Don’t monetize until you have this (advice from Seth Godin)

Hey, hey. It’s another Sunday.

Do you know what that means?

It’s the day before Monday.

Jokes aside, today is a serious discussion, the type of discussion that decides if your creator journey is going to be fun or not.

A problem I made when I started writing online was trying to monetize too fast.

Spent weeks banging my head against the wall thinking I was a ‘bad creator’ because I couldn’t monetize in my 3rd month on X.

Then I realized that banging my head against the wall wasn’t going to solve my problems.

But reading and seeing how the pros do their marketing and create offers is the solution that I was looking for.

That’s when I stumbled on a new way of marketing and creating offers from Seth Godin:

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“Find 10 people. People who trust you, respect you, listen to you, or need you.

Those 10 people have what you need to create and sell.

Hear what they have to say, and create an offer for them.

If they love it, they’ll find 10 more or a hundred or a thousand, or just 1 more, either way, you’re winning.

If they don’t love it, then start over.

As your ideas spreads, your business grows with it.”

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It may not seem like they are paying attention to your content, but trust me, people are reading it and seeing what you’re doing.

And you might also feel like you’re not growing, but you are. You’re just too hyper-focused on what’s at hand.

Stop for a second. Zoom out. Do you see how far you’ve come?

This approach (of finding 10) changed how I approach offer creation.

I launched my first mentorship program because 10 people wanted me to mentor them.

And since people loved the mentorship, they referred others to me.

Once I couldn’t handle the demand I turned the mentorship into a digital product. That’s how I created The Modern Creator.

This is why I think us, smaller creators, have an advantage over bigger creators.

Big creators are like fast fashion stores (H&M, Zara, Cos).

They spend hours on market research, customer avatars, marketing, etc.

They’re trying to create a solution that fits all. They can’t launch a “yeah, yeah” offer. It HAS to be a great offer and it takes them months to launch it.

After all, they have a reputation to live up to.

But us smaller creators?

We’re like those niche boutique stores.

We custom tailor our offers based on the demand and the prospect’s needs and launch new offers overnight.

So if you want to create a successful offer, find 10 people first. Create a rough outline of a program and send it to them.

If they love it, you win. If not, try again.

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Hussain Ibarra.

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PS:

I’m thinking of doing a live workshop talking about writing engaging story-based emails that sell. If you’re interested reply to this email and tell me what are the biggest struggles you’re currently dealing with?

I’ll make sure to feature it in the workshop.

I’d love to hear from you.