics, privacy, and finance; the intersection here is technology and the market. This way, they'll have a constant stream of content to create.

4. Attention Economy

If you are reading this on a mobile phone, laptop, or tablet with an internet connection, then you already have the tools to connect to the world economy.

In today's world, attention is money. The world's most successful companies now use attention to sell products, and you can sell anything that provides value to others.

• How to manage attention? By building a community.
• How to build a community? By providing value for free on social media.

To summarize: You have a job, a passion, and the tools to connect with the world. Now, the real challenge begins.

5. Building a community from scratch

Step 1: Begin

• Precise positioning: Choose a niche area that you are familiar with and can consistently produce content in. If you have already identified your interests and hobbies, then your niche area is basically determined.
• Professional Image: Choose a concise, distinctive username and nickname that are highly relevant to your content area. No one will pay attention to an unoriginal account. Your username should clearly convey who you are and what you do, maintaining professional consistency both visually and semantically. Furthermore, use a striking, high-quality profile picture to reinforce brand recognition. The profile picture can be a real photo or a consistent AI avatar. It must be clean, clear, and aligned with the content theme to ensure it's instantly recognizable in your feed.

• Value Statement: Write a clear, value-focused personal profile that explicitly states what problems you can solve for others and what results you can create (avoid excessive personal details). People only care about what you can offer; they are not interested in your private life. Keep your homepage header image simple, professional, and highly relevant to your core positioning.

Step 2: Create a list

• Searching for peers: Now, you need to do some "homework" on your field. Search for keywords related to your passion on social media platforms (such as Twitter). Find active accounts in the field (it will be easier if you already follow them), at least 100 or more.
• Tiered management: Then, these active accounts are categorized based on the number of followers (e.g., 0-5k, 5k-10k, 10k-25k, 25k-100k, 100k+).

If you don't understand why this is necessary, here's an explanation:

• The first category is your initial social and cross-promotion targets. You are at similar stages and have similar interests. When you frequently provide valuable replies under their content, they will follow you (don't beg for attention), and you can grow together.
• The same principle applies to the second and third categories. As you grow, you will be noticed by accounts with a larger number of followers, leading to further cross-promotion.
• Categories four and five are for instantly replying to their high-quality posts . They have a large fan base and a highly relevant audience to you. If you don't understand why this is important, grasp this: you'll have the opportunity to showcase your account to hundreds of thousands of people. All you have to do is quickly reply to their content and provide high-quality, valuable insights. Don't just reply with "nice," no one will click into your profile because of that; don't use AI-generated replies, that's easily detectable. Be genuine, be yourself, offer your experience and insights valuable in your specific field, and then watch your account continue to grow.

Step 3: Growth of your account

• From 0 to 5,000 followers: Post at least 15-20 updates daily, including 3-5 original posts, and make at least 10-15 high-value replies to the accounts listed above—the more, the better. Make your replies thoughtful and engaging, avoiding generic statements. Share your best-performing content for greater exposure.
• From 5,000 to 10,000+ followers: Continue to post 10-15 replies (or even more) per day; increase original content to 7-10 per day; start using automated tools to schedule content postings while you sleep to keep your account active.

Step 4: Create high-quality content

• Use short, easy-to-browse text (avoid long blocks of text).
• Use lists, line breaks, and keywords to make content stand out more in the timeline.
• High-performing content can be retweeted to achieve secondary dissemination.
• Use threads/long posts to present list-style content.
• Write articles to provide in-depth, engaging content.

Step 5: Avoiding Traps

• Do not rely on the "mutual following" strategy.
• Avoid overuse of tags and abuse of the @mention feature.
• Don't plagiarize, stay original, and add value to your field.

Step 6: Scaling up

• Drive traffic to yourself by providing valuable replies;
• By providing a clear homepage introduction and compelling featured content, you can increase engagement and conversion rates. People will check out your account because of your value.
• By interacting with high-quality accounts, you can gain the same quality of attention and further dissemination;
• Further development by leveraging automated tools and newly established networks is a cross-propagation strategy.

