this is what's wrong with the creator economy

there are some things that I get pretty annoyed with and this is one of them a beginner starts their creater Journey they learn writing marketing branding and other skills paired with their craft that allow them to be a one-person business because as a Creator you need to be a specialized generalist in other words you need to have a general understanding of all of these skills that allow you to do well in digital business because you're technically the CEO you're the operations guy you're the actual person doing the work you need a broad skill set to

actually do that thing but you also need to be very good at the one thing that sets you apart so good at many things but incredible at one thing because the general understanding of the many things is what makes you good at that one thing so to start is that if you don't know the one thing that you're good at it's because you haven't tried or learned enough of a lot of things so here's a graphic that we're going to refer to later in the video as well but pretty much this represents what a specialized

generalist is you have a bunch of concentric circles or overlapping circles and the darker circles represent skills and interests and then the center circle is your ability to solve problems within those so in the intersections of the overlapping skills and interests is where you can best identify profitable problems and solve them another thing to take into account here is that these circles the Outer Circle are like fields of awareness so the more knowledge and skill you have in one domain the bigger the circles get and the more all of the circles overlap making you more

valuable and Powerful when it comes time for you to narrow in on a problem and solve it by starting a business now back to the story SL the thing that I get annoyed with the beginner Creator starts because they want to make money and there's nothing wrong with wanting to sell a product so that you can stop selling someone else's because you are going to have to sell a product either way it might as well be your own now here's the tricky part the beginner Creator wants to help other creators with the skills they've learned

Marketing sales branding writing or whatever it may be they want to help other creators with the skills they've gained experience in in the business model they've gained experience in that makes sense where I get annoyed is when people call this a Ponzi scheme and this happens quite a bit but so few people talk about it because they're probably afraid of being labeled as a Ponzi themselves but I'm here to absolutely rip apart this argument as a whole the people that call it a Ponzi scheme don't understand business so they only see the surface of what's

going on and reduce it to that you're just a Creator helping creators become a Creator you're just a coach coaching coaches to become coaches I I get it I really do that does sound weird and it looks bad on the surface but so does really anything unless you try to look deeper or you actually gain experience in it yourself you're going to think of all Meatheads in the gym as just Vin main dudes Who Stare in the mirror all day until you actually get in there and experience the progress and the meaning and the Fulfillment

and the lessons that come from actually doing something with your life the first thing this narrow-minded crowd doesn't seem to understand is what a Ponzi scheme is they just seem to think that helping other people do what you've done aka the only thing you're actually qualified to do is bad so they call it a Ponzi if you think that's a Ponzi good luck doing anything aside from working for someone else for your entire life a p scheme by definition is a type of financial fraud that pays returns to earlier investors with the capital of newer

investors rather than from profit earned by the operation of a legitimate business that's not what a Creator business is so I'll handle more objections on this later but what you need to understand is that a Creator business is a business creators can either operate as one person or with a team so by this logic creators helping other creators these people that label the Creator economy as a Ponzi scheme are also labeling B2B business like a lot of businesses as ponies because if there can be oneperson businesses and there can be onep person creators and there

can be creators with the team there's obviously businesses with teams creators helping other creators is like a business helping another business and if you're told to learn a marketable skill as your first skill and your only option is to help another business with that and a Creator is a business and you're a Creator because you're trying to attract clients with the marketing skill that you just learned like do you see the problem here you just don't understand what a Creator is Ponzi schemes are characterized by dependence deception and manipulation business in general and especially the

Creator model is characterized by Independence persuasion and choice nobody is forcing you to listen to anyone or buy their product just because it isn't a fit for you doesn't mean it isn't valuable and worth paying for to someone else as you get larger there's obviously going to be negative comments like the ones in my comment section right now especially on a polarizing topic like this video but like you do understand that you can just turn off the screen like you don't have to be angry at this you're going to forget about it in a day

anyways so why are you wasting your energy if you're not benefiting from the thing that you chose to watch now let's look at this from an evolutionary perspective there are two types of hierarchies the first are Dominator hierarchies systems where the structure is maintained through force power control and domination the relationships within this type of hierarchy are typically characterized by coercion top- down Authority and fear so examples of this include most corporate structures you under a boss and having to do the work they assign to you and force you to do or else you don't

