Steph Smith: 6 Figure Side Hustle - IdeaEconomy

Wes Kimbell breaks down some of the key frameworks, techniques, and ideas behind Steph Smith's success.

Steph Smith is a senior manager of The Hustle's Trends.co newsletter of 15,000+ subscribers. While working at The Hustle, Smith has sold over $100k worth of Doing Content Right.

Big Idea: Working for someone else is a great way to build expertise and leverage your employer's audience for your own creative endeavors.

Kevin Conti of Software Ideas shares lessons on building his premium newsletter to $10k per month in less than a year.

Big Ideas: There are some good lessons here on validating your business idea before starting, the importance of having good distribution channels to find customers, and opportunities using industry databases for unique content.

The Mom Test is a highly recommended book to validate new business ideas. Here is a great summary of the key concepts of the book.

The trick to passing the mom test -

- Talk to your potential customers
- Ask questions that help you validate your idea without revealing that you are actually planning to build a business around it.
 

Step-by-step instructions on how to use Facebook groups to get email subscribers.

via @Josh Spector

Sponsorships can be a great way to monetize a newsletter. But they're not a good fit for every creator. Here's how to know if they're right for you.

via @publisherweekly

Great explanation of growth hacking with specific examples.

"To drive traffic to his e-commerce site, Spera began running small tests with paid search ads, paid social ads, and organic search. He made incremental changes, taking special notice of what channels got the most traction and what variables delivered the most bang for his buck.

He also A/B tested his site’s product pages, tweaking description copy and photos to see which variations converted visitors into customers at the most efficient rate.

Then he repeated the winning formulas over and over."

via @producthabits.com

"Many articles describe the bumpy road that Nathan Barry, the founder and CEO of ConvertKit, took to bring his company from the bottom to today’s industry leader. In fact, you can see it all here. But the one thing they fail to mention is the email marketing strategy that encouraged this growth."

Big Ideas: ConvertKit leveraged a community, user-generated lead magnets, and free courses to build an audience and attract customers. There are many lessons here for all creators.

via @producthabits.com

Viral growth can be a powerful method of distributing product and acquiring customers. It’s adored because, generally speaking, it’s free and when done well it can lead to explosive growth.

I subscribe to well over 100 newsletters and blogs to curate this newsletter every week. One of my favorites is Creativerly.

Philipp Temmel publishes a weekly newsletter of interesting articles, tools, and resources for the creative community.

Creativerly has a similar target audience to IdeaEconomy, however, we focus on different types of content. I particularly like Philipp's software and resources to help creatives work more effectively.

I'm especially looking forward to his next edition because he will share everything he has learned growing the Creativerly newsletter to over 1000 subscribers.

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

LinkedIn Advertising: A Complete Guide in Using LinkedIn Ads for Your Business - LyfeMarketing via @morningdough

Learn exactly how to use threads to grow your Twitter following - HypeFury - via @JoshSpector

6 ways using Google Alerts can help grow your blog today - RyRob.com

Start using these 15 Google Analytics dashboards instantly to analyze your website data with the same metrics that top agencies and consultants use. - Databox

How to use LinkedIn Creator Mode: What marketers need to know - SocialMediaExaminer

Content Marketing For Beginners: Complete Guide - Ahrefs