Read and Write with Natasha
This podcast discusses writing life, reviews books, and interviews authors and industry professionals.
Read and Write with Natasha
Mastering Solopreneurship With Ayodeji Awosika
In this episode, we focus on actionable strategies for aspiring writers and solopreneurs to thrive in the creator economy.
Author and solopreneur Ayodeji Awosika shares his insights on leveraging personal strengths, mastering marketing skills, and the significance of building an audience to achieve financial independence.
We discussed the following:
• Importance of aligning work with natural strengths
• The myth of the starving artist and the necessity of marketing
• Building a robust email list for direct audience engagement
• Discussing the realities of the creator economy and persistence
• Aiming for manageable financial goals like 20K a month
• Daily habits and practices that support long-term success
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Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time, happy reading, and happy writing.
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so like I have gotten to the point where I understand that and the thing is like anyone can do it. It's not that they can't, it's just only like it just tends to be only that 20 percent that seem to be willing to that get the 80 percent of the results. So I used to bump my head against the wall for the longest time and like try to convince and plead with everyone to get them to jump aboard. But like now it's gotten to the point where it's like if you're not motivated, then I don't want to work with you. Like if you're not, you're not already sold and predisposed to like wanting to do this, I don't want to work with you. And I feel like a lot of people should have a conversation with themselves and say like do you want to do this because you want to do it or because it's like the hot new, shiny toy of the creator economy thing?
Speaker 2:Hi friends, this is Read and Write with Natasha podcast. My name is Natasha Tynes and I'm an author and a journalist. In this channel I talk about the writing life, review books and interview authors. Hope you enjoy the journey.
Speaker 3:Hi everyone and welcome to Read and Write with Natasha. Hi everyone, and welcome to Read and Write with.
Speaker 3:Natasha, I'm very excited to have with me the author, ayodeji Awashika right 2.0. His work has been read by hundreds of thousands of people and he's been featured on top publications like the Business Insider, the Huffington Post and Thrive Global. He also has helped solopreneurs scale to 20k a month. Wow, I want to scale to 20k a month, but anyway, thank you so much for joining me today. I've been following your work everywhere on medium such such that, and I'm so excited for you to join. Thank you for accepting my invitation. So I um, I think first thing first is, you have a very inspiring backstory and I believe that's what inspired you to write these books. So, if you can tell us, and tell the audience, what are your books exactly about and what do you have to achieve or what's the message that you want to send, yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of my books, like a lot of my books, center around the idea of like aligning with, aligning with who you naturally are to figure out the kind of life you want to live Right. So, like in the destiny, I'll talk a lot about how to find your strengths, how to follow, like your natural inclinations, the things that you have been drawn to for a very long time, and just kind of riding the wave of things that you're already kind of predisposed to doing so that you can accomplish the goals of like having passion and everything like that. So, like a lot of people are trying to find this perfect life or this perfect passion, when really the reality is kind of you should find something that you have some sort of like natural level of competence in and then start building your life around that, and then that's how things get easier, that's how you get the career you want, how you have more confidence, how you build habits that spill over into like ancillary areas. Like for me, like writing was something that I knew I wanted to do from pretty much from like middle school, and I always kind of had like a a talent for it, I guess you could say, and pretty much it wasn't until then that my life improved, where, once I found something that it was easy, it was easier to stick with because I was naturally good at it. It was in line with what I really wanted to do, instead of what society wanted me to do or what my parents wanted me to do. Then it became easy right.
Speaker 1:So I pretty much before then I had been fired from like pretty much every job I ever had. I tried all these different ideas, businesses, little marketing schemes that never worked. But as soon as I found something that I was predisposed to being good at, then the habit stuck and I wrote one article 9 years ago and I've literally been writing every day since, from day one. I've never took a sustained break, unless I was 6. I've been writing every day for almost a decade and it's helped me make a bunch of. It helps help me make a lot of money, help me meet a lot of cool people, have an interesting lifestyle, don't have to work for anyone else, and it was all because I leveraged something that I was, that I was good at, and so like that's kind of the through line of like a lot of the different things that I write about is just mapping mapping your world around to the way that you're kind of already wired, instead of trying to fit yourself into somebody, a mold.