survive and things like the animal kingdom where male gorillas or male apes are the alpha male and they have their choice of mates and food and whatever they want until they get overtaken or dominated by another alpha male and of course certain political structures like dictatorship fall under that category hierarchies reflect in everything on a biological level a cancer cell can begin to create a dominator hierarchy unless reintegrated into the natural hierarchy of the body Ponzi schemes aren't exactly Dominator hierarchies but they are in a similar League what I'm trying to help you understand here

is that everything is a pyramid everything is a quote unquote pyramid scheme but there's a distinction further than that that helps you understand which one you should go into because you're in one right now and you think you're so ethical and Noble saying that other people are Ponzi and pyramid schemes you're in one right now you have to to survive you're just unconscious of it and so that's why you're very manipulative with it so the sad thing is that the people calling this a Ponzi scheme are trapped in probably a much worse scheme and when

they don't realize that they close their mind to really the only way to get out of their misery so the second type of hierarchy is an actualization hierarchy or a natural hierarchy which is inspired by theories like maso's hierarchy of needs and they're structured to support the growth development and self-actualization of its members leadership in such hierarchies aims to empower individuals rather than to control them so this is where Innovative startups and the Creator economy and Progressive education which is also the Creator economy because that's where education is nowadays people watch YouTube and learn more

on that than they do in something like a college course I sure did at least that's my personal experience maybe not yours but the thing here is that actualization hierarchies don't control the members they Empower them and allow them to evolve and kind of raise people up under them right it's still a pyramid structure as anything is you being raised by your parents and them teaching you what they know so that you end up going to do the same thing as them if you were to look at that with a critical eye like you are

now the Creator economy you would probably also label that as a Ponzi scheme but since it's just normal life to you and how you're supposed to live you don't see it so to the point creators don't control what you do they are literally just media channels they distribute information if you feel like that is bad refer to the Tyler the Creator tweet about cyber bowling and turn off your screen the defining characteristic of the Creator economy is to improve yourself and then improve others to become valuable and then to help others become valuable and yes

if you somehow manipulate your perspective to make yourself feel good about trolling another person you can paint that as a Ponzi your pyramid scheme when that's just the most fulfilling way to live your life so please don't close your mind off to that by labeling it as such because you're just creating a miserable life for yourself man come on so the Creator economy is based on the exchange of value which has persisted throughout Evolution that's what human communication is built on solving problems and distributing the solution that's what writing is that's why we carved on

the walls that's why we wrote Scrolls it's the to pass down what we knew so that others could use it and do the same thing that got results a Creator who helps another Creator is perfectly within the realm of reason and it's arguably one of the most fulfilling things you can do taking into account the Independence High skill cap High earning ceiling High agency and everything else that makes life worth living being a Creator in my eyes is the way of the future and many other influential people who have predicted creators as the future of

work so you can watch my video on the future of work but I recently uh read something from the CEO or the founder CEO or founder of LinkedIn where he's a very smart individual but he's talking about how AI is going to replace a lot of the tasks that we do as humans therefore decreasing the cost of doing those things meaning more money in our pockets and less of those things for us to do so he is also on the same side as me and betting that becoming a Creator starting a onep person business using

Ai and just technology in general to be able to do what a 10p person team would do as one person and to really just enjoy your life and build what you want an idea to think about so here's what to expect in this letter why the Creator to Creator Market is new weird and the opportunity you've been waiting for because you're always quote unquote too late to the rest my secret weapon for being perceived as an authority so you can overcome impostor syndrome and stop questioning everything you do and last the best path to starting

a oneperson business as a Creator how to start the skills you should learn and what to sell in what order these are my favorite videos to create because I enjoy arguing so let's talk about the C2C Market or the Creator to Creator Market similar to how there's a B2B Market businesses to business and b2c Market which is business to Consumer a content creator is a business model meaning a Creator helping creators is a business helping other businesses there are metric ton of creators out there most of them don't understand business it's quite obvious why other

creators who learn marketable skills like everyone tells them to would want to help and teach them by the narrow-minded standards they're essentially saying that the entire B2B Market is a Ponzi scheme yeah that's a reach but to help you clarify this you as a consumer or someone who would be labeling this as a Ponzi scheme see a Creator and you just expect that they know everything they don't know everything some people just pick up a camera and they gain Millions upon millions of followers others have to actually develop a skill set so that they are

worth watching and that's how they gain the subscribers so the people who grow and grow and grow and then don't know how to monetize because they may have gotten lucky in some case or people just like how they look they're hot and so people follow them but then they don't know how to actually make a living from that you would be surprised how many people with millions of followers are not making anything at all and the same goes with businesses someone says I'm going to start a business because I have this skill and so they

