There’s a particular flavour of condescension reserved for older people who want to make money online. You’ve probably tasted it already, that sugary, patronising tone that treats sixty-somethings like they’ve just discovered fire because they’ve worked out how to post on Facebook.
“Look at Margaret, 73, who’s made £50 on Etsy!”
As though Margaret hasn’t been running complex projects, managing budgets, and navigating office politics since before the internet existed.
Let me be clear from the start: this isn’t one of those articles. I’m not here to marvel at your ability to use a computer or pat you on the head for being “tech-savvy for your age.” That’s bollocks, and we both know it.
What I am here to do is lay out why—if you’re in your fifties, sixties, or beyond, and you’re thinking about creating an income online—you might actually have the most unfair advantage of anyone in the digital space right now.
And why most of the advice you’ve been given is spectacularly useless.
The Lie We’ve All Been Sold
The internet would have you believe that online success belongs to the young. Twenty-three-year-olds with ring lights and perfect skin, spouting advice about “hustling” and “disrupting” industries they’ve barely dipped a toe into.
And look, some of them are doing brilliantly. Good for them.
But here’s what nobody’s saying: most of them have nothing to teach. Not really. They’ve got energy and optimism and a willingness to spam their mates, but they lack the one thing you cannot fake and cannot rush.
Depth.
You know what depth looks like. You’ve lived it. You’ve spent decades actually doing the thing that all these courses and coaches claim to teach. You’ve made real decisions with real consequences. You’ve failed properly, not “oops, my Instagram post didn’t get likes” failed, but “I have to tell twelve people they no longer have jobs” failed.
You’ve built things. Raised things. Survived things.
And yet, when you look at the online world, it feels like there’s no space for you. Like you’ve missed the boat. Like everyone speaking a language you arrived too late to learn.
I’m telling you now: that’s backwards.
What You Actually Have (That Nobody’s Telling You About)
Let’s talk about what you bring to the table that the twenty-three-year-old with the ring light absolutely doesn’t have.
You’ve stopped performing.
Younger creators are exhausting themselves trying to maintain a personal brand. They’re worried about being cancelled, about saying the wrong thing, about their content “aligning with their values” whilst simultaneously trying to game an algorithm.
You? You’ve already done your performing. You’ve already proved yourself in rooms that actually mattered. You don’t need validation from strangers on the internet because you’ve had real validation in the real world.
This makes you dangerous. In the best possible way.
You can spot bullshit instantly.
You’ve sat through decades of corporate meetings, sales pitches, and people trying to pull the wool over your eyes. You know what substance looks like. You know the difference between someone who’s done the work and someone who’s just read about doing the work.
This means when you create something, a course, a guide, a service, it’s not going to be hollow. It’s going to have weight.
You understand nuance.
The internet loves binary thinking. Things are either amazing or terrible. This strategy either works or it doesn’t. You’re either crushing it or you’re failing.
But you know that’s not how anything actually works. You know that the right answer is usually “it depends.” You know that most problems are solved with experience and judgment, not a five-step framework.
This makes your advice infinitely more valuable if you can find the people who are ready to hear it.
You have actual expertise.
Not “I read fifteen books and now I’m an expert” expertise. Real expertise. The kind that comes from doing something for twenty, thirty, or forty years. From seeing patterns. From knowing what works in practice, not just in theory.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you: that expertise is criminally undermonetised online. Everyone’s so busy chasing the new and shiny that they’ve forgotten there’s gold in the old and tested.
Why the Usual Advice Doesn’t Work
Most advice about making money online falls into one of two camps:
Camp One: “Just start a TikTok!”
No. Absolutely not. Unless you actively want to, and even then, be very careful.
TikTok is designed for a specific type of content, created by a specific type of person, for a specific type of audience. If that’s not you, forcing it will make you miserable and produce content that feels like watching your dad dance at a wedding.
Could you learn it? Of course, you could. You’ve learned far harder things. But should you? That’s a different question entirely.
Camp Two: “Build a passive income empire!”
This one’s sneakier because it sounds sensible. Who doesn’t want passive income?
But the reality is that passive income takes enormous active work upfront. It requires technical knowledge, marketing savvy, and usually a fair bit of capital. And most importantly, it requires you to be selling something that people actually want to buy, which brings us right back to expertise and positioning.
The advice isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete. It skips over the hard middle bit where you have to work out what you’re actually offering and who actually wants it.
What Might Actually Work
So if the usual advice is either patronising or incomplete, what does work?
Start with what you already know.
I know this sounds obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many people try to pivot into something completely new because they think that’s what “online business” means.
If you spent thirty years in project management, you know project management. If you ran a team, you know team management. If you worked in finance, hospitality, education, healthcare, whatever it was, you know that thing deeply.
That knowledge has value. The question isn’t whether it’s valuable. The question is: who needs it right now, and how can you package it in a way they can actually use?
Think smaller and more specific.
The internet rewards specificity. Not “business coach for everyone” but “helping former corporate managers transition to consulting.” Not “general life advice” but “navigating retirement when you’re not ready to stop working.”
The narrower you go, the easier it is to find your people and the easier it is to create something genuinely useful.
Choose the medium that doesn’t make you want to die.
If the thought of being on camera makes you feel ill, don’t start a YouTube channel. If writing feels like pulling teeth, don’t start a blog.
You could do email newsletters. You could do consulting calls. You could create written guides or templates. You could run small workshops. You could offer one-to-one mentoring.
