I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Why creators earn more in 2024
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Hey Reader, What were you doing in 2012? I had just released my first book and made $12,000 on launch day, which was a big deal at the time. The internet was a very different place back then. In 2010, earning $100k as a creator put you in the top 1–2%. By 2012, it was $250k. By 2015, it was $1M. What was commonly referred to as a “side hustle” back then has now become a legitimate career path. Creators are earning substantially more than they were before for two key reasons:
If 2012 creator me had the tools available in 2024 through ConvertKit, my earnings would have been much higher. Let alone if I had also been thinking in terms of flywheels. The network effects from ConvertKit’s Recommendations alone would have allowed me to grow my audience exponentially. Advanced automation tools, that were much more difficult to set up back then, are now accessible in a simple, easy-to-use interface. In addition to it being easier to grow an audience, another reason creator earnings are up is because of business model sophistication. Creators can now easily make money a variety of different ways. Tools like ConvertKit make it easy to monetize in whatever way suits you best: from coaching and consulting, to selling templates, books, and courses, to making money from newsletter sponsorships. And you don’t have to pick just one. If you are just getting started, any of those are a great place to start. What used to require buying a domain, setting up hosting, installing shopping cart software, and doing all of your own marketing, now just takes signing up for one tool. If you’re a great writer, start a newsletter. If you have expertise, offer coaching. If there’s a skill you can teach, make a course. There’s never been a better time to earn a living as a creator. Even if you’re not new to this space, I’d encourage you to examine how creators today are not just earning a living but generating real wealth. Yes, the tools are better, but I can’t overstate the importance of mindset. If you continue to think of this as a “side hustle”, you’ll earn like it’s a side hustle. This has obviously been the focus with my podcast and why I’m so passionate about teaching people how to turn the attention of an audience into real wealth. But if you haven’t taken a recent look at the many ways creators generate revenue in 2024, I’d encourage you to check out these creator case studies to get some ideas. PODCAST4 Steps to Building a Personal Brand TeamUsually, I’m the one doing the coaching on Billion Dollar Creator, but at a recent mastermind in Cabo, we switched it around. In this episode, you get to hear Matt Schnuck coach me about my personal brand! We talk about:
Watch or listen to episode » CONVERTKIT FEATUREExplore Paid Recommendations in ConvertKitWe’ve made it even easier for you to get paid to promote other creators in your Recommendations modal with Paid Recommendations. Now under the Earn tab, you can more easily setup the integration with SparkLoop and discover a list of creators and newsletters looking for fellow creators to promote their list. In the discover section of Paid Recommendations, you can now:
Make money recommending other newsletters. View knowledge base article » X POSTThe Golden Ratio (or the 60/40 rule)If you're a design nerd, you know that the Golden ratio is 1.618. But Hans Lorei simplifies this into the much more memorable "60/40 rule" and shows a bunch of examples of how to use it to design better homes and projects. The photography he uses in the examples is beautiful. Have a great week! —Nathan |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw? It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people. If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot. This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now). A lot of people will look back...