Speaker 3:That's just not a good fit for you so you're pretty much living the dream that many, let's say, full-time writing writers want to live. Right, you're, you're or aspiring writers. You're pursuing your passion and you're actually, you know, making a good. From what I'm seeing and you can correct me if I'm wrong is you're making a good income and you're helping others. Other writers scale to 20K a month, and so the idea of the starving artist. You definitely do not embody that. So, in a nutshell, what is your secret, what is the secret to your success that made you kind of defy the mold of the starving artist and live a comfortable life pursuing the passion of writing, which traditionally is not a money-making career? Great question great question.
Speaker 1:In two words, I would say sales and marketing. Um, so there is. I read. I read this booklet, one of my favorite books of all time. It's called rich dad, poor dad, by robert kiyosaki. It sold like 32 million copies, right, and in the book he part of the book.
Speaker 1:He's like having a conversation with this woman. She's a writer and she was asking him like how to become successful as a writer and he went on to this like long, like diatribe, about how you need to learn marketing and sales so that you could promote your book, package it properly, do all things like that. She kind of scoffed and was like yuck, like I'm a writer, like I'm not a marketer, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to cheapen myself. And then he stopped and he said it's called best-selling author, not best-writing author. So I think what happens to a lot of people is they just want to write. They basically just want to write. They want to write about whatever they want. They don't want to take into mind what the market is interested in. They don't want to take anyone else's views into account except for their own in. They don't want to take anyone other, anyone else's views into account except for their own. They don't want to market their work, they don't want to promote themselves, they don't want to build an audience around what they're doing. So they have that. They have eyeballs. They kind of just want to like sit in a corner and just write like these random essays and stories and then like, somehow they think money is just going to magically fall from the sky and it's not that way. You have to, be honestly, pretty aggressive about promoting yourself, whether that's publishing on different platforms, to build an audience around your writing so that you can sell something like a book. So that means being on Substack X. Linkedin Medium is where I really got my big break. You mentioned all these other different websites that I've syndicated my work on. So it really was me publishing stuff all over the place and then building a tribe of people who liked my writing.
Speaker 1:Another key thing getting people starting and growing an email list. I tell everyone who wants to make money Starting and growing an email list. I tell everyone who wants to make money pretty much doing anything online to start an email list, grow an email list. And the people who listen to me, some of my most successful students, the one who makes six figures all that they all just took my advice and they started building an email list. So the reason why the email is so powerful is because it's a place where's a place where you can kind of like direct, more direct communication with your audience, like when you're on social media, when you're on sub stack, like there's there's 9 000 different other writers flying across the feed where they could just see one of your posts and like just go right, but on email you can send it directly to them and you can use your email list to like your readers to know, like and trust you more and to do some of those persuasive things that get people to buy, like copywriting, like doing launches for your books.
Speaker 1:So, in terms of promotion, with each one of the books that I published so my first book I had no email list at all books that I published. So my first book, I had no email list at all and it was the least selling book. The second book I had a couple thousand email subscribers and I sent a fair amount of emails doing a promotion. So my third book I had a much bigger email list. I sent a ton of emails. I provided bonuses if you bought during the launch week and on the last day I sent 3, 4 emails.
Speaker 1:So some people don't understand. Let's say, you're launching a book, launching a product, whatever you might have to send 3, 4, 5, 6 emails on the launch deadline and people are really I don't know if it's afraid or resistant to promotion. But the people I know who are most successful in online business, especially like in the creator thing like you have to be a shameless promoter. You have to put yourself out there, like because you know more and more people are creating content every day. And it's like if you're not frequent and top of mind, then you're just, you're just going to be, just going to be kind of left in obscurity.
Speaker 1:So you have to, to some degree, you have to play the game right. So, like you might want to have well-crafted words, but, like if you don't have a good headline that makes people want to click on the post, it doesn't matter what you wrote. If the title of your book doesn't make people curious about it or the cover is doesn't make people want to open it. People judge books by their covers all those sorts of things. Even if you want to get picked up by a publisher, a lot of publishers won't touch you unless you have an email list with 10, 20, 30,000 people on it, because they know that you, as the creator, as the writer, need to have extra distribution, or else it's just going to be hard to get, like copies of your book or your products or anything in front of people um, I mean, I completely agree with what you said and I was one of the writers who made the mistake of I just I just wanted to write, keep me alone, and uh, I mean I.
Speaker 3:I suffered from that. That later in my game, I realized the importance of marketing and I'm in a situation where I'm scrambling for marketing advice, right, like if you see these books here. I'm trying to read books on marketing and follow creators. How did you teach yourself marketing? You're a writer. You don't have I'm assuming you don't have a marketing background. How did you teach yourself?
