What’s the difference between the writers who earn the big bucks like $10,000 per month and the ones who don’t? There are several, but honestly, they don’t have much to do with:

• Your natural talent

• Your IQ

• Your skillset

You’re smart enough to figure this out. It’s not your fault. You’ve just been given the wrong model, and you’re likely playing the wrong game.

Most Writers Are Playing the Wrong Game

I used to get high all the time.

Not on drugs, but on views, likes, shares, and engagement.

I remember when I first started posting articles in this online magazine called Thought Catalog.

My posts would get tens of thousands of views each. Every single morning I’d check the stats on my articles before I even wiped the crust out of my eyes. It was addicting.

Not figuratively addicting. Literally addicting.

Getting engagement on your work floods your brain with dopamine, so you keep chasing the high.

The only problem? Engagement isn’t a business. Eyeballs aren’t money. Likes can’t pay your bills. At least, not anymore . . .

I got lucky.

I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Medium had released its partner program that paid writers for engagement.

It was a brief window in time where you could get paid well just to write, which is every writer’s dream.

I was already on the platform when they released it, and I had 10,000 followers, so I went on to hit $10,000-$20,000 a month just through writing.

Unfortunately, though, that window has closed. Medium changed the algorithm, everyone’s earnings shrunk by 90%, and the royalty playbook died.

We saw the writing on the wall and built products and services to support our work.

I launched a productivity cohort, built courses based on my personal development books, coached people 1-on-1, and coached writers to improve their skills.

By the time the foundation of the royalty model collapsed, I had a different revenue stream.

So the window has closed, but we’re dealing with the residue of the golden era of Medium that leads people to believe in the royalty model even though it has several pitfalls.

The Substack Dream

Substack has fully supplanted Medium.

I remember hearing whispers about it back in 2022. A friend of mine told me to write over there because Medium was cooked.

Substack was built on a similar premise — write and get paid.

But things were a bit different.

With Medium, members just paid a single $5/mo subscription to read paywalled articles on the entire website, so you’d just write, and the more engagement you got, the more you got paid.

With Substack, you have to pay a subscription to every individual publication you want to read paywalled content from.

It tried to replicate the just get paid to write model, but the mechanism made it more difficult for writers to earn straight from words.

And on the surface, the model makes perfect sense.

Build an audience. Get a small percentage of them to pay. Make a living from your writing.

The problem isn’t the writers who believe in this model. The problem is the incentives underneath it.

Think about it. How many subscriptions are you willing to pay for at one time? 2, 3, 5? There’s an upper limit.

Which means every writer is competing for one of those limited spots in your budget.

In game theory, this can create a race to the bottom.

On Substack, writers don't necessarily compete by charging less—they compete by giving away more for the same price.

The individually rational move is to sweeten your subscription so readers choose you over everyone else.

But when everyone does it, the market resets its expectations.

What used to be a $500 course becomes a bonus for a $10 subscription.

What used to be paid coaching becomes an included community call.

Everyone works harder, customers expect more, and the effective price of expertise collapses.

You can make all the right moves and still be playing the wrong game.

Every individual decision makes sense. Of course you should give your subscribers more value. Of course you should make your offer more attractive. Of course you should look at what successful writers are doing and try to compete.

But when everyone makes the same rational decision, the economics of the entire market can get worse.

You can make all the right moves and still be playing the wrong game.

With Medium, you literally just wrote articles and got paid.

With Substack, you’re not just writing, but essentially operating an online membership community with products at a fraction of the price that you’d normally offer them.

And this is where a lot of talented writers get stuck, because they’re doing exactly what they were told to do.

Build an audience. Grow your email list. Create a paid tier. Convert a small percentage of readers into customers.

It sounds logical because it is logical.

The problem is that most writers never sit down and do the math on what the model actually requires.

At a 3% conversion rate from free to paid, you’d need 33,000 subscribers to hit $10,000 per month with $10/mo subscriptions, and that’s assuming you engineered your publication for paid subs from day one.

And even getting that many subscribers doesn’t guarantee you’ll get paid.

I personally know writers who have 10,000, 20,000, and 30,000+ subscribers who are nowhere near $10,000 per month.

These aren’t bad writers. They didn’t fail to work hard enough. Many of them successfully accomplished the thing writers are told is the hard part:

They built the audience.

The problem is that the business model requires more than just building an audience.

Capturing attention and turning it into money are two different skills.

I talk about how to do the second here:

If you build a big enough audience, it should convert into money.

It’s a little mind-boggling to believe you can have tens of thousands of subscribers and be broke, but it happens all the time.

If this is the model you’ve been following, I understand why.

It’s the model writers have been sold for years: build an audience, start a paid tier, sell some e-books and low-ticket courses, and eventually the numbers will add up.

Sometimes they do.

Often, they don’t.

I’m not trying to pour cold water on your dreams. I’ve just been doing this for a decade, and I’ve had enough time to see the difference between what sounds like it should work and what tends to work in practice.

So much so that I switched my model and how I taught my own clients.

It used to be so hard to get my writing clients to get major financial wins by playing the royalty model, the low-ticket model, the Gumroad e-book model, but when I switched to this model, some of the same writers I coached went from hundreds of dollars a month to $10,000+ a month because we played a different game.

Share

Make Money So You Can Make More Art

I learned this phrase from Jeff Goins, one of the OG’s in the writing online space.

Rather than being a starving artist who struggles to earn because they try to make their art their business. Become a business owner so you can make money that supports your art.

This is how writers have always done things. I remember reading a book called Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday where he talked about this.

Most authors, both self-published and traditionally published, sell fewer than 2,000 copies of their book.

So what did authors in the past do? They supported their work through things like coaching writers or pumping out pulp novels under a different name for cash grabs.

They created an architecture for revenue that supported the work they loved.

If you want to have the freedom, the joy, and the time to pursue your creative pursuits without all of the pressure of needing your words to pay your bills directly . . .

Build the business layer underneath.

I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just telling you what I’ve seen. As follows are all of the things the writers I’ve coached to $10,000 months had in common.

They sold products and services related to their writing that mathematically made sense

They start with 1-on-1 coaching priced at $2,500 to $5,000+ that helps deliver an outcome related to the topic they write about.

1-on-1 coaching is trading time for money, but it helps you collect large enough chunks of cash so you can create a full-time income.

After you hit $10,000 months you can move to coaching at scale, where you take the same insights from the 1-on-1 program and turn it into a group program where you go from multiple calls a week to one call per week with the group and handle the rest in the portal.

Then, as you build workshops, resources, AI prompts, GPTs, and guides to support your clients, you can sell those as your low-ticket products and then use those to create customers to support your high-ticket products.

That’s the path I teach that makes sense to me.

For you? The math has to make sense. I did make $20,000 per month back in the day selling nothing but self-paced courses, but they were priced at $497-997, so I could do a launch once a month and hit my income goals.

I’d advise against having your entire business model reliant on selling products that are less than $100 because that’s 100 new customers every single month.

I like the model I teach because it keeps you focused and the path to building a product ecosystem is smooth and simple.

You can try to build an entire product suite where you are horizontally building a set of related products that are low and medium-ticket, but it’s a tricky game to play — constant launches, email marketing wizardry, software mastery, copywriting, offer building.

Bottom line: the path to making $10,000 per month as a writer involves selling products and services that are priced high enough to make the monetization math make sense.

They understood this truth about writing topics

Writers get told some version of “follow your passion and the audience will come” all the time.

I wish business worked that way.

It doesn’t.

You can’t invent demand.

You can’t make people read writing they don’t want to read or buy products they don’t want to buy.

That doesn’t mean abandoning everything you’re interested in and chasing whatever makes money. It means finding the overlap between what fascinates you and what people already care enough about to pay for.

All of the writers I coached to $10,000 months met existing demand.

There was already a market for what they were writing about, and people were already buying products and services from writers in that market.

The good news? There is a wide range of markets and sub-categories, to the point where you can write about a topic that interests you and pays at the same time.

The three core categories to monetize are health, wealth, and relationships.

Underneath those categories are sub-categories.

Health examples:

• Nutrition

• Fitness

• Mental health

Wealth examples:

• Career advice

• Real estate

• Sales

Relationship examples:

• Marriage

• Dating advice

• Parenting

Then each subcategory has all types of different little pocket niches and themes:

Career advice can turn into industry-specific job search advice, like how to land a data analyst job, or it can become a process to take people through, like career pivoting, or it can be an upskilling model like AI for UX professionals.

Nutrition can go extremely narrow, like fixing Hashimoto's with gut health protocols, or dietitian advice for people taking GLP-1s. It can be broader, like holistic health. You can focus on the mental layer underneath, like emotional eating.

In parenting, you can help parents manage neurodivergent children, navigate parenting as a single parent, or even reclaim a relationship with an estranged child (a woman in a mastermind I’m in makes great money doing this).

It doesn’t have to be hyper niche.

It can be multipassionate so long as those passions are related.

If you’re a relationship expert who helps clients understand attachment theory, topics like nervous system regulation and mindfulness might be a good match.

If you’re a business coach, neuroscience relates because it can help people execute tasks, and public speaking might be woven in there because it’s a way to get visibility and bring in clients.

Where people get into trouble is trying to jam 17 wildly different passions into one business.

And I get why.

Curious people are interested in a lot of things. I’m the same way. But your business doesn’t have to contain every dimension of your personality.

Some of your passions can just . . . be your passions.

You don’t have to monetize every fiber of your being. When you make money to support your art, by the way, you have more time to just do creative stuff and enjoy your passions for the sake of them.

They built a marketing system that didn’t require them to be marketing geniuses

I’m a pretty good writer. I’m a mediocre copywriter. And I’ve been practicing it for years and have read dozens of books on it. Still doesn’t come naturally to me.

Copywriting isn’t intuitive for most people, so the type of writing you have to do to build a low-ticket empire is challenging.

Go study a post of a best selling Substack writer with a booming paid tier, above the fold, before the paywall, they write a bunch of bulletpoints that tease your curiosity and they know just how much to preview to hook you.

To sell low-ticket products, you need to have good copywriting in your emails, which you will have to write dozens of for a launch, to your landing pages, to your book titles, all of it. It’s a lot.

It’s a tough model to crack.

So if you’ve struggled to make this model work, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bad at business.

Look at what the model is actually asking you to become good at.

You need to become a good writer, copywriter, email marketer, product creator, offer builder, and launch strategist—all while continuing to grow your audience.

That’s a lot of skills packed into one business model.

I’d rather play a game where you only have to get good enough at a handful of things to win.

But this model? It’s doable.

You just have to get good enough at marketing to win.

• You can learn how to write compelling blog posts with attractive headlines to get enough attention to monetize it

• You can learn how to send simple messages in DMs to bond with readers and either sell your products via chat or book strategy calls

• You can learn how to run a strategy call and close clients by learning how to listen to their problems and present your offer as the solution

The model we run is deceptively simple: Write posts that focus on the problems and desires of your readers, reach out to people who engage with your stuff in DMs, and a couple of times per month make simple offers to your audience.

I talk about that model in depth here:

This model takes some effort. This model might not be the sexiest. And this model requires you to be a business owner.

But there are some benefits that make it worthwhile.

You get to explore your intellectual curiosity: most of my clients who’ve done really well came from a traditional discipline, like their career or a practice they ran, but they get to talk about their field unencumbered and share their real opinions.

They enjoy the work they do with clients because it’s intellectually stimulating and they derive a sense of meaning from it that maybe feels less like bliss, but more like joy.

You get ownership: You don’t hate work. You hate working on something you own. There will be ups and downs when you’re running your own shop, but it’s yours. There’s the satisfaction that comes from knowing you’re done renting your mind and instead own intellectual property.

You get autonomy: Some days I work 12 hours. Other days I work 2 hours. I have a handful of set times where I meet with people, of course, but I’m in charge of when that is allowed to happen. I can dial up or dial down how much I work, how many clients I take in, or what offers to make based on the lifestyle I’m pursuing at the time.

One of my clients is a 25-year-old woman who lives in Bali. She’s like me. ENTP.

Fascinated with ideas and spends time she could be spending on her business reading Charlie Munger books, reading tweets from founders on X, and vibe coding projects for fun.

She works about 2-4 hours a day running her group program. She could scale more aggressively if she wanted, but she doesn’t because she doesn’t need to. $20,000 a month living in paradise is . . . pretty good.

She’s picky and doesn’t work with clients who just want a job. She wants to help people build careers that make dents in the universe. Instead of passion, she’s on a mission. And she’s having fun doing it.

Think of your version of this . . .

Where you have built up enough of a business to have some level of control over your life. Not all of your time is free, but enough of it is. You’re writing about topics that fascinate you and working with clients who energize you.

You’re building a business that doesn’t just serve you, but makes a contribution to the world, making it a better place to live in. And, yeah, you worked hard, there was some stress, but it’s the type of stress that helps you grow because it’s devoted to something that’s yours.

Place that picture in your mind and do what it takes to build it right now.

To turn your writing into a profitable business, you must master two skills:

• Creating value: Getting visibility through your writing

• Capturing value: Turning attention into income

These are two separate skills. Getting good at one won’t make you better at the other.

Most writers focus almost 100 percent of their time and effort on creating value. A small handful of writers focus on capturing value.

The Substack writers who earn the most money have better value capture systems.

They have a clear path from their articles to their offers and product ecosystem.

They’re not just writing to write. They run a business, using writing as the engine to generate customers and clients.

If you go look at their publications, you’ll notice there’s much more to their operation than a pledge button.

Nearly all of the six-figure writers sell something other than a paid subscription.

They promote their offers.

They have systems designed to make people aware of their offers.

And the sharp ones design their Substack newsletters to turn attention into cash from day one.

Because if you don’t learn how to capture value, you can build a big audience that doesn’t make much money.

You can write a viral post that gets tens of thousands of likes and grow your list to 30,000 people and not even make enough each month to cover your rent payment.

If you’re an educational writer who wants to not just write, but have a newsletter business that can hit six figures, this article is for you.

If you’re a hobbyist or you’re here to take it slow and enjoy the community for now, have fun and enjoy your time here. This article isn’t for you.

I’m not going to be writing about value creation — getting attention — because there are a bunch of other Substack articles that have covered that topic extensively.

I don’t see as many talking about how to turn attention into money, so I decided to write a piece that focuses on this massively underrated skill.

Value Capture Systems — How to Turn Attention into Money

Think of a value capture system like a net.

Imagine you throw out a fishing net for small fish, but it has gaping wide holes. Fish you otherwise would have caught will swim right through.

Most writers have nets with gaping wide holes because there’s no clear path for their readers to take the next step with them.

Someone reads one of your Substack posts, they enjoy it, but there’s no obvious next step for them to work with you or buy your products.

There’s no call to action to book a call with you on your posts.

It might be on your website or your publication page.

But they would have to go to your page, find the link to the website, click the work with me page, then go to book the call.

You’re making them do all the work.

People are busy. You’re one of 873 emails in their inbox. They’re not eagerly sitting there trying to throw money at you without any prompting.

Maybe there is a call to action on the post, but they don’t take action that day.

What happens next?

• Do you reach out to them directly in the DMs after engaging to create a connection?

• Do you make invitations by sending non-public emails straight to their inbox?

• Do they ever get multiple emails in the span of a week to hear about your offer?

Or do they get weekly emails with the occasional call to action to work with you, or zero calls to action to work with you?

If all you’re doing is sending weekly emails with no next step, you will just keep growing your subscriber base without converting it into clients and customers.

To earn more from your newsletter, there needs to be a value capture system to promote your coaching and even your low-ticket products (sticking a link to your Gumroad guide at the end of a weekly Substack post isn’t enough).

For this strategy to work there has to be a product or service available for them to buy that is something other than a paid subscription.

This post is about building a writing business. To run a business, there must be a product or service that is for sale.

I’d have an offer you can sell for $1,000 minimum because it makes the math to reaching your income goals much easier.

That’s 10 customers to hit $10,000 in a month.

Ideally, you’d have a coaching offer you can sell for $2,500-$3,000, so that’s 3-4 clients a month to hit $10,000.

The rest of this piece assumes you have something like this in place. Let’s talk about how to capture more value so you can make more money.

Make More Invitations

Give more people opportunities to take the next step to work with you.

At a minimum, have a work with me button at the end of your posts or a call booking button if you run sales calls.

But you can make invitations in a lot of different ways:

• You can drop an announcement in your subscriber chat

• You can post an invitation on your notes feed

• You can send a direct email to your Substack list with a simple invitation email “I’m hosting a live workshop next week. Want to come?”

• You can promote lead magnets directly to your list, get people to reply to get access, and start convos

• You can invite people to a pop-up live call Q&A

You’re not signing enough clients and getting enough customers because you’re not creating enough opportunities to either talk to you or work with you.

We are down to 1 spot for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book your $10K roadmap call

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

Conversion Events: Structured Campaigns Engineered for Cash

A conversion event is a launch that is dedicated to a singular call to action designed to promote something:

• A free webinar

• A paid workshop

• A cohort

• A low-ticket product

• An invitation to your high-ticket coaching

A conversion event has constraints that get people to move:

• Deadlines for registration

• A cap on the number of clients you work with

• Disappearing bonuses

The way you run a conversion event campaign is different than your typical weekly Substack article cadence.

You’d send shorter emails that use storytelling, social proof, and your philosophy to move your customers toward working with you.

Say I’m writing a campaign as an FDNP who helps women with their health. My campaign might look like this:

• Problem: Why you end the night with a bloated belly that makes you look pregnant

• Agitate: You spent a small fortune on supplements but still feel like shit

• Solution: The underlying problem that causes brain fog, bloating, and fatigue (and how to fix it)

• Announcement: “I’m looking for four women who want to reduce brain fog, bloating, and chronic inflammation over the next 90 days.”

• Proof: Jane went from feeling like her body was on fire every day to inflammation-free in 90 days — we did these three things

• Philosophy: The wellness industry lied to you. You can reduce your symptoms with zero supplements

• Plan: 3 steps to heal your body naturally

• Objection: Why your labs are normal but you still feel like garbage

• Desire: Imagine waking up inflammation-free, with a clear mind and glowing skin [...]

• Doors close: Enrollment closes tonight

Running a conversion event will sell your coaching or your courses much more effectively than just sticking a link to your product at the end of an email

You can run conversion events one week out of the month.

