Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
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With wages stagnating over the past three years and layoffs seemingly commonplace, many professionals have sought to start solopreneur businesses. A solopreneur business is a business (often digital) that the owner can run without a team.
In September 2022 I quit my job. Even though I had two law degrees and a Master of Sciences, I signed a one-year contract that paid me $50,000 a year while working more than 50 hours a week. Well, I had some savings and had been planning on starting my solopreneurship business for a few years, so I wasn't starting from scratch. Before this one-year contract, I founded a technology startup and had a higher paying job in the technology industry.
Related: 4 Ways to Make Over $1 Million with Your Online Business
When I left my job, I figured I'd have six months of runway to earn enough to cover my annual expenses before I found a job. It's important that you know exactly how long you have to get your business up and running before embarking on a solopreneur journey or giving up your source of income. This way, you can minimize the stress by setting a stopping point instead of endlessly dragging yourself and your family through the pain of starting a business while falling deeper into debt.
Let's start your journey to $150,000 and walk you through exactly how I did it, step by step.
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1. Hack your original audience
The biggest challenge in building a solopreneur business is starting the journey and building an initial audience. Going from 10,000 to 50,000 followers is much easier than going from 0 to 10,000. From my experience and from conversations with many content creators, I have learned that you have to fight for your first 10,000 followers. There is no set formula for this early phase of brand building.
The most common mistake I see people make when starting their journey is that they try to create systems that can take them from 0 to 100,000 followers. That does not work; You have to fight for each subscriber until you reach a subscriber base that regularly engages with your content (often around 10,000). Once you have a base of followers, you can start building your systems, but in the beginning it's a waste of time.
My first step started about two years before I left my job. At the time, I worked for a newsletter publication and sent daily business news summaries to approximately 40,000 business owners. For over a year, I was fortunate to be able to include a link in my byline that prompted readers interested in legal insights for their startup or small business to subscribe to my newsletter. This little trick helped me get my first 10,000 followers.
I've also seen content creators work their way to their first 10,000 followers through viral videos, product creation, viral tweets, cold messages, cold emails, paid advertising, and more. When you start your journey, this is where you need to be creative and invest all your time and effort. Unless you manage to reach 10,000 followers on social media or through a newsletter, you will struggle to generate effective and consistent income as a solopreneur.
Related: 4 Ways to Avoid Loneliness as a Solopreneur
2. Focus on one channel
Once you gain 10,000 followers on a channel, you need to focus on that channel. For me it was an email. For ten months, all of my content was written for email; When I had time, I repurposed it for social media. A big scaling mistake solopreneurs make when building their audience is immediately expanding it across multiple platforms. Don't lose momentum on a platform by dividing your attention. Dominate one channel before using your influence and following that channel to get a head start on all the other channels you want to use.
3. Diversify sources of income
While you should only focus on one channel for growth, you need multiple channels for income. My audience is startup founders. I get paid by advertisers to promote products, by founders themselves to teach them how to fundraise, and by investors to recommend companies to them. Focus early on on securing multiple sources of income; Even if you make very little from each source, it's better to increase the size of those deals than to look for new channels when others are desperately drying up.
Related: Diversify Your Income: Protect Your Finances with These Strategies
4. Capture every price point
When monetizing your audience, you need to consider every price point. A big failure I see today is solopreneurs charging $10,000+ for advice with no cheaper services available. While it's true that a $1,000 offer might cannibalize some of their higher-priced sales, I've found that lower-priced products can help generate interest in higher-priced products and build trust and loyalty with your audience.
If you only help people who can pay $10,000 for advice, why should the average person follow you? Too many YouTubers abuse those followers who cannot pay large amounts; They build a brand from their likes, retweets, subscriptions and followers and then abandon it when they need help.
Related topics: 5 strategies for being successful as a sole proprietor – without burning out
5. Interact with followers
A common piece of advice you're likely to hear is to comment on top creators' posts to promote their audience and grow your following. In my experience this is not the optimal way. Instead, I decided to spend my time connecting with my audience.
Even though my comments on their posts don't get more than 1,000 views, they build a relationship between me and my followers. It means a lot to a random follower or reader when I take the time to write to them or comment on their posts. In the long run, it increases the likelihood that they will support my posts, remain a follower, and purchase a product, not to mention the many great relationships I have built with followers!
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