start but then they realize hey business just isn't about my skill I need to learn mark Marketing sales distribution social media all of these other things and so someone needs to help them with that if they don't have the time to learn it on their own that's the entire freelance Market that's the entire coaching Market that's the entire any of that and a Creator who has direct experience with that thing is the most qualified person to help those people now the weird thing here is that the Creator model is just so new creators are both

businesses and consumers meaning they buy from other creators to learn because that's who provides the education and courses and they run a business with what they've learned creators are in the center of a B2B and b2c vend diagram and the lines are becoming more blurred every single day more big businesses are doing in-house creators or they're going more to social media and they realize that company people don't follow Company accounts so they need personal Brands they need creators and then since more people are becoming creators the BTC Market or business to Consumer is it it's

slowly getting blurred it's all becoming this just big mesh of creators creators with teams or businesses with marketing that is Creator focused the reason people label this as a Ponzi is because they don't understand the model yet it isn't a normal part of society Boomers will still tell you to get a real job no matter how much you make as a Creator they still think internet bucks are some imaginary currency and that it doesn't count unless you break your back over some manual labor that robots should and will eventually do so what I'm saying here

is that just the fact that people are calling the Creator economy a Ponzi is more of a sign than ever that one it's new two it's profitable and three you should probably go into it if you don't know what to do with your life it's just like you probably missed out on bitcoin and you're probably still going to miss out on it if it continues to go up are you going to miss out on this one too people thought Bitcoin was a huge scam a huge Ponzi potentially what I can guarantee there is when Bitcoin

was so new and actually still to this day I guarantee there are many people that call it a Ponzi so if you're into Bitcoin and you're still calling the Creator economy a Ponzi you're an idiot the Creator to Creator Market is growing and thriving every day creators as a business have to learn so many skills and span across any interest imaginable so when they go to teach that thing and the person learning it can become a creator with it because creators can build an audience around any interest then I understand how that can be seen

as an illegitimate thing but in that sense everyone online is a Creator teaching Their audience how to be creative whether directly or indirectly so even if it was a Ponzi it's reality and your life still won't be very good with that pessimist mindset this goes beyond just marketing skills or becoming a Creator this is the same thing with like the productivity Niche where I've seen a few videos that trash on productivity accounts because they're just like well he just learned productivity and now he teaches productivity and I don't know that makes my brain short circuit

so I can't understand that he should be making money from from whatever he got his degree in again you you why do you go to school you go to school to learn things what do you do with what you learn you earn an income from them so does it really matter if you learn from school or you learn online where all of the information is there and people that are actually doing it have experience with it and then they go and teach it and help the other person and they're actually helped and it's not a

scam there's a thing called a refund as well so if you don't like the service you got you can request a refund and then go from there incredible you can't really do that in a Ponzi scheme so what about the scenario when a beginner Creator is just getting started and they want to help creators with the skills that they learned so content branding marketing maybe email marketing landing page design whatever it may be my question there is what beginner Creator what if the beginner Creator is someone like Alex hosi who hired a Twitter ghost riter

when he was just starting on Twitter when that ghost writer didn't have any prior experience or really anything and he still got paid EXT ex well and he still did very well so a message for people that are just starting out is you're probably going to get trashed on a lot by people who just don't think you what you're doing is legitimate but the only way to break through that is to actually do it and get results because how else are you going to get results it's they're going to trash you until you have actual

client results but you have to get a client without results in order to get results from a client so just do it another thing is that I've helped eight figure e-commerce CEOs start a personal brand and they have no idea what goes into it they're extremely good at building the e-commerce side of the business but social media business is a completely different skill set for them and they don't know anything about it so they could hire a beginner creator that just got to 10,000 followers and then you would think that that like okay 10,000 follower

Creator who this is his first business and he's helping an 8 figure e-commerce CEO like what's going on there that's super weird but again you're only seeing the surface and you don't understand the difference in skill set then that's just how it goes now my favorite scenario if you were to purchase a course on skillshare or udem me created by creators to learn about email marketing would that be a Ponzi so when you learn it from someone who is a public Creator who actually has results why do you not apply the same mindset is it

not better to learn from someone who can get customers from an email list itself if they are teaching email marketing rather than relying on skillshare or udem me for the distribution of said course that's the entire point of email marketing no why would you buy bias getting less results for yourself because the person teaching the skill does so from a place of public Real World Experience anyone can create a course but since creators on social media are a business they are the ones with real validated results so the same thing goes with teaching social media

