One high-leverage idea to scale your audience (and your business). Delivered every Tuesday.
Earn your first $1 online with this simple strategy
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We all love winning the game of attention, but revenue is the true lifeblood of any business. Views, likes, streams, and followers are important metrics—social proof matters—but too many creative people get stuck at this stage without considering how to monetize their efforts. Yes, you can make a little money from streams on Spotify and ads on YouTube, but if you want to convert your passion into purpose and your purpose into profit, you’re gonna have to sell something. This means creating a product or service that other people will pay you for. And then making sure they know about it. It’s a one-two punch. Here’s the basic framework. Step 1: It all starts with awarenessNo one will buy anything from you if they don’t know you exist. Now, odds are you’re already putting in the work to generate awareness for yourself or your business. This can look like regularly posting organic content, boosting posts, or using ads to send traffic off-site to someplace like Spotify or a landing page. Whatever the method, every effective sales funnel starts with spreading the word to new people and doing your best to remain top-of-mind for your existing audience. There is a lot of competition in the market, and marketing is a game of attention. So you have to play the game. If you’re not playing the game, your first step is to get on the field and start sharing what you’re doing online. Everything else comes downstream of this. If you are playing the game, congratulations, it’s time to move on to step two. Step 2: Capture your audienceAll that attention you’re earning does nothing for you if you can’t direct it toward the outcome of your choosing. This starts by differentiating the “warm” traffic from the “cold”. Put simply, a warm audience is comprised of people who know you exist, whereas a cold audience has never heard of you before. When you’re generating awareness in step one, you are pursuing a cold audience of people, working to pull them into your warm audience. The moment someone engages with your work—whether by viewing, liking, clicking, commenting, or saving—they self-select into your warm audience. We can take these people and pull them into a saved group (what Meta refers to as a “custom audience”) and retarget them with an offer of our choosing. This means every person we are targeting for a sale has opted into the process (i.e. our funnel) with their attention. When done correctly, no one will see a sales ad for your business unless they have chosen (through their own actions) to do so. This helps to remove the “spammy” feeling many associate with ads. It also creates an opportunity for you to find someone genuinely interested in what you have to offer and then delight them with the opportunity to solve their problem with your specific product or service. Everybody wins. Step 3: Craft an undeniable offerIf you want to make money, you have to give people something they want. The best way to do this is with a product or service that solves a problem or addresses a pain point in someone’s life. Of course, there are other revenue streams beyond that. Music, art, and entertainment of any kind are wonderful ways to generate revenue for your business. The value proposition for art is just a bit more esoteric than solving a specific problem and will likely take more effort to generate demand. Such is life. But regardless of your product or service, the best way to make the sale is to retarget your warm audience with an irresistible offer. Identify the need, create the solution, and then present it to the customer. The cheapest way to accomplish this is with organic content, which will, hopefully, be delivered to your followers (no guarantees, of course). A more reliable method is to use paid ads. But the most effective long-term solution is to build your email list. Either way, you’re presenting your product or service to a group of people who have already expressed interest in your brand (again, via their attention). If you can amplify this presentation by sweetening the deal with something like a discount or a free add-on, you may just end up with a home run. Need help implementing this strategy? Book a call with me. Want our team to do it for you? Learn more at DuPree X.
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The One Thing
One high-leverage idea to scale your audience (and your business). Delivered every Tuesday.
Many independent artists mistakenly believe they have to be great at a thousand things to succeed, but it’s really only three. Yes, it feels like you have to master everything from video editing to writing, to networking, and on and on, but that’s simply not the case. Most of the opportunities you’re looking for can be found downstream of nailing only a handful of high-value tasks that matter most. I believe that if you can master these three skills, the rest of what you might feel compelled...
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