That keeps you from burning out your list. If you stick to a 3-to-1 ratio between giving and asking, you’ll maintain a quality relationship with your audience.

Social Selling

One of the best ways to capture value on Substack and monetize the attention you’re getting? Talk to people.

Every engagement is a request to have a conversation.

Every like, re-stack, comment, subscribe, or follow is an opportunity to build trust, identify problems, and present solutions to those problems by working with you.

This isn’t cold outreach.

You’re reaching out to people who took the first step.

It’s natural to continue the conversation in the DMs because they’ve already shown interest.

Say you’re that same FDNP and you reach out to one of your readers:

“Danielle!”

“Thx so much for the love on my post about gut health tips.”

“What resonated with you most?”

Let them talk. It’s natural that if they’re reading a post about gut health tips, they are experiencing gut health problems.

You can continue to ask more questions as they open up:

• “How long have you been experiencing brain fog?”

• “What have you tried so far to fix your gut health?”

• “What do you think you need most right now?”

Don’t just ask questions back-to-back like an interrogation.

Add value and little tidbits of advice sprinkled into your flow.

Oftentimes, I’ll send them a link to an article or a YouTube video if I can find one related to their problems.

Some people will want to take the relationship deeper and you can make an invitation to book a call to discuss working together, or you can just sell your product straight up via chat.

I had a writing course and community called the Writers League that was $597.

The first month, I tried social selling with my 3,000-follower account on X I made an extra $10,000. I patched up a hole in the net.

You can use social selling for anything from a $97 mini-course to a $10,000 coaching program.

There are people in your audience who would buy from you, but they’re not going to make the first move.

If you do, you’ll start adding monthly revenue to your business that was always there, but never captured.

The value capture system can get much deeper than this, but starting with these handful of recommendations works well on their own.

This might make sense to you, but you’re still having some hesitations because of one of the following reasons:

• You don’t want to be salesy

• You don’t want to be aggressive

• You don’t want to bother people or be annoying

• You don’t want to be a bro marketer

• You don’t want to reach out to people or talk to anyone

This isn’t the part where I’m going to tell you that you must follow my system.

I’ll just sum it up in one word — trade-offs.

You can try to build a business where you write weekly essays, grow your subscriber base, and add the occasional link to your products without doing launches, making structured invites to create inbound leads, sending any messages, or making overt invitations.

But the tradeoff is the potential that you can spend a lot of time, effort, and energy building an audience that never amounts to the income goals you’re after.

I’ve met so many writers like this — tens of thousands of subscribers and followers earning $1,000 to $2,000 per month when they could be earning $10,000 to $20,000 per month.

Passively writing is good for fun money. But if you want business-level income, you have to take business-level action.

Also, there are other reasons why marketing your business makes sense and beliefs to adopt that can lead to building a legitimate business instead of a writing hobby.

Your Reader is Busy

• How many notifications do you have on your phone?

• How many different demands do you have on your attention?

• How many Substack posts do you skim through and skip right past the call to action?

You’ve probably been in a situation where you’ve seen an ad for something or read an email about a product that you want to buy, but you just didn’t at the time because you were busy.

I get it. Because you’re so invested in your writing and your business, you think other people are just as invested as you. They’re not. They need reminding.

You’ll Change More Lives With Your Marketing Than Your Coaching

In order for your client to get the result you deliver, you have to get them in the door to work with you.

If your potential clients have a problem that’s affecting their life negatively, you’re helping them by making them aware that you can help them.

I’ve seen my clients change lives.

They help people go from wasting months applying for jobs to landing dream roles.

They help people process trauma.

They help people navigate serious life transitions.

All because they got better at making people aware of how they can help.

Sales is problem-solving

Your potential client or customer has a problem. You have a solution that can solve the problem. Selling is just articulating how you can solve the problem.

You’re not inventing pain or desire that doesn’t already exist. You’re not offering solutions to problems people don’t have. You’re not pitching products to people who haven’t expressed any interest in your insights.

I don’t hard-sell people. I just ask a lot of questions to get insights about their situation and make an invite if I believe I can help them. I only make an invite if I can help them.

Selling isn’t something you do to people. Done well, it’s something you do for people.

Writing is The Engine

Your Substack newsletter is an engine. It’s a means to attract people into your world so they can know, like, trust, and buy from you.

Most writers struggle to earn what they’re worth because they treat audience growth as a destination when it’s not.

Growing an audience isn’t a business. Running a business is a business. The sooner you understand this and build the value capture system, the faster your business will grow.

If you can’t monetize 1,000 subscribers, you won’t be able to monetize 10,000.

Whatever follower count you’re at right now, stop and check the holes in the net before you keep casting it out week after week.

We are down to 1 spot for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book your $10K roadmap call

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

“Every time I describe my coaching to potential clients, it comes out like word salad.”

Had a conversation with a nutritionist who told me this a bit back.

Her problem? She’s good at many things, can solve many problems, and has a wide variety of things she can help people with that don’t fit into a neat little box.

She’s not alone.

You’re great at what you do. Intuitively, you understand that your work is valuable.

But you don’t know exactly how valuable it is (pricing).

Nor do you know how to capture it in a way that others not just understand, but in a way that compels them to want to hire you.

You know if you got a client in the door, you’d do great work for them. So the problem isn’t your skills, your delivery, or your method.

It’s how you talk about them.

The Translation Problem

The translation problem occurs when your audience, your leads, and your potential clients on strategy calls kind of sort of get what you do.

Because the messaging isn’t clear, they don’t fully get it.

This leads to . . .

People visiting the services page on your site and clicking away.

Hearing “I need to think about it,” on strategy calls, only for them to ghost you and never hear from them again.

Writing articles that don’t turn into clients and customers.

It can lead to feelings of guilt when you’re charging thousands of dollars because you’re not even sure it’s worth the money.

You’ll hesitate to promote yourself because you don’t have confidence in what you’re offering.

You can end up discounting, working with clients who don’t value you, and getting burnt out because you sense that you’re worth more but at the same time can’t justify it.

My goal today? Help you solve the translation problem so you can:

• Confidently charge what you’re worth

• Attract energizing clients who value your work

• Promote your work with excitement instead of guilt and shame

• Reach your income goals faster because you’re priced appropriately

• Become known as the go-to person in your space because your value is clear

Let’s start with the one thing to understand if you want people to not just value your work, but pay for it.

We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book your $10K roadmap call here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

Nobody Buys Coaching (They Buy This Instead)

People buy the increased likelihood of outcomes. The more concrete and specific the outcome, the better.

Health coaching is a product: reducing chronic inflammation is an outcome. Getting rid of Hashimoto's without prescription drugs is a specific and concrete outcome.

Career coaching is a product: landing a job is an outcome. Landing $150K data analyst job in 6 months or less is a concrete and specific outcome.

Productivity coaching is a product: freeing up time to work on your business instead of in it is an outcome. Free up 15 hours a week to work on your business instead of in it is a concrete and specific outcome.

The promised outcome doesn’t need to be hyper-specific or have numbers associated with it, but the more concrete you can make it, the better.

You’re a coach or an expert, so you’re in love with your frameworks, your strategy, your methods.

Those are important because mechanisms — the way people get the result — matter.

But, above all else, your future client is thinking, “Can this person help me get what I want?”

Think of yourself like a doctor. You might know the root cause, but your future client can only see their symptoms.

People aren’t as concerned about your 19-step methodology as they are about the symptoms that are showing up in their life.

They think in terms of

• Getting rid of a problem: bloating, perfectionism, getting ghosted after job interviews, social anxiety, unprocessed trauma, brain fog, employees leaving.

• Alleviating a fear: marriage imploding, running out of severance, never writing that book, having to go back to their corporate job after failing at business

• Achieving a short-term desire: Landing a remote job, being able to speak up at a meeting or performance review, waking up pain-free, writing 30 days straight, losing 10 lbs, raising their prices.

• Accomplishing a long-term dream: Writing that book, building a six-figure business, finding a spouse, achieving their life purpose, traveling the world as a public speaker

Write down a handful of answers for each in your potential clients’ words when it comes to your own business, and you’ll start understanding what your clients actually value.

Now that you understand people value outcomes, it’s time to help you understand the value of the outcomes you produce.

How to Understand Your Own Value

Do you ever feel a little bit guilty about the idea of charging thousands of dollars for your offer?

Like, you’re extracting cash from people who already have tight budgets to begin with?

Or maybe you don’t have guilt about charging what you’re worth at all, but you don’t understand specifically how to think about price or how to get it across to the people you’re talking to?

In either case, there are a handful of frameworks you can consider to understand how valuable your work actually is.

I’ve worked with about a dozen career coaches who have helped their clients land jobs that pay anywhere from $150,000 to as much as $300,000.

Charging $3,000-$5,000 to help them land these jobs is mathematically anywhere from a 30Xto 100X return. If you have cold math on your side, you should feel zero guilt.

For financial ROI, you can think in multiples. You should be able to deliver a 5-10X return on what you’re charging if it’s a business-related offer. Change it to 25X to 50X for career coaching, working backward from salary.

But what if your value isn’t a concrete ROI number you can easily point at?

People value things with money that aren’t about money:

• Relationship problems and desires

• Alleviation of negative emotions like stress and anxiety and positive emotions like peace and contentment

• Legacy, status, and looking good in front of their peers

• Accomplishing a soul-aligned purpose

• Time, which is one of the few things people truly value more than money

A past client of mine runs a psychology practice school where she charged high-net-worth founders and execs to alleviate stress and practice mindfulness.

They paid thousands because, although they had all the money in the world, they lacked peace. Their lack of presence affected their relationships, as they couldn’t enjoy their time because they were always focused on the future.

Last, a lot of people don’t consider the literal financial ROI hiding underneath something they think is intangible.

If you’re a nutritionist, an FDNP, or a health coach, you might prevent a catastrophic hospital bill.

If you’re coaching married couples, you’re saving thousands in legal fees and the need to divide up assets by helping people save their marriage.

If you’re a peak performance coach who helps 7-figure founders free up 20 hours per week, you’ll free up time for them to focus on increasing the profits in the business.

The bottom line: most coaching offers are worth $3,000-$10,000+ if you have the right type of client, solve the right kind of problem, and deliver the right kind of outcome.

As long as value exceeds price, you can charge as much money as you want guilt-free.

Now that you understand your value, let’s talk about how to articulate it.

Start With Who

Think of the clients you’ve worked with who were happy to pay, easy to get results for, and energized you to work with.

• What problems did they come to you with? How did THEY describe their situation?

• What specific moments in their life prompted them to come find you?

• What outcome happened as a result of you working together?

• What’s the before-and-after picture of working with you?

Sometimes the answer is right in front of your face. Imagine you’re writing your next Substack post to your dream client. Speaking of . . .

Build a Catalog of Your Dream Clients’ Desires

For this, we use the four-factor analysis, where you write down answers for these four categories:

• Fears

• Frustrations

• Hopes

• Aspirations

Your writing strategy becomes writing articles that explain why their problem is happening, or why their desire is unfulfilled, what to do to fix it, and how to make it happen.

Sniped a headline here again for an example from Victor, who I think is one of the best headline writers on Substack.

Pop quiz: what are the frustrations here?

• Weight gain

• Puffiness

• Specific weight gain and puffiness

• Hormone imbalance

And then he ends the headline with (how to fix it), alluding to the outcome.

Daily practice: Go to the leaderboards of top writers and study their headlines to see how they’re almost always speaking to one of the four factors.

I taught this writing process to over 1,000+ students.

Pick an item from the 4FA, turn it into an outcome, turn the outcome into a headline. Over time, this will build a catalog that maps to your dream clients’ needs.

Craft a Buyable Offer

One of my favorite examples of offer crafting? A video where I saw a young girl craft a babysitting offer.

It started basic: I’ll babysit your kids.

Then she enhanced it:

• I’ll tutor your kids through their homework

• I’ll pick up the house and put things away

• I’ll cook healthy organic meal recipes your kids love to heat

So the promised outcome went from: Your kids will still be alive when you return home to you’ll come back from date night to a peaceful and clean home, plus your kids are smarter and healthier.

There’s a full offer training at the bottom of this post behind the paywall if you want to take a gander, but in short, you just want to start thinking about how you can add features that drive outcomes so your offer is more valuable.

Pitch like a Pro

Instead of telling your future clients that you’ll give them ‘1-on-1 coaching calls,’ describe the process of working with you using the hell-to-heaven bridge.

With clients, I show them how to structure their programs into 3 pillars. Each pillar goes from the problem (hell) to the outcome (heaven). Again, just go back to those problems and outcomes expressed by past clients and the list you wrote down and start thinking of the bridge.

So instead of saying “You’ll get 1-on-1 coaching calls for your health strategy intensive,” you’d say.

You’ll go from:

• Body inflammation to inflammation-free (or dramatically reduced)

• Brain fog to clear and focused work sessions

• Bloated and puffy to lean and sculpted

Jazz up the way you talk about your features. One of my clients is a career pivot coach.

Her onboarding comes with a questionnaire to help her clients find their strengths, but instead of saying “you’ll have to fill out a form,” she says “we’ll help you find your zone of genius so you can easily land jobs because you’re more qualified than your competitors.” She calls it the Zone of Genius assessment.

Pro-tips:

• Tie all of your features to the outcomes your clients want

• Give them names to make them sound proprietary

• Describe them in terms of what they’ll do for your clients to make the outcome easier to accomplish, faster, and with less stress and friction

Your program is a lot more compelling than you think when you find the right words to describe it.

Final Thought

You don’t need to get smarter. You don’t need more certifications. You don’t need more experience to justify the value of working with you. You’re already more than valuable enough.

Like I’ve shown you here, the key to raising your prices, signing dream clients, feeling confident in your marketing, and reaching your income goals has nothing to do with pumping yourself up. It doesn’t require bravado or bro marketing.

It requires understanding. When you take the time to understand your value with logic and rationality, the guilt goes away because both you and your clients can clearly see just how worth the money working with you is.

You spent years getting great at what you do.

Spend the next 12 months getting great at talking about what you do, and your business will look wildly different than it does right now.

We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book your $10K roadmap call here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

All you need is 1,000 people paying you $10/mo, and you’ll make $10,000 per month.

Is it possible? Sure. But the reality is bleak.

Let me be clear about who this is and isn’t for.

If you’re here to write for fun and make some fun money, click away.

This is only for solopreneurs — consultants, coaches, practitioners, experts — who want to build profitable businesses from their words.

The Ugly Reality of the Low-Ticket Passive Income Dream

The headline is about paid subscribers, but paid subscribers are just one example of a strategy that fails for 99 percent of people who try it — the ‘passive’ income model.

You want passive income. A paid tier with an ecosystem of digital products like e-books, downloads, and mini courses.

You figure it’ll all add up in the long run.

Here’s what’s likely to happen.

You’ll wake up a year from now with a couple of dozen paid subs and a handful of sales of your digital products and e-books.

You’ll start thinking to yourself:

“I should be making more. Why aren’t more people buying my e-books? Why aren’t the course sales rolling in?”

You’ll have a growing audience, but most of your audience won’t buy from you. And you’ll be working harder than ever — hosting lives, creating deep-dive guides for your paid tier, and constantly posting content to grow an audience who will continue not to buy from you.

There are a couple of different reasons why this model doesn’t work for 99 percent of solopreneurs.

The Math Ain’t Mathin

You want 1,000 subscribers paying you $10/mo to make $10,000 per month.

Assume you can convert 5% of your free subs into paid subs.

That means that at $10/mo with 1,000 paid subs to hit $10,000 per month, you’d need 20,000 subscribers to hit that mark.

But 5% assumes you engineered your Substack to convert from day one.

I’m a marketer, so I know what the pros do.

Everything is set up before they turn on that button:

• They have multiple deep-dive guides paywalled and ready to go

• They have old course materials to add to their tier

• They have a start here page set up with an upsell ready to go

• They have copywriting bullets on each post to tease you into going paid

• They have engineered launch posts to announce monetization from day one

Most of you won’t be in that position, so even if you do grow, you’ll probably convert at 3% or less, which means you will need . . . 33,000 subscribers just to hit $10K/mo.

Now let’s look at why most people struggle to sell any low-ticket products in general.

We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad, where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book Your $10K roadmap call here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

You Underestimate the Marketing

An old coach of mine was running a campaign for a $27 workshop this month. The campaign for this workshop probably lasted about two weeks in total.

He sent an email every day. Sometimes twice a day. He was running ads on IG. On the last day before the workshop went live, he sent five or six emails.

Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Sounds annoying and aggressive, doesn’t it?

I ended up buying it. But I had to see it a bunch of times before I did.

One time I saw an email and didn’t have my card on me.

Another time, I did have my card on me, but it was rejecting the payment, so I just decided to do it later.

I had the money, but part of me was like, “agh, do I really have the time for this, or is it going to just sit on my shelf?”

Sending many emails in your campaigns helps mostly because people are busy.

So the first hurdle you have to cross is the volume problem — building a big enough audience to make the low-ticket math work.

Then you have to solve the frequency problem — promoting yourself often enough to get people to buy.

Let’s bring back the conversion math here.

Say you have even just a $100 product. To make $10,000 in a month, you have to sell 100 copies of that $100 product. Not just one month, but every single month.

Typical conversion rates for email lists for a product at that price point? 1-2%.

I checked the numbers of a big creator’s launch for a $97 product the other month, and it converted at about 1%.

Let’s say you bump it up to 3% to be generous, then you’re looking at a 3,300-person list. And you will not convert at 3% unless you do a legitimate launch for that low-ticket product.

It’s anything but simple, easy, or passive. You have to convince many different people to buy, multiple times, repeatedly, stretched across long durations.

You’ll End Up In Marketing Tactical Hell

Marketing tactical hell is what happens when you have a dozen different mediocre strategies running at one time, and you don’t know what to do to fix the problem.

You will be quite active — doing all of the things — and it won’t add up.

You’ll spend Saturday mornings hosting an hour-long live for your paid subscribers that you promised as part of your tier, but only 3 of your 24 show up, and so now you’re essentially doing 1-on-1 coaching for $30.

You spend months writing that e-book, pour your heart and soul into it, only to get 14 sales.

You’re on the content treadmill, creating all of these deep-dive guides you promised as part of your tier.