Case Study: Drizz

Some people question whether this approach is effective; let's look at an application example.

• Starting point: Drizz had only 24 fans at the time.
• Action: Focus on macroeconomic content. Publish an article related to the FOMC as the FOMC meeting approaches.
• Result: The number of followers increased from 24 to 157.
• Follow-up: The account later reached 527, but because it didn't post frequently enough or reply to enough messages, the growth didn't reach the potential higher level.

Since then, the account has admitted that it sometimes wanted to give up and failed to persevere as expected. That's okay; this path isn't for everyone. But to truly stand out, you must treat it as your "5-9" career, not just a "hobby."

6. Commercialization

If monetization is not possible, then all the previous efforts in building the community are meaningless. It must be clear that building a community is extremely difficult—not impossible, but incredibly time-consuming. This means that after finishing your 9-to-5 job each day, you shouldn't be lying around watching TV shows, but rather continuing to write content, analyze problems, and consistently deliver value, all driven by your passion.

Fortunately, you can use AI to help with brainstorming, but AI cannot replace your writing. People can easily see through AI-generated content, which means you won't be able to build the connections necessary for scaling and success within a community.

Of course, you might receive some advertising revenue from platforms and earn some pocket money. But our goal is financial freedom, right? Here are some compliant and effective long-term monetization methods.

Method 1: Platform advertising revenue sharing ("Money from Musk")

Once you set up your account, you'll be able to earn a share of the platform's advertising revenue. The core of Platform X's profit model lies in attracting high-quality users, rather than simply pursuing a large number of followers or superficial data. The platform prefers to reward users who truly create value, rather than those who complain about the algorithm. The platform only cares about one thing: convertible attention . Platform X aims to attract users with purchasing power, who are of interest to advertisers, and who are willing to invest in the platform, such as users subscribing to Premium Blue Label. The platform's algorithm is not targeted at individuals, but rather prioritizes promoting content that is engaging and has conversion potential.

The key to monetization: Your revenue depends on the quality of your audience, not the quantity.

• Geographic location: Fans from the United States and the European Union can bring in more advertising revenue.
• Paid users: Fans with premium memberships are worth ten times more than regular fans.
• Content type: Some topics generate meager revenue, while others yield substantial income. You need to enter areas where advertisers are willing to spend money to grab attention, such as finance and cryptocurrency.
• Sustainability: Consistent output is more important than blockbuster products.

How can you truly earn rewards? Besides audience quality, you should also pay attention to :

• Replies, forwards, and quotes that reflect genuine interaction.
• Dwell time: This silent metric determines the fate of your content.
• Long-form content that can capture attention, such as articles and videos longer than two minutes.
• Online Q&A sessions (AMA Spaces) can enhance community cohesion.

Once you grasp these concepts, the platform transforms from a mystery into a predictable machine. To earn rewards, you need to meet basic requirements: be at least 18 years old, enable two-factor authentication, verify your email address, have 500 followers, 5 million impressions in the past 90 days, and subscribe to a Premium subscription. Connect to Stripe to start earning passive income.

Method Two: Selling "Skills"

People are happy to pay for the following:

• Methodology
• Disassembly and Retrospective
• Research System
• template
• Workflow

Here is a complete guide on how to do it:

