[00:00:00] Tim Forkin: The numbers used in this video are estimates for an average creator business. HeyCreator insists you share more information in the comments. We will reply to them. In today’s episode, Matt and I are talking about the fastest ways you can make 10, 000 a month with newsletters, coaching, and more. Courses, all of that.
And I’ll pass it over to Matt now, who looks like he’s on the sideline of a football game. Matt, how are you doing today? Tim,
[00:00:25] Matt Ragland: Tim doing great. It’s a lot of excitement down here on the sidelines. The players are ready. They’re jacked up big rivalry game. Uh, but we’re excited to tell you about how to make 10, 000 a month with a few different types of businesses.
As creators, there are multiple ways that you can earn 10, 000 a month. And to be honest, what you’re going to see for most people is that there is a combination of different ways that you get to 10, 20, 30, 50, 000 a month in your business. And so take all of these and think about not necessarily how you can do all of One and only one, but what is the first one that you want to start with and how can you put different pieces of these business models into place as you grow your creator business?
[00:01:15] Tim Forkin: Newsletters. We do so much with newsletters. We have the newsletter agency. I’m going to kick it right to you. What is the fastest way to make 10, 000 a month with a newsletter?
[00:01:24] Matt Ragland: The fastest way to make 10, 000 a month with a newsletter is by using your newsletter to promote other opportunities, courses, coaching community that you have.
That is the fastest way to earn 10, 000 a month kind of through a newsletter. But earning 10, 000 a month with a newsletter does take a little bit more time because the main ways that people earn directly through a newsletter. There are a few different ones. The most popular and one that you’ll probably see the most are sponsorships.
And so if you’re talking about how can I earn 10, 000 a month with newsletter sponsorships and you send a weekly newsletter, well, that math is pretty simple. We’re talking about having a 2, 500 sponsor slot in a weekly newsletter. That’s 10, 000 for a month. And now while All of these numbers can vary based on different factors.
I would say based on my experience that you need 100, 000 subscribers, maybe 70, 000 at minimum, to earn that kind of weekly rate for a newsletter sponsorship.
[00:02:24] Tim Forkin: And sponsorships really are The only newsletter specific way that your newsletter makes money, but I want to stress something here. You mentioned a hundred thousand subscribers to get to that number for a weekly send.
You and I both know that it’s really hard to get to a hundred thousand subscribers on your list. And maybe most people watching aren’t even at a thousand subscribers. So we talked about the combination of how the different pieces, the newsletters, coaching courses, community, any offer can combine up to 10, 000 a month, but speak to.
How’d you get to those first thousand subscribers all the way up to a hundred thousand subscribers, because that’s like the missing piece here. It’s like, it’s the easy thing to say. It’s a simple way to explain it, but how do we actually grow our list to get to that number where this makes it viable to get the 10, 000 a month?
[00:03:11] Matt Ragland: It’s a really great point. What I focus on here is how to get your first 10 and that may seem like. A really small number when we’re talking about 100, 000, but who are 10 people that I can reach out to directly to subscribe to my email newsletter? And again, this may seem like very humble beginnings, but I can guarantee you that every single newsletter that’s been started starts from zero.
That’s just the nature of it. The person that I’ve been following that has had the fastest path on their way to 100, 000 subscribers right now is Chanel who runs a great newsletter called growth in reverse. And I believe she started in December, 2023. So she’s been going up. About no, December, 2022. So she’s been going about 18 months and she’s gone from zero to, I think she’s like 40, 45, 000 subscribers and she’s been growing pretty quickly.
So that’s 18 months to get halfway there. Now these things tend to compound. I don’t think it’ll take her another 18 months to get to a hundred thousand, but that should give you kind of an expected timeline for getting that number of newsletter subscribers. But getting your first 10. Even your first hundred is often direct outreach, and those are family, friends, uh, people that you have connected with that you might know who are interested in this thing, that you’re starting a business, that you’re starting to create content around.
And then social media is also a good place to start to get more visibility, more eyeballs. Uh, if you have a bit of a budget, you could run ads, or you could do something called, um, paid recommendations, which we’ll talk about next. But. Getting that first 10 and to that first 100 is often a lot of uh, grunt work And then you can ask people like hey, do you do you know anybody else you can ask for recommendations?