You’ll keep up with your cadence of writing 4 notes per day and 1-2 articles per week.

Your audience will grow, but it won’t solve your monetization problem. The likes and the comments used to be fun, but after a while you can start to resent an audience that pats you on the back, showers your praises, but doesn’t open their wallets.

You’ll start thinking you’re the problem. You’ll wonder why you can’t figure it out.

You started your newsletter business for freedom, but you realize all this passive income stuff actually . . . takes a lot of work . . . and you’re not even getting paid what you’re worth.

Now you’re just confused.

What should you shut down? What should you double down on? Which product is the winner?

Is the answer more followers? A new platform? A different structure for your paid tier? Which aspect of the paid tier should you change? The price? The features?

You go in loops and loops, not wanting to keep wasting time on strategies that aren’t working, but then not risking time trying something new that won’t work.

What advice will you get? Just keep posting! Hang in there!!!

I’ve seen this model kill people’s careers who otherwise would have succeeded, and it makes me sad.

None of this is your fault.

You are a practitioner, a coach, a consultant, an expert in your field who wants to express yourself and build a business with your words.

But you were given a model built by content creators and marketers for content creators and marketers.

You need a strategy that’s built for you.

You can turn this around and turn that same audience into a six-figure business if you use a model that’s built for coaches, consultants, and experts.

.

The Reverse Pyramid Business Model: Stop Building Your Business Backwards

Brian Clark — founder of an eight-figure online education company for creators and solopreneurs — said this about the passive first model:

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I arrived at the same conclusion and modeled my strategy the same way he’s talking about in his note.

I call this method the Reverse Pyramid Business Model. I got the name from a bodybuilding program.

I learned this concept called reverse pyramid training that helps you build muscle faster —  you start your sets with the heaviest weight.

You have the most energy, which means you can get bigger gains because you can do more reps at the weight that causes the most muscle growth.

I applied this same logic to business.

Let's get you cash and confidence upfront so you have the strength to build your empire for the long-term.

Then, with a healthy bank account, client results, and proven frameworks to use, you’ll be able to build your scalable empire.

Step 1: Create a 1-on-1 offer you can sell for $3,000 or more

Some of you might be wondering:

“If my low-ticket products and paid tier aren’t selling that well, why would people buy something more expensive?”

Low-ticket products — ebooks and courses — require more effort and sacrifice to accomplish the result, so people value them less.

Coaching increases their odds of success and requires less effort and sacrifice on their part to get the result.

You provide guidance that information alone can’t provide — judgment, nuance, speed, structure, curated information sequenced for your clients.

This doesn’t even require Zoom calls. I’d suggest it, but I’ve met coaches and consultants who sell and deliver four to five packages strictly via text.

With this model, you can sign clients each month without having to do complex marketing campaigns.

The process is dead simple:

• Write notes and articles

• Add calls to action to book calls to work with you

• Send a couple of messages each day to people in your audience to connect and convert

I break down what that model looks like in a bit more depth here:

Step 2: Coaching at Scale — The Best Model for You and Your Clients

Selling courses at scale is great for the course creator, but bad for customers. The course creator gets paid, but 97% of the customers don’t even finish their course.

1-on-1 coaching is great for clients but bad for the coach long-term. The clients win, but the coach starts to drown in customized game plans, and their income hits a cap.

Coaching at scale is great for both the coach and the clients.

Clients get access to you for nuanced feedback through a game plan call, weekly calls, and your portal to help them implement.

You can give them some 1-on-1 access for game planning, but the rest can be handled in the group format.

Since you’ve worked with many clients, you can turn your insights into structured roadmaps and frameworks that you’ve tested, so they can get results without your time because the framework does the heavy lifting.

The best part about building a program like this? It’s assembled instead of created.

You won’t have to guess at the curriculum, you’ll just take the patterns of 1-on-1 clients who already paid you and turn them into the course structure.

You’ll create little assets for your 1-on-1 clients on an as-needed basis that will become part of your group offering

You will still have to put time into working with a client roster. It’s not passive. But it’s scalable.

When I work with clients, we take the same offer that we were selling 1-on-1 and switch it to group without lowering the price.

They’re selling $3,000-$5,000+ group programs and managing dozens of clients in 4-6 hours per day.

Step 3: Sell Your Sawdust

Loggers realized that after cutting wood, they can sell the sawdust it created.

You can sell your sawdust, too, by breaking off chunks from the stuff you’ve already built for clients.

You can take your curriculum, slides, and transcripts and turn them into custom GPTs, AI agents, and tools.

You can host a workshop that you were already going to do for clients and charge the public for access.

You have a handful of lessons or workshops built, and then you sell them up and bundle them as a course.

You know people will want to buy them because you built them at the request of people who already bought from you.

This helps you avoid having to come up with a curriculum, a bunch of slides, and a fancy sales page all before someone has paid you $1.

In the future, once you do have a big audience and all of your systems are dialed in . . .

You can make things ridiculously more passive because you’ll have the traffic, all of your ideas are vetted, and you’ll have an ecosystem that has evolved.

Your odds of getting the passive empire results are HIGHER with this model.

Why I Chose This Model

I built this model because I’ve met so many people who struggled and felt burnt out by the passive model.

I’ve seen people put months into writing an e-book that sold 3 copies.

I’ve met creators who shot and recorded a dozen videos and put together a course nobody bought.

I’ve met writers with big audiences who struggle to monetize them.

My model isn’t sexy, but it’s effective.

It takes work . . .

But as you’ve seen here, all of these models take work.

Don’t want to do client work to build your base? Cool. But your alternative isn’t going to be any easier.

The best thing you can do for your business is abandon the idea that you’re going to roll out of bed, write some articles, slap together some products, and get rich.

Besides, I don’t think you want a passive income empire as much as you want autonomy, agency, and something you own.

You want to be known for your knowledge, paid what you’re actually worth, work with clients that energize you, share compelling ideas, and make an impact on this world.

You wouldn’t mind working a full work week on something that belongs to you, so build it. It’ll be worth it.

You’re not meant to sit on the beach and sip pina colodas anyway. You’re meant to put a dent in the universe and get paid to do it.

A smart practitioner like you most likely needs:

A model that doesn’t require you to be a marketing savant to make money online.

A model that isn’t completely passive, but fulfills you because you work with clients that energize you and teach topics that fascinate you

A model that finally gives you something you own so you can have some control of your time in the future and have a real shot at scale.

If this sounds like it might be the right model for you, then here’s the next step.

We are down to 2 spots for the August growth squad where we’ll help a small handful of experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by building a business model that requires zero paid subscribers.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book Your $10K roadmap call here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

You saw some influencer with a ring light on Instagram explain your field to two million people.

The advice wasn’t bad. It was OK. They were just confident and had a clever hook.

You thought to yourself:

“They don’t know anything I don’t know. Actually, I know more than them.”

Not in an arrogant way either. You … just … actually know more.

You’ve felt this way for a while. That you could take your knowledge online, create content about it, and build a parallel career on top of the profession you already built.

But Instagram feels fake and performative. You don’t want to jam your life story into a 3-second hook and dance on camera to get views.

You found the answer in writing.

Not posting content, but writing essays and nuanced takes on the stuff you lived/

You’re posting now.

Figuring it out as you go.

Some land, some don’t.

But you’ve noticed the ones that land are the ones only you could have written — the case that went sideways, the thing they don’t teach you, the pattern you’ve watched four hundred times that nobody’s bothered to name.

You get the sense that if you keep writing and publishing, you have a real shot at doing this online thing. It feels different than the other times where you tried to post on social, tried to build an email list, and tried to do ‘all of the things.’

That instinct is correct. And your timing is better than you know.

I’ve noticed a quiet shift happening.

A creator economy that used to be dominated by surface-level influencers is making space for thoughtful professionals who are coming online to give their thoughts a place to live, get visible, and build online versions of what they’ve been building in the background.

It’s making space for someone like you. This isn’t just my opinion either. There’s real data on this.

Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy will roughly double from $250 billion in 2023 to $480 billion by 2027

My prediction: the people who will dominate this era and collect most of the cash are the professionals and practitioners who focus on depth over hype.

See, depth can’t be faked. Anyone can write a clever hook, but only a veteran can document what they’ve done.

You didn’t spend the last 10 years building a personal brand.

You spent the last 10 years building.

You’ve decided to take what you’ve done offline and turn it into a portfolio business that helps you get the money, meaning, and freedom you deserve.

This is the perfect window for someone like you to build.

Something’s Happening…

When I open up my Substack app and scroll down the feed, I don’t see 21-year-old life coaches.

I see a metabolic food scientist with 6,700 subscribers waxing poetic about the 200,000 nerve endings in your feet.

A performance coach sharing insights from working with professionals at Fortune 500 companies, with 10+ years on Wall Street.

A Silicon Valley therapist describing how your nervous system reacts to ascending the career ladder.

These aren’t people regurgitating advice they heard elsewhere. These are skilled professionals and experts with proven track records who finally decided to take their decade(s) of lived experience online.

Not only are people paying attention to them, but they’re actually paying them. I’ve paid for coaching and consulting from experts I’ve found online. Not because they had clever hooks, but because I had real problems that I needed a real practitioner to help me solve.

More people are starting to feel this way. They reward depth, experience, and actual perspective. They don’t want the perfect coach who pretends to have all the answers. They want insights from a real human with scars who shares the answers they’ve accumulated over a decade.

Audiences are leaning in and paying attention. Professionals and experts are coming out of the woodwork to write online and build businesses at a pace I’ve never seen in my decade of being in this space.

The question is why?

The Career Insurance Policy

One of my clients got laid off recently. But he wasn’t panicked. Actually, he was heading out for a three-week vacation in Europe with his family.

Multiple clients decided to pay him in advance for August because he only works with a select number of clients. His offer has been sold out for the past six months straight.

He started building this career insurance policy a few years ago by building his catalog on Substack and LinkedIn.

He went on to build an entire portfolio of products, from Maven courses to 1-on-1 coaching, until he found a winning product with a custom portfolio service.

He was quietly stacking away $10,000 per month on top of his six-figure job. By the time he got the notice from his company, he already had a parallel income stream in place.

A portfolio career has gone from being a nice-to-have option to an insurance policy for your future, especially for those in midlife who are being restructured out of the market and not let back in due to ageism.

Some want to abandon corporate altogether as a whole because it feels pointless — the job that’s time-consuming but completely meaningless, well-paid but completely useless some days, where everyone knows, and nobody says anything because they’ve got mortgages to pay.

Corporations will exist indefinitely into the future, thousands of people are getting hired every day; people are getting promotions and climbing up the ladder just fine, but for a certain sector of the population, they’re just done playing the game.

A Body of Knowledge No Longer Confined

“I want to build something online outside of my practice. Not therapy. Something more.”

She likes her practice. She enjoys seeing patients, but there are confines to her profession.

There are other ideas she is not only fascinated by, but believes are just as useful as traditional psychotherapy. Manifestation through subconscious programming, esoteric spiritual practices, Zen Buddhism rituals — stuff that’s almost considered mysticism, but it’s not.

She realizes we are not just humans with brains, but people with minds and souls.

This so-called woo-woo stuff is actually science operating at a deeper and more interconnected level than the literature accounts for. When she sees a patient in her practice, she has to leave this aspect of her advice out and leave out an aspect of herself.

She can only make so much per hour because her rates are capped by insurance billing, and she has to be there seeing patients all day to make a living. So she’s decided to start writing these nuanced takes online and build a business that’s bigger than the confines of her practice or hourly rate.

This is a client example that matches a situation a lot of traditional practitioners with extracurricular knowledge find themselves in.

There’s a conversation happening in your field. You want to be a part of it, share the insights you’ve earned, and get paid well to do it. You also want to be able to have a business that doesn’t have to fit inside the neat container your traditional discipline constrains you to. Something new, different, revolutionary even.

And then there’s scale. One of my clients went from having to see one-on-one patients all day to building a psychology school with dozens of clients she only met with once a week on group calls.

She doubled the money she made at her practice while working fewer hours to serve her clients. This is what life can look like when you package your decades of knowledge and turn it into digital real estate that pays you at scale.

A Way to Get Clients That Doesn’t Rely on Kindness

She’d been making six figures a year as a coach, with 100+ successful clients, a decade of experience, and a proven track record. But something changed in the last 18 months. Nearly 100 percent of her clients came from referrals and word of mouth, but the referral well dried up.

Nothing changed about her marketing. What changed is the market.

I asked her if she knew where her next client would come from. She said no. So we went to work and started building a marketing system that didn’t rely on the kindness of strangers — posting client-attracting writing, running campaigns, learning how to engage with her audience and turn them into buyers.

A lot of existing coaches, who didn’t really need to spend much time online to get clients, are building personal brands because they need a way to create demand, especially when there is more competition and the market sophistication is higher.

Buying behavior is different now. People want to feel you out before they work with you. They’re going to look you up, read your work, watch your YouTube videos, and understand your philosophy before they pull out their wallets. Having a web of influence in the form of information people can consume gives you a competitive advantage.

Also, some coaches who’ve been quietly building offline are building online now because they just have . . . a lot to say. If you’ve spent a decade quietly working with clients in the background, there’s just a deep well of stories and insights begging to be shared.

People are coming from different entry points, but they’re all ending up in the same place, in front of a blank page with decades of things to say and skills they’re figuring out how to package and sell.

How to Take Your Tiny Slice of a Half Trillion Dollar Pie

The personal brand coaches aren’t dominating the market as they used to, thanks to the age of the microauthority — a solo operator with a tiny empire based on niche knowledge that people are seeking out more often now.

You are sitting on a decade of stories, insights, and knowledge that feels obvious to you but that others find mind-blowing.

You don’t need to become a content creator or a professional writer to make this work.

You just need to be you, but packaged properly. in order for you to take advantage of this $500 billion opportunity, the one thing that you need to figure out, the one thing that you need to do, is solve the packaging problem.

The main thing that I see with a lot of experienced professionals is that they have a large body of knowledge.

They’re good at getting the information out there.

The information they have has depth and nuance, but there’s packaging in what they’re writing that needs a little bit of help and polishing, especially the way that we’re talking about what they do.

The first thing is you want to be able to clearly articulate exactly how you can help people in a way that’s easy for them to understand and buy.

Most practitioners and experts know a lot, which means they have a lot of jargon and a lot of insider terminology, but the customers, the people they’re trying to help, are normal everyday folks.

This means they have to translate from that academic style to a more colloquial style that’s meeting people where they’re at.

Instead of talking about your insights and your terms, talk about your potential customer or buyer’s problems.

Instead of talking about your methods, talk about their symptoms.

Instead of talking about your big body of knowledge, talk about the moments that your readers find themselves in their lives so that they will want to reach out and pay you.

Learn how to package your knowledge into offers. Nobody buys coaching, and nobody buys expertise.

They buy a solution to a problem. Saying, “I’ll give you one-on-one calls for career coaching,” is different from saying, “In the next six months, we’re going to find you a $150K data analyst job or work for free until you do.”

Phase one: we’re going to get you from being invisible to recruiters to having recruiters calling you.

Phase two: we’re going to get you from a lack of energy and confidence to walking into an interview calm and confident.

Phase three: We’re going to get you from not passing through rounds to accepting the final offer. That’s an example of how you take what you know is structured into an offer.

The last thing you need is a way to turn that attention into cash. The way that makes the most sense is having conversations with potential clients.

The biggest thing that is going to hold back most otherwise skilled practitioners is the fact that they think that their skills alone are going to be enough to get them clients and build their portfolio of careers.

That’s not true.

You took 10 years to get good at the skill of knowing what you do, but the skill of talking about what you do, promoting what you do, reaching out to people, and creating conversations to create cash is the final skill that you need to turn this all into a profitable business.

Related reading to help you implement at a deeper level:

I’m looking to help a small handful of experienced professionals and experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by packaging their knowledge into a buyable offer, writing articles that attract clients, and creating connections with readers that turn to cash.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below:

Book Your $10K Roadmap Call Here

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Is it possible to make $10,000 per month on Substack without being a Substack coach, a make-money-online coach, or a big guru who has tens of thousands of Subscribers?

Yes, but there’s only one path I’ve ever seen work that doesn’t require you to sell money or have a gigantic audience.

Here’s exactly what I’d do if I wanted consistent $10,000 months on this platform.

Who This Is For

This approach only works for practitioners and professionals who have the skills to deliver for clients or customers.

It’s for those who want to run a business that sells a product or service.

Examples: career coaches, nutritionists, parenting coaches, fitness coaches, nervous system experts, finance pros, AI experts, brand strategists, fashion consultants, writing coaches, therapists, relationship coaches.

Now that we’re clear who this is for, let’s walk through what I’d do if I were in your shoes. Not what you must do. Not what I definitely think you should do. Just what I would do. Take what you want and discard what doesn’t fit.

I’m looking to help 4 writers, coaches, and experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months using the exact strategy laid out in this post.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book Your $10K Gameplan Call Here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

Make These the Centerpiece of Your Substack Strategy

I’d get clear on three things:

1. Who you help

2. The problems you’re uniquely qualified to solve

3. Your offer

Why? Because when you’re clear on all three, everything about growing your business gets easier.

When someone visits your page, they instantly know whether or not you can help them.

When you write, your dream clients feel like you’re reading their mind.

When you make an offer, the right people lean in and say yes.

What happens when you don’t get clear?

You can wake up 12 months from now with 17 paid subscribers and have to write deep-dive guides, host monthly Q&As, and create a huge library of resources just to make $200/mo when you could’ve earned 50X the money with the same information.

Who You Help

Answer these three questions to find your dream client:

• Do you like them?

• Can you help them?

• Can they afford to pay you?

The best way to do this exercise is to think of the client you loved working with the most.

My client Monica did this. She realized she enjoyed working with executives instead of mid-career professionals because they’re driven and happy to pay her rates.

She went from charging $1,100 per client to $3,900 per client just by getting clearer on the who and making that clear on her website:

The Problem You’re Uniquely Qualified to Solve

People might buy vitamins to get healthier, but they will buy painkillers to get rid of a headache.

A lot of writers and coaches struggle because they sell vitamins.

“Become a better leader” is a vitamin. “Keep your best employees from leaving and draining cash making new hires,” is a painkiller.

What problem keeps coming up over and over again with your readers and clients?