• Choose skills people are truly willing to pay for: you're not writing a diary, you're packaging a solution. First, ensure you have in-depth knowledge of the relevant field, pay attention to the difficulties people face in that area, and assess the practical value of solving the problem. Additionally, observe whether there's clear online demand. Whether it's market analysis, design, writing, fitness, cryptocurrency, programming, or productivity improvements, anything with demand and the potential to create results through knowledge is likely a worthwhile area to develop.
• Defining the shift: Every successful product accomplishes only one thing: taking the reader from point A to point B. Specifically, it needs to answer two questions: What problem is the reader currently facing? And what goals will they be able to achieve after reading? If you can't clearly explain this shift in one sentence, the product will be difficult to sell.
• Build a clear framework: People don't simply buy raw information; they prefer structured content. Therefore, transforming your skills into a clear process is crucial. An effective process can include key steps: understanding the basics, proper setup, executing core skills, avoiding common mistakes, and expanding or optimizing results. Such a framework not only helps users quickly master skills but also enhances the product's usability and value. It's important that users can implement the guide within the same day; otherwise, the product is unlikely to be considered high-quality.
• Writing eBooks/PDFs: Use sharp, concise language, no fluff. Employ simple language, short paragraphs, direct instructions, use screenshots for clarity where necessary, provide examples only when needed, and utilize tools like Canva or Google Docs. The layout should be clean, readable, and consistent with your brand. No designer is needed; clarity is paramount.
• Product Packaging: When promoting a product or service, the focus should be on the changes users can achieve, rather than specific content details. Users are more concerned with saving time, reducing uncertainty, avoiding mistakes, receiving clear guidance, and whether there is a proven plan. Therefore, when introducing a product, emphasize what goals it can help users achieve, rather than emphasizing the specific number of pages or modules it contains.
• Building Authority Through Content: Content is the core driver of product sales. Publishing high-quality content daily helps build authority and attract user attention. This can be achieved by sharing insights, lessons learned, operational guides, failure stories, screenshots, framework analysis, and quick solutions, providing clear and valuable information. By consistently producing high-quality and practical content, users perceive even free content as highly helpful, naturally leading them to purchase more in-depth paid resources, such as PDFs.
• Building a sales infrastructure: Setting up a sales infrastructure requires only a few key tools, including Gumroad, LemonSqueezy, or Payhip. This is accompanied by a single page, a purchase button, and clear action guidelines.
• Posting correctly: When posting content, avoid directly dropping links. Instead, create anticipation: start by posing a question, then showcase some content from the guidelines, explain your target audience, and share user reviews or early feedback. Additionally, pinning posts containing key information can increase visibility. People are more drawn to energetic, confident, and clearly articulated content, so be sure to convey these qualities when posting.
• Iterative upgrades: Customer feedback allows for continuous product optimization and improved user experience. Adding clear examples, templates, checklists, additional pages, and updated strategies makes the product more attractive and usable. These improvements not only help users better understand and use the product but also ensure its long-term competitiveness, making it a lasting choice.
• Building an ecosystem: When building an ecosystem, a single guide is merely a product, while three guides can constitute a business. To achieve this, it is recommended to create complementary assets, including beginner versions, advanced versions, domain-specific versions, as well as toolkits, cheat sheets, and templates. This is not just about creating a PDF file, but about building a sustainably accumulated intellectual property.
• The repetitive cycle: mastering a skill can lead to creating a product; each product is a revenue stream; each buyer has the potential to become a repeat customer. The path is: learning, packaging, selling, optimizing, expanding, and repeating. Simple, efficient, and high-leverage.

Method 3: Selling "Convenience"

• Understanding Convenience: Convenience is about removing obstacles, helping people achieve results faster, skip painful processes, reduce choice costs, save time, and avoid confusion. If a product eliminates the "right friction," it goes from valuable to indispensable.
• Identify the things people hate to do: Convenience stems from frustration. Look for tasks that people avoid because they are boring, repetitive, time-consuming, technically complex, or emotionally exhausting.
• Package your solutions into effortless products: convenience must feel instantaneous. This can be done as templates, checklists, automation scripts, AI-powered prompts, plug-and-play systems, and more. If a user can pick it up and use it within 60 seconds, it's often easier to sell.
• How to get results quickly: When choosing convenience products, users are most concerned about "how to get results quickly." To meet this need, developers need to focus on improving product efficiency, removing redundant content, and optimizing the user flow. Specific measures include: providing simple and clear operation guidelines, specifying the execution method for each step, and adding screenshots to assist in illustration when necessary. At the same time, tasks should be broken down into small, repeatable actions, and a simplified one-page operation guide should be provided to meet the need for quick use. Importantly, product design should avoid theoretical instruction and instead focus on providing direct and effective shortcuts to help users quickly achieve their goals.
• Make the offer irresistible: Users buy convenience not because of low prices, but because of the significant improvement in time management. The appeal of a product or service lies in its ability to help users save hours each week, simplify complex learning processes, reduce stress, provide clear solutions, offer a competitive advantage, or directly provide ready-made solutions. Effectively communicating the value of a product or service by showcasing the time saved, reduced effort, and avoided frustration is crucial to compelling users.
• Sell through demonstration, not persuasion: Show before-and-after comparisons, demonstrate how many steps and time your method saves. Make people feel it's easy, and the product will sell itself.
• Build authority by solving small problems every day: Every piece of content you post should say, "I make your life easier."
• Repeat this cycle: find the obstacle -> remove the obstacle -> package the solution -> sales results. Convenience is almost legal "cheating" in the digital economy.

