We went from a few $1,000 a month to $50,000 a month over a pretty short period of time. If you’re starting a business in the content marketing space, you can too. How do you do this? How do you go from just starting out to running a business most people would view as a healthy lifestyle they can live on and grow on?
#1 — Buildout
Once you’ve picked your niche, once you’ve decided what you’re going to build in an area where you are skilled and enjoy, then you need to do some work for free or very, very cheap.
The idea here is to do work (1) that you enjoy because you’re going to do better work at it, and (2) that you think will have a network effect as a result of you completing it. For example…
- There’s a podcast you really like, but you think you could edit or promote it better than what they’re currently doing, so you go ahead and re-edit it or build some promotional material for it or make better content cuts of it, whatever it is.
- You send it to the host and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan. Here’s what I think I can do and I’ve just gone ahead and done this gratis for you. Let me know what you think.”
- Do that a few times and most likely all of those are going to stick. The host will be surprised you did some free work for them and you will offer to use it, promote it, give some mentorship, or whatever it is that they’re interested in.
That’s how you start. Start for free. Start showing your chops on a small scale but in a way that allows you to demonstrate your abilities to people who can have a network effect.
#2 — Present and charge
Use that work, especially for people who have a brand name or are known in your space, as your portfolio to demonstrate your skills and begin charging them. Not a huge price, but one that is fair or even at the bottom end of the market price for whatever you’re doing.
That’s going to allow you to have a track record of well-known people and regular paying customers. That will get you into that cycle and allow you to do.
A few examples from how we got started:
- We saw one of our clients, Dynamo Ventures, producing a podcast. We knew we could do it better so we emailed him with some ideas both for production and promotion and gave him examples for free. Subsequently, they hired us to produce their podcast and we have now produced their podcast for four consecutive years. That’s four years of revenue from that little bit of effort we put in at the very beginning.
- Two-time Super Bowl champion Torrey Smith wanted to start a podcast. He put on Twitter, “Who knows who can help me with this?” We came in, we built a bunch of examples, we built a bunch of fake content, we went and found interviews of his from YouTube and spliced it into a fake podcast episode. He was like, “How did you guys even do this?” But we made it, cobbled it together, and now he’s been a customer for two years. (By the way, that’s a great example of the network effect. People love working with the guys who produce Torrey Smith’s podcast.)
That’s the strategy. Now let’s get to some simple math.
Let’s do the math real quick
- Charge $3-5,000 a month. With 10-16 customers, you’ll hit the $50,000 goal every month. 10 customers if you’re charging $5,000 a month, 16 if you’re charging $3,000.
- Add 1 customer a month. If you start at ground zero, you only need to add at least one customer a month over a 12 month period to hit your customer target. Think about that. If you can add one customer in the next 30 days, you’re on track. If you don’t add one customer until the end of the next 60 days, you’re still on track. You can do that.
- Present your record. If you continue to do that over a 12 month period, then you’ll have a track record that you can point to and say, “We’ve done this for notable people and we’ve done this for regular paying customers who pay us a fair market price, in which you should also pay.”
- Double your prices. After you’ve worked steps one through three for a year, maybe a year and a half, then it’s time to double your prices. That’s going to be very scary, but it takes you from being a freelancer who is dependent on getting new projects all the time to an actual business that you can scale and sustain.
That’s the simple math to go from very little to 50k a month. Anybody who has a little bit of effort, sweat equity, and chops can do it. If you have any questions, let us know at adam@trustheard.com.