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- The only way to succeed as an online creator (Why you need your own offer and how to build one)
The only way to succeed as an online creator (Why you need your own offer and how to build one)
The only way to succeed as an online creator (Why you need your own offer and how to build one)
Every day the creator economy gets bigger, and there are lots of new creators who want to make a living out of it. But, whether they are fitness influencers, coaches, or artists selling courses on how to do what they do, most of them fail due to not having a reliable source of income.
The main problem is how they try to make money. There are affiliate products, sponsorships, or in the worst-case scenario hoping to earn enough money through the monetization each platform provides.
Each of these has one thing in common, if you want to make enough money you need a huge audience, but unless you get very lucky that won’t happen for at the very least a few years.
This is unsustainable for most creators, it requires a lot of time and since you won’t see any results for a long time you’ll probably end up quitting.
But now imagine instead of making 5% of every sale you make with an affiliate link, you make 100% of it. Now it is different, now you have a great reason not to quit, now you don’t need a huge audience, and now you can actually make a living out of it.
How to make 100% of every sale you make
As a content creator, you can either sell something for someone else or sell your own thing. And if one of those options just gives you a percentage of the total revenue from the sale, I think we can agree it is better to have your own offer in place.
There are lots of things that you can sell and here is where lots of creators make the mistake of starting to sell a physical product.
It is not that physical products are bad or that you can’t make them work, but the entry barrier is much higher with these since you need to handle things like manufacturing, storage, and shipping.
So, you have two options to begin with. Either an info product or a service-based business. Both have the advantage of having no upfront costs (Or in some cases very small ones) and ideally, your offer will consist of both of these until you are able to live off just info products.
Ideally, a service-based business will just be a stepping stone in the whole process of becoming a creator.
But before we get into that let me explain what both these options are.
Info product
For those of you who might not be familiar with the term, an info product is a product that delivers information to the buyer. It is a product whose value relies on knowledge, information, or how to do something. This includes things like courses, books, guides, etc. Basically, anything that isn’t a tangible thing or some form of software.
Service based business
A service-based business is basically freelancing, coaching, or consulting. Each of them requires you to be good at something that others might find useful.
Freelancing consists of having a skill that someone else is willing to pay for, for example: copywriting, ghostwriting, video editing, etc.
Consulting is showing someone how to do something, let’s say you are an email marketer and you developed some email system, then you will get paid to show someone how to implement that system for themselves.
Finally, we have coaching which is pretty similar to consulting, but here, instead of just helping them implement something you are going to focus on them reaching a certain goal with that system, let’s take for example a fitness coach, in this case, it will be more goal driven and basically consist of you taking them by the hand to that goal that they want to reach.
Service or info product?
Now, ideally, you will be working towards making a living off a product that you sell that requires no work on your part other than promoting it on social media. Obviously, you’ll have to work to build that product, but the idea is that once you have already built it you will be able to sell it as much as your skill allows you to.
The problem with this is that it only works if you have a decent-sized audience (Or paid ads), which is something that could take a long time to acquire. So, you need something to do meanwhile, which will be your service-based business.
What you need is to find something you are good at and help people with that skill. It can be anything from fitness coaching to designing websites as a freelancer. In this case you will have to build a high ticket offer around your skill and then sell it to people that need it.
How do you sell it?
In the beginning, you’ll have to do a lot of outreach until you find people who are willing to pay you, once your audience starts growing you’ll probably have people reach out to you to help them. You should promote your offer in a lot of your content as well so that you are able to get leads through your content.
Eventually, you’ll have a big enough audience that will allow you to create that digital product that we talked about and you will be able to launch it and start making money with it so that you can slowly stop client work until you completely replace your current income with it.
Once you do that you can then scale it as much as you want and maybe even become a millionaire.