You’re a generalist health coach, but you realize emotional binge eating before bed pops up the most, so you make it a cornerstone problem and sign clients in droves.

Your offer

Nobody buys coaching, products, or services. People buy bridges from where they are and where they want to be.

A good offer is a roadmap that delivers a transformation from hell to heaven.

One of my clients was a trauma-healing coach who had done random one-off hourly consultations. In her words, she didn’t have a signature offer to point to.

So we built the roadmap.

First, we started with a simple promise her buyers could understand: process and eliminate painful traumatic memories in 6 months.

Then, we built the roadmap in langauge her clients could understand in three simple pillars that went from the problem to the outcome in before-and-after language.

Pillar 1

Before: Unconscious programming runs the show — procrastination and self-doubt hijack you without you knowing why

After: The emotional anchors are released, painful memories are reconsolidated into stories of resilience, and the weight of years starts to lift

Pillar 2

Before: Your deepest limiting beliefs create resistance — you sabotage yourself right at the edge of change

After: The internal narrative is rebuilt with self-understanding — where you saw obstacles, you now see opportunities, and you stop reacting as a victim of your past

Pillar 3

Before: Vague longings, no direction — you’re drifting and hoping instead of choosing

After: A vivid, emotionally charged vision plus a strategic roadmap that turns abstract dreams into concrete, soul-aligned goals you’re actively moving on

She’d never hit $10,000 per month before because she was selling one-off consultations that were hard to explain over Zoom.

Once we fixed the offer and put a $5,000 price tag on it, she was able to cross the magic mark:

Price the offer to make the math make sense and create a flagship program you sell for $1,000 to $5,000, a high enough price point that you don’t need tons and tons of customers to hit $10,000 per month.

You don’t need to do 1-on-1 coaching to make this happen.

Rachel manages a 20+ client roster for a high-ticket group program and only works 4 hours a day max:

You don’t need to take sales calls if you don’t want to either. It helps, but you can sell $3,000 offers with a Google Doc that breaks down how it works.

I’m working with a dietician client right now who will sell her entire offer on Google Docs, manage it in a group, and close clients by chatting with them.

When you have a solid offer priced at enough income to help you reach $10,000 per month without needing hundreds of customers and a gigantic audience, it’s time to focus on building a buyable newsletter.

Build a Buyable Newsletter

People buy outcomes.

Nobody lies awake at 2 a.m. thinking they want to buy a course or a coaching program — they’re up at night because they want to get rid of a problem or achieve a desire.

If you want to build a buyable newsletter, make it a map of the internal world of your dream client.

To build a buyable newsletter, we use the four-factor analysis.

You look at these 4 core areas:

• Frustrations: What problems and frustrations are people in your audience facing?

• Fears: What happens if the problem doesn’t get fixed?

• Wants: What’s a short-term win your reader would love to have?

• Aspirations: What’s the long-term result your readers want to accomplish?

Your answers become article topics and headlines.

Frustration: waking up to pee at 2 A.M. and not being able to get back to sleep.

Headline: Why You Wake Up to Pee at 2 A.M. (And How to Fix It)

This is a real problem I had. I saw a post with this headline. I clicked, read it, booked a call, and paid for help after 24 hours of reading it.

The writer had less than 200 subscribers. I didn’t care about her follower count. I cared about my problem. She spoke to it at the right time, so I paid her.

Focusing on problems and desires attracts clients. And you can have fun with it at the same time.

One of my favorite examples is someone like Vitally Melany.

She focuses on problems and desires in her writing and she has swagger, depth, and nuance in her work at the same time.

Look at the headline:

• defined jawline — desire

• glowing skin — desire

• de-puffed face — problem

This formula will help you print money with your Substack:

Pick a fear, frustration, want, or desire x package it with a clickable headline x post it weekly for 12 months.

Give People a Chance to Work With You

If you want people to come to your party (work with you), you need to make more invitations to work with you.

Only 15 percent of your audience is going to be ready to buy right now.

You want to stay top of mind and make more invitations, so you’re there when they’re ready to go.

Here are some of my favorite ways to create more opportunities for people to work with you.

Conversations that connect and convert

Some people in your audience want to work with you, but they’re not going to come to you first.

You can build connections with your audience and earn more at the same time by sending messages to everyone who follows, likes, re-shares, and comments on your work.

You’re not being salesy here. These aren’t cold messages from people who don’t know you.

You’re reaching out with genuine interest to see how you can potentially help the people in your audience who already expressed interest in you first:

Handraisers

Once or twice a month, you can write a post and an email that is a direct invitation to work with you: “I’m looking for 5 men who want to do a full body recomposition and get shredded without losing muscle.”

Campaigns

One week per month, you can switch up from your normal weekly cadence and send more promotional emails to your list for a week to promote your offer

The 9 Word Email

This comes from Dean Jackson. You send a direct email to spark conversations that can turn into clients

• “Are you still looking to make a career pivot?”

• “Would you like a free GPT to fix your LinkedIn bio?”

• “Hosting a nervous system reset workshop next week. Wanna come?”

They don’t have to be exactly 9 words, but you’re essentially sending these short conversational posts to your list that read like a 1-on-1 email that lots of people will respond to, especially if sent from a plain-text ESP like Kit.

Calls to Action

Every email should invite the reader to do something.

Doesn’t always have to be to buy something. It could be something as simple as responding to the email or pointing them to another resource that can help inform them, but get clear about the next step you want them to take, and more will follow.

The $10,000/mo Gameplan

• Treat your Substack like an engine to build a business instead of a tip jar to get paid subscriptions

• Focus on attracting customers and clients instead of chasing vanity metrics like followers and subscribers who are never going to buy

• Write about the problems and desires of your perfect future client instead of random musings

• Cash comes from conversations, so talk to your audience daily instead of waiting for clients to come to you

• Build an offer with a clear roadmap that charges what you’re worth, so attract driven clients you’d love to work with

If all you did was focus on the above, in 6 to 12 months, you will have consistent $10,000 months.

I’m looking to help 4 writers, coaches, and experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months using the exact strategy laid out in this post.

The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below.

We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.

If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.

Book Your $10K Gameplan Call Here

(Don’t book the call if you have zero clue what you’d sell, have zero experience, or have zero audience or network to reach out to. This is not for complete beginners.)

You have to stop pretending like you don’t know exactly:

• What’s wrong

• What needs to be fixed

• And how much responsibility you have for the outcomes you’re getting in your life

You know you’re in a relationship you’re settling for.

You know you need to stop eating cheeseburgers and go to the gym.

You know you could have a better job or start a business to fix your financial situation.

These are just examples, but there’s a specific issue going on in your life that you know needs to be fixed, yet you are gaslighting yourself into thinking you somehow don’t know what the problem is.

The Fundamental Rule You Must Understand If You Want to Change

The reason why you can’t make changes in your life is simple — you don’t actually want to change. You want your life to stay the same because you’re benefiting from it staying the same.

These are called present goals. You have a present goal to stick to what’s familiar to you that sits underneath your conscious awareness. It’s running you without you knowing it, and you convince yourself you want to change when you don’t.

Your life changes when you stop trying to just force yourself to change by trying to lock in or grind your way to success.

It doesn’t work because you’re swimming up against the tide of your present goals that will keep dragging you backward until you make them conscious, re-frame them, and act on the new goals you set for yourself.

So, this time, instead of asking yourself ‘what do I need to do to change?’ ask yourself ‘how am I benefiting from staying the same?’

A classic example here: A lot of people, myself included more times than I can count, will self-sabotage some aspect of their business. They won’t post enough of their writing to get attention, they don’t promote themselves enough, or they won’t make enough invitations to work with them.

They’re sabotaging their businesses because they want to avoid the weight and responsibility of having to perform and deliver for their clients.

Having to do the work and deliver for clients calls into question things about yourself that you might not want to be called into question — your skill level, your diligence, and whether or not you’re cut out for running the business at all.

So you sabotage before it ever gets there so that you can keep telling yourself the story that, if only you had tried and done your best, things would have worked out, but since you didn’t, there’s that little mental escape valve that helps you feel better about yourself.

All sorts of examples fall into place here:

You say you’re sick of being lonely and want to put yourself out there, but your goal is avoiding rejection.

You say you’re tired of being invisible online and want to put your name out there, but your goal is to stay invisble to you can avoid being called out for looking cringe.

You say you’re tired of living your current life, but your goal is to stay the same because you’re afraid of trying your best only to find out you’re not actually cut out for what you want.

Your present goals help manage the dose of pain you feel because you more or less know what to expect — low-grade anxiety over your inaction gnaws at you, but you can bear it.

You don’t know how much pain is on the other side of uncertainty, so you’d rather not face it at all.

This is a tough nut to crack, though, right? You’ve probably tried different ways to solve this already that haven’t worked, like saying affirmations or reading a self-help book that told you to think positive.

Here are some techniques you might not have tried before that can legitimately get you to rethink what your future might hold for you in a way that actually makes the pain of staying the same more than the pain of changing.

This Exercise Might Finally Reframe the Fear You Feel About The Future

Anxiety about the future comes from vagueness.

You have this vague idea about some uncertain future you’re worried about happening, but you haven’t actually articulated the scenario you’re afraid of.

If you did, you might not feel so afraid of it.

I learned this concept called Fear Setting from Tim Ferriss, where you spell out what the legitimate worst-case scenario lies ahead of you and just decide whether or not you’d be OK with it.

You want to build an online business. OK, what are you actually afraid of happening?

What are some of the worst-case scenarios?

Here are a bunch of things that can and will happen to you if you run an online business and put your words on the internet to do it:

• Someone will leave a mean comment on your posts and call your credibility into question. There is a 100% chance this will happen multiple times.

• You will put together a product, ask people to buy it, and nobody will. This happened to me before. It hurt for a couple of days. I got over it.

• You will pour time, money, and energy into strategies that won’t work.

• You’ll underdeliver for a client, and they’ll ask for a refund

The more specific you are, the better. I remember watching this video once where Alex Hormozi said that you’re not afraid of everyone in your life finding out about your writing, your business, or your personal brand. You’re worried about a small handful of specific people finding out.

Then, gotta ask yourself: will you survive if your Aunt Linda finds out you’re posting content online and thinks it’s weird? Run the scenario in your mind, and if you can bear, it’s time to hit post.

So now you have decided that the pain of this new future is actually bearable because, after taking the time to deeply articulate it, you realize it wasn’t as bad as you thought.

What next?

Two things: you come up with a new set of change-based goals that replace your staying-the-same goals and come up with a system that makes change possible.

Change Your Present Goals

The new goals you set for yourself can’t be based on outcomes that you can’t control.

If you set them that way, you are at the mercy of luck, the opinions of others, algorithms, and a bunch of other factors you can’t control.

You have to set new goals that are based on inputs.

• Your goal isn’t to get likes on your newsletter, it’s to publish your newsletter.

• Your goal isn’t to make sales, it’s to come up with an offer and put it in front of people.

• Your goal isn’t to get people to like you, it’s to be your unapologetic self more often.

All of these goals are tied to the inputs of the person you’d like to become. And the person you’d like to become isn’t a set of accomplishments and validations from others. It’s a state of mind, and a way of being that isn’t based on anything but the way you’d like to show up.

Not for others, but for yourself. Just becoming the you that is stripped of all of those unnecessary layers of your personality that you add to keep people from seeing the real you, the version of you who stops pretending to like stuff they don’t like and want stuff they don’t want, the version of you that isn’t constantly pinging off the environment to figure out what’s cool and interesting.

Write a New Script For Your Life and Embody the Behaviors for the Person You Want to Become

This process is like applying a What Would Jesus Do mentality to your own life.

What would the version of yourself who you’d like to be do in the situation right now?

You want to build a newsletter business based on your skills and interests? Cool.

What are the qualities of someone who has a newsletter business?

• They publish prolifically

• They come up with offer ideas and ship them

• They have a set of content pillars that match what the market wants

OK, cool, now we have to ask yourself: what would the business owner a year from now do in the present moment to get where they want to be?

Let’s take something like putting together an offer and selling it. Putting together a big, complicated program or 19-day challenge is a lot to take on if you don’t have the experience.

So, what’s the smallest, minimum viable dose of a strategy like that?

You could put together an offer for a $99 Zoom call, write up an email about it, and send it to your list.

This is exactly what I did on the advice of a friend who noticed I was procrastinating on putting the offer out there.

She forced me to put the offer together, write the email, and hit send, all while we were chatting about it live.

• I created a rule for my writing students that they had no more than 3 edits on their posts before they hit publish, so they had to ship their work.

• I taught them outlines that constrained their ideas so they were easier to articulate.

• I’d get them to commit to content pillars for 90 days instead of 9 years to give them enough time to make progress without feeling overly committed

I’m using business examples here, but all of this boils down to gradual behavior change theory, which is scientifically rigorous and useful for change.

Take the new behavior you want to adopt, shrink it down to an atomic level, execute on it, go up a tiny bit higher, repeat until you’ve rewired your personality.

Remember This About Yourself

You learned how to become who you are today.

This idea that you’re just the type of person who does or doesn’t behave a certain way?

It’s not true.

You’re just the accumulation of the reference experiences you’ve had over the years that turned into beliefs about who you are. And all of it can change.

This starts where we began.

The key to all of this is abandoning the idea that this is all some mystery to you.

You know what you want.

You know who you want to become.

You know what needs to be done.

Admit those first, but then go a level deeper than just ‘trying to lock in,’ which doesn’t work, and instead start to ponder this.

What conditions could you create that would give you the maximum possible odds of turning into who you’d like to become?

Those conditions can engineer you into a version of yourself that previously escaped you. The loop can be broken. Things can one day click for you. Never doom. Never give up. Never stop believing change is possible for you.

More From Monetize Your Mind

This publication is dedicated to three topics:

• Mindset advice to help you become the person you’re meant to be

• Writing advice to help you attract attention you can turn into money

• Monetization strategies you can use to build a full-time business

Check out some related articles here to dive deeper:

You can engineer luck through constant exposure to potential opportunities.

You can’t guarantee you’ll start the next Google, write the next Harry Potter, or add 100,000 subscribers to your Substack newsletter.

But you can inevitably live out a dream previously thought improbable if you learn how to increase your surface area of luck.

the serendipitous mat…

Read more

You’ve been living the same six months over and over again for years.

You want to change your life in some meaningful way — starting a busines…

Read more

Your knowledge wants to become money.

You can take the skills and interests you already have and turn them into a business.

Whether you’re thinking about starting a business using your expertise or you’re already an active business owner who wants to grow…

This guide will walk you through the exact steps you need to turn your thoughts into cash and get paid to be yourself.

Subscribe now

The Three-Part Mental Monetization Model

Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now. - Naval Ravikant

The only way you’re going to stick through the rough parts of building a business, which there will be, is by building the type of business you’re passionate about building.

If it were just about money, you could launch any kind of business, but money alone isn’t a big enough piece of motivation.

So we have to solve the problem of building a business that you enjoy running but also makes profits at the same time.

That’s where the mental monetization model comes in. It has three parts:

Skills: Whether these are skills you’ve developed in your career, skills you taught yourself, or problems you solved in the past, you have to actually be good at a skill that can solve a problem or teach something to a paying customer.

Interests: You have interests that might be outside of your skill set. You might be a therapist, but you’re interested in art. You’re a UX professional, but you like writing. You’re a data analyst, but you enjoy personal development and philosophy.

Demand: There has to be a tribe of people who are interested in not just learning about, but paying for in the form of a product or service. It’s usually possible to find this overlap, but you have to find it.

You need all three.

If you have skills and demand, but you’re not really interested, you’ll build a prison. You’ll make money, but you won’t have fun.

If you have skills and interests, but no demand, you build a hobby. You’ll have fun, but you won’t make money.

If you have interests and demand, but no skills to back it, you have a mirage. You’ll have a shot, but it’s risky because you’re regurgitating.

Rather than tell you what this can look like, I’ll show you:

A former client was into therapy, eastern philosophy, and art, so she built a program that used art and meditation on top of traditional therapy methods.

I write about business, personal development, and writing advice. Writing and business are my skills, personal development is my passion. So I write about all three.

A former student has exited 7-figure companies, so she has business skills, but at age 65, she’s launching an unretirement offer that helps people find their next chapter. She’s using her business skills to help around a topic she cares about.

I built a skill inventory GPT you can use to find the profitable skill that you can turn into a business. Subscribe, and you’ll get it in the welcome email.

Subscribe now

If you’re already a subscriber, send me a DM with the word ‘skills,’ and I’ll send it to you.

To Niche or Not to Niche, That Is The Question

I understand.

You don’t want to be boxed in. You don’t want to be one-dimensional. You don’t want to target a tiny niche because it feels like a trap and you’re cutting yourself off from opportunities.

Rather than tell you what to do here, I’m going to teach you how to think.

First, let’s explain what people actually pay for. People pay to get problems solved and move away from pain, and they pay to move towards pleasure and a positive outcome.

Painkillers sell for more money than vitamins.

You might buy some vitamins to get healthier. You will buy ibuprofen when you have a headache.

Take a look at your idea, your content, your bio, your about page, your business plan as if you were a stranger.

Is it clear what problem you solve and what benefit they’d get from reading your stuff, working with you, or buying your products?

If the answer is yes, you’re good. If it’s no, I’d rethink it.

Now, a quick primer on niches.

Pretty much all products in the coaching, consulting, or course-creating world tend to fall into one of these three categories:

• Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

You can tie almost any offer back to one of the three.

Say you do personal development coaching or peak performance — people are usually looking for peak performance to achieve a goal like making more money in their business.

You help midlife women navigate the messy middle and write their next chapter — that’s a wealth offer in the form of a career.

You help people manifest — well, what are people usually trying to manifest? Money, a new job, a spouse, better health.

What about hobbies? Well, people who make sourdough tend to post about it online or tell their friends. Part of having a hobby is the fact that other people know you have a hobby. So, it’s relationships.

Either way, there’s a lot of wiggle room to be had as long as you’re in one of the three markets.

So there are categories, subcategories, and niches.

Let’s look at some subcategory examples here:

• Wealth → careers, writing online, finance

• Health → nutrition, fitness, mental health

• Relationships → dating, parenting, marriage

Within subcategories, there are niches:

• Careers → job search advice, upskilling, fractional work

• Nutrition → gut health, emotional eating, vitality

• Parenting → connect with estranged children, parenting ADHD children, peaceful co-parenting

Sometimes niches can cross demographics, but they don’t have to. Usually, you cross it with a demographic if it actually makes the offer stronger; don’t do it arbitrarily.

