I believe in quick wins.
Quick wins are the fuel that keep you going.
There are some Creator Gurus that like to tell you that you should build slow and take your time.
It’s important to understand WHY they are saying that before we try to make them look bad.
They are saying it because of mindset. It can take a while for people to make money online but not because they don’t know what they are doing.
It’s because it can take a while to find Message-Vision Fit.
So if money is made when you find Message-Vision Fit we can then see it’s not a product of time, but a product of hitting the mark.
Are you with me so far? If we understand this then it makes perfect sense to question why should we take our time trying to make money?
Why can’t we make money in our first week? Hell, why can’t we do it the first day?
And the answer is you can.
But what about trust? People don’t buy from you unless they trust you, right?
The Trust Fallacy
How often do you go to the grocery store and buy something new without researching it? Plenty.
How many people go into Target and buy $500 worth of stuff that they never even heard of before? Plenty.
People buy without trust all of the time. At least in how we think about trust.
The truth is that your audience is filled with many people on different parts of the customer journey. Some are at the beginning and those are the people we often think about when we say you need to develop trust.
But there are some at the end of the journey who are well aware of their problem and they are sick of it.
They want it gone.
They’ve tried other solutions and they all failed.
They are desperate.
They see you have the solution and guess what? They buy from you the same day they come across you.
It didn’t take you days, weeks, or months to get them to trust you.
You hit them with the right stuff and they went for it.
Why Word-of-Mouth Works
And what about word-of-mouth? Why is it so effective?
It’s because the trust someone else has can be transferred to you.
When you tell someone how amazing Scrivs is at Odd Noodle, they’ll take your word for it and come over here to sign up.
I didn’t need to gain their trust.
I have yours.
And what happens if you have a massive network? What if you have a giant email list and you’re the only person I talk to?
I build your trust and then you tell your audience of 100,000 people how amazing I am.
I took a shortcut to trust.
So it’s okay to ask why trust is needed or why we need to wait a LONG time to make money.
But if we look at the strategy of most creators using social media, we can understand why they have no choice BUT to wait forever before they can make money.
The Failed Social Media Strategy of Creators
We will use Twitter as an example, but this can apply to any social media network.
We need to give the person we’re going to talk about a name. Let’s go with Gigo. That sounds fund.
Gigo has decided that he wants to build a life of freedom by being a Creator. It doesn’t matter what he does, just know he’s a Creator.
So he creates a Twitter account and sets up a newsletter because he doesn’t want to wait before getting subscribers (smart man).
And what happens next?
He starts to post on Twitter, but he wants to spread his posts out so he only posts 3x a day while replying to 10 other Tweets.
At the end of the first day, nothing has happened. Nobody has followed him and nobody has subscribed to his newsletter.
He sticks with this posting strategy for a couple of weeks and he’s slowly building up his account and getting some subscribers.
This is why people tell you that you need to go slow and take your time.
It’s because for most people things are slow and again, the advice is meant to keep you in the game.
But there is a problem with Gigo’s strategy.
- His posts don’t hit the mark
- His replies don’t stand out
- His bio isn’t interesting
- People have to wait a week to get deeper information from him on his newsletter
This is the strategy that most Creators go with.
It’s not terrible, but it’s not great either.
So how can we improve it?
How to Make Your First $1,000 as Quickly as Possible as an Online Creator
Let’s assume you know the audience you want to target. That’s important.
Let’s also assume you know the outcome they want and the main problems they face in getting that outcome. That’s important.
Let’s also assume you have a solution for those problems. That’s important.
When you have those things you can make money.
Let’s return to Gigo and see how he can improve his strategy.
Step 1: Find the Contrarian Solution
It’s tough to stand out online.
There are so many people trying to play this game that getting the attention of anyone is a very difficult task.
The worst thing you can do is sound like everyone else.
So what do you do?
Find what everyone is saying and then find the contrarian view.