You can ask for referrals, but it’s often just uh, like being very proactive And asking people Hey, do you want to subscribe and saying like this is like just talking about the newsletter more and more that’s something that I don’t see people doing as much as I think they should, which is talking about their newsletter on social media, put it in the put it in the signature of all the emails that you send.
Maybe not if it’s good for your work, but any personal email that you send like Put a subscribe to your newsletter link there. So there’s a few different ways to go, but I will say like the first 10, the first hundred, even all the way up to the first thousand is, is a lot of, is a lot of hard work and is a lot of direct outreach, but it does start to like grow and build faster from there.
[00:05:28] Tim Forkin: Yeah. I would say the. thing that I didn’t know that I wish I knew when I started posting online is basically just plug my newsletter under almost every post that is any sort of like that pops off in any way, shape, or form. Like if five people like it, that’s enough eyeballs to, and you can see the views now on Twitter X, like how many people are seeing this post, like plug your newsletter below it.
I wish I would have known that Your email list, growing your list does wonders for all of the other parts of your creator business. And having that, having that focus on growing your list, like allows us to talk about the other things, the courses, the community, the coaching. Um, it’s just, it’s just The most important, like, first step.
I made a video on my channel, like, the secret first step to growing your creator business, and it really is the list.
[00:06:17] Matt Ragland: Yeah, you make a really great point that, while newsletters may not be your fastest path to 10, 000 a month as a creator, it is the most important step that I think we’ll help you get to 100, 000 a year, 200, 000 a year, those multiple 10 figure months.
It’s all powered by the newsletter. So maybe it’s not the place where you make the most money directly through like sponsorships, recommendations, or even paid newsletters, which, which some people have, but it is the most important. Like. promotional channel, connection channel that you have to your audience.
[00:06:47] Tim Forkin: You’ve mentioned referrals, and that’s interesting to me. I really haven’t used that for my newsletter yet as like some sort of referral program or paid referrals. Tell me more about how creators like me, like you, like anyone can grow their list with referrals. recommendations.
[00:06:59] Matt Ragland: Yeah, it’s really interesting because the paid recommendations piece is something that Sparkloop and ConvertKit and Beehive have all promoted in the past year and basically what it is.
So let’s take a Sahil Bloom for example, or our mutual friend, Tim Grahl and his business story grid. So if you choose to like recommend people on your list. To saw hills to Tim’s to literally thousands of others and those people sign up and convert that means like they stick for more than two weeks, then you’re going to get paid like two or 3 and that adds up.
So if I recommended like 100 people go to like sign up for story grid or saw hills newsletter, the curiosity chronicle, then I’m going to make a couple 100. Uh, this month and I could do that no matter the size of my list, no matter the number of people. Uh, so this is, this is something that I’ve seen more and more people do as a monetization strategy because like there’s no, there’s no entry point.
There’s no barrier to entry, I should say, to, to doing this. Uh, you could do this on the other end as well. If you’re thinking about like, Hey mate, do I have a little bit of a budget to grow my newsletter this way? Also, that’s something that, uh, people, people are doing to try and get their newsletter in front of people that may not see it is by doing the same thing.
Like, Hey, I’m going to spend a couple hundred dollars this month, uh, allowing people to recommend their newsletter to me as well.
[00:08:21] Tim Forkin: I hope all of this really stresses the importance of growing your list. Again, this is something that I really wish I would have known as a creator, you’ve seen how growing your list allows you to do wonders both financially and with your content, your reputation, if you prioritize growing your list, because honestly, without your list, you probably can’t get to 10, 000 a month with your newsletter.
[00:08:46] Matt Ragland: As a creator, one of the most important things I’ve learned is that it’s impossible to be on this journey alone. I needed other creators in my circle. for accountability, for support, to learn from and to grow with. And this is why we started the HeyCreator community. It’s a place to connect with like minded creators, to follow a proven roadmap of success and get the support you need to build your creator business.
For more information, just go to heycreator. com slash community.
