Own Your Audience; Week 4: Recurring Revenue

Hi guys, welcome, welcome. We're just waiting for everything to connect, giving people a few minutes. Oh, okay. Yep, giving people a few minutes to join, making sure it's connected across all the platforms. Hi guys, welcome back to week 4 of Own Your Audience Challenge. We are thrilled to have you. As we explore a very exciting topic, monetization and recurring revenue. Woo! It's going to be amazing. Before we jump into that though, we wanted to talk about the TikTok ban and what is going on, because there's been some new developments. Amanda, take us away.

Yeah. So it was just super quick update. Even if you don't think this is relevant to you, it is as a creator, 100%. This is going to like, potentially set a precedent for something we haven't quite seen before. And we have seen a lot of like shifting sand from all manner of different social media platforms. So I think everybody probably remembers in March the House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban TikTok, and it seemed like, like it was— it's been crickets since then. It definitely seemed like that was just going to like die on the hill, literally. Um, but Saturday, this past Saturday the 20th, The House tucked in the TikTok ban with a massive foreign aid bill. It passed through the House with ease, is expected to pass in the Senate, and Biden has said he will sign it. And so that is like— it's a perfect example of how the United States government works, first of all, and how things get passed. I don't— I'm not going to express my opinion on that one way or another, but that is the situation. And I have written pretty extensively. We talked about this on lives. But the situation here now is under this tucked-in bill, TikTok or ByteDance, the parent company, would have 12 months instead of 6 to sell to a US-based company. The 3 companies that could afford the multi-hundreds of billions of dollars price tag that is expected to be put on this company. So again, 2 or 3 companies that could actually afford it. It will violate our laws in the United States on monopolies for either of those companies to purchase ByteDance. And, and, and, and the Chinese government has already said that they will block a sale of ByteDance to a United States-based company anyway, which they can do because ByteDance is a Chinese company, which is what started this whole thing in the first place, because our government feels that That poses a national security risk in that the Chinese government could subpoena all user data, including personal information of Americans. The Chinese government could just have all that information. And then also, this is obviously a presidential election year here in the States. And so there is significant concern about algorithm massaging to sway the election. So those are 2 like really big no-nos for us over here stateside. And the other possible outcome of this, assuming this passes through and gets signed into law, ByteDance could challenge, uh, this law in a United States court, and, um, that would very likely not be successful because, uh, like case law dictates that we value national security, like quelling national security risks even over and above free speech. So I am having a lot of trouble seeing a pathway in which TikTok is not banned. In about 12 months' time. So heads up on that front. And that doesn't mean the government will reach in your phone and take off the app, but it will prevent the download and account creation of any subsequent registrations in the United States, and it will prevent shipping updates like software updates to the TikTok app itself, thereby rendering it defunct in a matter of months. So if you're a creator on TikTok, TikTok, you have an audience over there. You need to start very strategically moving them off to another platform and build a freaking email list, which is what we've been talking about this entire month. So there's the update back to you, Erin.

Yeah. Okay. Before we dive in, I do want to acknowledge all of the hard work that you guys have been putting in with building your audience and all of that. So if you have any stories or really cool things that have happened as you've started to build your audience and build out your weekly newsletter or monthly or biweekly newsletter, let us know. We'd love to hear that. We'd love to celebrate your wins with you. So please, we wanna hear your stories too. Okay. So we're gonna be talking about recurring revenue. Amanda, can you introduce us into this idea of what is recurring revenue and kind of start teetering into the monetization that people can do within their newsletters or Weekly emails.

