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I wanted to become a creator because I wanted to do what I want.
Plain and simple.
That explains why 30% of children and 54% of adults in the US said they wanted to become a creator / YouTuber as a career in Harris Poll and Morning Consult surveys.
Most people would tell them to “get a real job” or to “be realistic” but I think the opposite.
We all have an innate drive to do something that fulfils us.
Something that we want to do.
Something we can progress at (and not get trapped in the same mechanical tasks day after day).
Something we can become skillful at to the point of having more control over our main resources: time, money, and choice.
There are a few problems that spring up here:
Everyone wants to be a creator, nobody wants to accept that it’s a business, and because of that, you have to learn every single skill necessary to run a business.
People think it’s as easy as just posting “authentic” content without putting any thought into persuasion, marketing, or sales. People hide behind the term “authenticity” – which many don’t seem to understand – so they don’t have to improve their communication in writing, videos, designs, etc.
When they finally figure out that social growth is relatively simple if you don’t rely on the algorithm, they don’t know how to monetize the audience they’ve built.
The result?
100% of people start.
1% of those people continue because their audience is growing.
1% of that 1% actually becomes in full control of how much they make.
Most people quit because they lack the ability to solve their own problems. If they aren’t growing, they blame “reach” and “the algorithm” rather than their content quality and ability to get their content shared by manual effort.
Then, when they grow, they complain that their niches “aren’t profitable” rather than testing marketing angles until they are profitable.
(Nobody wants to “unlock their potential” bro. Target an actual problem in someone’s life.)
None of those are true, you just aren’t an entrepreneur yet. You can’t call yourself out on your own excuses, learn the skill that solve the problem, and continue that process until you are as successful as you want to be.
Let’s dig into this.
We’ve already discussed how to grow multiple times in the past, so we’re going to focus on the mistakes people make to monetize.
There are 3 stages of creator monetization.
What most people don’t know is that they can jump to stage three.
In an upcoming letter, I’ll detail exactly what skills I would learn first, what I would build, and the exact steps I would take to skip the pain 99% of beginner creators go through.
Stage 1) The Content Creator That Took The Name Too Seriously
I don’t know what people are teaching nowadays (I just don’t pay attention) but supposedly there are a large amount of creators who think only building an audience is the key to their success.
So, they do whatever it takes to build an audience. They follow the trends, cater to the algorithm, and before they know it, they have a massive audience without any monetization knowledge.
The result is that they remain dumb to their potential as a creator.
The novice monetizes with:
Sponsorships
Affiliate offers
Platform revenue
Unless you have a huge, dedicated following, then these are almost always a bust. Forget about making anything worthwhile as an account with under 100K followers.
My question for people in this stage:
You do understand that you can just create your own version of the sponsorship or affiliate offer and take 100% of the profits?
And if you can’t, you can create a profitable product based around the sponsorship and affiliate offer and move that to the backend to make even more money?
Stage 2) Building Yourself Into A Second 9-5 Without Realizing It
A lot of people skip the first stage (thank goodness) because they come across someone teaching a service-based model, such as freelancing, coaching, or agency work.
These are the common promises they hear:
You can replace your income with 2-3 clients paying you $2000+ a month.
You can monetize your skill set without a large following.
All you have to do is learn a skill, do free work to build a portfolio, and start reaching out to prospects.
These are all true but beginners are often let down with the reality of this business model.
You don’t realize how much outreach is required, so you send 20 cold DMs and call it a day. Even if you send more, 90% of them are ignored, 5% of them respond telling you to get a life, 4% are tire kickers, and 1% buy from you just to be disappointed in your work and ask for a refund (and refunding your first few thousand dollars isn’t fun).
Of course, this is the worst-case scenario for the majority who start from scratch, and you get better at this process as you practice, but I understand why one who goes through this process might think online business is a scam and why you’d rather go back to the last job you hated. As with most things beginner related: skill issue.