branding or becoming a Creator if you buy a skillshare course on becoming a Creator and the creator doesn't have an audience that is very large and they're using skill share of all things to distribute the course when they could just build a social social media audience with that skill set and sell the course you can see who's better to buy from it's not skillshare is a authoritative reputable company but you're going to get better courses from the people who are actually practicing what they preach and at that point you're like oh well he's selling a

course on how he sells a course and this this and this but that's the best place to learn now the last question is as a new Creator just learning new skills is it ethical to help other people in exchange for money and if you're answer is no apply that same way of thinking to any other business model how do Freelancers initially start making money they learn the skill maybe they build some portfolio stuff but they haven't gotten clients yet they don't know if that's act if they're actually skilled at it you have to start with

a client for free or for a lower amount of money and then you gain testimonials you get results you get better and then you work so as a new Creator yes you should probably start helping people now and and start trying to make money it doesn't matter how experienced you are because you don't actually start gaining experience until you have the first client because practicing without real world feedback unless it's on your own business which is a very huge Pro for being a Creator is that you're your first client and that's the entire magic of

it you learn the skill you sell the skill you get testimonials you keep going you do whatever you want we'll talk about this later so the Creator economy is so new and that's why there's an abundance of information and that's why there's a lot lot of supply and demand or there's a lot of demand and that needs to be filled with Supply and if that's where the money's going and what people want to actually spend money on maybe not you because you think it's a Ponzi but a lot of people want to learn this stuff

because they see that their current life is a dead end and so technology and what has allowed for the crater economy to exist is an option so yes it's a profitable very profitable industry so with that the only scam in this scenario is your inability to think for yourself by the way I teach you how to be a Creator in my course digital economics but in reality I just teach you every single skill that you need to know as a business owner in the modern age but if you want to call yourself a Creator afterwards

because technically that's what you will be then be my guest now we don't have to go through the pain of being perceived as a Ponzi so I want to go over my secret weapon for being perceived as an authority and the thing here is I'm probably not going to change the minds of people who don't want their minds to be changed it's like trying to change a Republicans or democrat's mind and trying to convince them to become a Democrat or Republican and that's probably just not going to happen because it's an extremely rare yet valuable

trait to be able to drop your beliefs in an instant once you're provided with a better one but most people don't because that would require them to change and most people just don't want to change so let's get into this I'm a writer I teach people how to write some would say that's a bit weird but as I mentioned what else are you more qualified to teach than what you do and have experience in now where it gets tricky is that I'm also a Creator so when I teach writing I'm technically teaching people how to

become a Creator I'm a writer that uses social media because as a writer designer musician or anything it's a bit stupid not to be on social media because media is how you attract an audience to your work so you actually get paid and social media is the media right now so that makes others perceive me as a Creator in other words if you actually want to earn a living by doing what you enjoy and want to teach or help people with what you do because you're qualified to do that and it's a perfectly valid and

impactful business model so if you want to do those things you are at risk of being called a Ponzi by stupid people so the secret to avoiding this is by understanding positioning it's suboptimal to say I help people become a Creator it's more optimal to say I teach writing so you can attract people to your work it's suboptimal to be a coach that coaches coaches it's more optimal to have a lead generation system for service businesses and to bias your content toward attracting the coaches you want to help you can teach other creators Andor people

who want to become creators there's nothing wrong with that as technically anyone on social media that has a business which is a lot of people including most of the B2B Market is a Creator just position yourself as someone who teaches X for y benefit you don't need to directly teach people how to become a Creator what I'm saying is to position as you would if you were a business selling to other businesses I'm not helping you become a Creator by teaching branding I'm teaching you branding so that you can get XYZ benefits for your business

now let's talk about how to actually start as one person if you're wanting to do this one person business or Creator thing because another common piece of advice that is just extremely annoying and people need to stop saying it and just mind their own business is you should start a real business first then do the Creator stuff and I get it I really do but just listen to yourself you're telling me that I shouldn't leverage one of the best ways to generate traffic for a business just so I can suffer with your methods of cold

email cold calls and paid ads that's not very beginner friendly now is it I get that you have an identity to defend because your business mind was raised in an older generation of tactics but there are better more accessible ways to do things now technology has allowed people to build oneperson media companies make a great living doing so attract audiences that older Generations would be jealous of all at minimal to Z cost thanks to writing on social media so the benefits of becoming a Creator right now are pretty difficult to contain in one list but

