Steal this and make money
I’m here to tell you something you won’t like.
The standard advice for building a creator business is completely wrong.
Here’s what gets churned out by Mr. Get Rich Quick and his army of gurus peddling you fake courses promising riches.
- Create content
- Build an audience
- Create digital products
- Sell those products for profit
It’s a great plan. In theory.
But here’s what’s wrong:
- Create content – what kind? For who? Where?
- Build an audience – what if that audience doesn’t want to buy anything?
- Create digital products – what if you make the wrong thing?
- Sell them for profit – what if the audience you built doesn’t have their wallets out?
You might as well listen to South Parks Underpants Gnomes for business advice.
You can easily spend a year building an audience only to find that your audience has no interest in buying what you’re selling.
I would know. I’ve made this mistake. Twice.
I built up an audience around guitarists interested in Djent, an obscure metal music subgenre.
My thought process was this: I play guitar. Guitars are expensive. I’ll promote affiliate links to guitars and make money. Easy.
Only it wasn’t until after I built the site and filled it with content that I realized guitarists are broke.
And that subgenre was so small it never would have stood a chance.
I tried to pivot and noticed guitarists did buy guitar strings. But commission on a pack of guitar strings is around $0.50 and finding 2000 new guitarists to sell a pack of strings to wasn’t going to happen.
That’s why I now live by and teach the upside-down audience method.
The upside-down method
We are going to flip the script.
- Solve a problem
- Find someone willing to buy it
- Build an audience around that product
- Make lots of content promoting the product.
Step 1. Don’t pick a niche, pick a problem
Most advice is to pick an audience and start building content for that audience, which is good, but not great, advice.
Instead, pick an audience, and pick a problem that audience has.
Take runners for example. If you are a semi-regular runner, you face tons of problems. What gear should you have? What training plan should you follow? What should you eat? How can you check your technique?
A business is solving a problem, and those are all great problems to solve.
Bonus points if you pick a problem you have already fixed for yourself.
For instance, writers are my audience, and the problem I have chosen is how to make money as a digital writer. I know I can solve this because I have solved it myself already.
I turned my writing into a full business seven years ago. And I’ve since launched and operated five other profitable writing businesses.
Pick a problem you can solve.
On to step 2.
Step 2. Don’t just stand there. Make a waitlist!
OK, you’re solving a problem.
Now you can go one of two ways. You can go straight to trying to sell it. Or you can make a waitlist.
I like the waitlist option to gauge interest and start building an email list. It’s what I did when I came up with the Slow Writers Club.
You can create a landing page on Carrd and funnel people to a newsletter hosted by Kit to validate if there’s any interest.
Here’s the waitlist page I built with Carrd:
This is a double whammy. You collect interested people in a newsletter, so even if they don’t want this product, you can try to sell them your next product.
Step 3. Create Content
You’re ready to start creating content.
You have a problem you are solving, and a product in mind to solve that problem. Now, you can start creating content your ideal customer will read.
Point all that content to your landing page and start collecting your audience.
Aim for 200 visits.
After that, you should have 10-50 people on a waitlist and be ready to pre-sell your product.
Step 4. Start a presale
Congratulations. You are ready to launch a business.
Once you make a sale, you are in businessAnd it’s a case of rinsing and repeating to a larger and larger audience.
But what if no one buys? Well, that happened to me. (I’ve had six failed businesses so pretty much everything has happened to me lol)
My first attempt at the Slow Writers Club was going to be a community. I had 30 people on the waitlist and sent out 5 sales emails across 3 days.
A few clicks. No buys.
I asked a few friends I thought would be interested in joining and got more no thank you’s. But I got feedback.
People didn’t have enough time to contribute to a community, so they didn’t see the value.
Awesome.
I was able to pivot it towards a coaching community instead of a peer community.
And I have people on a waitlist, so I can ask them what they want, what problems they have, and try again.
TLDR
- Come up with a product
- Create a landing page
- Create content
- Pre-sell it
Don’t grow an audience. Grow a business.
🧑💻 I teach you how to turn your writing into a creator business you love. Click here to learn more.
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