Method Four: Selling "Premium Communities"

People are willing to pay for the following:

• Acquire unique resources
• Receive mentor guidance
• Define your goals
• Strengthen a sense of responsibility
• Provides a sense of direction
• Drive action
• Be with like-minded people

A truly high-class community has its own culture: values, tone of voice, language, standards, shared mission, and so on. People pay for a sense of belonging.

• Provide clear value: Clearly explain what you will get after joining and how your life will improve. For example: daily analysis, workflow guides, live Q&A, opportunities to communicate directly with you, as well as practical tools, templates, and shortcuts.
• Provide transformation, not content: What truly makes members feel valued is their own growth and change. Every member should feel, "I am not the same person I was last month." Achieving this transformation requires clear direction, a well-defined structure, effective accountability mechanisms, daily motivation, and a continuous sense of progress.
• The opportunity to connect with you is key: your presence, guidance, and attention are the premium of the community.
• Establish a structure to maintain engagement: This requires weekly themes, regular activities, challenges, milestones, etc., so that members always know what to do next when they log in.
• Create a high-quality environment: Set rules to eliminate noise, spam, and low-quality issues. A clean community with 30 loyal members is better than a server with 3,000 "zombie" members.
• Community optimization enhances brand strength: As a living organism, the community continuously improves its overall performance by refining the user experience. Optimization methods include simplifying channels, adding new tools, introducing experts, launching new templates, hosting meetings, and updating systems. Simultaneously, it's crucial to listen to member feedback; each improvement will have a cumulative effect, making the community operation more agile.
• Scaling up rhythmically: Don't rush to chase numbers when scaling; chase density. Community growth comes from consistency, transformation, word-of-mouth, results, and member victories. A virtuous cycle begins when spontaneous recommendations of "I must join here" emerge.

Other monetization methods

• Revenue sharing tool: Earn commissions by promoting other digital products through referral links.
• One-on-one support and assistance: Similar to a paid community, providing personalized services.
• Merchandise : If the product is cool and fits your field, you can sell merchandise.

Important reminder: Avoid over-marketing. Maintain a balance between content and sales (at least 5:1 is recommended), otherwise you will quickly lose the trust of your followers.

7. Balance and Savings

When income starts to improve, the most common risk is that the cost of living rises rapidly, leading to debt in pursuit of a "more refined life," which only results in being tied to the system for longer.

What needs to be done is to save and clearly allocate cash flow:

• Use your 9-to-5 income to cover living expenses (you could do it before, and you can do it now);
• Use the extra income you earn during your "5-9" time slot after get off work to save.

Of course, you can go on vacation and enjoy good food, but don't be too extravagant and squander all your income. You need this money to truly achieve financial freedom.

8. Investment

Don't trade, don't gamble, invest and save to grow your assets and outpace inflation.

Depending on your region, find the best investment options that will reduce capital gains tax (e.g., ISA stock and share accounts in the United States).

Below are five investment portfolios, along with their expected volatility and compound annual growth rate (CAGR), as well as their expected returns after 5, 10, and 15 years.

*Note: NFA, DYOR.