• Career coach for cybersecurity experts — this makes sense because there’s niche-specific advice like security clearances and certifications

• Testosterone protocols for 40+ men — women don’t want or need testosterone protocols

• Peak performance for entrepreneurs — this makes sense because entrepreneurs value performance because they can see the financial ROI.

The Best of Both Worlds

When it comes to your writing, you can build a topic umbrella. This is where you write about 3 to 4 topics that are unique, but somewhat related.

Examples:

• Dating advice for men, fitness, personal development

• Somatic therapy, relationships, psychology

• Career skills, AI, peak performance and productivity

I wouldn’t have an umbrella of completely unrelated topics; however, like ancient history, makeup tutorials, and teaching people how to code.

My friend Marcos Ruiz, a 7-figure ghostwriter, invented a method called the P.E.S.T.O. Pillars that helps you build a unique personal brand that’s entertaining, educating, fun for your audience, and connects you with people because people buy coaches, not coaching.

Personality: Sprinkle bits of your life into your writing— your hobbies, the skills you’re learning, places you’re traveling, the people in your life you care about.

Education: This is where you are giving how-to advice or explaining how you’ve done something. You’re educating your audience around the problem they’re willing to pay for.

Stories: Your story is your edge. It’s what will make people bond with you. Share all kinds of stories in your content, from the origin story of how you built your business to stories from your day-to-day that you weave into your content (I show how to do this in the social media writing training that’s below the paid line of this article)

Trending: If something is trending on social media or in the news and it’s related to your topic, add your $.02 to catch the tidal wave of traffic.

Opinions: In a world where multiple people are selling the same products, making the same offers, and promoting the same claims, your opinions, POV, and perspective help you stand out.

With this model, you get to have a business that solves a specific problem for someone who wants to pay for it, but then you get to have fun by weaving all of your interests into the business.

I think people think that niching down means you get to have no fun. No, it just means that the focus of the thing you sell should be specific. You can do this AND capture all of your interests into the business at the same time. They aren’t mutually exclusive.

This month, I’m helping 6 coaches and consultants add $5,000 per month to their business in six months using skills and audience they already have.

Join in July and get 8 months for the price of 6. Why? Summer is the unfair advantage. Your competition is waiting for September to get serious.

You’ll spend July and August building the offer, the positioning, and the pipeline — so when Q4 hits, and everyone else is scrambling, you’re already running.

The bonus month expires when the 6 spots fill.

Your next step: a free 15-minute $10K Roadmap Call.

We’ll see if this model can get you to $10K months — and if it’s a fit, how to grab a spot. Either way, you leave with a clearer plan.

Book Your $10K Roadmap Call Here

Monetization Models

I’ve tried every single monetization model there is, from selling $5 ebooks to doing $30,000 consulting deals.

You want to pick a model that meets your financial goals and your lifestyle goals at the same time.

So, we need to do some math here.

First, start with your goal. Imagine it’s 12 months from now, how much money would you have to make from your online business to feel like it was a success?

Let’s just say the number is $10,000 per month.

You have options here, but I want you to take a serious look at the math first because I don’t think a lot of people think it through.

Let’s take something like publishing books. Books are great marketing tools for getting customers to know, like, trust, and buy from you if you have a back-end offer.

They are usually terrible vehicles for making money in and of themselves because you have to sell so many copies. If your book is $10, that’s 1,000 copies per month needed to hit $10K. Less than 7% of books sell 1,000 copies lifetime.

Paid subscriptions, from what I’ve seen, convert at around 4 percent, but let’s round it up to 5%. Let’s assume you charge $20 per month. You’d need 10,000 subscribers at a 5% conversion rate.

Paid subs are good because they create customers and people who are serious about your stuff. Many of those will buy a higher-tier product. So turn them on, but start thinking of ways you can monetize beyond the paid tier, too.

When the prices go up, the math starts to get a little more fun. Say you sell a $497 course, well, now you’re looking at 40 sales a month to hit $10,000.

Most sales convert at .5-1% for launches of this kind, so you’d need 4,000 to 8,000 subscribers, which is doable if the list is full of potential buyers who have problems you can solve and not people who read just for entertainment.

When I work with clients, we usually build offers that sell for $3,000 to $5,000, which means you can make $10,000 per month with just 2-4 people signing up each month, which means you can monetize faster and with a smaller audience.

The general rule of thumb here, the lower the prices of your products, the bigger your audience needs to be.

If I were starting from scratch, I would do it like this.

I’d want to test and validate my topic fast.

Maybe I’d be a little intimidated at creating some high-ticket offer right away. What I likely would do is launch some one-on-one consulting calls at $250 an hour.

You don’t need any modules or slides, just your insights and Zoom. I signed my first four clients by sending one email to my list, and they booked calls with me.

Regardless of the model, the bottom line is this: Monetize sooner rather than later. Even if it’s just paid subs. Even if it’s affiliate products. Even if it’s an e-book. You want to establish a seller-buyer relationship early because if you don’t, you can put your audience in the friend zone and build a list of non-buyers who just want free content.

In the gated section of this piece at the bottom, I’ll walk you through the step-by-step launch strategy one of my clients used to sign 8 clients in a week with a brand new fitness coaching offer.

You Need an Offer

Now that you have a body of knowledge or a skill to sell to people, you need to turn what you do, the service, into an offer.

Here’s the number one thing you must burn in your brain if you want to sign clients.

Don’t sell what you do.

Sell what your product or service does.

• Don’t sell fitness coaching. Sell Abs.

• Don’t sell copywriting. Sell conversions that lead to sales.

• Don’t sell relationship coaching. Sell a happy marriage.

When you’re selling, you must understand — your prospect is in pain. They want to move away from that pain into a state of pleasure.

Your offer is the bridge that fills the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Here are some components of your offer to think about:

• Promise: What is the outcome they will get in exchange for the money?

• Timeframe: How long will it take to get the outcome?

• Pricing: How much does it cost?

• Urgency/Scarcity: Why should they buy this now as opposed to later?

Bad offer: I’ll write ‘copy’ for you

Good offer: I’ll book you 20 qualified sales calls per month on a pay-per-call basis with a done-for-you sales funnel

Bad offer: Career Coaching

Good offer: Land a FAANG job in 6 months or less

Bad offer: Dating coaching

Good offer: I’ll help you get 10 first dates with quality matches in the next 6 weeks

When it comes to pricing, start no lower than $1,000/month. $1,000/mo creates enough cash flow to help you reach your income goals without needing a ton of people to say yes.

Selling low-ticket products like e-books and $47-97 courses, or $5 Substack subscriptions, requires you to get tons of people to say yes.

Urgency/scarcity: You need to give people a reason to act now, or else they won’t. This is why it’s smart to cap how many clients you take each month and add some sort of reason to act now, like a price raise after you sign your next batch of clients.

I recorded a full training on how to craft and validate your high-ticket offer. It’s included underneath the paid line of this article at the bottom. You can upgrade here or join the paid tier for access:

Subscribe now

The Only Four Ways to Sign Clients Or Get Customers

There are only four ways to get attention that you can convert into clients or customers

• You can produce one-to-many content for free (organic traffic)

• You can produce one-to-many content by paying for advertisements (cold traffic)

• You can reach out 1-on-1 to people who know you, follow you, and like your content (warm outreach)

• You can reach out 1-on-1 to people who don’t know you (cold outreach)

Every single one of these methods works.

Organic content + doing email launches works best for digital products and courses

Organic content + warm outreach is the best combination for coaching.

Paid traffic works well for both warm and cold if you know how to do it, but most of you probably aren’t in that bucket.

Cold outreach works, but you probably won’t enjoy it.

Long story short you need a way to turn attention into money.

I run a dead simple process with clients:

• Write client-attracting content that focuses on the frustrations, fears, hopes, and aspirations of your audience

• Reach out to people who subscribe, like, comment, view your profile (for LinkedIn), or re-post your content and start conversations

• Either book a sales call to close the client, or you can send them a Google Doc version of your offer and sell by chat without needing a call.

I like sending DMs because you just make more money than you otherwise would have. I remember selling an extra $10,000 of my $597 writing course in a single month the first time I tried DMs. I’ve sold $5,000 programs via chat with no calls, too.

Your other option? Do a monthly launch to your list. I would do launches if you’re selling $297 or above. Spend the first two weeks of the month giving value, spending the third week teasing the launch, and then the last week doing the launch with emails like this:

• Problem: Articulate their daily pain

• Agitate: Show how life gets worse if they don’t solve the problem

• Solution: Preview your model to fix it

• Philosophy: The wrong way vs. your way or old way vs. new way

• Proof: Client wins, testimonials, and stories (even if the proof is just you)

• Plan: What are the 3 steps you will take to fix it

• Final day: Send 2-5 emails announcing doors close (you make 50% of sales on the last day)

You can do all of the above. I send DMs and do email launches and make offers and CTAs in posts.

You need to make more offers and communicate with your audience more frequently than you might think.

Final Thoughts

If you did these four things:

• Build a monetization map with skills, interests, and demand

• Pick a lane to stick with for your topic and pillars

• Test and launch an offer early

• Repeatedly promote your offers via emails or DMs or both

And repeat across 6 to 12 months. It’s more than possible to add $5,000 to $10,000 per month in revenue or more.

The Monetization Your Mind Bundle For Paid Subscribers

Below the paid line are 3 step-by-step trainings you can use to monetize your mind:

• Craft and Validate Your High-Ticket Offer: A step-by-step training for building your first offer and signing your first 3 clients.

• The Consistent Email Blueprint: How to consistently create emails that people love to read while keeping your newsletter fresh & profitable.

• Social Media Writing 101: This will show you how to write daily short-form posts that attract attention from future clients and customers. It was originally made for X, but the same exact style works for notes on Substack

These will be core trainings that will be in the library for the paid tier of Monetize Your Mind.

Hit the upgrade button below to get access to all of the trainings.

Read more

Yesterday I was on a call with someone who told me:

“I don’t care about followers. I don’t need validation. I know it’s a vanity metric. I know you can game the algorithm to get more of them. I want more clients. I want to know how to build an audience of buyers.”

Refreshing to hear someone speak about this in such a straightforward way.

That’s who this a…

Read more

You’re sitting on a $100K business right now.

I’m not gassing you up whatsoever.

You have real skills — the kind that took you 10+ years of trial, effort, pain, and sacrifice to earn.

You can help someone who walks in the door today.

And you have an audience — even a small one — of people who already lean in when you write.

Only 7 percent of coaches, consult…

Read more

I have 23 paid subscribers. But they pledged without me asking. I’ve never once promoted a paid tier. Never sent an email about it. Never added a pop-up.

Yet, I still make $10,000 per month with Substack as the engine to help me do it.

Paid subscribers are cool, but I’m playing a different game.

If you want to build a $10,000 per month business in less than 12 months using Substack as the engine with my strange method, this guide will show you how.

Who This Works For

My approach won’t work for everyone.

This approach works best for:

• Active coaches and consultants who’ve worked with clients before

• People with certifications and credentials who can deliver for clients

• People with a professional background that lends to building online education businesses

• Self-taught hobbyists or experts who have in-demand skills and knowledge that people are willing to pay for

In short, you have to be an educational writer who is focused on a subject that falls in one of the 3 big categories of monetizable topics — health (mental & physical), wealth (career & business), or relationships.

Random examples: Nutritionists, nervous system experts, career coaches, career pivot experts, AI, dating coaches, leadership coaches, midlife transitions, neuroscientists, UX designers teaching AI, data analysts, fitness coaches, writing coaches, finance experts, holistic health coaches.

You get it. If you’re just exploring topics right now, or if you have zero idea what you’d sell or wouldn’t be able to help someone if they walked in the door, this isn’t the article for you.

Substack is an amazing place to write, explore your intellectual curiosity, have fun, build community, go slow, and make some fun money on the side. But this article is for you if you’re both a writer and an entrepreneur or a skilled professional who wants to start or grow a business.

Money Likes SPEED

Building a business takes time, but that doesn’t mean it has to take forever.

Most educational writers are under-monetized because they’re taught a model that requires them to delay gratification for too long:

• Spend years building an audience

• Wait forever to monetize

• When you do monetize, start small and sell inexpensive products

The feedback loop is too slow:

A feedback loop is simply what happens when you take an action and get a result that tells you whether what you did worked or not. The faster you get that result, the faster you can learn and improve.

Imagine opening a food truck versus planning a restaurant chain. With a food truck, you learn within days if people will buy your food and what menu items work. You can change prices, adjust recipes, or even switch cuisines next week if needed.

But with a restaurant chain, you might spend a year designing menus and renovating locations before serving your first customer – only to learn people don't want what you're selling.

In the creator economy, subscription models often create painfully slow feedback loops.

Maybe you’re already feeling the pain of trying to do all of the things you’re told to build and monetize a personal brand on Substack.

Write 5 notes a day.

Write full long-form essays twice a week.

Engage with 10 notes a day.

And then, on top of that, for you to have an actual paid sub-tier that people will pay for, you have to do more than just gate some articles. You have to add stuff to make it compelling:

• Live Q&As

• Monthly workshops

• Downloads

• Mini-courses

All just to get people to pay you $10/mo.

I had a client once who was doing so many different things for people who were paying her $5/mo on Patreon — weekly calls, community, all of these bells and whistles.

We shut it all down and did this model instead. She had spent years operating her business without ever hitting $10,000 a month.

After we made this switch, she made $10,000 in a day:

The July Summer Sprint

I’m looking to help 6 experts, coaches, or consultants add $5,000 to $10,000 per month in six months — using Substack as the engine to sign clients.

Anyone who joins this month gets two months free. Your six-month clock doesn’t start until September 1st.

Here’s why.

Your competition thinks summer is slow. They’re waiting for September to get serious. That’s exactly why you shouldn’t.

July and August are when you build the foundation — the content, the offer, the positioning, the client pipeline. So when Q4 hits, and everyone else is scrambling, you’re already running.

We’re also doing Substack-specific workshops throughout, so you know exactly how to use this platform the way I use it.

Six spots. July start.

Your next step is a free 15-minute $10K Roadmap Call.

On the call, we’ll walk through whether this model can get you to $10K months and what’s actually been standing in the way.

I’ll only talk about next steps to secure one of 6 spots if I think it’s a win for both of us.

Book Your $10K Roadmap Call

How to Build a One-Person Business Fast

It’s a math problem.

Getting to $10,000 per month by getting people to pay you $10 per month means you have to get 1,000 people to say yes, which means you probably have to build a 10,000-person email list minimum.

Paid subscriber tiers are good for creating customers. Getting people to pay you a little bit of money does get them to take you seriously, and some of your buyers will want more — a $5/mo paid sub can be a $5,000 client.

If you want to build fast, though, I wouldn’t use paid subs as your primary way of making money. Instead, work closely with a few people who pay you much more for your knowledge.

When I work with clients, we usually have them build programs where they charge $3,000 to $5,000 per client, which means they only need 20-30 clients in a year to hit $100K instead of needing 1,000 paid subs.

When you work with high-paying clients one-on-one, you get immediate feedback:

• Did they buy your offer?

• Did they get results?

• What worked and what didn't?

• What do they want more of?

Working closely with clients makes everything about your business easier:

• You know what to write to attract more clients because you’re getting insights from current clients

• You notice consistent patterns from clients that make it easier to build scalable products like courses and digital products down the road

• You slowly build assets for clients over time, so by the time you want to build products, you’re just assembling stuff you already have

You have a direct line to your most engaged customers. You don’t have to guess what works - they’ll tell you. And because they’ve paid good money for your help, they’re invested in giving you honest feedback.

With this model, you can get to $10,000 per month faster and then scale after that.

One of my clients was sitting around $10,000 per month, but she was drowning in one-on-one delivery.

We built a group coaching program, charged the same as her 1-on-1, and changed the delivery method.

Clients get an initial 1-on-1 call with her, and then the rest would be handled on weekly calls or in a portal with asynchronous feedback.

She’s working fewer hours, making more money, and her clients are getting better results because they are learning from each other.

If she runs a workshop for her existing clients, she can charge the public for tickets — boom, there’s your low-ticket product. She can then invite people into the group.

Do you notice how, in this model, every single piece of the business is validated, tested, refined, and improved by working with real paying customers first and building scale in the long term?

When you do it the other way, you run the risk of all sorts of nightmare scenarios that happen when you try to do it the other way:

• Spending dozens of hours putting together slides, recording videos, and making worksheets for a course that nobody asked you to build

• Putting months and years into audience building, only to realize you built an audience of people who like to read your work but don’t want to buy from you

• Creating an audience that devalues your time because you give so much of it away for so little money, which ends up cannibalizing your higher investment program, because they’re already used to getting your time on the cheap.

It might seem faster to chase lots of small subscribers, but working with a few high-paying clients gets you to meaningful revenue faster and teaches you what you need to know to scale bigger later.

When you have a $3K + offer to sell, writing becomes the engine to attract dream clients.

Write Client Attracting Substack Articles

You want to educate your audience. Of course you do. That’s why you started writing in the first place.

But education alone doesn’t move people.

Go a level beyond teaching them what to do. Teach them what to want. Teach them what to believe. Teach them a better way than the one they’ve already tried and abandoned.

You believe in your method, right?

You think it’s genuinely in their best interest to do it your way, right?

You care about your readers, and you want them to win, right?

Then take this next sentence seriously:

You will change more lives with your marketing than you will with your coaching.

If your marketing doesn’t get people to move, they won’t hire you to implement what you teach.

They have to buy into you and your philosophy before they’ll buy into your program. These writing techniques will get them to lean in.

Tell them why you arrived at your conclusion:

Don’t just drop the framework. Show them the road you took to get there. I promote this model because I spent years watching the “build a big audience, sell low-ticket products” path chew up and spit out talented, knowledgeable people who deserved to win.

When I started installing a different model with the right clients — people who had real expertise and a real audience, even a small one — everything changed for them. I’m not selling you a theory. I’m selling you something I’ve watched work dozens of times.