I'm going to try first you forced to learn every skill required to run a modern business this is easier than ever thanks to courses tutorials and needs of access to tools for practice you build an audience AKA Social Capital so when you want to build a startup or the business you've always dreamed of you don't need personal capital or Venture Capital you have users for your app and customers for your products three you have a network beyond your audience you can reach almost anyone on the internet for what you need if you have 10K followers

and each person following them has 500 to 1,000 followers and the same for the people following them you effectively have a network of 10x your audience so no you obviously don't need a lot of followers to make an income four you can do what you enjoy attract like-minded people introduce new people to your skills and interests and create a meaningful business model you love showing up to every day even if it's difficult at times and five since your Only Lovers are writing and building products or services can cut your work times down as much as

you want if my audience is growing with 30 minutes of writing and I send them to a good digital product I technically don't have to work any longer than that especially if my 30 minutes of writing generates more traffic than someone writing for 8 hours on a book that won't be seen by anyone the same thing goes for just social media in general if I can write one post a day and people like my posts more than other people's posts and I grow my audience faster and I have a digital product that I can plug

some people can spend 5 hours writing posts and not get anywhere because their writing isn't that good and they don't understand social media watch my video uh how to grow on so how to build an audience on social media from zero followers something like that but with the whole like how long do you work thing it's as long as you want as long as you're good at what you do so I'll leave it at that how do we actually get started first is start then learn the best way to learn is not by taking course

after course after course until you find yourself in tutorial hell with nothing built no results and no money the best way to to learn is by starting being overwhelmed and having no idea what you're doing that way your mind is hungry to learn and has something tangible to apply that learning too I will tell you right now that you are absolutely wasting your time if you are learning from a course but you're not building anything alongside of it especially the projects that the course offers if you're just going through it to try to consume information

super fast stop everyone can watch a video on exactly how a top CEO built a billion dooll business in record time but how many people have actually replicated that if it was as easy as following a step-by-step tutorial I'm talking to you people who want these videos to be shorter then everyone would be billionaires by now it's not as simple as me giving a 5 minute step-by-step advice video there are plenty of those out there and we don't live in a Utopia you don't understand what the learning process is it's your mind growing it's your

mind lifting weights getting stronger the muscle being built and it needs more than just the weightlifting it needs the nutrition it needs the rest it needs the recovery it needs the the right conversation so when you're learning something you need the right worldview not only to accept that information but you need the right reasoning and the why and the idea that makes it click for you specifically so you that you know how to get results outside of the step-by-step advice that was given to you you know how to make it work for your unique situation

that's why I make these things so long is because now you have have all of these ideas in your head that will slowly change your behavior more than any other short video out there over time because the ideas accumulate until they click so all of the stuff that you think is fluff in this video is just seeds waiting to sprout and you don't see the value in those seeds because they're buried under the dirt right now so you need both the right idea at the right time and experience experience experience experience experience is experience is

not only progress experience is determined by frequency of failure like fighting a boss in a video game you try once and get destroyed you change your strategy a bit try again and still lose you have a better idea try it and almost win then you lose five more times and question your sanity you turn off the game and touch grass then the perfect idea crashes into your mind when you least expect it you boot the game up go in with confidence and win with ease remember this process whenever you're discouraged with with your progress It's

All a Game so here's how you learn you need a goal to frame your learning in this case it's building an audience and making an income if you aren't making progress toward those then you need to continue learning testing and failing until you see follower and income growth if they aren't growing it's a skill issue two you need to start with what you know it's pretty obvious that you need a profile on social media regular content being posted and some way to monetize the people who see it third you need consistent ideas flowing for how

to improve your process by courses to see other people's systems and experiment with them have some form of inspiration entering your mind every day four you need specific information when you encounter a problem research how to solve a problem when you experience it not before like how to start a newsletter or design a profile picture or build a website there has never really been a point where I learned a specific skill like graphic design or marketing I learned tools like Photoshop but what you actually do with the tools or do with social media or do

other things that just came from practice and experience and getting ideas here and there that help me refine and test my process it was less of a like I'm going to sit down and learn this type thing and more of a I'm just going to do this and then I noticed ideas along the way that I slowly integrated and I slowly got better it's like I start doing it and then I notice an idea on let's say Twitter and then I try doing that thing and then by doing that thing and seeing results with it

that locks it into my skill set and I continue that process for years and then I'm good step two after learning how to learn is choosing your domain of Mastery so back to the topic of specialized generalism with this graphic of the overlapping circles valve the company that created the video game halflife mentions that their company is composed of t-shaped people people who are both generalists and Specialists the top of the T represents being highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things the bottom portion represents being among the best in one narrow field of