I. Extremely Low-Risk Investment Portfolio

• 80% S&P 500 Index: Broadly and diversified investments in the U.S. stock market, providing stability, lower volatility and consistent long-term performance.
• 10% TSMC and ASML: These two companies are at the heart of global semiconductor and AI manufacturing, possessing deep moats and high demand.
• 10% of “high-quality” companies, such as American Express (AXP), Visa (V), Mastercard (MA), Moody’s (MCO), S&P Global (SPGI), Ferrari (RACE), and Hermès (RMS), possess a sustainable competitive advantage and predictable revenue.
• Combined Indicators:
  • Expected CAGR: 6.7% - 8.4%
  • Volatility: 12% - 13%

II. Conservative Investment Portfolio

• 60% of the S&P 500 index: the core defensive foundation.
• The 15% MAG7: Investing in the world’s strongest technology companies at a manageable scale.
• 10% TSMC and ASML: Critical semiconductor infrastructure.
• 10% of “high-quality” companies: Reliable global compound interest machines.
• 5% Bitcoin: A small allocation to capture asymmetric upside potential without distorting overall volatility.
• Combined Indicators:
  • Expected CAGR: 7.5% - 9.3%
  • Volatility: 14% - 17%

III. Balanced Investment Portfolio

• 40% S&P 500 Index: A solid foundation for stabilizing the overall portfolio.
• The 20% of tech giants: key engines for long-term technological growth.
• 15% TSMC and ASML: Monopolists in AI and semiconductors.
• 15% of “high-quality” companies: balanced, predictable cash flow.
• 7% Bitcoin: Provides long-term convexity.
• 3% Robotics: Small investments in emerging and innovative fields to avoid excessive risk.
• Combined Indicators:
  • Expected CAGR: 9% - 11%
  • Volatility: 17% - 20%

IV. Aggressive Investment Portfolio

• 30% of the top seven tech giants: the world's strongest technology platforms and AI leaders.
• 20% TSMC and ASML: Key AI infrastructure.
• 15% Robotics technology: such as UBTech, Xpeng, Unitree Robotics, etc., high innovation is accompanied by high volatility.
• 15% of “high-quality” companies: providing high-quality ballast during market downturns.
• 10% Bitcoin: Significant asymmetric upside potential.
• 10% S&P 500 Index: Marginally reduces volatility.
• Combined Indicators:
  • Expected CAGR: 12% - 16%
  • Volatility: 25% - 32%

V. Extremely High-Risk Investment Portfolio

• 35% Robotics Technology: Cutting-edge technology with highly dispersed results. Companies mentioned include UBTech, Xpeng Motors, and Unitree Robotics.
• The 30% tech giants: continued dominance in AI, cloud computing, software, and global digital infrastructure.
• 15% Bitcoin: A macro asset with a high beta value and significant historical long-term appreciation.
• 10% TSMC and ASML: Provide structural technology exposure and a very strong moat.
• 10% Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD): High-beta fintech stocks directly relevant to the next generation of investors and traders.
• Combined Indicators:
  • Expected CAGR: 15% - 22%
  • Volatility: 35% - 45%

Regarding risk: The less responsibility you take on, the greater the risk you can tolerate. It's advisable to start investing during periods of extreme market panic (for example, when fear and greed indices are low but asset prices are at historical highs; they will inevitably crash at some point), and begin dollar-cost averaging (DCA) investing at that time. Alternatively, you can choose to invest all your money when everyone is saying Bitcoin is a failed experiment. There are many options. You need to invest to outpace inflation.

Simulation results suggest that if the process proceeds according to the "attention acquisition → community building → successful monetization" model, it could take up to two years. Upon success, it should generate at least $2,500 in "investable income" per month (not used for daily living expenses). Based on the CAGR of the aforementioned investment portfolios, the expected returns after 5, 10, and 15 years will be substantial.

9. Financial freedom

When an individual's investable capital reaches approximately $1.5 million to $4 million, financial freedom becomes within reach. At an annualized return of 3%, this translates to approximately $45,000 to $120,000 in passive income annually (equivalent to $3,750 to $10,000 per month). Adding in personal brand and long-term product revenue, this means a total monthly cash flow of $10,000 to $30,000, with virtually no pressure, no employees, and no complex operations. Moreover, this model is entirely online and can operate from anywhere.