The Steal Club - Monetizing as a creator. 4 ideas.

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This is The Steal Club, a newsletter for creative solopreneurs.

We share weekly lessons, strategies, frameworks, and templates to grow your audience and business. “Stolen” from the best creators in the industry.

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Ninety-nine percent of people who start writing books never finish them.

That’s because they don’t have a “north star” to guide them through the process. They never stopped to figure out their WHO, WHAT and WHY.

In other words, they didn’t have a book elevator pitch.

If you’re an entrepreneur who wants the best business card imaginable—one that will get you more and higher quality clients, speaking gigs, media appearances and more—you need a book.

Therefore you need a book elevator pitch.

Get the simplest template imaginable to create your book elevator pitch in a few minutes here.

Creators are experts at getting attention.

But likes and followers don’t pay the bills. Money does.

In today’s email, we’ll go through 4 different monetization tactics that top creators use to make money. So let’s jump right in!

#1 - Feedback as a service

Sometimes as creators, we get so caught up in what we do that we could use a fresh pair of eyes. This is what some creators do to make money:

They offer “audits” or “honest feedback” as a service.

How does it work?

You have expertise in one particular topic. Then you sell an hour of your time (or 10-20-30 min) to review something related to that topic.

A few examples:

• Review your writing
• Landing page feedback
• Social media profile audits
• Code review (is that a thing?)

Possibilities are endless.

The cool thing about this business model is that it’s super easy to implement. You need a landing page, a payment link, and a screen recording software like Loom.

Case study: Jay Clouse and “online presence audit”

Jay Clouse made over $3,600 in a few hours after tweeting this 👇

There’s a lot of demand for things like this. In fact, this tweet by Jay inspired me to set up my own!

#2 - Build an email course

Email-based courses are learning experiences like an online course, but delivered via email.

It has a low entry barrier (just an email), is entirely automated, and allows you to build relationships with your potential customers.

How does it work?

1. You build an email sequence around one very concrete topic (example: how to set up a Twitter profile)
2. You get people to sign up.
3. You send them one email every day with one lesson.

Depending on the model you choose, an email-based course is perfect for preparing the ground to make a sale at the end. 

Alternatively, you can sell access to the email course directly (which works as your product).

Case study: Will Steiner and Emailbasedcourse.com

Doesn’t get much more meta than this. Will sells an email course on how to build email courses for 99$.

From what I heard, it’s really good. So I’m probably taking it soon!

#3 - Focused 1-on-1 consulting

This type of monetization is slightly different than your typical 1-on-1 coaching.

How does it work?

In this case, we are talking about a 1-on-1 session that is heavily focused on achieving just one thing.

You offer 60 minutes of your time to solve one very specific problem. The service’s title should reflect this transformation:

“From X to Y in 60 minutes.”

Another benefit from this: you get to talk 1-1 with your target audience. This helps you better understand the problems they face, which is great for your future content (and products)

Case study: Jay Alto and his Youtube thumbnail consultation

Jay does a better job at explaining his strategy than I do. Peep Jay’s profile and the link on his bio 👇

#4 - Run paid ads on social media

I have 0 experience with running paid ads. I once tried to run Facebook ads, and it was a disaster. But I know there’s a massive opportunity on paid ads for creators.

How does it work?

The first thing you need is a digital product at a “no-brainer” price (under $120)

Then you need to write a few promotional posts, the same as if you launched your product directly on social.

Then you boost those posts with paid ads focused on retargeting.

The only con of this strategy is that it requires some investment upfront. The good thing? You can start by spending as little as 5$ per day.

It could be a cool experiment to try next!

Case study: Alex Berman

Alex made $10k in 7 days with a paid Twitter campaign pushing a thread that promoted one of his products. 

Then retargeted the people who interacted with said thread with another campaign.

These are the original thread and the retargeted tweet:

PS: Service idea → Run paid ad campaigns but super focused on people who sell digital products. Get a % of every sale that comes through your ads. Who’s doing this?

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See you next week!

Alex Llull

Thief Master

The Steal Club

PS: I'm building a database with all the content formats I've been sharing on The Steal Club.

I will be doing an under-the-radar release soon. If you want to be among the first to hear about it, simply click on this link. No need to do anything else for now!