⚡ 💡The 25-year-old that created a $40 million newsletter - IdeaEconomy 💡⚡

"Daniella started The Newsette between her sophomore classes at Boston College. The daily newsletter includes a blend of branded marketing, curated links, and original content mostly in the form of interviews."

"Today at 25-years old, she led the company to close the first quarter of 2021 with $13 million in booked sales with a projected end of year revenue at $40 million."

How I plan to get this IdeaEconomy curated newsletter to 10,000 subscribers by the end of next year. I'm at 1200 subscribers now and I'm adding over 150 subscribers per month.

"Whether you’re a creative start-up or an artist or a creator you need to cultivate and create your story."

"Be the plucky underdog. Do things differently. Go against the status quo and take on the Goliaths of your niches and industry."

Big Idea: Niche sites with an affiliate sales focus are a great business model for creators.

"Joseph Clements did what a lot of people do when they start a new blog: he wrote a few posts, got bored, and largely abandoned it."

"But then something happened that pulled him back in. He logged into his analytics dashboard and saw he had received a few thousand hits from Google searches. The blog, Smoked Barbecue Source, served as kind of a beginner’s guide to cooking barbecue, and apparently, a lot of people were stumbling upon it while conducting research on Google. What’s more, several of them had clicked on Amazon affiliate links and purchased expensive grills, which meant the site was already producing passive income."

"10x Creators aren’t just marginally better than average creators at one skill, they’re decisively better at three — and the combination of these skills gives them massive, compounding, and unfair advantages."

• First, great creators are better at shipping valuable products and content.
• Second, great creators are better at building systems.
• Third, top creators are better at leveraging the systems they build.

via @ebizfacts

Big Idea: Don't give up too soon. It can take years to take off.

"I’ve seen something similar happen with the more than 600 participants who have gone through my online Recognized Expert course, which teaches professionals how to build their reputations and brands. On average it takes them about two to three years of effort to show almost any progress in expanding their platforms, and about five years to show meaningful growth."

This site that shows exactly how terrible the internet has become.

It's a great reminder to limit popups, browser notifications, and all the other annoying garbage that clutters access to content we want to see.

via @rishikesh

Big Idea: Public challenges like 100 articles in 100 days are a good way to promote your work and committing to quantity helps you to get much better, faster.

"And Ness labs absolutely would not be what it is today without those articles. They laid the foundation for what Ness Labs is, and they generated hundreds of thousands of views, a dozen consulting contracts, and many coaching sessions to people randomly finding me through one of the articles. In terms of exposure, I have been invited to several podcasts and some articles were featured in the press."

Great interview with "Josh Constine, principal investor and head of content at SignalFire, one of the leading VC firms investing in the creator economy."

It covers the state of the creator economy, how creator-focused services were unbundled and now are getting bundled back again in all-in-one solutions, opportunities for creators and builders, and some predictions on the future.

Several examples of creators who have leveraged Twitter to build their audience and business.

"Social tokens haven’t received the same attention as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), DeFi (decentralized finance), or DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), but they’re a critical part of crypto, Web3, and the digital economy. And given that social tokens involve people—often famous people—creating their own economies, social tokens will eventually be as buzzy, disruptive, and public-facing as NFTs."

via @forefront.news

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

18 Ways to Improve Your Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR) - neilpatel

Ramit Sethi shares his 8 sequence email funnel for product launches - iwillteachyoutoberich

10 Proven Methods to Go Viral - theartofpurpose via @fortheinterested

5 strategies to generate demand for your business - ahrefs

5 Ways To Use Quora For Your Marketing Strategy - richardfang

There are no shortcuts to a sustainable social media strategy- sproutsocial - via @chadunderwood.com

How To Write A Perfect Guest Post Pitch - bloggingguide

How To Improve Your Newsletter Welcome Emails: Best Practices & Examples - newslettercrew

How to get your first 1,000 email subscribers - ghost