How To Monetize Your Following

I talk about growing your following and community a lot.

But as the saying goes, “likes ain’t cash.”

In other words…

Large Following ≠ Lots Of Money

There’s more to growing a successful personal brand than amassing a large following...

You also need to be able to monetize it.

And there are some notable examples that illustrate this exact point.

For instance, back in 2019, there was an Instagram influencer with 2 million followers.

Because she had such a massive following, she decided to launch her own fashion line.

Had her own designs made, professionals flown out for the photo shoot and everything.

But when her collection launched…

She wasn’t even able to sell the minimum 36 pieces needed to keep her agreement with the manufacturer going.

Now, contrast that with a really awesome entrepreneur I spoke with this past week.

She’s making around $1.5M a year from 13k followers on Instagram. 

And I've seen people do even more with less...

That's why it's so important that your start incorporating “Monetization Moments” in your audience-building process as early as possible…

Because if you don’t, you could accidentally build an audience that won’t ever buy from you.

In today’s newsletter I’m going to share how you can integrate Monetization Moments into your own audience growth process.

If you apply what I share with you, not only will you likely see an instant boost in your current revenue...

You’ll position yourself to grow your revenue exponentially as your following increases.

Before we dive in...

Many people have asked me about the "master plan" behind my content game...

The one responsible for growing Herb's community of 14 million without a single paid ad...

And responsible for adding some 750K followers to my personal brand over the past 12 months...

Well, you won't have to wonder much longer.

Content Empire OS is coming, and in it I'm sharing the framework for my ENTIRE content strategy.

Stay tuned for more launch details.

Monetization Moments

Before we dive in, first I want to remind you what our overarching goal is.

We’re trying to “convert” people from a rented audience (social media) to an “owned audience” (our newsletter) and finally to a “monetized audience” (aka people that purchase from us). 

Now, it’s important to note, that although I say “monetization moments…”

I don’t mean that we’re selling something every single time.

Monetization moments actually have less to do with making money… 

And more about making an “ask” of your audience.

Because we want to turn our audience from passive consumers of our content, to ENGAGED followers.

Why is this?

Well, people subconsciously create patterns in their heads to help lighten their cognitive workload.

And if you’re not asking things of your followers, you’re essentially training them to only expect free value from you.

Practically this means that whenever you do eventually decide to ask something from them...

The response will likely be extremely poor, because they’ve been conditioned to only consume from you.

Additionally, regularly making “asks” can help eliminate tire-kickers and freebie seekers from your audience.

It essentially serves as a small filtering system to ensure the quality of your followers is good.

Newsletter

The very first “ask” you want to make of your audience is asking them to join your newsletter.

As long as your audience is on a social media channel, you’re at risk of losing them.

I’m sure you’ve heard of influencers getting locked out of their accounts before.

But that’s not the only reason you want to get people onto your newsletter…

Gaining access to someone’s inbox increases the opportunity that they’ll actually see your content. 

Because you’re competing with just a fraction of the competition that you have on social media.

Also people have a different frame of mind when in their inbox - they’re typically there to engage or even "do business."

Whereas people by default go on social media to be entertained and to mindlessly consume.

And as it stands, email is still on of the most profitable channels you can invest in.

There are many businesses that do 30%-40% of their monthly revenue from email.

Social Media 

I know I just spent a minute harping on why you should convert your social media audience to your newsletter...

But another Monetization Moment with your following is getting them to engage with you on other platforms.

The reality is, we're all still using social media to build our personal brands...

And you will ultimately benefit from growing your following across all your channels.

The growth helps get you to gain traction with the algorithms - which if you have your monetization strategy dialed in - means more money in your bank account. 

Also, you’re asking your followers to take an action, so we’re still reinforcing the back-and-forth component.

Making Money From Your Audience

Now, let’s focus on ways you can actually make money from your audience.

This might sound obvious, but to make money you need an offer to sell them.

You’d be surprised how many founders don’t have any offers and wonder why they aren’t making money.