study this works because you become skilled at one thing you become valuable in many domains but you often aren't aware of how your skill can overlap with those domains if you don't have experience in them I would argue that I'm very good at writing not because my grammar is that good or my writing is actually that good it's because I'm good at achieving the main goal of writing which is sparking Behavior change or just getting through to people some people can do super academic writing or just super clever or abstract or artistic or poetic writing

and those each have their own goals but for my goal of sparking Behavior change and changing people's lives I would say I'm a very good writer at that and when I consider it from another perspective writing isn't my main skill that's not the one thing that I'm very good at and I actually didn't know what that main skill was until people pointed it out to me so that's one thing to take into account is that you probably won't know what the one thing you're good at is because if it's the same as something that someone

else the one thing that someone else is very good at then you're competing with them it's it's usually something that's hidden and just expresses by you being a generalist I'm very good at holding multiple ideas in my head at once I can often work through entire strategies or business models or uh Visions for the future like with cortex I constantly have like the end goal in mind in every single step along the way so I'm able to think through all of that and like change the strategy along the way and see what others can't within

that so that we can actually stand a chance at competing with these other bigger companies but maybe writing is what led to that so at the end of the day the best advice I can give is to just learn stuff and build stuff and just keep going so if I could rephrase what a t-shaped person is or what a specialized generalist is or a generalized specialist whatever it is a person who can and will learn any interest or skill toward one project goal or Vision they understand the mission their role in it and what they

need to learn to make it happen this is very difficult in corporate positions or jobs that don't allow for autonomy or breaking out of your repetitive routine of tasks the larger your awareness surface area the more valuable problems you can solve you stop competing with specialists in a given Niche and start solving problems that nobody else can solve to start as a Creator you need value to share you need content ideas you need something to monetize you need a reason for people to follow and pay you so I don't think it helps much to get

super obsessive and OCD over this and just write out a bunch of stuff and put them in little boxes instead I just encourage you to write out two to three broad topics that you want to write about and and then start researching okay what are people talking about on Instagram what about YouTube what about just Google search the topic and write down a few ideas that you can start writing about under that and let it go from there and this could be very specific to like marketing or programming or it can be something a bit

broader like self-improvement or psychology or really anything the point is to make noise and find signal so try everything just write just write get good try new things practice experiment and then some things will do better than others that's how you filter data it's like you see okay what went right what went wrong what's this little Spike here okay I need to do more of that and then you do more of that so the first step was starting then learning the Second Step was choosing your domain of Mastery so you have something to write about

step three is to learn the right skills first as habits so along with your current skills and interests and the topics that you want to write about there's just a few skills that you need to absolutely learn to make the Creator business work or any business the first is writing so you need to write posts emails video scripts landing pages courses DMS and course material I teach this in two-hour writer two is speaking which is an alternative to writing for Distributing ideas in a consumable way this is often enhanced by writing first that's why I

write these videos as newsletters first it's because writing helps me become a better video maker and speaker three is marketing so understanding how your writing or speaking reaches people where it reaches them how it impacts them and what the result of that is do they act or engage toward the goal you are leading them toward and then four is sales so crafting your writing in a way that makes people perceive what you offer as valuable sales is the antidote to starving Artistry and if you were to combine all of these it would simply be persuasion

that's the skill you need to learn and we're going to talk about that and break it all down in the next video what you need to understand that these are more so habits than they are skills although it's kind of like a daily practice right you're building the skill through the Habit they are habits of successful individuals if you go to any crater or just successful individual for that matter if they're still working in the business if they're not completely retired I guarantee you they are writing every single morning and that writing is backed with

marketing and sales or it is a very persuasive writing you need to write every single day if you aren't writing every single day you're not building a business sorry that's just how it works and I don't mean like writing a newsletter writing content that's a major part of it I'm talking DMS networking communicating with other people is how are you going to make money if you don't have someone else to pay you and if you don't write how are you going to produce anything writing is the foundational medium of communication writing is tangible thinking and

you won't get anywhere if your ideas stay in your head writing is how you build and spread your ideas so where do marketing and sales come into play these shape how you write and speak if you just write whatever you want however you want you'll end up as an author with zero readers or a startup with zero users this doesn't strip you of your creativity because creativity happens within the limitations you provide in fact it takes more creativ to remain authentic and get your message across in the most impactful way possible as an example it

