🚀💡 $80k per month Creator in 2 Years - IdeaEconomy💡 🚀

"Adam Enfroy taught himself SEO and used his expertise to scale his business software review site. In just over a year he was making $80k/month."

Big Ideas:
► Another example of the opportunity with niche websites. Niche websites sell for up to 50X monthly revenue now, making this a $4 million business.
► The most successful creators as increasingly acting like startups. They invest and scale content creation, rather than just experiment part-time. 

I've recently passed 2000 subscribers on this IdeaEconomy newsletter with a 50% open rate.

Here is exactly how I got those subscribers and what I would do differently if I were starting today.

"Your online network determines your level of success on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and largely in your business.

The bigger and stronger your online network is, the more likely you are to be successful in whatever endeavor you choose.

Unfortunately, 95% of people that attempt to build relationships online are focused only on themselves."

Related Link: Creator collaborations: the what, why, and how + examples to inspire you

"Most creators start with the aim of selling high unit volumes of low-ticket offers. But, this is only sustainable for building an audience in the initial stages. It’s not enough to scale.

Add to that the fact that low-ticket offers require regular updates and more effort on marketing, and you’re bound to find yourself in the middle of where you don’t want to be—burnout."

Interesting post discussing Jack Butcher's journey with VisualValue.

Big Idea: Niches are forged, not found.

"Create what you can with the skills you have for the people you know. Every action you take will function as a new connecting flight, opening up opportunities that couldn’t be seen from your previous location. Then use those to take you to where you want to ultimately land."

"Successful niches don’t happen by accident. They aren’t stumbled upon during normal business hours or discovered while reading a curated list of this year’s most profitable industries."

Josh Spector offers solid advice on becoming a successful newsletter creator. 

Big Ideas:
► A newsletter is not a goal in itself. It's a tactic to accomplish a goal.
► Aim for valuable, not interesting.
► Is the content you publish in alignment with the audience you want to reach and the transformation they want to make?
► Focus on output, not outcomes. It's the process that's important.
► Your content is a long-term library of value that compounds over time.

Interesting take on the value of creating while working full-time.

►  It’s about self-sufficiency: what you learn shipping something from end to end.
► It’s about self-actualization: having creative control and autonomy and not ending the week with nothing.
► It’s about long term games: building a personal network and reputation that will outlast any employer.
► It’s about optionality: having a backup plan if something goes wrong, and incubating dozens of business ideas that could be big, creating luck for yourself.
► It’s about having a job while not being your job.

Big Idea: This is the first time I've heard the term Meta Creator.  "A “Meta-Creator” is someone who creates content about creating, instead of just creating."

"The sneaking suspicion that even if you win and are top of the heap at the Meta-Creator game, you are still limiting yourself from what you could be doing with your life. What the people you actually look up to are doing with theirs. What the world could be benefiting from if the greatest minds of our generation just applied themselves to other problems than “How to Crush it on Twitter” or “Get a Million YouTube Subscribers” or the 3923rd “How Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger Think” blogpost. I promise you Musk or Bezos or Obama or Malala or whoever you look up to spend zero time as meta-creators."

via @theslice

Summary and lessons from Ausitn Kleon’s book "Show Your Work", an early guide on building in public.

"How does a creator assess whether they’re on a trajectory for success, especially when early growth seems so slow?"

"In February 2022 I was feeling pretty pessimistic about the financial trajectory of this newsletter, but here we are just a few months later and I’ve roughly doubled my monthly revenue. I simply needed a little extra time to experiment and see what worked. I couldn’t have predicted that outcome in advance. Sometimes, we’re on the verge of success and don’t even realize it; it’s only in hindsight that we realize we were making progress all along."

"We invest a huge deal of money and time to create a project. For a couple of years, there is seemingly zero progress. It’s like you are throwing money in an ever-expanding dent. At a certain point. And only under the condition that you: Persist long enough; Stay disciplined; You have all of that money to throw; You happen to successfully battle the inner doubt, the impostor syndrome, and the frustration of the lack of feedback. You reach a point of breakthrough. A major change."

Here is a selection of the best links I've found this week to level up your creator skills.

How to Grow Your Email List with Social Media: 10 Experts Share Their Best Tip - aweber via @optinweekly

How to write compelling ad headlines for creative testing - marpipe

SaaS content marketing: The ultimate (but simple) guide - marketermilk via @iniatorcreator

How to Get Brand Deals with less than 1000 Subscribers  - videoinfluencers via @creatorbread