There are hundreds of ways to share what you know. Pick the one that feels sustainable, not the one that some twenty-eight-year-old guru insists is “the only way.”
Accept that you’ll need to learn some new skills, but not all of them.
Yes, you’ll need to understand the basics of how the internet works. You’ll need to know how to set up a simple website, how to take payment, and how to communicate with people online.
But you don’t need to become a tech wizard. You don’t need to master every platform. You don’t need to learn graphic design and copywriting and SEO and email marketing, and Facebook ads all at once.
You need to learn enough to get started. Then you learn the next thing. Then the next thing.
You’ve built complex skills before. You know how this works.
The Real Barriers (And Why They’re Not What You Think)
Let’s be honest about what actually gets in the way.
It’s not the technology.
Technology is a barrier, but it’s not the main one. You’ve learned harder things than how to use Substack or set up a Stripe account. Yes, it’s annoying. Yes, it feels like it should be easier. But you can figure it out.
It’s not your age.
Your age is actually an advantage, as we’ve established. The problem is that you’ve been told it’s a disadvantage so many times that you’ve started to believe it.
It’s the confidence gap.
This is the real one, isn’t it?
You look at people half your age acting like experts, and you think, “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t position myself that way. I couldn’t charge money for what I know.”
Even though what you know is deeper and more valuable than what they know.
Even though you’ve been paid for your expertise your entire career.
Even though people have been coming to you for advice for decades.
The gap isn’t in your knowledge. It’s in your willingness to own that knowledge publicly and put a price on it.
And I get it. There’s something that feels unseemly about it. Something that feels like showing off. Something that feels vulnerable in a way that’s different from anything you’ve done before.
But here’s the truth: if you don’t value what you know, nobody else will either.
What This Could Actually Look Like
Let me give you some real examples, not the viral success stories, but the quiet, sustainable ones.
The Consultant
Former HR director, sixty-two. Spent her entire career in financial services. Thought she was done when she took redundancy. Realised she knew more about navigating corporate politics than anyone she’d ever met.
Now runs a small consulting practice helping mid-level managers position themselves for promotion. Three clients at a time, £2,000 per month each. Works fifteen hours a week. Has a waiting list.
The Course Creator
Retired teacher, sixty-seven. Spent forty years teaching English literature. Thought about writing a novel but realised what he actually enjoyed was helping people understand why literature matters.
Created a series of email courses on classic novels, the kind adults always meant to read but never did. Charges £47 per course. Sells about twenty per month. Made more last year than his teacher’s pension pays.
The Membership Builder
Former garden designer, fifty-nine. Knees gave out, couldn’t do the physical work anymore. Realised she’d spent thirty years solving the same problems over and over—people wanting beautiful gardens but not knowing where to start.
Built a membership community, £19 per month. Monthly Q&A calls, a library of simple garden plans, and seasonal advice. Two hundred members. Sustainable income, work she can do from anywhere.
None of these people went viral. None of them has millions of followers. None of them is “crushing it” on social media.
They’re just quietly making good money doing something they’re actually qualified to do, for people who actually need it.
The Permission You’re Waiting For
Here it is: you don’t need anyone’s permission to monetise what you know.
You don’t need a certification in “online business.”
You don’t need to master every platform.
You don’t need to be young, or cool, or “on trend.”
You need to be useful. You need to be clear. You need to be consistent.
That’s it.
The question isn’t whether you can do this. The question is whether you want to.
Because if you do, if there’s something you know deeply, something you could teach, something you could offer, then the infrastructure exists right now to make that happen. The tools are there. The audience is there. The need is there.
What’s missing is your willingness to say: “I know this. It’s valuable. And I’m going to help people with it.”
Everything else is just logistics.
Where to Start (Without Losing Your Mind)
If you’re actually going to do this, and I hope you are, here’s how to start without descending into chaos:
One: Pick one thing you know deeply.
Not everything you know. One thing. The thing people have been asking you about for years. The thing you could talk about for hours without notes.
Two: Identify one specific problem you can solve.
Not all the problems are in that area. One problem. The one that keeps coming up. The one people would pay to fix right now.
Three: Choose one way to deliver the solution.
One-to-one calls? A written guide? A six-week course? A monthly membership? Pick one. You can add others later.
Four: Tell ten people about it.
Not ten thousand. Ten. People you know. People in your network. People who might need this or know someone who does.
This isn’t about “going viral.” It’s about starting a conversation.
Five: Help the first person who says yes.
Do it properly. Do it thoroughly. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Get a testimonial. Use that to find the second person.
Then the third.
Then you iterate.
This isn’t sexy. It’s not “scale to six figures in six months.” But it works. And it works in a way that doesn’t require you to become someone you’re not.
The End Bit
Look, nobody’s pretending this is easy. Building something new never is, regardless of your age.
But you’ve done hard things before. You’ve navigated complexity. You’ve started from scratch more times than most younger people can imagine.
The difference now is that you’re doing it with decades of experience behind you. You’re doing it with clarity about what matters. You’re doing it without the desperate need for external validation that makes younger people do stupid things.
You’re doing it because you have something worth offering.
And because, frankly, the world could do with a bit more depth and a bit less noise.
So if you’ve been sitting on an idea, if you’ve been thinking “maybe I could…” but talking yourself out of it, consider this your nudge.
Not because it’s easy.
Not because you’ll definitely succeed.
But because you’ll definitely regret not trying.
And at this point in life, you know exactly what regret feels like.
You don’t need more of it.
Until Next Time
Discover more from Dominus Owen Markham
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.