Speaker 1:marketing. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, a lot, a lot of different ways, like one, even though I dropped out of school, I did go to school for marketing for a couple years I ended up dropping out, but there I um actually worked in a marketing agency for five years.
Speaker 1:That was really helpful, and so I worked inside of a business where we were doing work for clients, like digital marketing stuff, social media, seo, pay-per-click ads, like I. I learned a lot just doing that. And then, like, as I was working there, it was like simultaneously, where I was working at this marketing agency and I was like starting to pick up with the writing thing, so like to get better at the job at the agency and for my business, I just started. I just started consuming like so much information, like a crazy amount of information. Like I have read hundreds of books, dozens of books on marketing, books on copywriting. I've taken courses, courses on copywriting, courses on writing blogs, courses on how to write and market and publish your book, courses on how to scale your income with info products, coaching on how to become a coach, like everything you name it. I've always like had some sort of like mentor or piece of information that was consuming. But I think the difference is like I would actually just go use the information, where I think a lot of people get stuck. They consume information but like they don't use it Right.
Speaker 1:So you know, alex Ramosi has a really good saying. He was like he defines. He defines. He defines learning as a behavior change, right. So like, if you consume a piece of information and then you do not change your behavior as the result of that information, then you didn't learn anything. It's like if you read a book let's say, for example, there's a lot of freelance writers out there Maybe you read a book and the book tells you, hey, in order for you to get clients, you should do outreach and reach out to companies. Well, if you read the book, nod your head and say, oh, that sounds amazing, but you actually don't go do the outreach, you may as well have not have read the book. You gained as much value by not having read the book at all. If you don't do the things that are in the book.
Speaker 1:The difference between myself and others is, if I read something in a book and there's a tactic to implement, I'm going to implement it. A book and there's a tactic to implement, like, I'm going to implement it, and I would read these different, like over time, like I would read different articles, and I was like, oh okay, do this like practice, how to write it practice how to write a headline. Here's some headline examples practice writing them every day. And that's one of my first. Like one of the first courses I took, one of the first guys I learned from his name was john morrow. He was like if you want to get good at headlines, practice writing them every day.
Speaker 1:I I've probably written like 20 000 headlines in my life right, I go, I wake up every single day and actually do them right. So where people tell me like and I'll pass that information out, well, hey, like you want to get better at writing headlines, practice writing headlines. And they say I'm really struggling with my headlines. And I'm like did you practice the headlines with like well, no, it's like well, okay. Then how are you going to get better? And I'm like did you practice the headlines? Was like well, no, it's like well, okay. Then how are you going to get better?
Speaker 1:And I think a lot of people in this creator economy, they just don't like they literally the threshold of like action and effort required of the creators, like most creators fall not even a little bit below the threshold, but like well under the threshold, like extremely below the threshold, where it's like if you want to get good at writing, you have to write like 100 blog posts before you're even like before you like that writing 100 blog posts gives you the point where, like you don't suck at writing anymore and most people like they want to write, they write five blog posts.
Speaker 1:They they're not getting millions of readers, they're getting mad at the algorithm, they're getting mad and saying it's just not working. It's like you're no, you're not doing the work and I think that it's really a lack of implementation. A lot of people like to, because you get like dopamine spikes from learning things right when you consume information. Like, oh, I just learned this, I feel, I feel like I'm doing something, but then if you don't do anything with the information, like I said, it's like you may well have, you may as well have not have done it at all. So I would tell people moving forward, like, instead of reading 12 marketing books, read one marketing book three times in a row and do every single thing that book says. Then move on to the next book.
Speaker 3:What are your favorite marketing books?
Speaker 1:I think for people who want to kind of monetize their knowledge, I would say Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson is a really good book. It walks you through step by step how to create a business that where you're sharing your knowledge with people, right? So, like a lot of writers, they like monetizing by taking what they're writing about and turning into like coaches, like coaching programs and courses and stuff like that. Well, expert secrets is like the like the absolute group blueprint to figuring out how to do that. So expert secrets by russell brunson would be really good. Um, also would want to read some books about copywriting. So you have, like you have to get good at copywriting is probably the most the most powerful skill for making money online period like, if you know how to write copy, like you'll never be broke. So I would say umvertising by Drew Whitman, copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards and Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman those are also good. So if you just read those books and then maybe the other books in Russell Brunson's trilogy or his com secrets, it teaches you how to build sales funnels, experts secrets and then traffic secrets. You just read those three books and read three copywriting books three times each and then implemented what they said and actually implement what those books said, you'd end up being more successful than most people on planet Earth when it comes to business. People just don't need that. You got to implement the information that you read, right? So if you're going to read a book about a funnel how to build a funnel well then you have to actually go in and build the funnel. You have to go build the funnel. If you read a book about here's how to write an email sequence, you then have to go and write the email sequence. If it says, all right, write these daily Seinfeld emails that tell a story and have a call to action at the end of them, you actually have to go out and write them and do that.
