There are some cool AF creators out there.
I spend a lot of time sending DMs to interesting creators. What always amazes me is how many of them make stupid amounts of money online.
Yet…
- No website
- Small audience
- Mediocre intelligence
- Many are from poor countries
I spoke to one guy today. Get this: he gets paid $250 USD per article to recycle his old blog posts and publish them in someone else’s newsletter.
Oh, and they link to his newsletter in every addition. Crazy, right?
Here’s the formula many of these $10K a month creators use. Copy.
Make love to a birdy
I like birds. The only bird I make love to daily, though, is Twitter.
I love her so much. She’s damn fine and likes to flirt with a maximum of 280 characters. Damn girl!
Okay Twitter … shut up and take my money.
Tweets are thoughts.
Content shouldn’t start with an idea that takes 2 hours to flesh out and write or record. Twitter allows you to make tiny bets.
The data then tells you what tweets should become long-form, and what tweets should burn in hell. Sweet as bro (as they say in New Zealand).
Content is the pillar of making money online.
Tweets are flirting with data before you go home and get laid for two hours, creating a piece of content.
Get excited with big balls of thread
Once you have a series of tweets, it’s time to spread them out.
You can go straight to writing an article or making a 10-minute Youtube video, although I like to take it slow and get to know a piece of content. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast (as they say).
Tweet threads are blog posts.
The difference is each blog post gets made up of tweets. One tweet is an idea — and each tweet can only be 280 characters.
So you’re forced to take long-ass stories and make them short.
Almost everyone needs this lesson…
Get to the damn point. Stop waffling.
With tweet threads, there’s no time to be Abe Simpson and crap on with your war stories from Vietnam. You gotta get with the program.
Many people don’t know that tweet threads on Twitter get an artificial boost.
Threads are seen as high value so those little birdy employees push the magic green button: BOOST.
The magic is in the last tweet in the thread.
You can promote whatever the heck you want. I recommend not pulling your pants down and asking for a massage. Instead, take it slow.
Make the last tweet a link to a newsletter. Just don’t call it a newsletter, because they’re snoozefests. Who wants another newsletter?
Not. Freaking. Me.
A newsletter builds an email list that stores money for your future self.
The strategy I stole off a $1.7M bald man
Justin Welsh is a badass. He’s my god.
I kneel for him when he walks through the virtual door on LinkedIn and spreads his gospel.
One of the challenges of creating a newsletter is making it good.
Most newsletters suck worse than my loud-ass neighbor who can’t keep his pants on when he walks past the window.
Justin taught me to use google alerts. All you do is a weekly roundup of curated stuff you love that readers will wet their pants for.
Set up a google alert for people, topics, or keywords of interest. Go through the alerts. Curate your favorite ones. Make them part of your weekly newsletter.
There’s one more step…
Choose a newsletter style. The layout of your newsletter is key.
Tim Ferriss does 5-Bullet Friday. James Clear does 3–2–1. You do you. But change up the style. Many newsletters use boring, repetitive formulas.
Change the language, change the description, change the category, change the result.
Nicolas Cole taught me this: make up a category.
For example I don’t teach writers. Writers are boring. They think an eventual book deal with a publisher will make their unicorn fantasies come true.
Nope. I write for online writers.
We’re data-backed. We worship white space on a piece of writing, not blocks of huge text uglier than my pubic hair after it’s not shaved for 3 months.
I’m about to bin my newsletter and start again. The current template I use is bad, so the unsubscribes are high over a 12 month period.
Boring equals unsubscribes.
High unsubscribes mean you’re lazy — or you suck and need to improve.
$0, minimal work, high loyalty
When someone joins an email list they need an incentive.
The biggest incentive is to solve one of their problems. Most of us would normally solve our audience’s problems with an eBook or checklist.
This gal Liz taught me a better way: free email courses.
An email course is up to 5 emails that help a person solve a problem. They work better because you can see if your solution is good.
If you have an email course and the audience never gets past the first email in the series then you have a data point — your solution is crap.
That’s cool. Chill. You can iterate.
Also, an email course requires more engagement. An eBook is a one-night stand. An email course is a multi-day series of dates where you get to look into each other’s eyes and decide if you wanna make babies.
The time required to build an email course is only a few hours, it costs you $0, there’s no fancy-ass graphics, and the loyalty of anyone who completes it is much higher.
Create an email course to build deep relationships.
Let’s get to the juicy one I’d never heard of
So far everything we’ve spoken about makes $0. Win. Nice.
It takes a lot of $0 stuff to make $10K a month. Read that again.
Nathan Barry started a company called ConvertKit. The guy doesn’t reply to my fanboy messages but that’s cool.
The guy’s dream was to build an online course and sell it. The problem is that he had zero time to create and maintain one because of his startup.
He invented a new category: paid email courses.
Here are the steps…
- Create an evergreen email sequence with your favorite software.
- Write four emails in advance.
- Market the email sequence as a product people can buy via social media platforms, blog CTAs, podcasts, etc. Send the customer to the sequence when they pay.
- Once a week write a new email. Add it to the sequence. Everyone that’s already at the end of your sequence gets the new email when you publish it. Fresh subscribers get the original timing.
What’s unique about this approach is that the emails are evergreen so it doesn’t matter when a subscriber gets them.
All you do is publish timeless information in your emails and never mention current events, so it’s impossible to know when it was written.
Rather than charge a subscription fee Nathan recommends charging once for it (he sold his for $100). The benefit is there’s no obligation to write every week or continue adding to the email sequence.
Subscriptions equal ball-and-chain. You become a slave.
The final step to $10K a month
The paid email sequence is cool. But it won’t make you $120K a year.
You’re going to want to add other income streams.
There are a million ways to make money online: video courses, cohort courses, accountability groups, paid communities, coaching, eBooks, paid speaking gigs, consulting, eCommerce, merchandise, affiliate links, etc.
Now that you’ve got a content machine churning away and bringing in new subscribers, you just have to be courageous enough to accept money for what you do.
As you sell stuff you’ll learn what makes sense for you and what doesn’t.
Expert, James Camps, compiled data that says an email subscriber is worth a minimum of $1 per user per month with monetization turned on. His email list generates him $22, but the guy is conservative.
Gotta love that.
So at $1 per subscriber per month you need 10,000 to make $120K a year.
I know plenty of people who got to 10,000 emails subscribers much faster, but let’s assume we’re not all geniuses.
That’s the formula. $0 content that leads to a paid email sequence and at least one other income source.
$120K doesn’t buy a Lambo.
But it does buy your time back. Try it.
If nothing else, forget everything I said and launch a paid email sequence.