This post itself is a great example of that.
I’m saying you don’t need to wait 6 months before you try to monetize. I think you should try on day 1 if that’s possible.
So I have my contrarian view. But I also need a contrarian solution or else this is pointless because when I tell people they can make money on Day 1 and they ask how I better have an answer.
Talking out of your ass isn’t a great way to make money.
What’s the solution?
Step 2: Build a Path
Here is where we get to enforce the trust.
I know I said you don’t need it before, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get it.
When someone has a problem that they need to be solved because it’s preventing them from getting the outcome they want then they don’t take breaks from finding a solution.
So when I go on Twitter and I talk to people about how they can make money quicker if they have the right content strategy then what are they supposed to do next?
Go through all of my tweets to try and figure out what I’m talking about?
Remember, those that are desperate want to make moves now.
So if someone asks can I explain further what I mean by the right content strategy I should have a guide/post up on my site that shows them exactly what I mean.
Notice I didn’t say an offer that I send them.
This is about trust.
So they go and read the guide. It explains their problems and shows them the things that I did to overcome those problems. There are also links to other resources on my site that they go through. After an hour there is a lot of trust in me because I’m helping them and I’m speaking their language.
Amazing!
They understand the concept but they want to get a more thorough understanding of how to implement it.
Well, guess what?
I just happen to have an offer that does that.
In a perfect world, they’d go and buy, but if not that’s okay as well. At least they know it exists.
(Note: This is the “complicated” part of this process and I’ve simplified it a bit for this example, but you can do some really wild things with path creation.)
Step 3: Get Their Attention
Okay, so now that I have the backend of the process all set up, it’s time to go out and get the people.
This is another part a lot of Creators screw up on but that’s because they don’t know any better.
Remember the Customer Journey?
Most social media posts only focus on the people that are at the beginning. They create what is known as Potential content.
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This kind of content is necessary to bring awareness of what’s possible for people. That starts them on the journey.
But there are people who have gone along the journey and are stuck.
These are the people that are most likely to buy so you also need to create content for them.
So I have tweets all scheduled out where I ensure I have content hitting all phases of the Customer Journey.
But I can’t stop there.
I need to go hunt down discussions where I can start to plant the seed into people’s minds that there is another way.
Now, this is something important to keep in mind. Most of the time, when you’re leaving comments it’s not for the person you’re responding to.
It’s for the people reading.
So someone reading my comment may say, “Hm, that’s what I’ve been thinking, but I don’t know how to make it happen.”
They click to go to my profile and see a pinned tweet that covers how to make money quickly as a Creator. That tweet links to a guide on my site that goes deeper.
That guide links to an offer and they purchase it. If they don’t then maybe they sign up for my newsletter and the next one just happens to cover the topic again but from another angle.
Step 4: Step 3 Again and Again and Again
All I have to do now is stick with Step 3.
Continue creating content that addresses the problems and tackles the different parts of the Customer Journey.
And here is where it gets really cool.
Someone that saw a tweet from me last month that addressed the beginning of the Customer Journey now happens to be close to the end and now they see a tweet addressing that.
So they go to the site and dive deeper.
This is how you build customers.
Being Strategic With Your Content
The reason why so many Creators fail to make money with their content is that their content strategy doesn’t address the different stages of the Customer Journey.
You can only get away with telling people that it’s fun to be a Creator before they start asking how do they make it happen.
If they can’t continue to get that information from you, they will go elsewhere.
This is why one creator with 5,000 followers can make $20,000 a month while another creator with 100,000 followers makes $13,000 a month.
Experts like to tell you that you need a big audience to make money because they’ve built a big audience of people in which, they have no clue where they are on the Customer Journey.
And when that’s the case it’s always going to be a numbers game.
Try to get a ton of people to follow you and some are bound to buy something.
But I’ve shown you there is a better approach to all of this.
It’s on you to decide if you wish to implement it.