Speaker 1:If you read a book about how to go get leads and it says, for example, there's a book, $100 million leads Alex Ramosi Ramosi's books are pretty good too. Like he has a book, a book on offers, but in the in the leads book he was like if you like, this is for like, if you want to do a client based visit, if you're doing freelancing, whatever, maybe you're like, if you want to get leads, you should spend four hours a day where all you're doing is outreach, sending DMs, sending emails, trying to get leads. The percentage of people who are actually willing to do that, based on my decade of experience, is probably less than 1%, and that's why they're broke Because most people just don't want to do the things that are required of them to build a business and, like you, maybe buy a course from this person or you're reading about all the sexy creator economy stuff, like. I've been doing this for 10 years almost and I still don't feel like I know nearly enough or that my business is nearly where I want it to be, and I'm still working harder and putting more effort than some creators were in the beginning of their journey and they feel like they feel like entitled to. They feel entitled to results they haven't earned. It's like Charlie Munger has a great saying. He was like to get what you want, you have to deserve what you want, right? The world is not a society, is not a dumb enough place for you to just somehow get what you want. You have to deserve what you want, right? The world is not a society, is not a dumb enough place for you to just somehow get what you want without deserving it. And most people just don't. They just don't do what's required and it it can happen for you if you do the work. And also I would say, like, if you want to get good at, if you want to get better at business, you have to get good good at reverse engineering what other people were doing and then figuring and backtracking and doing your own version of that.
Speaker 1:A lot of people are like how do I come up with a business idea? Go, look at what businesses already exist and just copy one of them. That's the easiest way, because we're not trying to build venture-backed startups or anything like that. We're just trying to build coaching businesses, client-based businesses, service businesses. You can just clone that.
Speaker 1:You see someone else is doing a lead gen cold email agency. Start your own and just be better at it than they are. You see somebody's coaching about relationships. Do that Right. So, like everything, the answers are already up there. Podcast what do what are the most successful podcasters do? I would just go watch their interviews or watch their whatever concept they have about starting a podcast and just copy it and then, after that, like you will begin to, you will begin to add some level of nuance that comes from your own personal experience and like your various sources of knowledge and information, but I would say this is it's just's just the speed at which you execute new information will determine how long it takes you to be successful, and most people take forever to make decisions, and that's why it takes them so long to get where they want to be.
Speaker 3:So listening to you talk, I realize that you have a very special, highly driven mindset. How did you develop that? And when you say that some people refuse to do the work or are not willing to do the work, what made you have the mindset that you want to do that? What was the trigger?
Speaker 1:That's a great question that you want to do that. What was the trigger? That's a great question. I think that it comes from. I think it was because, again, like I mentioned earlier, when you find something that you're good at, you get like uh, you get a faster feedback loop right. So, like, for me, what happened and you know a good, a good chunk of this could have just been blind luck, right. So, like, I wrote an article for my friend's website. It did pretty good. Then I started finding other websites that I could post on. I started posting on Thought Catalog. One of the editors like took a liking to me and like started helping me with my writing. My articles were going pretty well over there. So it was like I was seeing feedback. I was seeing feedback that like what I was doing was getting results, and so it just motivated me to do the next thing.
Speaker 1:And then after that also, it was just like I would also say, a constant like brainwashing of myself, like through personal development content, like constantly learning new things and just always like trying to feed my mind with the, with new information and try to execute it. And then also, I think like I feel like I came up. I feel like I came equipped with like a pretty. I have, like I've always like a a natural disposition towards like being hyper ambitious, like I will. I'll admit that, like I feel like that was like part of that is just whatever genetic whatever, wherever it came from. But I feel, like my it kind of just like a perfect storm of like the pre-dest, like all the ways I was predisposed to want to do things. Cause like I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't be as motivated if I was doing something else. Like if I was doing, you know, if I was being like building out some accounting firm, like I probably wouldn't work as hard at that right. So, like the nival ravikant says, you know, find work that feels like play to you, so then you can out compete everyone. And I think that's been one of the keys.
