Making money with 0 followers
1 Marketing Lesson
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What’s good young and eager mind :)
Been AWOL for a minute cuz I’m creating something new but more on that later this week. Super excited and can’t wait to share!
Anywho, let’s get right into it.
In order to understand how you monetize an audience if you don’t have an audience yet, let’s first discuss some of the labels people use and why solopreneurship is different:
One person business
Solopreneur
Indie-hacker
Creator
Influencer
Digital Nomad
I’m sure I missed a bunch.
Some of these are specific to one’s audience.
E.g. if you’re trying to sell the ‘make money on the beach with your laptop’ lifestyle to a bunch of early twenty-year-olds, the Digital Nomad label is useful. (Even though, I, and many of my friends, are technically in that segment aside from age.)
Indie-Hacker is a term that specifically refers to people doing the startup thing but at a much smaller scale. Instead of raising VC, these guys bootstrap and try to be profitable as a 1 person company. They’re typically software engineers although no-code has been increasing in popularity for the last 2 years or so.
You get the gist.
I wanna talk about these 3; Solopreneur, Creator, and Influencer.
Creator
This is short for content creator. YouTubers tend to call themselves creators. These guys make content (usually YouTube vids) and build their subscriber count.
Influencer
This is very similar to the creator but influencers tend to use social media platforms more. Usually, it’s Instagram or Tiktok.
Solopreneur
A person who builds an audience and sells to them over the internet. Usually information products.
Alright, let me quickly pre-empt the fair critique that the boundaries here are really fuzzy. But hey, we’re not doing math :)
But the whole reason behind today’s email is to highlight how solopreneurship is different.
Creators or influencers tend to use the platform itself to monetize their audience. E.g. Creators tend to make a living from YouTube ads. At least until they get big enough. But that’s their mindset. How can I make a living from AdSense?
It’s very similar with Influencers (which is why they’re complaining about TikTok only paying $5 per million views) although they tend to have brand deals as the first thing that comes to mind with respect to monetization.
Now here’s the key distinction.
You and I, the solopreneurs, start with monetization at the forefront of our minds.
Everything we do already takes into account monetization.
If you look at my Research-First loop, you’ll notice research is a MASSIVE component of the process.
The reason being that, once you’ve chosen an audience you seek to serve, understanding how they talk, what they complain about, what they’re currently buying, why they’re currently buying it, how urgent fixing the problem is, and how much they’re spending to fix the problem, helps guide your content and product-making decisions. You know.. the whole “the hell should I even make???” phase.
Now, remember when I said the boundaries are a bit fuzzy between these labels?
Well, that’s cuz many influencers and creators have discovered that solopreneurship is a low-hanging and lucrative way to earn money.
The goodwill they’ve built with their audience is potential energy that can be transmuted into dollaroos.
So when they turn that money machine on, they’re oftentimes able to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few days.
Cue the Techcrunch articles about how influencer X made $578,263 in just 48 hours! Which of course is super misleading.
There are two big takeaways I wanna point out to you:
A huge benefit of the solopreneur approach is that you can start to make money within a month vs. having to wait 5 years until you have a big enough audience that you can monetize.
The creator approach, for us as solopreneurs, should be looked at as pouring gasoline on the fire. Not every creator is a solopreneur, but almost every (successful) solopreneur is a creator. Look at the hundreds of essays I’ve written on Youngling Research (I’ve written so much, Squarespace doesn’t even index all of them, which is a story for another time) and Medium. (I even started on Instagram waaay back in the day.) I got 23K tweets, hundreds of posts and comments in communities where my audience hangs out, and many hours of content in terms of my podcast and being interviewed etc. All of this stuff build goodwill with the people you seek to serve and makes it easier to get discovered by new potential customers.
Where should I create content?
If you’re overwhelmed, don’t be.
Just start to create. Anything is better than nothing.
If you’ve got 0 ideas, start a substack and start writing. Hit me up and I’ll share it in my RJY’s newsletter :)
If you’ve got some idea about who your audience is, look for the problems they have (or what I call cries for help) and do a ridiculously good job of solving their problem.
Then that person might join your email list or even buy from you right away, and your in-depth answer can be polished and turned into a piece of content that you can post in that community.
This is the white belt advice.
If you’re slightly further ahead in the game, I’d focus on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
If you’re comfortable with video, YouTube is probably the best out of all of them because YouTube has great distribution built in. Great videos go viral, full stop. While that’s not true on Twitter for example. A great thread only goes viral if the right people share it.
I’ve heard good things about TikTok but for me, it’s such a negative, incendiary environment that the mental health impact isn’t worth it to me even if it’s good for business but YMMV.
Cool, that’s it.
Chop wood, carry water and we’ll talk tomorrow.
RJY