It’s not as difficult as you may think.  Everyone who hustles online is after one thing: financial freedom.

For most people, it’s hard to come by.

I’ve experimented with different models and have spent the better part of the last decade following all of the different avenues of online business, with mixed results.

This has given me insight into what makes the digital world tick.

If you want a guaranteed roadmap to financial freedom, forget everything you think you know and internalize these three steps.

• Pick the one thing you can do best, such as a preferred skill or area of expertise.
• Fuse this skill or knowledge with your actual self, to create a digital persona.
• Monetize this digital persona.

Can’t spell it out any simpler than that. Anyone who is really killing it online is doing some form of this.

There are thousands of gurus and marketers out there trying to sell you piles and piles of products, techniques, “hacks,” live trainings, and seminars, hoping you don’t realize the truth and copy what they are doing.

Can you make money without following these steps? Sure. I’ve done it.

For example, let’s say you have a great product and you happen to make a sales funnel that slays. Well there you go, you’re making money online.

Add in a little paid advertising and you’ve got yourself a little income stream.

But are you achieving financial freedom? That’s the question.

What I realized is, anyone can throw a website together, create a sales funnel, push people to a product, and make some side money online.

You can even make five or six figures doing this if you’re really about your business.

However, like so many others, you’re probably not where you want to be. It’s because you haven’t followed the three steps.

On a side note, this is one reason why “gimmick businesses” like affiliate marketing and Shopify dropshipping will ultimately never give you true financial freedom unless you get extremely lucky or pair these techniques with the roadmap to financial freedom. Because they lack personal branding and a digital persona.

How many faceless marketers have you seen push products through email marketing and affiliate techniques? I’ve certainly bought my fair share of such products and sold many as well, and can say with relative certainty that no one is actually making substantial money this way, and if they say otherwise, that in and of itself is a part of their “digital persona” and are trying to make you feel or believe something.

Real money is made when you push actual value and pair it with a cultivated persona.

This “value” can be anything, just so long as you know how to combine it with your own image to create a brand.

I can’t stress enough how useless everything else in the marketing space is. And I mean EVERYTHING.

Chatbots, gimmicky “push button software,” convoluted sales funnels, even a lot of paid ads and free offers, etc. It’s all technique without substance.

People want to connect with a persona, and what to be provided with value. Lock those two items down and you’ve essentially cracked the code to financial freedom online.

Growth Hacking the Digital World

So how do you do it? How do you create the right product or cultivate a persona?

There is certainly more than one way to go about doing this. Some achieve this success and follow the roadmap unconsciously.

Let’s reevaluate the most important step in the roadmap: creating a persona.

Doing this properly is at the center of everything, because it is the lynch-pin of the current online business model.

After studying this for years, and understanding energy and human nature, as well as digital systems, it has become apparent to me that there’s more going on behind the scenes with this than is readily apparent.

You see, it’s not as simple as just making up a personality around a bit of knowledge or a product. This is an asinine idea if you think about it.

No, the secret is in tapping into something that’s already there, a digital self image.

A personality in and of itself is merely the collection of various perceptions, typically enhanced by innate traits. These can be skills, talents, abilities, knowledge, and so forth.

Because the digital world works as a replica of the physical with controllable parameters, you can effectively generate a persona out of thin air so long as it begins with a base, or a part of your self-image.

We all actually have multiple digital self-images. Technically speaking, all of them are equally valid, but not all of them are equally useful.

Personas connect with personas. If you aren’t bringing out one or more of your personas, or digital self images, your likelihood of “connecting” with others is slim.

That’s just not how the world works.

These personas are cultivated by setting the parameters and using them to interact and gain feedback. The vehicle is the persona, and the energy the vehicle is powered by is the product, skill, or knowledge.

You equip a persona with the right skill or value-product, a feedback loop is created.

You begin to interact with other digital self images, or personas, thereby creating credibility. This credibility is the currency that assists in being successful online.

This process of creating a feedback loop of value is what I call digital growth hacking. It’s the formula virtually everyone online uses to generate money and attention out of thin air.

Keep this in mind if you seek success: the digital world is just a less restrictive version of the physical world, and according to the laws of quantum physics, anything is physically possible.

It’s all about creating the necessary persona to generate the right outcome.

Draw Out Your Roadmap

The secret to crafting the outcome you want is to sit down with yourself and analyze what skills or knowledge you have that are worth making a persona around. Or to be more specific, to draw out a persona based on these select talents and traits.

If you don’t have a skill or any knowledge, making money online is the least of your problems.

Most people who are successful online are in that position because they are providing value.

But this goes for all aspects of your life. You have to bring something to the table. Gaining or making value should be your top priority going forward.

So forget the gimmicks, forget the “sales tactics,” the masterclasses, the webinars, and all that other nonsense.

Work on your Self.

Once you do that, you’ll find the part of your that resonates most deeply with your newfound skills and knowledge, and that will be your persona. From there, you can use this digital self image to communicate and travel around the “digital world.” The more value this persona provides, the stronger this image becomes in its ability to move around, make connections, affect change.

It all starts with harsh self-criticism and analysis. What are you good at? What would you like to learn? What habits will you have to give up to make time to learn it?

This is Deep Work, the kind of transformative process that you can’t go back from and must inevitably face if you’re ever going to move past who you are right now.

It’s necessary however, in order to get where you want to be. Financial freedom comes when you have successfully merged value with a persona. Money comes naturally after that.

Just remember to keep in mind what you are dealing with when it comes to the “digital world.”

You’re looking at an interface for communication through a persona. Nothing more.

Once you break it down like that, your mission and path to financial freedom becomes crystal clear.

Cut out all the excess BS and drill down to what matters.

No gimmicks. No corny sales pages. No thousands of dollars of ads.

Just follow the roadmap.