Speaker 1:Like a lot of people, when they're when when they're trying to build up a writing career, it feels like work to them. It doesn't feel like work to me. A lot of people struggle to write. I don't. A lot of people get writer's block. I've never experienced writer's block like once in my life. I my life, I've always just had things to say. I've always had things to do so. I think that's why I think it's so important to find that lane in your life that kind of fits who you are and your personality like a glove. Then it'll be easier for you. So another reason why I might be more motivated, because I will admit, it is way easier for me to to write than I feel like it is for a lot of other people okay.
Speaker 3:So I'm gonna play the devon's advocate and I've I've been reading lately, and just some of the opinions of the, let's say, the naysayers or whatever, and they're saying you know, the creative economy is not going to last, it's just a fad, and the majority of, let's say, the solopreneurs, they're going to either realize that this is only a side hustle, it will never provide them with the full income, and eventually they're going to pivot towards something else. So, you know, as a solopreneur, as someone who helps solopreneurs, do you think it's sustainable what you and me and others are doing?
Speaker 1:I think that the greater economy, that solopreneurship, making money online, is going to be distributed like everything else has been distributed on the planet Earth ever. Okay.
Speaker 1:Meaning that, if you look at the way that an economy works, a small percentage of people make most of the money. If you look at people who publish books, a smaller percentage of people make most of the money. If you look at people who publish books, a smaller percentage of people get most of the results. So, like the, the fact that most people don't succeed in the creator economy is no different than the fact that most people don't succeed at any kind of business, so it's not something that's unique to the creator economy. So, yeah, most people are going to quit becoming creators and solopreneurs, just like most people start businesses and quit. Just like most people who say they're going to get in shape and quit. Just like most people who say that they're going to achieve their big goals and quit. I don't think it's a creator economy thing, I think it's a life thing. And quit. I don't think it's a creator economy thing. I think it's a life thing. I think it's that the vast majority of people, not just in the creator economy but in general, do not accomplish what they really set out to do with their life for whatever variety of reasons. And then there's that 20% of people who, through whatever mechanism whether it's the way they're naturally disposed to wanting to do these things. Something happens in their life that makes them just finally put their foot down. Maybe they they find some piece of information, some content, something that clicks for them and things change. But it's like this is just. You know, henry david throw I think his name is he said most people live lives in quiet desperation. It's like it's living, living under your potential of what you want to be in life. For most people is it's the rule and not the exception, and so I think like, if you want to, I I definitely saw myself that way too. When I would look up around other people, I always looked at myself as the exception to the rule, where I just felt like the attitude I kind of took was just like why not me? Me, you know, like everyone, like I see other, like there's other people doing this and they're just human beings like why can't I do it? And I just persisted enough and existed enough. But yeah, I mean, I make no bones about that, I have been doing this for 10 years.
Speaker 1:At this point, almost most, most people quit. Not only do they quit, they quit within not even months. It's like days to weeks. It's not like most, most of people that like take podcasts. I think they said there was like a statistic, only I think it was like less than less than 20 of podcasts make it more than like 90 days posting once a week. So it's just the way of the world, so like, and I think that people who would say things like the creator economy is dead, they're all there, they didn't, they didn't want to do it anyways, and now they're looking for, they're looking to absolve themselves of responsibility for the fact that they just didn't do the work.
Speaker 1:They want to blame the mechanism, they want to blame the creator economy, when the fact is, like the very definition, that if other people are succeeding in the creator economy and you're not, does that mean there's something wrong with the creator economy or something wrong with your strategy, right? So that's the way I look at it, where people want to like, throw stones at at the game, and then they, and then, and then, honestly, it turns like it turns some of them like bitter and all these things where they're just like all you have to be, you have to be a charlatan to succeed, you have to do all these gimmicks, and this is like no, you just have to like. You have to like write really good stuff and learn sales and marketing and exert a slightly above average level of effort, and you have to do it for a long time, a long enough time to get it to work. And I think I don't know some. Another thing I've, I wonder is this like if people come equipped with like an intuitive sense for, like an intuitive sets for how the creator economy works and like how to like for, just like, for example, like little things, like if you go on the timeline and you see that everyone out, like most of the other content pieces on there are like aesthetically pleasing with like line spacing, it should just kind of click in your head like that you should do that.