Focus on their pain and explain why it’s happening:

The pain is the pitch. I once came across a Substack post about why people wake up to pee in the middle of the night. That was a problem I’d been dealing with for months. It was wrecking my sleep. I read the post, felt completely seen, and DM’d the author. Paid her the next day. She didn’t sell me. She described my life accurately enough that I sold myself.

That’s what you’re after. Not a clever hook. Not a viral note. A post so precisely aimed at the specific, daily, embarrassing texture of your reader’s problem that they finish it thinking — this person is describing my Tuesday.

Pick fights with competing mechanisms:

Not people. Mechanisms. I’m currently picking a fight with paid subscriptions as a primary business model for experts and coaches. I’m not saying the people teaching it are wrong or bad. I’m saying the mechanism might not be right for you — and here’s why I think that.

That’s a fight worth having in public. It creates distinction. It signals a point of view. It attracts the people who already suspected the conventional wisdom wasn’t working and were waiting for someone to say it out loud.

A nervous system coach can pick a fight with talk therapy as a first-line solution for dysregulation.

A nutritionist can pick a fight with calorie counting.

A career coach can pick a fight with the “just apply to more jobs” advice that’s been failing her clients for years.

Never take jabs at people. Always take jabs at methods.

Anticipate and reframe the limiting beliefs, keeping them stuck:

Let’s look at the thoughts that have gone through many of my clients’ minds before I worked with them.

My audience is too small.

I need more followers before I can really sell anything.

Nobody’s going to pay $3,000 when I only have 400 subscribers.

Your audience isn’t too small. Your belief about what’s possible with a small audience is too small. The nutritionist with 433 subscribers doesn’t need 4,000. She needs four people who are exhausted, whose doctors keep telling them their labs are “normal” while they feel anything but. Those four people exist in her audience right now. They’re reading her posts. They’re just waiting for her to make it obvious she can help them.

You don’t have a growth problem. You have a conversion problem. Those require completely different solutions. Chasing growth when your conversion is broken is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Explain why the old way wasn’t their fault:

You were taught a business model of building a big brand to monetize — because the people who sold it to you teach growth, not monetization.

They’re good at getting followers. They built an audience by teaching other people how to build audiences. Of course, that’s the model they’re selling.

But you’re not a growth guru. You’re a nutritionist. A nervous system coach. A career coach. A functional health practitioner. You have a specific solution for a specific person with a specific problem — and that person doesn’t require a hundred thousand impressions to find you.

You built the freebie nobody downloaded. You launched the $47 product that made eleven sales. You posted three times a week for eighteen months and watched your subscriber count crawl while your bank account stayed exactly where it was.

And because it didn’t work, you assumed the problem was you. The creator who told you to build a $47 course had 80,000 followers when they launched theirs. They just forgot to mention that part. You didn’t fail. You were just given a model that wasn’t built for you.

Use Your Substack Articles to Increase Time Under Attention:

The more time somebody spends reading your work, the more likely they are to buy from you because you’re capturing more of their time under attention.

This is the reason why books are one of the best tools for signing huge coaching and consulting deals or paid speaking gigs. By the time someone has spent multiple hours digesting your model, method, worldview, and philosophy, they’re pre-sold on working with you.

One of my clients got a $15,000 corporate deal because someone at the company had read a bunch of his work, which was about a unique approach he had to UX design. Your goal isn’t to write posts to get subscribers, it’s to build a catalog that shows how you think

How to Turn Your Substack Newsletter Into a Real Business Instead of a Hobby

Again, remember, this is for you if you want to build a real business from your words.

Writing is important because it builds trust, increases time under attention, and creates community and relationships with future clients.

Building an audience (of people who need your help) helps you earn more. In the long run, it’s in your best interest to grow.

But building an audience and building a business isn’t the same thing. One doesn’t automatically lead to the other.

The following steps are the things that will move the needle and help you build a business with your words.

Cash Comes From Conversations:

Every engagement is an implicit request to start a conversation.

Every time somebody:

• Likes an article

• Likes one of your notes

• Leaves a comment

• Subscribes to your newsletter

They are signaling to you that they value your insights. The next obvious step is to just start talking to them. This isn’t a cold stranger who doesn’t know you, this is someone who leaned in first.

You don’t have to be salesy to do this. All you’re doing is having conversations with people about their problems and proposing the idea of working together if it makes sense for both of you.

Make More Offers:

You’re not making enough offers. You’re not giving people enough opportunities to work with you.

Adding a book a call with me link at the end of your articles isn’t enough.

An offer looks like writing an email that says, “I’m looking to help 5 data analysts land their dream jobs in the next 6 months, reply with “data” for more details,” and hit send.

It’s sending a Dean Jackson 9-word email to your list that says: “Are you still looking to lose 20 lbs?”

An offer looks like doing a 5-day email campaign for your offer with capped spots and a deadline to join.

An offer looks like doing 3 LinkedIn profile audits for potential clients.

An offer looks like making invites to work with you in the DMs.

An offer looks like sending an email sequence to someone who signs up for your list after downloading a freebie.

Most experts make one offer a month, if that. They write posts, send newsletters, show up in the notes feed, build genuine trust — and then whisper an offer into the void once in a while and wonder why nobody bites.

Your reader needs to hear from you multiple times, in multiple ways, before they move.

Build a Dual Newsletter Strategy:

Substack is not a sales platform. Substack is where you build trust. It’s where you shift beliefs, name pain, and accumulate time under attention until your reader can’t imagine working with anyone else. It’s doing that job beautifully. Let it.

But trust alone doesn’t pay your bills. At some point, you need a direct line to your reader that isn’t filtered through a platform optimized for discovery and community. You need to be able to show up in their inbox and make a real offer without it feeling off-brand for where they found you.

That’s what a dedicated email platform is for. Use Substack for discovery and new subscribers, and migrate them to a traditional email marketing software like Kit or Beehiv. This list is more direct. More offer-focused. More short, snappy, and story-based. Substack builds the relationship. Your email list monetizes it.

There is no reality where you write posts that name real pain, have genuine conversations with people you can actually help, make offers consistently, and don’t build a real business from this platform.

The audience doesn’t have to be massive. The niche doesn’t have to be perfect. The tech doesn’t have to be dialed in. You just have to play a different game than the one you were taught.

Stop waiting for subscribers to turn into income. Start having conversations. Start making offers. Start letting the people who need you most actually find you.

The July Summer Sprint

I’m looking to help 6 experts, coaches, or consultants add $5,000 to $10,000 per month in six months — using Substack as the engine to sign clients.

Anyone who joins this month gets two months free. Your six-month clock doesn’t start until September 1st.

Here’s why.

Your competition thinks summer is slow. They’re waiting for September to get serious. That’s exactly why you shouldn’t.

July and August are when you build the foundation — the content, the offer, the positioning, the client pipeline. So when Q4 hits, and everyone else is scrambling, you’re already running.

We’re also doing Substack-specific workshops throughout, so you know exactly how to use this platform the way I use it.

Six spots. July start.

Your next step is a free 15-minute $10K Roadmap Call.

On the call, we’ll walk through whether this model can get you to $10K months and what’s actually been standing in the way.

I’ll only talk about next steps to secure one of 6 spots if I think it’s a win for both of us.

Book Your $10K Roadmap Call

There are multiple Greek definitions of the word sin — to fall short or miss the mark.

You were put on this earth for a reason. You have an assignment to fulfill. There’s a standard for you to meet.

It’s not measured by the outcomes you produce. It’s measured by your intentions and the actions you take as a result.

God speaks to you in your conscience. In …

Read more

A few weeks ago, I met a doctor on Substack.

Not a “wellness creator.” Not a woman who read three books about cortisol. An actual MD.

She can read labs.

She can see what’s happening in your bloodwork that no coach on this platform can see.

She can do telemedicine. She can prescribe medication.

She can take a tired, foggy, burned-out professional and literally change the trajectory of their health.

You know what she asked me?

“How do I make money with this?”

There’s a company called FitScripts that charges $35,000 per client for vitality work.

Lab analysis, protocols, and ongoing support. Thirty-five thousand dollars. For work she is more qualified to do.

The part that gets me?

I had been personally searching for someone who does exactly what she does. Me. A guy with money, a real problem, and a credit card.

I wanted someone to actually read my labs instead of glancing at them for 90 seconds.

I wanted real guidance from someone with real credentials.

There are thousands of people out here like me.

She’s wasting her talent on $5 subscriptions — surrounded by a sea of demand from customers willing to pay her thousands, and she just couldn’t see it.

She’s Not Alone

I’d love to tell you this doctor is an unusual case.

She’s not. She’s the most common story on this entire platform.

For the past two years, I’ve worked with coaches, corporate professionals, and experts across every category you can imagine.

And almost every single one of them suffers from the same disease.

I call it the Value Capture Gap.

The Value Capture Gap is the difference between what your skills are worth and what you’re actually charging for them.

Look at the pattern from a client I have worked with.

A UX expert who knows how to tie design decisions to the business metrics that PM teams and execs care about — knowledge that saves companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in bad product decisions.

He packaged it into a $10 ebook.

A coach helping people heal trauma — work that changes the entire arc of someone’s life. She was charging $5 a month and throwing in free live sessions.

A resume expert who could reroute someone’s whole career. $50 reviews.

And then I run across a medical doctor who can do what a $35K-per-client company does. Wondering how to monetize.

And every one of these gaps exists for the same reason:

Experts price against other creators. Buyers price against the cost of staying stuck.

Why Smart People Undercharge

The smarter you are, the wider your gap tends to be.

The doctor has read ten thousand labs — of course it feels obvious to her. That’s the cruel side effect of mastery.

The one person on Earth who finds your knowledge unremarkable is also the person setting the price.

If you came from corporate, it’s worse. You’ve never actually priced your own knowledge — your salary did it for you. But your old employer billed clients $300 to $500 an hour for your brain.

Now you’re charging $5 a month for the same brain.

A $5 price tag is tantamount to apologizing for the existence of your ‘business.’ It makes “yes” so painless that you never have to feel a real rejection.

The most expensive thing you can possibly do? Charge low prices.

Pricing Teaches People How to Think About You

If someone offered you a Louis Vuitton bag for $5, you wouldn’t think “what a deal.”

You’d think “fake.”

The price would destroy your belief in the product — even if it was real.

Now look at your own page. Ten, fifteen, twenty years of expertise that companies pay thousands for — selling for the price of a gas station coffee, with a “buy me a coffee” button underneath like a tip jar.

You’re positioning yourself like a panhandler for knowledge your counterparts charge 1,000X for.

And your audience is taking notes.

Many of you remind me of my BFF — Freebie Fiona.

Her audience loves her tips. They save her posts, download her guides, and say “OMG thank you sooo much,” in her comments.

She’s everyone’s favorite helpful internet friend.

That’s the problem. She’s a friend. Not a guide.

When her readers hit a problem they’d pay real money to solve, they go hire someone else — because Fiona trained them.

Every free tip and every tip-jar button taught her audience the same lesson: say thank you, not “how do I pay you?”

Your pricing IS your positioning.

Teach your audience you’re a $5 expert long enough, and they’ll fight you when you finally try to charge what you’re worth.

The Part That Should Actually Bother You

Maybe you don’t care about the money. A lot of experts don’t — they got into this work to help people.

Fine. Then this is the part that should keep you up at night.

Underpricing shrinks your impact.

Think about what you do with advice you pay $5 for. Do you rush out to go implement it, or does it sit on your shelf?

I remember I had bought all of these books on anti-inflammation diets, gut health optimization, better sleep, etc.

I couldn’t be bothered to read them and just paid someone to tell me exactly what to do instead.

Mind you, these were problems that were affecting my life in a bad way, but I was willing to fix them until the stakes were high enough and I got real expert help I deemed worth it.

I know a bunch of really smart health creators on here, but then I go see some 15-minute-long article behind an $8 paywall. Even though I could easily afford the subscription, it’s not worth the money for me. Would rather buy a snackwrap.

The $5K client shows up to every call. Does the work. Reports back. They have skin in the game, so they act. The $5 buyer downloads the PDF, skims half of it, and forgets it exists by Thursday.

So the real tragedy of the trauma coach had nothing to with her bank account. It’s that $5 a month practically guaranteed fewer people healed. The low price made her advice ignorable.

The cheap option isn’t the ethical option.

If you genuinely care about impact, underpricing is the most irresponsible thing you can do with your knowledge.

The Staircase to Nowhere

“Honestly... I don’t even feel like I’m worthy of doing this,” she said.

A year or so ago, I hosted a virtual summit with dozens of guest speakers. One of them had everything going for her on the surface. Thousands of followers. Tons of engagement. From the outside, she had a thriving writing business. That’s why I invited her.

Turns out, she had zero customers.

Her writing was excellent. Her audience was real. But she had built what I call a staircase to nowhere — a big audience with no buyers in it, climbing higher every month toward a door that doesn’t exist.

When your audience won’t buy, your brain offers you a comforting diagnosis: I just need more subscribers.

That diagnosis has a twin: “I’ll monetize later.” Once I hit 1,000 subscribers. Then 5,000. Then after the redesign.

The threshold keeps moving because the threshold was never real. You’re kicking the can down the road out of fear.

Waiting isn’t neutral.

Every month without an offer builds an audience optimized for free content subs, and trains them that you’re free.

“I’ll monetize later” can lead you right up the staircase to nowhere.

So you double down on growth.

You write two articles a week instead of one.

You write 5 notes a day instead of 3.

You hop on 97 Substack lives to build community.

The audience just keeps getting bigger than your bank account. It’s maddening. I have met creators with 100,000+ followers who make essentially zero.

Your obsession with subscriber count is not the cure for the Value Capture Gap.

People with the right model don’t need huge audiences.

One of my clients makes $10K a month with 2,100 subscribers.

Another signed $10K in clients with 1,400.

Another turned a $5 subscriber into a $5K client with a list of 243 people.

The summit speaker never figured that out. Her last post was February 4, 2024.

She didn’t fail loudly. She just quietly concluded the whole thing was pointless, and disappeared. And she had a topic and audience that, from the outside looking in, seemed successful.

If you knew how many of your favorite creators were broke, you would stop being obsessed with subscribers.

It’s sad. I see so many otherwise successful people fade out because they’re not built for the content treadmill.

You’re not a content creator. Why are you playing the game like one?

That’s what the Value Capture Gap actually costs. Not just money. Careers.

You’re Pricing Against the Wrong Thing

Remember the sentence I told you to hold onto?

Experts price against other creators. Buyers price against the cost of staying stuck.

Here’s what it looks like in the wild.

The doctor was pricing against other creators. Wellness newsletters. $9-a-month health coaches. Substack tip jars. That’s the comparison set in her head.

You know what her buyers are comparing her to? Chronic fatigue. Declining health. Years of medical uncertainty and doctors who won’t give them more than seven minutes.

The UX guy priced against ebooks. His buyers were pricing against six-figure product mistakes.

The trauma coach priced against subscriptions. Her buyers were pricing against decades of suffering.

You’re both looking at the same offer and seeing completely different numbers — and the buyer’s number is almost always bigger than yours.

That gap between the two numbers? That’s your Value Capture Gap, sitting there uncollected.

Investment vs. Cost

There are two numbers in every transaction:

Investment — what someone pays you.

Cost — what it costs them to NOT solve the problem. Financially. Emotionally. Mentally. Physically. Spiritually.

Experts who charge $5 are staring at the investment. “Who would pay me $5,000?”

Buyers who pay $5,000 are staring at the cost. “What does another five years of this problem do to my life?”

Remember the doctor.

While she’s agonizing over what she could possibly charge, the person across from her— me, that week — had been calculating something entirely different:

How much money am I losing because I can’t function at peak?

What’s another decade of brain fog worth?

What it’s costing me to not be present with my friends, my family, my kid?

Won’t delve into detail, but for me, my health stuff was ruining my life, so it was worth every penny to fix, which I did, with someone else.

$5K is irrelevant to the right customer.

My client who turned $5 subscribers into $5K clients. She reached out to the same people paying her $5 a month and offered them $5,000 of real transformation — and they said yes.

The only thing that changed was the size of the door she built for them.

People can’t pay you for what you don’t offer.

So What Is Your Substack Actually For?

Not paid subscriptions. Not tips. Not a “buy me a coffee” button.

Your Substack is a trust-building, gap-exposing engine.

The purpose of your content is not to deliver answers. Tips and how-to content attract freebie seekers and tire-kickers — and put you straight into the friend zone with a 🔥 emoji as your paycheck.

The purpose of your content is to help the right reader see three things:

1. Where they actually are.

2. Where they want to be.

3. Why they can’t close that gap alone.

When your writing does that, something changes. You stop attracting fans and start attracting buyers. Your audience stops saying “great post” and starts saying “how do I work with you?” A list of 243 people starts outperforming a list of 20,000.

That’s the game. Not growth. Value capture.

The Door

The hard part is already done.

The doctor already went to medical school. The UX guy already spent fifteen years in the trenches. You already built the expertise. Years of it.

Expertise people are actively searching for — I know, because I was one of them, credit card in hand, looking for someone exactly like the woman who couldn’t see me.

What’s even wilder?

Some of those buyers are already subscribed to you. Reading you every week. Waiting for a door worth walking through. My client’s $5K clients were her $5 subscribers the whole time.

You are not one more skill away.

You are not one thousand more subscribers away.

You’ve already built something worth far more than you’re capturing.

You’re just selling it through a door the size of a mail slot.

So Here’s a Door

If you’re an expert, coach, or corporate professional who wants to ramp up now — not “later,” we both know what later means — here’s exactly what I’m offering.

A 15-minute Gap Call.

book your gap call here

15 minutes on the phone with me.

I’ll ask you a handful of direct questions about your expertise, what you’re selling right now (or the offer you don’t have yet), and what you’re charging for it.

By the end, we’ll have put a real number on your Value Capture Gap — what your knowledge is worth versus what you’re actually capturing.

Then one of two things happens:

If I can’t help you, I’ll tell you straight and point you toward someone or something that can.

If I can help you, we’ll book a longer session and map the plan together: where your business should be a year from now, where it is today, and exactly what’s standing in between.

That’s it. 15 minutes. You’ll know your gap. I’ll know if I can close it.

[Book your Gap Call →]

Because that doctor is still out there, sitting on $35,000 of expertise, wondering how to monetize.

The only question is how much longer you’re going to wonder with her.

