Nicholas Cole of Ship30for30 shares how to turn your writing into a lucrative business.

Big Idea: Creators rarely get paid well for the content they create. Content is only how they attract an audience. The real business opportunity is selling services and products to the audience they have built.

"So what happens is a lot of writers create an account on Medium and “write what they want to write about,” and then complain because they only made $2.76 in earnings on Medium that month.

But that’s not surprising to me at all.

Because the same writers who say, “I don’t want to play the ATTENTION GAME” are trying to monetize on a platform where the underlying business model is THE ATTENTION GAME."

"The easiest way to make your first $1, or $100, or $1,000, or $10,000, or even $100,000 is NOT by collecting page views on Medium.

It’s also not by selling a product.

It’s by providing a service."

 

Joe Pulizzi of the Tilt shares why his previous business was a success in this short podcast.

This is another take on Nicholas Cole's ideas from the first link.

"The consistent blogging was critical to developing an audience and gaining credibility, but to break out, it took a research project, it took a magazine launch, it took an event launch. And 5 years later we had our exit."

Big Idea: Creators need to become startups if they want to build a significant business. Content alone is rarely enough.

Related Link:
Another good example of a "creator as startup" is Lexi Grant.
 

Neville Medhora, of Copywriting Course, shares how he puts together his newsletter every week. He answers users' questions at the end.

Big Idea: Neville uses a template of six items that he includes every week. A consistent structure like this makes it much easier to create content and can make it more interesting for readers.

Related Link:
Justin Welsh is a master of content templates.

"Everybody knows great content is important but what makes "great content" great? That's the question I answer (from an SEO perspective) in this article."

Big Idea: "Content" is often thought of as text. However, quizzes, calculators, infographics, and other forms of content can often outperform articles.

Related Links:
Five Levels of High-Quality Content - timsoulo

The Anatomy of Top-Performing Organic Content in 2022 - semrush
 

Dru Riley covers the popular trend of building in public in this Trends.vc report. There are lots of links to follow here.

Why It Matters
Building in public helps you:

► Validate ideas
► Stay top-of-mind
► Get fast feedback
► Build connections with stakeholders

Problem
You need to break through noise to share your story.

Solution
Make a habit of sharing struggles, wins, milestones, questions and lessons.

Neil Patel offers tactical lessons on increasing traffic with Quora, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.

"Hilary Erickson took her passion for nursing and turned it a blog, course, podcast, and more, making over $16,000 per month."

Big Idea: Niche websites like this are a great business model for creators. It's much harder to build a business with just a newsletter or podcast.

My friend Jonathan Santiago interviews makers and creators to get their best strategies and tactics to grow an audience through video.

Jonathan is a great interviewer, so I highly recommend checking out his show. He works for the video editing service Video Husky. They offer a monthly unlimited video editing service so creators can focus on creating new content.
 

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

What To Do When Rich Snippets Steal Your Clicks - ipullrank

50+ Great Content Marketing Resources -jsvxc via @gregbussmann

The ultimate guide to compelling email subject lines: data-driven best practices + 21 examples - klaviyo

How to come up with content that targets user search intent - rankmakers via @robertorobles

2022 email marketing statistics report for the creator economy - convertkit