Speaker 1:And I've noticed for some people it doesn't. We're like, or because like even like the very first blog post I wrote. It wasn't good but I still understood like yeah, okay, like the post has to have a headline, like explaining what the post is about. It has to have an introduction and a couple sections and close, but then, like I'll see some people post like my cat Frida ran away and like that's the headline of the post and it's just like this gigantic wall of text with this rambling story, and like it literally does not occur to them that they shouldn't be writing stuff that looks that way, and so, like, like a blind spot there, and I have, and I, I will admit, like another admission that I'll make too is like, let's say, for like my programs, right, so like I have programs that help creators scale their businesses, I don't accept everyone into my program. I will look at some people and I will kind of get a read on them and I'll be like I don't think I can get you results, I'm not going to let you in. And so I'm cherry picking the students that I work with based on whether or not they've already they've already exerted some level of effort, right, I usually don't, like I stopped working with people who are like complete beginners.
Speaker 1:I would usually work with people who have a little bit of experience, or they or they either have like professional or professional experience, that from their careers that they can use. Like I'm not picking Jane Doe who says she has no clue what to write about and that she hasn't written a post in six months, and trying to help her start a business, because I don't think she's going to be able to do it. So, like I have gotten to the point where I understand that and the thing is like anyone can do it. It's not that they can't, it's just only like it just tends to be only that 20% that seem to be willing to that get the 80% of the results.
Speaker 1:So I used to bump my head against the wall for the longest time and like try to convince and plead with everyone to get them to jump aboard. But like now it's gotten to the point where it's like if you're not motivated, then I don't want to work with you. Like if you're not, you're not already sold and predisposed to like wanting to do this, I don't want to work with you. And I feel like a lot of people should have a conversation with themselves and say like do you want to do this because you want to do it or because it's like the hot new, shiny toy of the creator economy thing? Right when I feel like a lot of people.
Speaker 1:They're like oh, everyone's talking about this creator economy thing, therefore I should do it. Like, no, I like making stuff, so it makes sense for me. Like, so a lot of people. Some people aren't cut out to be entrepreneurs and their life would just be better if they got like a really good job doing something cool that they liked. And you know, use the excess money and bought index funds and got some real estate and you get rich that way. So, like I think that a lot of people are like oh, the creator economy, anyone can succeed in the creator economy. It's for everyone.
Speaker 1:I don't believe that and there's nothing wrong with whatever thing you decide to do in life. That's why I always tell people do what makes sense for you, based on what you're good at, what you like and how you want to proceed. So, like I see a lot of people. They're like oh, I like writing is like such a struggle I don't like. Like, why are you trying to be a writer if you don't like to write? Yeah, no, but why would you that as a career?
Speaker 1:if you don't, if you literally don't enjoy doing it. You know what I mean and it's strange that I find a lot of people who are in that situation. Like I have a lot of friends who are full-time writers. Nearly a hundred percent of them pretty much a hundred percent of them were naturally predisposed to writing. They like it, they had a tendency towards being prolific and like like it wasn't like pulling teeth to get them to write an article and they also had an intuitive sense of like what it looks like. But they just needed some practice and they need, and they had some talent like I've.
Speaker 1:Basically I've honestly never had a student take off who wasn't already doing something before they ran into me. Like the, the people who have who have been the most successful. They were going to be, they were going to be successful anyways. I just helped speed things up for them a little bit because I just knew some things they didn't. But yeah, I mean a lot of people. I'm on sub stack every day. I'm like talking to people, look at their profile, coming soon sub stack, coming soon, coming soon, coming soon. I'm like dude, publish, like I'll make something, something, put something out there, but like, oh, but I'm scared, but I'm scared of what there's. No, it's just people on a computer screen, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I feel like a lot of people get like too hung up on it's like it's not that serious, like just just post some stuff, man, you'll be fine, you're not gonna die so I'm gonna ask you a bit about your tagline, which is I'm gonna read it uh, I help solopreneurs scale to 20k in one month by that, by landing clients that paid them $2,000 or more, by creating offers that could be very good and writing that attracts the ideal clients. Okay, so why 20K a month? And why are you so confident of the number 20K a month?