[00:09:16] Tim Forkin: All right. Coaching. 10, 000 a month with a coaching product. And honestly, this is the fastest way of any of the ways we’ve talked about to get to 10, 000 a month. If you have two clients at 5, 000 a month on retainer, that’s 10, 000 five clients at 2, 000 a month. And those are really the only numbers that really matter.
Truly makes sense because coaching tends to be a high ticket offer. Matt, tell us more specifics on how we can get to 10, 000 a month with coaching.
[00:09:44] Matt Ragland: Yeah, you nailed it with the like financial reality of it, that it’s way easier to find two or three clients that you can charge several thousand dollars to per month instead of trying to sell even.
10 10 spots of 1, 000 course, and it’s kind of hard to sell 1, 000 course for 100 course. It’s easier to sell, but then you have to sell 100 of those. And if you only have, say like 100 email subscribers, I can just tell you, you’re not going to convert 100 out of 100 to get to that 10, 000 a month mark. And so the fastest way to a 10, 000 month is with coaching clients.
And the thing that you have to focus on here is what am I really good at? Like, what is my clear delivery of expertise and focus your content, focus your distribution around that expertise that can be on YouTube. It could be on Twitter X. It could be on LinkedIn. It could be on Instagram. It could be on tech talk, but make sure that you have.
Like that distribution and that content and that purpose that is around the expertise that you have. That way you can get people into a newsletter funnel and continue to show them that you know what you’re talking about. You can show them clients that you’ve worked with. You can put them into a series where they’re getting testimonials, they’re getting examples, they’re getting worksheets from you.
So this is a way that you can. Talk about your expertise day after day after day and be able to cultivate those relationships and turn those into coaching clients with your email newsletter. That’s why we talk about email newsletter first, even though it isn’t the fastest way to make money directly.
But it is the most effective and most important way. And we’re seeing this in like the truest sense with coaching. This way you can cultivate and develop those potential clients that you’re going to work with at a higher ticket offer.
[00:11:30] Tim Forkin: Yeah. I want to hit on something that you said at the very beginning there about.
Your coaching offer is the thing that you are truly an expert at. And I’ve found with this is that the easiest thing is like, what are people commenting, replying, texting you after a call with them? Even if you’re just doing it for free to start off, what is the thing that you are actually helping people with?
Because I know that like, I think I’m good at certain things. I think I can help people with things. But until someone tells me, Hey, Tim, you helped me with this. You’ve helped me go from this to this. Whatever that A to Z trans transformation is that you are making for someone else. That is very clearly what the offer to build it around.
And if you can nail it for one person in their situation, there are at least four more people in this world that you can do that for as well. And that’s the easiest way. Like we talked about getting 10, 000 a month is Can you help five people at 2, 000 a month solve this specific problem that they’re having?
And whether they stay for multiple months or you have to get new clients in the door, if you’ve proven you can solve this problem, the money takes care of itself.
[00:12:35] Matt Ragland: Yeah. And you have to think about how important and how valuable is the problem that you’re solving. Like that’s, that’s important. Uh, like we can talk about creator coaching and email marketing and course launches, those for the right people are pretty valuable problems to solve, because if I can coach someone through their course launch for three months at 2, 000 a month, well, yes, it’s going to cost them 6, 000.
But if I’m coaching them to a 30, a 40, a 50, 000 launch or more, then that’s a really clear ROI for them. Especially if they’re not like. Getting super stressed out about the process and wondering, am I doing all the right things? Is my funnel set up in the right way? And so making sure that you have like that expertise that has a very like clear, uh, value proposition and a return on investment for your clients, that’s going to help as well.
And in a really important way.
[00:13:27] Tim Forkin: Yeah. Can we get in the weeds for a second? Yeah, let’s,
[00:13:29] Matt Ragland: let’s, let’s weed it.
[00:13:31] Tim Forkin: The question I might have is like, okay, I’m good at this thing. I can help people with this thing. People have told me I can help them with this thing, but like, I don’t What’s next? Do I need a landing page?
Do I need to do some cold DMs? Like, what would your strategy be to actually get these clients to get through that 10, 000 a month mark?
[00:13:45] Matt Ragland: Yeah, I would do both of those things, landing page and DMs as soon as possible and kind of do them in tandem. I will say like. The thing that we’ve talked about a lot on this channel, on this podcast is that you need to take action and you need to be willing to put yourself out there and work with people.