And while there are a lot of different things you can sell (we’ll get to those options in a minute), I want to focus on first are the different “tiers” of products.

Here are the ones I’m going to talk about today: 

• Low Ticket ($0 to around $497)

• Subscription (typically lower price point, renews monthly)

• Tier I High Ticket ($497-$4,997)

• Tier II High Ticket ($5k-$25k+)

Now I personally think that every founder should have products from each of these tiers.

Because you want to be able to offer your audience products that best suit their needs based on:

1. Where they are on their founder's journey

2. How much they trust you

(I’ve heard many stories of people buying a low-ticket product and immediately converting to an ultra-high-ticket offer because they just wanted to get to know the founder more before signing on with them.)

Low-ticket products and subscriptions are great because they’re a low barrier to entry.

However it’s hard to get rich off $19 products.

High-ticket offers typically have great margins, and also provide fantastic value to the buyer - but they can be harder to sell.

Subscription products are fantastic for bringing in guaranteed recurring revenue, however like the low-ticket products, you have to have A LOT of buyers to make "good" money from them.

(Although I'm currently working on my own high-ticket subscription offer that could eliminate these issues.)

If you’re just starting off, I recommend having both a low ticket and a Tier I high ticket offer.

Product Options

Now it’s time to actually create your offer.

You can check out a recent video I made about the topic here.

In terms of what to offer, there are many options available. 

Some of these include:

• Live Paid Trainings

• Slack Communities

• Group (Or Solo) Coaching Sessions 

• Digital Products Software (SaaS) 

• Consulting 

• Courses 

• Videos

• Books 

The possibilities are endless, but what’s most important is to find the product that best aligns with your brand and audience.

And there's no better way to find out than to start making offers and find out what resonates best with your following.

How Often Should You “Sell"

When it comes to how often you should "sell," it is important to find a balance.

Some businesses are built on a "churn-and-burn" model where they're only concerned about maximizing revenue in the short term...

However the biggest brands have built real relationships with their customers and audience, and while their growth trajectory might not have been as fast...

They have longevity on their side, and will ultimately reach higher revenue levels that the cash-grab businesses.

That being said, I think that as long as you’re still providing valuable content on a regular basis…

You can sell a lot more than you might realize.

I recommend promoting your newsletter daily.

When selling products, aim to promote at least one offer every 3-4 days. 

If you have multiple products, you can spend a week focusing on each product and then switch to the next one the following week.

This also serves as great content inspiration as well. 

You can always dial things in with time.

What’s most important is that you’re making offer, and monetizing your audience correctly.

There you have it, how to incorporate Monetization Moments into your audience growth.

I hope you found this helpful.

Take some time this upcoming week and plan out how you can start integrating Monetization Moments into your own brand.

Once you do, hit me up on Twitter with what you came up with (feel free to share a screenshot on social media and tag me!).

Let's win together 🥇

Matt

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

#1: I just launched a new YouTube Channel. I'm putting a ton of energy into creating heaps of valuable content that I think you'll like. 

Come check out my latest stuff, and give me a like and subscribe.

#2: Want to grow your audience and online business fast? Discover how to build a proven system for audience growth in just 2 hours here.

#3: Promote your brand to over 43,996 subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter (Booking into May 2023)

Copywriting is a founder's secret weapon for both audience growth and monetization.

Here are 9 Copywriting Tips that will take your writing to the next level👇

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Hypefury.

Hypefury is your secret weapon for dominating Twitter.  

Grow a large and engaged audience with powerful automated actions such as: 

• Automatic retweeting of your highest performing tweets 

• Auto-append which adds call-to-actions onto your best tweets

• Auto-DM which sends messages to those that interact with your tweets

Starting winning at Twitter here.

I've created an awesome guide that I want to give you (to help you unlock new content-creation skills).

I summarized 10 years of learnings into a Content Playbook. It has 10,000 hours of mastery summarized in 2 pages.

Share this newsletter with 1 friend and you will get access to this $149 resource for FREE.

Share using the Click to Share button below:

See you again next week!