Speaker 1:I just think it's like the number that is achievable if you reorient the way that you start your business and the way you focus. Most people they go after low priced opportunities where the math on how they're going to make money just doesn't make a lot of sense. Where you're like okay, if you're selling something for $100, so you want to even get to $10K a month with a $100 course, you're going to have to sell 100 people that course, not just that month, every single month. And then, if you do the math, that's only going to be a certain percentage of your audience that's going to take you up on that. Usually that's going to be a certain percentage of your email list and then usually that email list is going to be a certain percentage of the actual traffic you're getting, and so you're looking at having to build a pretty sizable audience in order to reach those income goals. It's like a lot of the people you see now who are pitching like oh, just join the creator economy, just sell courses, blah, blah, you'll get rich. What they've for what they don't not say I'm doing on purpose. What they fail to mention is that most of them started off doing done for you services or coaching and consulting at high prices, because the math is just easier, right? So if you can get people to pay you $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month, or you're collecting chunks of payments of $5,000 at a time, $10,000 at a time, it's a lot easier. You can build a business that does those numbers $10,000, $20,000 a month where you are only working with a handful of people.
Speaker 1:And so, like I learned this the hard way really, because the way that I got to 20k a month originally was writing articles on medium. I was publishing books, mainly those two, but like I didn't had to do so much, like at the height of my, at the height of my prime on medium, I was writing 40 articles a month, 42 000 word long articles a month, 40 brand new ones. It's a lot, right. So if, instead, I would have just packaged up what I knew in, either turning it to a coaching offer, or went and did freelance work where it's like, oh, instead of doing a bunch of articles, you could have, I have a student who has a client who pays her five grand a month just to write a couple articles a month. So there are people, there are certain companies, so it's like, really, there's like a small percentage of people whether it's your audience, whether it's businesses who are willing to pay 5, 10, 20 times more than what everyone else is paying. And so if you build a business where you focus on helping those people, then you can reach your income goals faster.
Speaker 1:And I also like the number 20K, because life gets better at 20 grand a month. That's like the number where, like, you can start to like spend a little frivolously, like you can, kind of you can go eat dinner, you can go eat dinner or can go eat dinner wherever you want and just kind of cover the bill. You can take a couple vacations a year, you can have a nice place to live, you can have a nice car and you can still save money. So once you get there, once you get the wrong 20k a month, it's kind of where, like, you start doing things where people it's not normal right. So I remember one time, um, I had some friends and they wanted to go golfing and I'm like, oh, I don't have any golf clubs.
Speaker 1:And they were like, oh, yeah, you could just use ours, that's fine. So I pulled up. I was like, nah, forget it, I'm, I'm going to start taking golfing seriously. So I just went to. I just went to the store and just bought a set of clubs and I showed up with them and they were like they're like, you just bought some. You just bought some golf clubs. It's like right now. I was like, yeah, you said we were gonna go golfing, right. They're like what?
Speaker 3:you just bought you just you, just you.
Speaker 1:Just you just dropped hundreds, hundreds of dollars on these golf clubs out of nowhere, like yeah, what are you talking about? What's the problem? They're like that's not normal. So one more like those like little, just stories of like random things where I'm just like I eat takeout, like I eat takeout every day. I don't cook groceries, I don't. I don't make food at all. I'll eat takeout every day. I have a maid that comes and cleans my place for me. I have people other, I have someone who comes to do my laundry for me or see, like, at those sorts of levels you can do some of those things.
Speaker 1:Like you can start delegating out and delegating out stuff that you don't want to do. You have extra breathing room to do things you like. Right, you know, drive a nice little vehicle, right, have a nice little place, nice stuff, camera equipment, tvs, laptops, all this, all this stuff and it's like it's it's kind of that number where you can you know you can't be crazy with your spending but if you get like 20k a month and you can live a, you can live a, you can live a decent life and like kind of take advantage of the things you want to have and also like the experiences you want to have, like travel or going to see shows or whatever. So I think that's a good. That's when I because that's when I noticed personally that I started to feel like maybe I have a little bit of money is what I was getting at that point what's your day-to-day like?
Speaker 1:that's a good question. So usually I wake up. Usually I wake up and I'll write for about two hours. So, whatever it may be, I might be writing an email to my list, social media content, stuff like that what, what, what time do you start the day?
Speaker 1:I'm just curious usually I usually wake up around six or seven. Then I kind of loaf around okay, I'm kind of lazy getting out of the house. It usually takes me like I've been trying to figure out how to shorten this, but usually takes me like an hour to just get up and get out of my house. I like to go work at coffee shops. I don't work at home, I can't, I don't like it. So I go out to coffee shops and work. So usually for like usually get there around eight, not right for like two hours.