I’ve realized that most people who read my content are not ready for the kind of commitment required to run a service business.
If your only goal is to make money by any means possible, you will lose. You will spam customer acquisition strategies, land a few clients, fail to get results, and hurt the initial reputation you were trying to build if you do this on social media.
Your mind is so narrowed by stress that you selectively listen to what people are saying online. They give you everything you need, but you only listen and implement the parts that are fast and easy, so of course you fail.
Most people start freelancing or coaching because they’re passionate about a certain skill, but the passion for that skill fades fast when they realize they weren’t passionate about the skill alone, but the ability to build what they want with that skill.
Client work leaves you devoid of meaning because you are still assigned projects to work on. You don’t get to choose, create, and iterate on projects you assign yourself. Your mind is still locked into another person’s dreams, not your own.
Keep in mind that I am talking about creators with the goal of staying as one person and having full control over their time. Agency work is fine, but that will have to take close to 100% of your focus until it runs like a well oiled machine, which most people don’t have the management or automation skills to do.
Becoming a freelancer or coach is a great option, but it has a few similarities as the job you just left.
First, monetizing with a service business is an incredible way to learn the skills necessary to make more money (marketing, sales, audience building, offer creation, fulfilment, operations, content writing, funnels, etc). Like how a job teaches you the real world application of the skill you learned in college, that’s a positive.
Second, once you have 4-6+ clients, your income is capped and your time is limited just like your job was.
Even further, you were told to niche down to land clients, so now you:
Have a niche that’s difficult to pivot out of.
Have client work to fulfil that takes up half your day.
Have outreach to do if you want to survive (because clients can leave at any time leaving you down thousands of dollars a month, very volatile).
Have to try to gather the mental clarity to come up with content ideas so you have an audience you can leverage when it’s time to get out of client work, but this is a last priority in your mind when it should be first.
Your only option is to increase your prices, start hiring people, or nearly start from scratch and productize. I’d rather you not go through that pain, because you don’t have to in the state of today’s digital environment. We don’t live in the 2016 clickfunnels era anymore where the only people on social media were massive influencers. Smaller creators have a chance because the industry has evolved.
Stage 3) Taking Full Control Of Your Income
Most people start with stage 2 – client work – because that’s the dominant online business paradigm at the moment.
As mentioned, there’s nothing inherently wrong with client work. It’s a great fit for some people. It’s not as great a fit for beginners as most make it believe. But for those who have similar goals to myself – full control over how much I work, how much I make, and exactly what I work on – there’s a different way.
Communities
Courses
Cohorts
eBooks
Other digital products that can sell while you sleep
Many people are turned off by these things.
For some reason, they see client work as more feasible. “Most people do it, so I should too.” They’ve been learning and working for someone else their entire life so it’s difficult for their mind to comprehend how they can earn more by doing less work for others.
Why do I believe monetizing this way is better than most?
1) Most people would rather learn things than have it done for them. High level entrepreneurs buy information all the time for themselves and their team.
Anyone who is looking to have work done would probably benefit more from learning the skill themselves and then hiring someone if they want to.
2) 99% of the people I’ve taught and worked to don’t want to work with ultra rich people. They want to do what they enjoy with people they enjoy.
In that case, you’re better off not wasting your time trying to charge high-ticket to people who can’t afford it.
Working with rich people is incredible advice. It works very well. But I don’t care to work with them. I want to work with interesting creatives who know they are meant for more.
3) Most people want to sell digital products as an end goal, but start with client work first.
It makes sense… start with client work > build an audience > productize your service and start to transition out of client work.
People don’t realize that with enough skill, you can monetize with digital products from the very start.
Just build a cohort, charge higher prices, get results, iterate to get better results, turn it into a standalone product if you want, repeat the process, and turn those products into bonuses of a community a few years down the road when you have a full value ladder built out.
I’ll talk about this in another newsletter. Hope you enjoyed this one.