Micro Education Businesses Are The Future

Audience Building Is The Greatest Skill Of The Decade

Personal brands are the new wave that won’t die out.

It’s not a phase.

The digital world is expanding faster than the physical, and personal brands are the avatars that occupy the space.

Everyone has a personal brand. Everyone is in the creator economy. But few realize that their contributions (posts and products) aren’t contributions at all.

Consumers are too busy posting about their lives to impress friends who aren’t really friends.

Creators are learning, building, and distilling valuable information that makes life better for everyone.

“It’s insane how much the marketing world has changed in a few short years, a personal brand is becoming less and less optional.”

Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the need for other types of distribution:

Manual – like cold email, cold calls, or cold direct message campaigns.

Bought – like purchasing Facebook or Google ads.

Borrowed – like paying for podcast, YouTube, or newsletter sponsorships.

Owned – like building an audience, newsletter, community, or list of product buyers.

The lines are blurred between them all, and I missed a few things like SEO, but they all have their use cases.

The first 3 are incredible for testing, beginner business owners, and having some form of control over your outcomes.

Owned distribution is a long-term game that scares most people away.

Let’s imagine I spent 2 years building a 100,000-person audience.

If I promoted my product every day for a month (in a smart way) I would get at least a million impressions.

How long would it take me to direct message a million people? A long time.

How much money would it cost for me to reach that many people with ads? Around $7,000 a month (based on $7 as an average CPM).

Not to mention, owned distribution compounds.

You can get to 10-20k followers in a year, 50-100k in two years, and millions after 4-5 years. That is, if you know how to iterate on your best content… or even write content in the first place.

It only makes sense to systemize your audience growth with time and leverage other distribution methods to make your desired revenue.

Once you see the power of personality, owned distribution, and flexibility of a personal brand – there’s no going back.

Audience Building Is A Stack Of High-Value Skills

To become a good audience builder, you can’t just study “audience building.”

This is the case for most skills that get abnormal results.

It’s not as simple as looking up a video on “the best skills to learn in 2023,” because that’s what everyone else is doing. It’s a great way to commoditize yourself and be replaceable.

Audience building is a stack of today’s most profitable skills:

Graphic design

Content writing

Copywriting

Marketing & sales

Human nature

Psychology

Self-awareness

Networking

And it demands multidisciplinary study and expertise.

Audience building is a lifestyle.

It is the act of capturing, curating, connecting, creating, and distributing valuable information, resources, and products in a way that impacts positive behaviour change.

If you don’t pursue a better life for yourself, you will fail.

A better life demands the habits of learning, building, and distributing.

Rapid Fire Tips To Start Learning, Building & Distributing

Here is exactly what you must do (without the fluff).

These must become habit.

That means a part of your everyday life.

If you can spend 8 hours building someone else’s dreams, you can spend 1 hour building your own.

If you don’t have 1 hour a day to invest in having 2 hours a day, and so on, you need to get your priorities straight.

Learning with intention:

Learn the principles of marketing, sales, writing, and social media. Binge-watch 30-50 hours of free content and paid courses. Build your personal brand along the way so you actually apply what you learn.

Study what interests you. Do not limit yourself. If you have the goal of building a better life for yourself, anything you learn will be from that lens. You are still “focusing on one thing.”

When you feel the excitement, or dopamine, that comes from discovering a novel idea, write it down. Refine that idea and post it to your profile.

Build for yourself:

Pursue your goals and document the process. By document, I mean to keep running notes, logs, successes, and failures somewhere safe, physical or digital.

From your journey, you gain a knowledge of 100. From that, you can create a path of 1. This is how you pass down a unique system that markets itself and gets better results than those looking to make a quick buck.

Along the way, post the advice, lessons, and authentic successes and failures you’ve experienced. This is called “building in public.” Don’t do it for others. Do it as a digital journal. It will pay off.

Distribute a purposeful product:

Most people don’t realize that products are authority catalysts. They think they are “selling out” by selling a product, but don’t realize that it adds perceived authority to their brand, and they gain more loyal followers.

Create a product that you need, or needed, in your life. Something that would have helped you achieve where you are now, or something that will help you achieve something faster. This can be clothes for style, courses for knowledge, journal for productivity, or anything in between.

Sell to yourself and you won’t have to worry about competition.

Customer Creation Through Education

I don’t agree with 99% of business gurus out there.

Most of the hyper-successful ones are old and out of touch. Most of the young ones never question what the old ones say and forge a new path.

It is common advice to “build a product for a starving market, then attract that market as your audience.”

Yes, obviously this works.

But it also comes with the downsides of:

Hating your customer base and not feeling motivated to work.

Not having autonomy over what you write and build.

Not being able to pivot into whatever topic or interest you are curious about.

Being forced into a specific identity, which spills over into the entirety of your life.

When you prioritize education in your brand through courses, content, cohorts, and coaching (all optional), you unlock the ability to create your own customers.

Humans Are Learning Machines

Why does a starving market desire what they desire?

Why are they willing to pull out their card and pay for something they perceive as valuable?

Why are you told to “niche down” so you can get specific on the problem you leverage in your marketing?

Because of social conditioning, learning, and education.

You target a specific person because they are educated to have that identity.

Their identity influences what they desire (because of who they surround themselves with and what they see as opportunity).

When you create identities through education, by leading people towards your vision through your narrative, people grow to desire the product that will help them reach that goal.

If you enjoyed this letter, it is part of a two-part series which I’ll continue in tomorrow’s letter!