Yes. So monthly recurring revenue or recurring revenue means consistent revenue month after month, sort of like a paycheck at a corporate job or just working for somebody else, except it's in your own business, which is super cool. Um, we hear so often from creators, I created a course, I launched it, I made X amount of dollars in the first 2, 4, or 6 weeks. And then like a few bucks here and there has trickled in since then, but I put in all this freaking time and effort and I hardly got any like return on my investment. And that is a key point of frustration for those creators who have attempted to start the monetization process. And so what we want you to think about is not these, like, not just one-time purchase digital products like courses, but rather how could we sort of like parlay those types of content into a recurring revenue model. And so what we want you to be thinking about here and why it's so important to build an email list, because you then like retain optionality, you leave the door open for yourself. You give yourself the option to pursue monetization opportunities in the future that makes sense. And our like full-on POV at Level Up Creators is you should be pushing toward recurring revenue because that's stable, predictable. It's the most natural extension for a digital product. For a digital thought leader or creator educator, because you are sharing your area of knowledge, expertise, and wisdom online. That is the subject matter of your social media accounts and what your people are— have like gathered around you. And they've raised their hand and said, I want to hear more of that. If they join your email list, they really, really like you. Those are going to be your next level of engagement fans, like your super fans. And those are going to be the people who are most likely to purchase something from you, like access to your online membership website. And so recurring revenue opportunities that we really like, obviously membership websites, paid newsletters, small group high-ticket coaching programs, which should be part of the customer journey with a membership website. I can come back to that another time. Masterminds, which is pretty, it's very similar to a membership model, but like a very different price point. Those are kind of like my 4 favorite recurring revenue options for digital thought leaders and creator educators.

Yeah, that's good. How do creators or digital thought leaders start implementing these things into their newsletters? What strategies can they use to really start promoting lists, especially if it's their first time?

Do you mean getting people from newsletter to a recurring revenue product? Okay.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's a great question. There's a lot of different ways to go about this, but I will, I'm just going to continue with the membership community analogy because I think that's going to fit best for our conversation today. There's kind of like 3 key, 3 keys to a successful membership community. Core content or foundational content. These are like individual courses or PDFs or templates or whatever things you're selling as one-offs and you put them all into your membership community as like foundational content that your members can consume at will, like asynchronously, 24/7, 365. It's always available. It's a major value add. Number 2 is the community aspect. So we all know that the comment section on Instagram or LinkedIn, as it were, is not the best place for community to actually happen. And there's a lot of like the vocal minority is often going to be the person that surfaces or small group of people that surfaces in comment section, which is very, very frustrating and really degrades the experience for those who are there for you to benefit from the community that you're providing and that you've rallied around your accounts. So what we want to do is actually move that community and people who are not trolling your account and who are not the vocal minority into a membership community, right? And so there's discussion forums that are dedicated in these membership platforms, and that's where you're going to really have the more meaningful conversations, and that allows people more direct access to you. I'm willing to bet your DMs or LinkedIn messages are out of hand, right? And so you probably can't even get to all of them anymore. And so we want to point people to, hey, if you want like one-on-one time with me, an individualized personalized response, like that needs to happen in my community. So they get access to you directly. They get access to the community of sort of like like-minded people. And you get to serve as the connector for all of those people. So that sort of even elevates the perception of your community members that they already have of you, but even further. And then the third piece is live events, and this is called ritual content. So these are specific types of live access points to you and your team and/or guests where you provide even more value. So you could be teaching a workshop or a webinar or having a Q&A or an ask me anything, or just like a happy hour, kind of whatever. The vibe and MO of your community is like, your live event should be a logical extension of those and like bringing people together synchronously over a tool like Zoom. So those are the 3 parts of a membership. So you gotta have the membership set up rolling and so that you have something to promote in your newsletter about your membership community. So for instance, we send out our newsletter every week and it is all about like creator and digital thought leader monetization, specifically toward recurring revenue. And we do like deep dives every single week, try and provide a tremendous amount of value. So I mean, that's like number one, regardless if you're selling something in your newsletter or not, is like it should be very value-forward in order to get people to actually take the time to open it and read it. But there's a section toward the bottom of our newsletter each week, and it promotes the— our newsletter goes out on Thursday, and so our newsletter promotes the 4 or 5 or 6 live events that we have in Level Up Creator School the following week. And so we are like teasing out that content in the newsletter and in our newsletter. Something we're working on actually is featuring some of the creators who are in Level Up Creator School and what they're doing and what we're talking about in their key takeaways from action workshops in our Creator School, snippets from office hours or ask me anything sessions where really great questions were asked. So we record those sessions and we can put snippets of those in the newsletter. Newsletter. And so it's not a hard sell, it's a long game. It is value adds and nudges, and you'll eventually put together like the right type of promotional content that people who have been on the fence for a long time, you know, they're seeing that promo, uh, will eventually like take the plunge and like dive in and give it a shot. So it's more discreet, it's more value add, and it's more like social proof, right? These creators are benefiting from this type of content in these ways. you need to join Creator School in order to have that same level of benefit. It's not in your face at all.