I remember a moment at work that made it crystal clear that having a job wasn’t for me.

Flashback ten years ago. I worked at a marketing agency as a project manager. Part of my job involved reading the contracts that came in from new clients.

The money in those contracts was far in excess of what we were getting paid. There was one contract where the cont…

Read more

I get it.

It feels like those moments from the past — the times you fell short, the times you failed to attempt out of fear, the times you broke the promises you made to yourself — feel like bricks cemented into the story of who you are.

You come to think you are your past. You give the past supernatural powers that cast a spell on your future.

After a while, inertia starts to set in. Each day of your life continues to confirm that you are just not cut out for what you want, which makes it that much harder to try again because, what's the use?

What's going to make this time any different? Isn't it time to stop kidding yourself and just resign yourself to your fate?

You get 'quiet desperation,' that comes from realizing there is so much available to you in life, but you just aren't going to do a damn thing about it. You can rationalize it away and lie to yourself all you want, but every once in a while, that voice will whisper to you and say you're wasting your life.

I’m not trying to give you false hope or some cliché motivational speech when I say what I’m about to say next because it’s something I genuinely believe. It’s the belief that helped me crawl from the deepest depths of despair over and over again.

You are under no obligation to be who you were yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, or even who you've been for the majority of your life. The past doesn't matter; it doesn't define who you are, and the only meaning it has is the one you assign it.

The past isn't real

Your entire life is nothing but a series of 'nows.' There is no such thing as an actual past. It's just a construct in your mind that mostly serves as a way to block you from being who you'd like to be right now.

The past isn't an objective account of what has happened in your life either. It is a cherry-picked patchwork of memories, some of which never happened. It's not fixed and unchangeable either.

Have you ever gone through a situation that felt horrible in the moment or days after, but felt like a step forward months or years later? Things like breakups, losing our jobs, or going through some health scare take different meanings in our minds depending on how long it has been since the thing happened.

Usually, it takes time for us to change our minds about these things, but it's a reminder that you always have the power to change the meaning of what has happened. What you perceive as the past is nothing more than the story you're telling yourself about events that have happened.

And the main narrative that holds us back is the story that we have to remain a certain way just because we've been a certain way. It's the story that the past has predictive power. It's this fictional idea that you just are the way you are because your past gave you no other choice.

For most of us, the past is a label maker. It assigns us these 'fixed' traits that cannot be changed. You see the past-driven-lie in phrases that start with the words 'I am."

• I'm an introvert

• I'm not the type of person who takes risks

• I'm not good enough

• I'm a screw up

• I'm a perfectionist

Somewhere along the line, you created a set of labels as a coping mechanism.

When you give yourself a label you built from your past, you get a convenient excuse. You get a way to absolve yourself from taking action. You create a shield to hide yourself from the idea that you could be living the exact life you'd like to live, but you're just choosing not to because you're afraid. You give yourself a way to avoid responsibility over your life, your decisions, and your current circumstances.

But there’s no such thing as a way you must behave. Your identity is always the one you choose.

You're Choosing How You Want to Live

Why would anyone choose to live a life they don't want? Well, because they have no choice but to choose. You have free will and the ability to make choices based on the way you perceive your circumstances.

Of course, your environment and upbringing play a role. If you grew up in poverty where you saw nothing but crime, drug addiction, and violence around you, being in that type of environment will make you much more likely to continue the cycle. But you still have a choice to decide what to do moving forward, regardless of where you start from. And regardless of where you started, it's always the best option to make the best choices you can given the situation.

That's the magic trick we play on ourselves. We choose how we want to live right now and use the past to justify our decisions. Why? Because, above all else, we tend to crave what's familiar, even if it means we hate our lives, because we can make sense out of the familiar.

There's a perverse comfort that comes from settling into a groove of living a life we don't want. The devil you know is better than the one you don't, and few things terrify us more than moving into an uncertain future because, in that uncertain future, there might be a newer, worse, more brutal type of pain than the pain we're experiencing right now.

When you enter an uncertain territory, you have no idea what's around the corner, what crushing ego blows, heartbreaks, and self-esteem destroying calamities are around the corner. You can't control the dosage of pain when you put yourself out there in a real way. So instead, you dole out a steady dose of dull yet consistent pain instead of risking the sharp, unpredictable kind.

If you want to change, the first step is realizing that, fundamentally, your goal is to same the same, to remain consistent with your identity, and stay exactly who you think you are because who you are is home.

It's really important to have that realization. That you are choosing, no matter how forced the choice may be, to live how you are right now and to also understand you're receiving some payoff for your behavior — you're getting something out of it. That's the key question to ask yourself:

"What am I getting out of currently choosing to live this way?"

You have some present goals you're trying to achieve, and creating character traits as defensive mechanisms.

Your goal is to avoid rejection at all costs, so you manufacture the personality trait of shyness so you can avoid putting yourself out there.

Your goal is to avoid failure, so you manufacture the identity of a perfectionist. That way, you can delay forever under the guise of "doing it right" and never have to confront the possibility that your best might not be good enough.

Your goal is to avoid the shame of being seen trying and still coming up short, so you manufacture the trait of 'being above it all." If nothing matters, you can't fail.

Once you recognize that you’re operating from a set of present goals that you’re using character traits as a means to achieve, you can change your present goals and therefore change your current behaviors. You can start now and begin to put the past in the dust.

You Can Make Up For Lost Time

You have to hold these paradoxical beliefs in your mind at the same time: You have an eternity left to turn things around. You have no time whatsoever. You're both the oldest and youngest you've ever been, so it's time to live out the adage:

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now"

Lamenting over the past is useless. You can kick yourself over all the time you wasted and run through the scenarios of how you wish things would have worked out. Or you can just let it go and decide to start a new chapter so you can make up for lost time.

The goal of this new chapter? Don't just live for the moment. Live to make up for all of those moments you missed. Overcorrect. Go to the other extreme. Live so fast, bold, and full of courage that you overwhelm your past with pure forward momentum.

I went up to the city to go to a rave party a few weekends back. I linked up with a good friend of mine from college. Back in the day, he was more of the shy and reserved type who didn't socialize a ton at parties or chat up that many women. We're all at the hotel, having a few drinks, getting ready to go out, and it seems much of the same. He's chill, nice, reserved, relatively talkative, but not talkative.

Not sure what it was. Maybe the atmosphere of being in the environment turned some switch on. But the second we get into the club, he's missing. Poof. Just vanished. We look around to see where he went, and there he is talking to a very pretty woman. He proceeded to do this all night. He hit on more girls (in a very respectful way, mind you) in one night than I'd seen him hit on the entirety of the time we were in school. He wasn’t just trying to pick up a date either; he was literally talking to everyone, man, woman, it didn’t matter. Not only was he tired of being the shy guy, but it was like he was trying to right all of the wrongs of his former shy self.

This is the correct response.

We are never going to fully get rid of that mechanism that keeps score. We all have that internal scoreboard that stacks up wins and losses — the wins being the times we went after what we wanted and the times we didn't. So, rather than fight against your nature to keep score, run up the scoreboard. If you're in the second, third, or even fourth quarter of your life, it's time to start chucking up 3's like Caitlin Clark until the clock hits zero.

The beauty of making up for lost time? Each win carries the same weight as 100 losses. As soon as you make that internal pivot to the kind of person you want to be, you just don't care about the past anymore because you see how much runway is available now to the new you. You're reborn, and the world begins to feel like a playground again.

And then that past that ailed you so much? You don't just overcome it. You change it.

Aggressive Redemption

It's time for your comeback tour. It's time to apologize to your past self with your current actions. It's time to wipe away the past failures with one gigantic W.

And perhaps the way forward isn't gradual exposure therapy or CBT, but instead hitting the nuclear button. Like my friend who said, 'Forget slowly working my way up to being more social, I am just going to talk to everybody in the club.' Just this cannonball of catharsis-fueled action to get that monkey off your back once and for all.

It's kind of like when you get into a cold pool. If you go in slowly, you keep getting confirmation that it's too cold, that you should turn back, that this was a bad idea. Every inch deeper just reinforces the shock. But if you just dive in headfirst? The cold hits you all at once, your body adjusts, and suddenly you're swimming. The water that felt impossible to enter slowly becomes completely manageable when you commit to it fully.

That's what aggressive redemption feels like. If you try to slowly become the person you want to be - dipping your toe in, testing the waters, making gradual changes - you keep getting hit with reminders of why you failed before. Every small step forward gets measured against your old patterns. But when you dive in completely, when you shock your system with such radical action that there's no going back, something shifts. The person you were becomes irrelevant because you're already living as someone else.

The cold doesn't get warmer. You get stronger. Your past doesn't disappear. You just become someone it can't touch anymore.

Increase Your Surface Area of Luck

Think about it this way: if you stay in your apartment all day, your surface area for good luck is essentially zero. The only good things that can happen to you are the ones that come through your phone or your door. But if you go out into the world, if you put yourself in new situations, if you start conversations with strangers, if you apply for jobs you think you're not qualified for, if you ask people out who seem out of your league - suddenly your surface area expands exponentially.

Every action you take, every uncomfortable conversation you have, every time you show up somewhere new, you're rolling the dice again. You're giving the universe another chance to surprise you. Most people live with a surface area the size of a postage stamp and then wonder why nothing interesting ever happens to them.

The person who sends out 1,000 resumes has a vastly larger surface area for career luck than the person who sends out 5. The person who approaches 1,000 people they fancy in person has a larger surface area for love than the person who swipes on dating apps from their couch. The person who gives their maximum effort into making each day their masterpiece, thousands of days in a row is pretty much guaranteed to win.

This is why aggressive action works so well. You're exponentially increasing the number of good things that can possibly happen to you. You're putting yourself in the path of serendipity. Your past self had a tiny surface area. Your future self can have a massive one. The difference is action.

What Now?

Since the past is not only done, but not even real. Since you now understand that you always have a choice. Since it's useless to ruminate about events you can change.

The only thing to concern yourself with is what you are going to do now, because now is all you have.

You can change the meaning of what the past means to you right now. You can decide to change right now. You can go on a permanent new trajectory that starts right now.

The goal is to write the script for the type of person you want to be and then proceed to method-act your way into being that person. You will fail. You will try to behave differently than you're accustomed to, and it will feel awkward and weird. But it's not fake.

I hate the phrase 'fake it until you make it,' because there's nothing fake about consciously choosing a new set of behaviors to live out. Wanna know what's fake? This contrived personality and worldview, and this set of current behaviors, are fake. They're inauthentic to the way you'd like to be, so the realest thing you can possibly do is to change how you operate.

Reverse engineer back however it is you'd like to be and make your best attempt at being that person right now. But don't start small. Don't ease into it. Pick one behavior pattern that defines you - a core one, not some surface habit - and tomorrow, do the exact opposite for the entire day. Don't prepare. Don't ease into it. Just be someone else for 24 hours and see what happens.

Once you see you can flip the switch once, the loop loses its power. And once the loop is broken, everything becomes possible again.

You feel invisible, don’t you?

You’re great at what you do, but nobody cares.

It’s like when you’re in a conversation and you can tell they’re not listening. Not because they’re trying to ignore you, but because whatever you're saying just…isn’t interesting.

If someone becomes a client, you’d crush for them, but you struggle to get them in the door to begin with.

So how do you get the right people to pay attention?

“Just post more,” doesn’t work because posting more poorly positioned writing just leaves you in the same spot as you started.

You’re told to just post a billion notes a day, but you can sense that’s off because you keep firing notes off into the ether and nobody reads them.

Not only will ‘just posting more’ not work, but you’ll end up getting burned out from the content treadmill that kills careers because you’re active –— you’re running — but you’re not actually getting anywhere.

The good news? You can fix this pretty easily once you understand what I’m about to tell you next.

From Invisible to Obvious in 3 Steps:

This week, I’m helping 5 coaches and experts get on a free call with me to walk through these 3 steps: diagnose the real problem your audience feels → claim a contrarian flag in your market → sell the identity, not the program.

By the end, you’ll have the positioning for your business mapped out. Note — this is only for active coaches who have worked with at least one client before. If that’s not you, please don’t book.

Get them to Pay & Pay Attention

The Problem That Keeps Most Experts, Professionals, and Coaches Invisble Online

You have a translation problem.

You have the knowledge in your head, but you’re not talking about it in a way your readers and potential clients care about.

You’re smart, you want to help, and your instinct is to teach, so you write like a coach, like an expert, like an academic — instead of writing like a prospect.

Your writing should feel like it’s reading the minds of your readers, addressing them where they’re at, speaking to their concerns, and making them feel like you understand them.

Before someone buys from you, they need to feel seen. That’s step one. But after that, you need to replace the current beliefs they have — which aren’t serving them — and replace them with the right ones that serve you both.

Until all of this gets fixed, you’re just talking past people.

If you want to get people to not just pay attention, but pay you, this is the first place you should focus.

Stop Selling Vitamins, Start Selling Pain Killers

Most coaches struggle because they are trying to sell vitamins instead of painkillers.

The pain is the pitch.

Nobody is awake at 2 a.m. thinking they need to hire a coach.

They are lying awake at night because they have a problem, and if you focus on the problem, they’ll pay attention to your content, and they’ll pay you to fix it.

If you’re conscious about your health, you might buy some vitamins, but if you have a headache, you will buy ibuprofen.

Take Substack — there are lots of nutritionists here who give wellness advice and provide healthy recipes. Great if you want engagement and a trickle of clients, not so great if you want to be profitable.

I hired a coach from here because I was literally up at 2 A.M. because I would wake up to pee, then I couldn’t go back to sleep, then I’d wake up underslept, then I’d have brain fog and body inflammation, which meant I struggled to focus on my business. I’d cancel invites out because my body felt like shit and I just wanted to go to bed.

She happened to write a post about waking up to pee at night, so I sent her a DM and paid her to fix the problem. I already knew the causal chain from peeing at night to → losing money in my business and suffering in my relationships.

Most of your readers need you to make the chain concrete for them.

You can sign clients selling vitamins, but it won’t grow as fast as selling painkillers.

Most people, in principle, understand that your writing should speak to solving problems. That’s level 1.

Level 2: Solve the Right Problem

Sometimes you can double your profits by changing nothing about your skillset, but by changing the problem you solve.

One of my clients helps UX designers use metrics to tie their work to business impact. In the beginning, he solved the problem of not getting buy-in from execs, which is painful, but painful enough for people to pay big bucks.

So, we took the same skill — data-driven design — and applied it to the problem of not landing a job because your portfolio doesn’t show business impact. He has sold out his program for six months straight.

Level 3: Solve the Right Problem for the Right Person

One of my former clients was a therapist who helped people alleviate their anxiety and get out of their heads.

She worked with 7-figure entrepreneurs, C-Suite execs, and high-level academics. The problem was affecting their career they were looking for the one thing all of the money and business success in the world wasn’t able to afford them — peace of mind.

Some of them realized they did all that work just to be miserable, and they wanted to be happy.

Already-successful people are more invested in their personal growth, and they have the money to solve the problem.

Level 4: Pick the Right Awareness Level

There are five awareness levels your audience can be at:

• Unaware — they don’t even know they have a problem

• Problem aware — they feel the pain but don’t know what to call it or that solutions exist

• Solution aware — they know solutions exist, but not yours specifically

• Product aware — they know about your specific method/offer, but aren’t convinced yet

• Most aware — they’re ready to buy, they just need a reason to act now

If you want to get visibility, you have to know how to play the awareness level game.

I had a client once who had an article titled something along the lines of “Everything You Need to Know About the EFT Method.”

In order to click on that article, you’d need to know what EFT is already — otherwise, you scroll right past.

That headline only speaks to people who are already solution aware or product aware, which is maybe 3% of the market.

There’s a much broader audience, sitting at the problem aware (or even unaware) level, who might have no idea what EFT is but are experiencing the exact problems EFT fixes — they’re stuck in a stress loop they can’t think their way out of, they spiral every time their boss sends a vague Slack message, they reach for wine the second the kids go to bed because their nervous system won’t come down, they replay the same embarrassing memory from eight years ago on a loop at 11 pm.

These people aren’t Googling “EFT.” They’re Googling “why can’t I stop overthinking” and “how to calm down fast.”

So to reach them, you write about the problem they’re already feeling, name it more precisely than they can name it themselves, then guide them to the solution. You can do this in the span of one post.

Imagine instead she had written something like The 4-Minute Body Reset That Does What Years of Talk Therapy Couldn’t for Your Anxiety

That headline catches everyone stuck in their anxiety, validates the frustration that the obvious solution isn’t working, and then opens the door to introduce EFT as the answer.

People pay to get problems solved. And when you talk about problems in their language, not yours, they pay attention.

How to Become the Obvious Choice in Your Market

Positioning answers one question: why you, instead of everyone else doing what you do?

Bad answers:

• You’re good at your skill

• You have years of experience

• You can solve the problem

Yes, so can 1,000 other people.

Positioning is a conscious choice about where to plant your flag in the market in a way that makes you look different in a way that matters to the people you want to work with.

1. Position against something

The fastest way to stand out in a sea of sameness is to publicly disagree with what everyone else is saying.

One of my clients is a career coach. Most career coaches on LinkedIn talk about fixing your resume, optimizing your LinkedIn, and applying online.

My client teaches her clients how to get jobs without applying online at all. She says applying online is a waste of time. She publicly says that other career coaches use outdated methods.

She teaches her clients to develop portfolio projects, build personal brands, and reach out directly to founders to land jobs.

Not only does it work — it’s different. In a market where everyone is saying the same thing, saying something else stands out.

This is why people are always buying new diet programs. They want to be sold something different because what they tried already didn’t work, so if you try to sell them more of the same all it does is remind them of their pain.

Most job seekers are getting bullied by the market and they’re already applying online. Rachel signs clients with ease because she’s selling a new opportunity instead.

I did a case study interview with her, and she said her content strategy boils down to looking at what most career coaches say and just saying the opposite.

What common advice in your industry do you genuinely think is wrong? Talking about that — and saying why — solves most of your positioning problems.

2. Sell an identity

The strongest offers sell a version of the person you get to become.

Look at Warrior Babe — the largest online 1:1 fitness coaching program for women in the U.S., specifically targeting women over 40.

The name itself does heavy lifting. You’re not a “client” or a “member” — you’re a Warrior Babe.