We’ve been talking about it with newsletters, like the first 10, the first hundred subscribers that you get are probably going to be the outcome of a lot of cold outreach. Now with coaching clients, like you’re going to, they’re going to want to see something. So you do need a landing page, but it doesn’t like necessarily need to be this super nice thing.
I have booked coaching calls. On a Google doc, I have booked coaching calls on a notion page. It took a while. I was doing like pretty well as a coach before, like I had a website or even a web page dedicated to my coaching services. And so that is something that like you can do in tandem. Because anyone who you sign as a coaching client is going to say like, Hey, who have you worked with?
Or what are some testimonials? What’s the outcome? What are you really working on? Um, what can I expect? Those are all things that a potential coaching client is going to want to see. So you do need some kind of landing page and you are going to need to do outreach through cold DMS, not the kind of like Twitter X, LinkedIn domains where like you have, you Questionably real people that are just diving into your unsanctioned DMS and just kind of offering you all the things go back and listen to the episode with Cody and Cole Hock about cold emailing and cold outreach.
Those guys are doing it the right way and it’s something you can follow, but you’re going to have to hustle to get there, but you do need a landing page so they can see what you’re about and you are going to have to hustle through doing direct outreach to people who you think could be a good fit.
[00:15:23] Tim Forkin: Yeah, I mean, it gets to the point where.
Like you can very easily qualify someone just by being like interested in them on social media. Right. That, that’s like the other piece is like. If someone, we talked about this with Cody and Cole, if someone follows you, they seem interesting and actually seem like a fit, like you’re not being salesy.
You’re actually helping them by like providing the opportunity to be a client of yours as a coach, right? It’s not like click baity or salesy or like scummy in any way. Like if you actually see someone you can help, like you are. You have all like the green lights in the world to actually go help people online that you see, as opposed to just strictly playing a numbers game and messaging thousands of people in hopes to get to that 10, 000 a month mark.
[00:16:03] Matt Ragland: Yeah. So I have a perfect case study for this. It actually just happened. I’m just about to close, close this deal, knock on wood, just about to close this deal for a new coaching client. And. Here’s the thing. Like this person has been on my newsletter. This person has been following me on LinkedIn. So they have like an understanding of what I do and how I can help.
But here’s where it really like went to the next level. This person was saying, I noticed that they were like, Hey, I need some feedback on this landing page that I have. And so I went to the landing page and I recorded a five minute loom. Saying like, Hey man, I would fix this. I would move this here. This is too wordy.
You can get rid of this. Don’t worry about this form field. You shouldn’t have this link to another page. Do these four things and you’ll increase conversions. That’s the kind of cold DM where like this person was familiar with me, but it was that they’re like, Oh my gosh, this is just what I needed. I know we’ve talked about coaching a little bit in the past.
I’ve seen you offer it. How do we get started? That is something that, you know, cultivated. Build an awareness build a sense of trust provide value through just like, uh, you know, regular regular public content But then like deliver something really specific and helpful From seeing his landing page to recording the loom to sending it to him 10 15 minutes tops and it’s going to turn into a multi thousand dollar coaching program,
you know Those awesome. HeyCreator newsletters that go out once or twice a week the ones that sign off from me Matt Ragland? Well, I’m not really writing those, not directly anyway. The reason those newsletters sound so much like me is because they’re coming directly from the Back Catalog of Content, and I have the team at Automatic Evergreen to thank for that.
They research, write, edit, and send weekly newsletters all the time. On our behalf so that I can spend more time on the podcast and more time in the community. If you’re looking to send high converting newsletters that make you money, you can book a call at automatic evergreen. com.
[00:18:03] Tim Forkin: All right. The fastest way to 10, 000 a month with courses, Matt, we talk about courses all the time. We’ve launched our own courses. We’ve launched courses for clients and courses. So, as, as I’m sure you’ll, you’ll tell us have the highest upside. You can jump way past 10, 000 a month with courses, but first, how do we get to that number?