Speaker 1:After that I'll go check in with my like checking in my community, see if there's things students need help with. So I'll usually spend like a half hour doing that. Then for maybe like another two hours, I'll go online and engage with people, send them DM and stuff like trying to close clients. So, like I, I do that, like that's the. That's one way I close clients a lot. It's like reaching out to people, sending them messages and stuff like that. Then, like in the afternoon, I may have things like I might have. I might have coaching calls with students or might have sales calls. Somebody wants to join.
Speaker 1:So yeah, this was like usually. It's like usually my days are about, I'd say probably about six hours, six hours long, sometimes more though. Six hours long, sometimes eight, sometimes sometimes 10 or 12. If I'm over I'm gonna overdrive and doing a launch or something, but I usually like to keep that sweet spot of like. The actual work I'm doing is usually about I work a regular schedule, let's say like six, six, eight hours a day, for sure what good habits have you succeeded?
Speaker 1:let's see reading huge like if you want to be a writer, you have to read a lot. It helps you understand different writing styles, gives you different information, and one thing you should do is like read, read outside of your niche, right? So like I didn't just read personal development books. I write, I write, I write books about like pop psychology books. I read books on like probabilities and statistics, books about biology and um evolution, history books, biographies of random people, like. So like, if you kind of I should read more fiction, by the way, I'm gonna start reading fiction, I'm gonna start reading novels soon, um, but if you kind of like collide your brain, so like there's this quote I think his name is murakami or something like this. He's like if you read the same thing, to read the same things everyone else does, you're gonna think the same things they do.
Speaker 1:So I think like everyone reads the same sort of like cookie cutter, airport books, like atomic habits and subtle art of not giving a fuck which those are great books, by the way.
Speaker 1:I've read all great books, but like you shouldn't only read those books, like read stuff outside of those books, because that way you don't sound the same as everyone else. You need different sources of information and so like I am like me, like I'll read stuff from people like, uh, like nassim taleb and like charlie munger, and like I'll read, like shareholders, letters from warren buffett and corporate memos from jeff bezos, like all these random things that, like other people probably aren't reading, and so that helped in like give me some ideas that were like a little like ideas and style that was like a little bit unorthodox compared to what someone was doing, and I think that's also a big reason why I was able to stand out, because they were basically all just kind of like cloning the traditional self-improvement topics and like writing style, and so I kind of like cross-pollinated a bunch of different styles and kind of helped me stand out great.
Speaker 3:So, before we conclude, if somebody tells you I only have time, I'm a writer, I only have time to really focus on one platform, one social media platform, what would you tell them?
Speaker 1:If they're a writer not going to lie. I'm really feeling Substack right now. Okay.
Speaker 1:If they're brand new, because Substack has, like everything it has a short form feed or a social media feed, like Twitter. It has sort of like a blogging article, discoverability, like Medium, and it has a newsletter function like ConvertKit. So it has all of the things that you need in one place and it's very user-friendly. For those of you who are tech challenged out there, it's pretty intuitive to learn how to use. In all social media platforms there's a life cycle of organic reach where, if you go to a certain platform when it's newer, organic reach is higher, meaning that your stuff just gets distributed randomly for no reason, and then as platforms mature and algorithms mature, our organic reach tends to go down.
Speaker 1:And I still think Substack is on that upward trend of having discoverability and organic reach where, if you're a smaller account on Substack, you can just start posting stuff and there is some level of ability for people to sort of just magically find it to where, if you're on twitter, like, you have to engage with other accounts a lot to create fuel.
Speaker 1:Same thing, kind of, with linkedin, um, but yeah, I think, and especially like, if you want to go the route where, like, you just want to write, well, your best chance. If you just want to write and you don't want to go heavy into doing coaching and consulting and all that is, spend all your time on Substack, build a sizable audience over there and start a paid newsletter. And you can get a paid newsletter at $10K a month $20K a month, I've seen it, um, but you just want to dedicate all your energy to that and, like, really focus on mastering how the platform works. So I'd say, if you're brand new, I really like it as a platform for new writers for sure yeah, this is how we met, actually correct.
Speaker 3:Um well, this has been a Ayu. I learned a lot and I'm sure many people who are listening or watching are going to learn a lot from you, and thank you for your time and I will see you on Substack and, for anyone who is listening or watching, thank you for joining us for another episode of Lead and Write with Natasha and until we meet again, Thank you for tuning in to Read and Write with Natasha.
Speaker 2:I'm your host, natasha Tynes. If today's episode inspired you in any way, please take the time to review the podcast. Remember to subscribe and share this podcast with fellow book lovers. Until next time. Happy reading, happy writing.