Two words that tell a 47-year-old woman exactly who she gets to become → strong (warrior) and still feminine and desirable (babe).

They’re positioned against an old and outdated model just like Rachel:

For 40 years, the fitness industry has sold women 40+ a lie: that your metabolism is broken and needs to be “fixed.” [...] ”That system broke you — not because you failed, but because it was never built for you.”

They’re selling a narrative — there’s the woman you used to be before kids and career and hormones wore you down, and there’s the woman buried inside you who’s still in there, and we’re going to go get her back together.

Compare that to the average fitness coach selling “12-week strength program for women over 40 with custom macros and weekly check-ins.”

Do you get it now? They are selling the EXACT same program as 99% of fitness coaches, but they’re focused on the prospect instead of the product itself, which is why it flies off the shelf.

3. Become a Propaganda Peddler

Propaganda is just the systematic spreading of a particular set of ideas or beliefs to influence how people think and act.

A nonprofit spreading awareness about clean water is running propaganda. MLK used propaganda to end Jim Crow.

Me telling you “you already have what you need, you just need to package it” is running propaganda.

Much of what you think you came up with on your own comes from a propaganda campaign.

Edward Bernays — the guy widely credited as the father of modern public relations — literally wrote a book in 1928 called Propaganda, where he made this argument plainly. He didn’t think the word was dirty.

He thought it was the most important skill of the modern age, and he proved it with one of the most famous campaigns in marketing history.

In the 1920s, the Beech-Nut Packing Company was sitting on a bacon problem. They needed to move more product. So they hired Bernays. At the time, the typical American breakfast was small — toast, coffee, maybe a roll. Bernays asked his agency’s in-house doctor whether a heavier breakfast would be better for people’s health.

The doctor said yes. Bernays then had him write to 5,000 other physicians asking if they agreed. About 4,500 wrote back saying they did.

The newspaper headlines that followed read: “4,500 physicians urge Americans to eat heavy breakfasts to improve their health” — and the articles helpfully suggested bacon and eggs as the ideal hearty breakfast.

Bacon sales soared. And a hundred years later, bacon and eggs are still considered “the American breakfast” — not because of anything inherent about the food, but because one man systematically planted an idea in millions of heads and let it grow.

That’s propaganda. And whether you like the word or not, every successful brand on the internet is doing some version of it. They’ve picked a worldview, and they’re spreading it.

The question isn’t whether you’ll peddle propaganda. It’s whether you’ll do it deliberately, for ideas you actually believe in, or whether you’ll just be downstream of someone else’s.

So pick your worldview and start spreading it.

4. Sell a lifestyle

Mind you, to set the scene here, I was fresh off a divorce, wanting a revenge body, and diving back into the dating market in my late 20’s.

I ended up buying a course called The Movie Star Body program.

In the video sales letter (VSL) for the product, he showed himself walking out of a mansion to hop in his Porsche with two models.

Then it cut to scenes of jacked characters in movies like Brad Pitt in Fight Club and Chris Hemsworth in Thor.

It then explained that women weren’t into the bulky bodybuilder physique and instead the lean V-shaped aesthetic.

Then he explained that his style of training — reverse pyramid training — was the way to get there.

What if you’re not selling sex or money, though? Can you still sell a lifestyle? Of course.

One of my clients is a UX designers that helps people land jobs.

He’s selling what it feels like to do work people respect, in rooms that matter.

His audience doesn’t want a Porsche. They want to stop being treated like a pixel-pusher. To walk into Monday with their head up.

The lifestyle he’s selling is respect, agency, and work that means something.

Figure out the actual life your product unlocks, paint the scenes that make it visible, and let people fall in love with it.

5. Sell your backstory

Your story is the one thing nobody else in your market can copy. It’s also what bonds you to your readers personally and builds the sort of parasocial relationship that makes them want to work with you.

People don’t buy coaching, they buy coaches.

I built my entire business on the back of one story.

I was broke, deep in debt, miserable in a job I hated, and I wrote my way out of it. Millions of readers, a coaching business, a life I actually want — all of it traces back to writing.

If you’ve been a long-time reader, you don’t just know the concepts I talk about — you know stuff about me.

I remember one time I was on a sales call, and the prospect said she related to me because she read an email when I talked about having rats crawling in my walls when I was broke. She, too, had rats crawling in her walls when she was broke.

Was it the reason she hired me? No.

Could it have been the difference between herra hiring me and a different business coach she didn’t have a personal bond with? Likely.

It’s as simple as actually telling your origin story at all.

I was where you are. Here’s what I did. I can show you the path because I walked it.

Your story doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just has to be yours, and it has to map onto the transformation you sell.

How to Go From Expert Who Shares Tips to Authority That Commands Attention

The experts who feel invisible online aren’t invisible because their work isn’t good. They’re invisible because they haven’t done the work to make their value legible to the people who’d pay them for it.

Problems get people to pay attention, and positioning gets them to see you as the obvious choice.

You already have the skills. You’ve put in the years. The work you’d do for a client is real, and it works.

The only thing standing between you and a thriving business is whether you’re willing to do the unglamorous work of naming the problem your audience actually feels, planting your flag where it stands out, and packaging your work so it reaches them.

From Invisible to Obvious in 3 Steps:

This week, I’m helping 5 coaches and experts get on a free call with me to walk through these 3 steps: diagnose the real problem your audience feels → claim a contrarian flag in your market → sell the identity, not the program.

By the end, you’ll have the positioning for your business mapped out. Note this is only for active coaches who have worked with at least one client before. If that’s not you, please don’t book.

I'm ready to stand out

The mythical magic number of the creator economy — the coveted $10,000 per month.

A ton of creators set this number as a goal.

In my experience, less than 1 percent reach it.

Not because they lack the talent or skill to do it (it's actually not difficult at all). But because they lack the right strategy, mindset, and guidance to do it.

It took me four years to hit $10,000 per month.

Knowing what I know now, I could do it in less than 12 months easy. I've helped clients hit this mark in far less time than me. I've even helped one make $10,000 in a single day.

This post is the advice I'd give to myself years ago to shrink the timeline to hitting the 'magic number.'

Money Mathematics

Reaching your income goal is nothing more than a math problem. Most people never hit $10,000 months because they don't take a serious look at the math behind it.

To figure out what it takes to make $10,000 per month, literally run the numbers.

I'll use substack as an example to make the point:

If you want to make $10,000 per month with paid substack royalties, you'd need:

• 2,000 subscribers at $5 per month

• 1,000 subscribers at $10 per month

• 500 subscribers at $20 per month

Let's assume you can convert 10 percent of your free subscribers to paid ones, here's the math on how many total subscribers you'd need to reach your income goals:

• 20,000 subscribers

• 10,000 subscribers

• 5,000 subscribers

Seems doable, right?

Of course it does. Some people have done it. Most people talk about how to do it, but haven't done it themselves. The vast majority of people aren't even close to doing it.

Because the math just isn't on your side.

The amount of energy, time, and effort it would require to write so many newsletters, post so many notes, and spend so much time engaging to get $5 subs is just too much for most people to handle so they burn out and quit.

It's the same with other creator models too like:

• Affiliate marketing

• Low-ticket digital products

• E-books

These are all examples of low-profit, high volume businesses.

To build a six-figure business with these models you need to be a prolific creator, add thousands to your email list, learn copywriting skills, constantly promote your stuff, all just to maybe make $10,000 per month years into the future.

I did the low-profit high volume strategy. It worked for me because, to be honest, writing comes extremely easy to me, requires almost zero effort, and I have the ability to write 2,000 word posts in less than an hour.

I would only suggest this model if you're that type of writer. If you were you'd know it by now. So, if you're not, don't try it because it won't work. No judgment. No shame. Just be real with yourself so you can stack the deck in your favor.

If you want the math on your side, you want a business model that:

• Doesn't require a ton of people to say yes to reach your income goals

• Doesn't require a big audience

• Doesn't take years of content creation to finally pay off

Enter the high ticket product and service model.

You can hit $10,000 per month with:

• 10 clients paying you $1,000 per month

• 5 clients paying you $2,000 per month

• 2 clients paying you $5,000 per month

It's possible:

You're capable of it:

You just need the right strategy.

I know what you're thinking. It's easy enough for me to tell you it only takes a few clients to pay you thousands at a time to reach your income goals, but you probably have questions like:

• How the hell do I actually do this?

• Who the hell pays that much for products and services?

• Where the hell do I start?

Great questions. Let's break each one down.

How Do You Turn Your Creator Skills Into $10,000 Per Month?

You do have to be a specific type of creator and have a specific type of skillset to build a six-figure business.

If you're trying to make $10,000 per month writing poetry or doing memoir or writing about history your best bet is to actually try to grow a paid substack, get sponsorships, write books, and cobble together little chunks of income because nobody is going to pay you high ticket prices for products related to those subjects.

It is what it is. Some writers and creators get upset at capitalism and market forces. They feel as if they should be compensated for writing in a non-profitable, unpopular, and non-education style niche. But that's not how it works.

If you want to make $10,000 per month your 'back-end' business model is going to have to be one, or some combination of these:

• 1 on 1 coaching ($1,000-$10,000 per month)

• Group coaching ($1,000-$2,000 per month)

• Mid-ticket courses ($297-$1,997)

• Done for you services for businesses ($1,000-$10,000 per month)

You don't have to go high-ticket or work with people directly. You can do well with mid-ticket. But if you want the fastest path to $10k months, high-ticket is the way.

If I were you, though, I’d start with either 1 on 1 coaching or done for you services, move to group coaching after that, move to mid-ticket after that, and then do low-ticket stuff like books, digital products, and substack subscriptions.

This is called the ‘reverse pyramid,’ strategy.

You sell the most expensive thing first to get cashflow into the business so you can reach your income goals faster, quit your job faster, and have resources to pour back into your business and fund the creation of more scalable solutions.

If you want to build a coaching business, you have to write educational content about a topic that has a market of people willing to pay for help with implementing the advice you give them.

This means your writing has to fall underneath one of these categories:

• Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

• Self-improvement/hobbies

I did a full-break down of the process from A to Z in this post:

The good news?

Underneath these categories there are a bunch of sub-categories and pocket niches you can build a coaching business around.

Fun example: My brother learned about attachment styles so he could have high quality relationships.

He took a certification course on how to coach it, and now he has clients who pay him thousands for it.

He writes advice articles specifically related to attachment styles which differentiates him from vague relationship coaches.

There’s a common misconception that you have to be a writing coach or make money online guru to make $10,000 per month. That you have to be part of some pyramid scheme. This is simple not true.

As a matter of fact, none of my clients are make money online gurus. Here are some examples of the coaching offers that students are running inside of my community right now:

• Anxiety relief

• Emotional trauma

• Data analysis

• Product design

• Mindfulness

• Photography

• Video marketing

• Creative writing

There are a ton of unique examples that you can use as inspiration for coaching that give you an idea of how many possibilities there are:

• Sleep coaches for parents with newborns

• Peak performance coaching for entrepreneurs

• Manifesting coaches (yes, really, tons of them)

• Breastfeeding coaches for busy moms

• Helping people overcome social anxiety

• Dating coaches for divorcees

• Coaching people on how to play instruments, do handstands, and run 5Ks

My personal favorite strategy right now for coming up with an offer is taking the skills you’ve used in your job and turning them into a coaching offer, a consulting offer, or a done for you service offer.

I have multiple clients who became mentors in their field and leveraged the stuff they were already doing. That’s the straightest and easiest path.

Second best would be leveraging a self-taught skill in the area of health, wealth, relationships, or self-improvement. You don’t need one, but getting a certification can help simply if it makes you feel more confident in what you’re doing.

Third best would be taking the time to learn a new skillset from scratch that you’d use to coach people but that could take a lot of time to get started.

Odds are, there is something you can turn into an online education business, you just have to take the time to do market research:

• Take an inventory of your current skills

• Look online to see if people are selling offers similar to the one you want to run

• Copy an existing business model and put your own twist to it

If you feel like you have zero skills that you can use for a coaching offer you can do a done for you service offer for businesses.

Take writers for example. It’s far easier to make $10,000 per month as a freelance writer than it is making $5 per subscriber.

If you like to write, don’t feel like becoming a coach, and still want to make a great living, just write for businesses. They have more money than individuals and can afford to pay you thousands per month for your help.

If you want to work with me personally to hit $10,000 months, you can meet with me to put together a customized plan to help you reach your income goals.

You don’t need to have an existing offer. You do need a skillset you can turn into a business or an existing business you want to grow. If you have that I can help you with the rest.

Just click the green button below and enter your information to book time to speak with me about your business goals

I want to hit $10K/mo

Who the Hell Actually Buys This Stuff?

You know what your problem is?

You're thinking about how much you'd pay for products and services instead of what your clients would pay for products and services.

That plus having a negative money mindset that operates from a place of total scarcity and fear makes for a deadly combo that'll prevent you from selling high-ticket.

First, let's burst the myth that people don't buy high-ticket products because everybody buys high-ticket products.

The same people who say a $3,000 program is expensive:

• Drive a $40,000 car

• Live in a $300,000 home

• Own a $2,000 phone

People pay for stuff they want to buy. If you want to sell high ticket products and services you just have to sell them to the type of people who want to buy them.

Most people don't want to pay high-ticket prices. And that's okay. Because you're not trying to get everyone to buy, you're trying to get the right people to buy and you don't need that many of them to buy to reach your income goals.

Think about your ideal client. They likely fall into one of these categories:

• Business owners who understand investment in growth

• High-achievers willing to pay to speed up results

• People who've tried the cheap route and failed

• Professionals who value their time more than their money

• Anyone who wants transformation, not just information

Why High-Ticket Actually Works Better

The number one reason why people buy high-ticket products and services, especially when it comes to coaching, is having more access to you plus getting the accountability to help them reach their goals.

Take self-paced online courses for example. They're cheaper, sure, but the average online course has an abysmal 3 percent completion rate because information on its own isn't enough for most people.

My clients get a dedicated client success coach who meets with them once per week to stay on track with their goals. He does sales role plays with them, gives them business advice, and sometimes just sets their head straight so they can do the work.

I meet with my clients in both 1 on 1 and group formats to continually give them advice that helps them iterate along the way.

They get a community portal where they can get unlimited help and reviews on everything they do including the ability to post recordings of their sales calls so I can give them feedback.

The accountability, feedback, support, and continual guidance and mentoring is not only the reason why they pay, but a big part of the reason why they get results.

Here's what most creators don't understand about pricing psychology:

• Lower prices attract lower-quality clients

• Higher prices create more commitment

• People value what they pay for

• The more someone pays, the more they pay attention

• Premium pricing attracts premium clients

Think about it like hiring a personal trainer for $100 an hour vs. buying a $5 ebook on how to lose weight.

You're just more likely to show up for the personal trainer because you're literally more invested in the help you're getting.

The ROI Math That Makes High-Ticket a No-Brainer

When you're selling high-ticket, you're not just selling a product or service - you're selling transformation and results. Here's how the math works out for your clients:

• A business owner paying you $5k to help them make $50k = 10x ROI

• A professional paying $3k to land a job paying $50k more than their currently salary = 17x ROI

• Someone paying $2k to solve a problem costing them $1k/month = 6x ROI in year one

This is why focusing on results and transformation in your marketing is crucial. When you can demonstrate clear ROI, the price becomes less of an objection.

Where the Hell Do You Start?

Most people never get started because they're too busy doing everything except what moves the needle.

I see it all the time - endless offer tweaking, unfocused content creation, trying to build a following without having real conversations.

Let me break down what actually works.

Your mornings are sacred.

The first two hours of your day need to be dedicated to lead generation. Not checking email, not scrolling social media, not "organizing your to-do list." You're reaching out to 25 potential clients with personalized messages.

Here's what your daily formula should look like:

Lead Generation (2 Hours):

• Send those 25 DMs to potential clients

• Comment thoughtfully where your ideal clients hang out

• Have actual conversations (not drive-by comments)

• Book calls with interested prospects

After lead gen, you need one hour for content creation. But here's where most people mess up - they create content trying to go viral or sound smart. Your content needs to do one thing: demonstrate you can solve specific problems for specific people.

Then you need one hour dedicated to pure sales activities:

• Getting on calls with prospects

• Following up with leads

• Handling objections

• Closing deals

• Onboarding new clients

The Weekly Picture

When you stack those daily activities, here's what your week needs to look like:

• 1 long form newsletter

• 3-5 notes (or short form content on another platform)

• 50+ meaningful conversations in DMs

• Active participation in 2-3 communities where your clients hang out

• Time carved out for sales calls to close clients and handle existing clients

Why does this formula work? Because it focuses on the only three things that actually matter:

1. Getting in front of potential clients

2. Having sales conversations

3. Closing deals

Everything else is a distraction.

The Reality Check

Most people reading this won't do it. They'll make excuses about time while binging Netflix. They'll claim they need more preparation while sitting on valuable knowledge. They'll wait to feel "ready" (which never happens).

But I've seen what happens when people actually commit. When they wake up two hours earlier, cut the TV time, and spend weekends building. When they push through the fear of having sales conversations.

Complete beginners have hit $10k months in 6-12 months following this exact system. People with zero following have done it. The system works if you work it.

The Path Forward

The steps are simple (even if they're not easy):

1. Choose your offer (coaching or done-for-you services)

2. Price it between $2k-5k

3. Create a simple sales process

4. Start having conversations

5. Track everything

6. Adjust based on feedback

7. Keep going until it works

Here's what you don't need:

• A huge following

• Years of experience

• A perfect offer

• To be the best in your field

You just need to:

• Help people solve real problems

• Have lots of conversations

• Be consistent

• Focus on revenue-generating activities

Final Thoughts

Getting to $10k months isn't complicated. The formula is simple:

(Number of conversations × Close rate × Average client value = Monthly revenue)

Want to break it down?

• 50 conversations

• 10% close rate

• $2k per client = $10k per month

The math works if you do the work.

Stop overthinking it. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Start having conversations today. The rest will follow.

If you want to work with me personally to hit $10,000 months, you can meet with me to put together a customized plan to help you reach your income goals.

You don’t need to have an existing offer. You do need a skillset you can turn into a business or an existing business you want to grow. If you have that I can help you with the rest.

Just click the green button below and enter your information to book time to speak with me about your business goals

I want to hit $10K/mo