takes much more creativity to build a business 4 hours a day without sacrificing your relationships or health than it does to build a business while forgetting about everything important in your life the former also leads to much more fulfilling results and more knowledge and experience also the best Marketing in sales aren't detectable the most creative people make it seem effortless like the book you get absorbed in that's persuasive writing and it captures your attention it holds your attention that's what marketing and sales do they capture and hold attention so whether or not it's by what

your perception of a sleazy marketer is the writing you get hooked in you can learn from that to learn how to Market better and make your own more effortless okay so you've learned how to learned you've chosen topics to write about you know what skills you need to learn now you need to focus on eyeballs the greatest mistake I see beginners make is that they just don't understand business rule one generate traffic rule two sell a product rule three optimize the system that Bridges one and two according to your ideal lifestyle I don't know what's

going on in people's minds but if you're audience isn't growing you're doing something wrong and if you aren't making sales you're doing something wrong actually I I heard the word theory of constraints the other day used in this context and I don't know what the theory of constraints is but I'm assuming it's slowly constraining what it is that is causing the problem so if you're not growing then you need to start to eliminate okay what am I doing wrong here is it how I'm writing is it that nobody's seeing my content is it that I

just don't have any network helping me and the same thing with sales okay look at are they clicking through the promotion that I plugged under my tweet okay are they clicking on the promotion in the email how many people actually made it to the landing page how many click the convert or how many click the buy button how many people actually paid where where are we going wrong there is it the copyrighting is it the headline is it the offer you start to test and improve these things it's not as simple as hey here's my

product go buy it and then they go buy it you need to actually make it perceived as valuable another thing here is that I've given exact strategies for the only ways to grow on social media and I mean the only ways to grow on social media so if you want to read that again Watch The how to build an audience from zero followers videos but for now just understand that you need to experiment and need to try everything until it works it may be replies to large accounts paid growth building a network or cracking the

algorithm everyone will scream about which ones are better which ones are unethical and which ones suck if you listen to them you may close your mind to the one that would have worked for you then you quit and call it a Ponzi LOL try everything and see what sticks a life well- lived not survived is a series of experiments lastly we need to talk about what to sell and in what order so I've talked about this many times before I would encourage you to go watch 0 to1 million as one person while working 4 hours

a day the title isn't long but you'll find it if you just type in 0 to 1 million and in that I break down how creative work must evolve if you want to earn more but stay as one person cuz otherwise your only option is to hire others to help you so in my eyes here's the best thing you can do first is create a minimalist offer this is actually a New Concept that I just created that I feel like will help you understand a lot better but I'll create a whole video on it relatively

soon in short a minimalist offer is one what you can help people with two a payment link and three optional a questionnaire for warm traffic so literally all you need to do is DM someone be like hey what are your goals you don't ask this directly but you start a conversation with them and you start to understand what their goals are what they're working on and then you try to identify where you can help them with your current skill set and then you offer to help them as a freelancer or a coach would then from

there you walk them through the sales script that you can start using at the start but you just walk them through and be like hey I have this valuable thing for you do you want to buy it I'm not going to teach sales right now in this video but I just want to make it known that you can DM people and execute the entire function of a landing page in the DMS the entire purpose of a landing page is to make them aware of the problem to amplify that problem to tell your own story to

prove that you can get results to show your offer or your solution and that's a static thing and that's what a sales call also does so if you're walking people through that persuasive process in the DMS then that could be arguably better than a landing page because the landing page is static and you can change and pivot what you say to each person in the DMS and then help them with whatever skill set you can and then you ask for payment and you build the offer on the Fly I haven't read this book but you

can go buy $100 million offers by Alex horoi and I'm sure it'll teach you how to create a good offer because when you don't have a large audience most of your sales are going to come from Direct messages unless you understand what I teach in mental monetization that allows you to monetize with digital products a lot earlier but that's fairly Advanced a lot of people won't understand it so your best bet is just going hard in the DMS until your business Acumen comes up you write content that targets people's pain points you respond to people's

comments and take conversations to the DMS you ask them about their goals further and give some free education this creates a network for yourself even if they don't buy you mention that you can teach them over the next few weeks and that it would cost some money but not much you help them achieve their goal with the skills or interests you've learned you test what actually gets results and refine your own system then you package that up and charge more Beyond step two which we'll talk about so as an example as someone who's into fitness