[00:18:22] Matt Ragland: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to think about courses in two different ways. So what most people are used to when it comes to courses is the traditional, like say quarterly or every six months, or maybe even just once a year, like course launch model, you build to a course launch, you send it to the entire list.
You’re going to do a cohort. There’s an event aspect to it. So. I want to like make people think about the way that you normally consider courses may not be in the like month to month sales and more of like an average over like three to six months. I made this mistake when I first became a full time creator because I had a course launch in And my, my goal was 10, 000 a month.
And the first launch that I did, I made 35, 000 in January. And I was like, man, off to a great start. Then I didn’t launch anything really in February. And I did like a little coaching program in March. And then all of a sudden I was like, Oh, I really need. This April launch to go well and it did not go as well as I wanted it to.
And so then all of a sudden that 35K launch followed by, I think it was a 5K launch in April. Now I’m like, Oh, I’m way off my 10K month. So it’s important to think about if you’re doing like an event based like launch calendar type of schedule for your courses. Make sure you’re kind of like averaging that out when you’re thinking about what if you can get to 10k a month.
The other way to think about this, and it’s kind of similar to what we were talking about with coaching is the fastest way to 10k a month with courses is to offer expensive courses. So one way to actually think about this to connect coaching and courses together. If you’re doing a higher ticket, say Two or three or 5, 000 coaching program.
What are the common threads with your coaching clients that you could turn into a group coaching program that you turn into kind of like a course. We’ve talked about this with the seven steps to seven figures. We’ve talked about this with kind of like the Hershey kiss model, the top down approach of start with high ticket coaching and move further and further down until you’re doing courses and you’re doing more templates.
So those are other things that we can talk about, but when it comes to 10 K month, Courses, make sure you’re averaging everything out, and it’s probably going to be helpful at the beginning to think about what’s the highest ticket version that I can do, because it’s, again, it’s probably going to be easier to get 10 people to pay you for a thousand dollar.
Group cohort model course that it is to find 50 people who are going to pay you for a 200 course.
[00:20:52] Tim Forkin: So I want to back up just for a second with these courses. I want to emphasize that they are being launched through the email list. I’ll tell the quick story of how we had a client do 100, 000 in a weekend and 95 percent of the sales came from their email list and they have 100, 000 Twitter followers.
So their email list is pretty big and that was enough to push them over this 100k mark, but 95 percent of the sales came from the list and not from social media. That’s a common misconception about courses. That’s the first thing. The second thing, understanding the conversion rates of that list, right?
So obviously we’ve talked about. The more subscribers you have on your list, the higher revenue numbers you have because there is a certain conversion percentage of the list, right? Because you can’t expect 100, 000 people on your 100, 000 person list to buy, right? It’s just completely unrealistic. It’s unrealistic to expect for 50 percent of your list to buy.
So Matt, I want to talk about a little bit, these conversion percentage numbers, because I want to know what’s an actual, like, percentage, uh, that might convert depending on the price of the product.
[00:21:55] Matt Ragland: Right. Yeah. Thank you so much for backing, backing me up there. That’s very true. And, you know, like we say at the disclaimer at the beginning of these episodes, uh, these numbers can vary based on, based on a lot of different factors, but let’s say you have a hundred dollar course.
Well, to get to 10, 000, For a hundred dollar course, you need to sell a hundred of those. And we’ve seen that the conversion rates for something that’s like a hundred dollar course can be like in the seven to 10 percent range, possibly as high as like 12 to 15 percent, but it’s probably not going to be higher than 15.
In fact, that would be, that would be amazing to convert 15 percent of your list. The other little caveat to make for this is that often your very first like major launch Will be like for a lot of people it’s going to be the best launch because that’s when you’re true believers You’re super duper fans that will literally buy anything that you you put up That’s when like they’ll do their best buying But if we increase the price of things a little bit and say we go up to two hundred dollars Well, if we’re going up to two hundred dollars, then 50 people to buy Well, then that is probably more in like Where the 100 might be a 10 percent at most on average, the 200 is probably more like 7%, okay?
