The real shift comes when you make your first $ or £ online.

It’s a game-changer, especially if you’ve only ever generated income from a 9-5 job.

In this Part we’ll cover getting the our first dollars in.

Let’s get started:

Low volume

At first your audience numbers will be low. That’s because we all start at zero.

In effect this limits what income sources we have access to.

This is simple mathematics. And it makes our choice of revenue paths much simpler.

For example, affiliate marketing. In affiliate marketing we get paid a % of a sale. I can for instance drop a link in here to an Amazon book I recommend. You’d go to Amazon and buy the book for $10. I get a small cut, let’s say $1.

This sort of revenue stream only works with volume.

Let’s say I have 1000 followers and 1% buy. That’s 10 sales and $10 for me. Not really worth it.

If I have 500,000 followers and hit that 1% then suddenly I get a $5000 pay day. That’s interesting.

But it relies entirely on volume. And when starting out that’s what we don’t have.

Realistically this removes the following revenue sources:

• affiliate marketing

• advertising revenue (ie. Youtube Ads)

• sponsorships / paid placements

• CPC deals (where an advertiser pays you for clicks)

• and any model that needs volume

If volume is (initially) off the table we need to focus on quality not quantity.

Best early doors play

With small audience numbers your time is best spent deploying a service.

If you’ve read other Prompt Playbooks you’ll know I generally recommend service as your early offer. The main reason for this is that it’s a way to get paid whilst learning more about your customers.

We are getting paid to work one on one with them. To get to know their problems and challenges. And to help them overcome said challenges. We’re getting paid to do market research basically.

I’ve written a whole Playbook on developing a service offer — this is part 1.

The basic play though is connected to what we’ve been covering about content marketing.

Remember, you are producing content that is connected to your audiences problems and challenges. That’s what has got them to follow you and show and interest in what you do.

So our service offer will align with this. Our service will help them to solve the problem with your assistance. Sounds simple - but people forget this alignment!

This also works because services are higher priced than products. So you don’t need many clients to start bringing in cash quickly. It’s the fastest way to convert attention into cash without spending lots of time developing products.

In terms of “logistics” keep it super simple. Don’t build your own website or hire an expensive designer to create it for you. Use an off-the-shelf tool for now just to get rolling.

I personally use Topmate for services. Here’s my profile so you can see the basic setup: Topmate. Calendly is also fine. Don’t sweat the platform itself - they are much of a muchness.

Roll into products

Once you’ve provide services to a handful of clients you’ll see the same handful of problems coming up again and again.

These are the problems you want to build digital products around.

We don’t just build digital products around whatever we think will be useful. Because we don’t know. We instead follow the lead of our actual customers and their problems.

Building (good!) digital products takes time so it’s important we get this feedback first. Otherwise we will waste a lot of time.

Again I’ve got a Playbook on digital products. Here’s part 1 if you need a detailed step by step.

I’d recommend this flow:

Checklist or Quick reference guide > Notion document or PDF guide > Video course

Again, dealing with the same customer problem but in more detail and with more support at each level. And each at a higher price point.

Then you slot these products in underneath your service as your entry offer.

For example:

1. $10 Checklist
2. $50 Notion document
3. $200 Video course
4. $300/hour service

This becomes your core funnel. You’ll be adding more to it later (we’ll cover this amongst other topics in the final Part).

In terms of delivery again keep it simple. I personally use Gumroad for most of my (low level) sales and product delivery. It removes a lot of hassle and again lets you get started ASAP.

This 1-2 punch of services then digital products, all focused on solving the same customer problems as our content marketing focuses on, is the foundation for the rest of our creator business.

In the next Part we’ll talk about other ways we can start to add revenue sources as our audience and business begins to scale up.