I can start talking to people they're struggling to lose weight oh dude I can help with that I've been into fitness for all of my life is that something you'd want me to coach you on then you start talking and then build offer out in the DMS and boom now if you want you can create an take form or a questionnaire that you would put in places like your social media bio or on your link tree or on your website and what that does is when people read your content and follow you and start looking

around or if it's something that you want to promote under your tweets then people can fill that out and make sure when you do this on the questionnaire you ask for their social media handle so that you can DM them afterwards but on the questionnaire you ask them what are their problems what are their goals what are they trying to get help with and you can go a bit deeper than that if you want to as well if you're decent at marketing or you understand the sales process and then you reach out to them from

there Tak it into the DMS help them out so now step two after the minimalist offer the minimalist offer is just is just to like test things it's just to start it's to see what people actually benefit from so step number two is optional but it's starting a service-based business now if I were to go back I would focus Less on services and more on a cohort but at the time I didn't know what I was capable of I didn't really think the audience thing was going anywhere and so service business was what I was

already doing with fre freelancing before then but when I started as a Creator I didn't start by creating another service I started by creating a web design course and I sold that pretty well at 500 followers I was making around 2,000 a month from the digital product alone so when people say that you can't monetize an audience with a digital product alone it's complete when I started learning from other people ahead of me and just observing people like David Perell and Dicky Bush who are running successful cohorts that's when I started to Pivot as well

but now I see as the optimal option but the thing here when a service business is for you is when your account isn't growing month over month you don't have a consistent flow of traffic but at that point that's a bigger problem than starting a service business and you should probably fix the traffic problem and start growing your account if you're truly adamant on it turn your minimalist offer into a freelance or coaching service you can go from there you can research that on your own I frankly just don't like teaching service-based work it's 100

times more complicated than just building a course or a cohort and guiding people through that now the thing here is so step three is to spin it into a cohort and I say spin because you're spinning something like a service into a cohort you're not going to be teaching the exact same thing the thing with a cohort is that you can charge very high prices like David Perell I believe he was charging 3.5k for a base tier of his cohort a writing cohort and 7K for the highest tier and he did very well when he

was starting out he's recently just closed closed or is closing the cohort but that's not a testament against cohorts working for a lot of people so what I'm saying there is is that a lot of people will tell you to start a service business or a client business because you can charge 2.5k or 1.5k or however much higher per client when you could just create a cohort and sell that for the same price and not have to do the annoying client work now of course you would have to use kind of high ticket sales or

DM tactics and do some cold Outreach and have sales calls and other things like that for the cohort but still it's a lot more fun than client work in my eyes and it transitions seamlessly into the next step which is turning it into a digital product but before that what a cohort is is usually based around a beginner level skill or interest a cohort is just a structured course that you guide people through you set a start and end date you have a curriculum you have one to two calls every week to answer questions and

go over material and sometimes you have a community for people to be in so now when you spin it into a digital product you just take a portion of that cohort and turn it into a standalone product and sell it for 99 bucks 150 bucks however much so if you want to learn how I build these curriculums for the cohort or the digital product and understand how I sell them check out again mental monetization so the best place to start here is your main skill or interest don't over complicate it teach the skill or interest

in the way you would want to be teached include projects templates tasks and curriculum that covers what people need to know to reach a desirable end result then step number five we're getting into like Uncharted Territory here for the beginners but it's to build something that you want but doesn't yet exist so at this point you have an audience a profitable business an excess cash flow you can invest into a new type of business or if you want you can continue scaling the service business you started by hiring employees at this point you know what

your audience wants and needs so it makes sense to complement your current audience and digital products and other things with a physical product or a software this is why we're building cortex it's why I've built a physical planner in the past because cortex is just me taking the system that's into our writer and creating a software that allows me to do that system better and allows people to create their own systems the other thing is that notion just felt bloated and wasn't nice to write in and I've been trying these notet taking apps as research

and it's like you log into the app and I have no clue what's going on I remember the first time I started with notion it's like okay you log in okay I can create pages but I know there's more power to this why do I feel overwhelmed when I haven't even started yet and it's I don't know it's just weird feeling and a lot of people don't have that much time to learn a new software they just want to get started get writing but this path isn't an impossibility for you either you just need Social

Capital so an audience and you need results from digital products and other things and then you can turn those into a software or a startup that you want to so depending on where you're at in your creator Journey I wish you the best of luck thank you for watching be sure to like subscribe check out the links in the description for free skill acquisition courses and to our writer to learn high impact writing digital economics join the cortex weight list and that is it for this video bye