So you want to just, if you have a thousand subscribers, you can expect probably about, uh, 70 of them to purchase. Now, let’s go up even further, that 500 price point. And if you go like even higher than this to say like 1, cohort program, you’re probably looking at something in the 2 to 3 percent range. In fact, this is something that we’ve seen with a lot of our clients, um, that we’ve worked on courses with, and we’ve worked on courses with bullet journal and Dan Go and a bunch of other bunch of other folks is that there’s.
Surprisingly, not a huge difference in conversion between like a 500 product and 1, 000 price point. Definitely don’t get half the conversion. So it’s like, there’s something about, we’ve talked about this on the show, there’s something about that 300 to 500 range that I think is going away. It’s hard to sell in that, in that range.
So if you went up to 1, 000, I actually think that you’d make more money. If you, if you went out there, but you’re probably looking at like a two to 3 percent conversion rate.
[00:24:09] Tim Forkin: Let’s go through a checklist of how someone could launch a course offer properly. Because we’ve talked about this growth. We talked about conversion percentages, but like what actually goes into selling the course.
So first, obviously audience and list size, but the second one, all of the questions that pop up, how long should my course be? What should I charge? Where do I host the landing page? Everything like that. What’s the next step? I know I can help someone and I have an audience to do it. Now, how do I structure it, package it and sell it?
[00:24:39] Matt Ragland: Yeah, I’ll say right at the top is that we do have a course launch blueprint, uh, course course about a course that you can buy as a part of HeyCreator. You also get access to it in the HeyCreator community. But the very first thing that I would do is just put a newsletter. Style landing page up, something simple, something you can do in 30 minutes, an hour at the most to start collecting specific emails for your course waitlist.
These are going to be the people that even though we might say 10 percent of your list overall would convert for a waitlist. Specifically, that number goes way up. You might get 25 to 30 percent of a waitlist to convert. So we want to start gathering in And being specific about the subscribers, the followers, the fans that you have that are interested in this course that you’re about to develop.
That’s the, that’s the very first thing is to build a waitlist. And you can do that with a really simple like newsletter style landing page. You can do it in ConvertKit. There’s a bunch of other tools, but that’s, that’s step one. Build your wait list.
[00:25:37] Tim Forkin: Can you walk me through the other things like quickly?
Like I know I need a landing page. So we’ve talked about that. Like how do I write like a sales email sequence or like, how do I get people to be affiliates for my course? Right. I want to sell more. I want to exhaust every opportunity I can to make sure this course launch goes well so I can get to that 10, 000 a month mark.
What would you like suggest there?
[00:25:58] Matt Ragland: Yeah. So after the wait list, then I would start building, building the course itself. And again, a lot of variables that can go in here, but usually I look for a course that’s 10 to 15 lessons. And then I’m thinking about what is the transformation that my customers, that the people going through the course can expect.
And the other thing that I’ve been thinking about, and you can go back to our episode with a Billy Broas about this thing about like sales arguments is what kind of beliefs. Do my potential buyers need to have in order to convert them to the sale? So there’s a good resource that we can, we can share in the show notes in the description to kind of walk through this.
But those are the things that I’m thinking about. And then in terms of the sales emails, often you should write more sales emails than you expect, because I’m guessing that probably what you’re thinking is one, maybe two sales emails. When in fact, you probably need to write like, Six, eight, maybe even 10 sales emails in order to like get the number of conversions that you’re looking for.
Now Keep in mind, the waitlist is really important here, that you want to send the majority of those emails to people who are on your waitlist, or if they joined like say a launch webinar that you had. And the other thing that’s important to do is to, like, use these opt out links. They’re easy to use in a tool like ConvertKit where you just have a little, like, not unsubscribe, that’s important, but a little opt out link that says at the bottom, Hey, if you’re not interested in this promotion at the time, click here and we’ll take you off the promotion list.
And that’s just a link trigger and convert kit. It’s getting in the weeds a little bit. But like I said, we go through this a lot in very, very fine detail in the HeyCreator community and in the course launch blueprint, uh, that you can, that you can get from HeyCreator.
Thank you for listening to the HeyCreator podcast. This show was produced by Tim Forkin and would not be possible without the The support of our incredible team at HeyCreator and the HeyCreator community. Make sure you connect with us on all of the socials at HeyCreatorHey, and for more information on our company, go to HeyCreator.
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