The Creator Economy Is Worth $250 Billion. 5 Experts Share How To Get Your Cut You don’t need a big audience to make a big impact

Have you ever posted on social media, recorded a video or written a blog? Congratulations, you’re a creator.

Want to get paid for it and build your business? I talked to five creators who will share simple, but underutilized approaches to making that happen.

And if you want to learn from even more experts, join me at the HeyCreator summit. This is a free online event where you’ll learn from the best minds in audience growth, content development, and building a business on your own terms.

But for now, let’s get a sneak peek at what they have to share.

Soli Cayetano: How to grow your community and revenue

Soli is the founder of Lattes and Leases, a platform empowering you to build wealth through real estate. She brings in $35k from her online community alone.

So, how did she build this audience, and how can you do the same? Here’s the advice she shared:

“Multi-day virtual summits. Offer a free event, leverage speakers’ audiences, and then pitch your product while attention is captive!”

Need more details? Here’s my suggestion:

First, determine a theme that would captivate your audience. This can include solving a major problem, introducing new approaches, or proving an overall update on your industry.

Then, find subject matter experts who will be a good fit to speak at your event. Encourage all speakers to share your event with their audience. This way, you’ll be able to tap into their audience and they’ll get exposed to other speaker’s audiences as well.

Now it’s time to make some money. As Soli mentioned, you’ll want to pitch your service during the event. You can say something like “If you want to continue this transformational experience, here’s how I can help . . .”

As a bonus, reward people who take action within a certain time frame. This sense of urgency will increase conversions and you’ll get an immediate cash influx.

Related: The Only Business Idea You Need to Start Making Money

Jay Clouse – Amplifying the impact of online courses

Jay is the founder of Creator Science, which offers content, courses, and membership community built to help you shorten the learning curve to becoming a professional creator. He brings in $50k per month and is expecting to grow even more this year.

And if you’re currently or considering selling online courses, you need to check out the pricing strategy he shared.

“If you sell courses, you can increase revenue by adding a second pricing tier. The first tier is the course itself and the second tier is the course plus a 1:1 session with you.”

Curious how much to charge for that session? Jay has you covered.

“You can simply add your typical hourly rate to the price of the course and 10-20% of customers will typically choose the second tier.”

So, imagine you’re selling your course for $100, and you charge $300/hour for consulting.

Now imagine you sell 100 courses (at $100 each) and ignore Jay’s advice. You’d make $10,000.

Not bad, but if you took Jay’s advice and were able to upsell just 10% of your customers (thats 10 customers in this example) to a consulting session (at $300 each), you’d make $13,000

That sounds good, but here’s how you can do even better: After a customer books you for a short consulting session, offer them a larger consulting package.

Again, let’s say just 10% of those customers take you up on that offer, and you charge $10,000 for your consulting package, you’d make a total of $23,000.

That’s 2x the amount you would have originally made, even though what you’re selling – your expertise – hasn’t changed.

Related: 4 Steps to Setting and Achieving Your Goals

Justin Moore: Monetizing your work through strategic partnerships

Justin is a sponsorship coach and the founder of Creator Wizard, a school and community that teaches you how to find and negotiate your dream brand deals.

Along with his wife April, he has been a full-time creator for over seven years and has personally made over $3 million working with brands.

You might be thinking that you don’t have enough followers to land brand deals, but that’s a misconception that can be cleared up by differentiating content creators from influencers.

Content creators focus on producing content that engages their audience. They know their audience wants to consume content such as how-to guides, “day in the life” series, tips and tutorials, and beautiful photography.

Influencers are simply sharing how they live their lives, and promote the products and services they use along the way.

Influencers are a marketing channel and they get paid in proportion to their audience size.

However, that’s not the case with content creators; you just need to produce content that engages a specific audience. So, the key to your success is finding brands that align with the same audience and need content to continue engaging them.

How can you make that happen? Justin has some advice for you.

“Think about sponsorships like a sales pipeline. Instead of waiting for brands to reach out, creators should conduct outbound prospecting, design systems to track and close deals more efficiently, and pitch brands on the next collaboration the moment the campaign ends.”

You don’t need a huge following to be successful as a creator, you just need to produce content that helps your audience and align with brands who value your perspective.

Bonnie Christine: Stay in your zone of genius by determining your “Freedom Figure”

Bonnie Christine is an artist, pattern designer, and teacher for creatives. In 2009 (her first year as a professional creator) she made a grand total of $15,000 from her blog.

In 2020 (at the height of the pandemic) she made $1.5 million from her online courses.

Now I’m not making any promises here, but if you want to grow your revenue even faster, Bonnie has some advice for you:

“A highly effective yet often underutilized strategy for creators looking to boost revenue is strategic outsourcing. Creative entrepreneurs often wear the badge of “Solopreneur” with honor, however, doing all and being all in our business isn’t sustainable. It limits our capacity, often involves working on tasks outside our areas of expertise, leaves us without backup, stifles creativity, and arguably reduces our overall impact.”

Bonnie emphasizes the importance of creators to staying in their zone of genius and provides a practical approach to determining what you should outsource.

“By determining what I call our ‘freedom figure’ – what an hour of your time is worth – you can better discern which tasks are crucial for you to personally handle and which can be more effectively managed by others. The goal is to concentrate on tasks that uniquely require your skillset and bring you joy, while beginning to delegate the rest. To calculate your freedom figure, simply divide your annual revenue by the number of hours you work. Then, consider outsourcing any task outside your zone of genius that could be delegated for less than your freedom figure.”

What’s the impact? Bonnie continues:

“By outsourcing tasks like bookkeeping, email, and social media management, creatives can focus more on their strengths. This not only leads to better creativity, more productivity, and increased joy, but also drives a significant boost in revenue. When you obsess over doing only what you can do, your business begins to flourish.”

What’s next?

Ready for more? You can discover more practical information delivered by recognized experts – including Entrepreneur Media’s VP of Social Media, Sana Ali – at the HeyCreator summit.

Plus, as a registered attendee, you’ll gain access to exclusive discounts on premium offers from Entrepreneur media.