Yeah. So for monetization models and funnels, which one would you, which one would you pick first if you're just getting started? Does it matter or is it kind of dependent on the niche that you're in?

Yeah. Right before this, I just got off a call with a huge creator who has a very successful newsletter and she was like, yeah, I'm thinking about starting a membership website because I've got to like, you know, kind of further monetize this thing. And that's a natural extension for her. She could also do a paid newsletter because she has a huge newsletter list and it's very, very popular, wildly successful, truly. And so something that she could do as an iteration toward a membership website or instead of is send out a free version of her newsletter, which would be abbreviated, and then a paid version of her newsletter that would be like the full thing. If I say what it is, I'm gonna blow her cover, which is not cool. But, um, we— the way that you could do that is give kind of the what and the why of whatever you're talking about in the free version, and then the how, like the nuts and bolts, the practical application, very actionable, immediately valuable information in the paid newsletter model. I will say Polina Pompliano, she has run The Profile— that's a paid newsletter— for years. She runs that on Substack. And she now has a book and does tons of interviews and has a podcast. And those have been natural extensions of her paid newsletter. But her model is she has, again, it's all run through Substack, which is a great platform if your whole business is centered around paid newsletters. She has a free version that goes out on Sundays. It's sort of like a content roundup. Half of it is for everybody. It's free. And then she has a section that says the following section is only available to paid subscribers. And so I assume that that section shows up on the free version, but then it's blank after that. But then I'm seeing, you know, the additionally like super valuable content there. And then the full version of the paid newsletter goes out on Wednesdays. And so she has a very natural promotion model that goes out in her free newsletter and it's a self-perpetuating cycle to recurring revenue. So paid newsletters would be step one.

That's so smart of her to like include that on the free version, cuz it's this constant, like. FOMO. What am I missing? There's something here that I'm not getting, and I'm like, I could get it if I just do this. So, I, I love that. That's so genius.

Yeah.

Okay. So, we've been waiting for some Q&A. So, chat, if you have any questions, fire away in the comments. Anything on monetization strategies, on even setting up payment gateways, we have tips for that. Managing subscriber expectation throughout the process too. Any of those kinds of questions, please pop them in to keep the conversation going. Here is one of the questions from our community. I am new to this whole newsletter thing. What are the most important factors to consider when choosing a monetization model or funnel?

So thinking to— thinking about recurring revenue specifically, since that's what we're talking to today, you have to understand the commitment level required for each of the 4 options that I listed. Again, paid newsletter, membership community, Mastermind, which is a basically more expensive membership community, and then small group high-ticket coaching services. And so there are vastly different levels of commitments for each of those. Um, newsletter is going to be the simplest to set up logistically. Substack is like literally the platform that is made to run paid newsletters on, and you can run the free version as well, like on the profile like I just mentioned. So from a commitment standpoint, that could have actually a similar level of commitment to a mastermind, kind of like depending on the vibe again and like ethos of your community and what people are gathering around you to receive, like the value they're signing up to receive. And so the cool thing is you get to make the rules on any of these things. The most important thing is whatever you promise in your marketing and sales efforts, you're not only delivering that baseline on, but you're going a little bit over and above to the like surprise and delight level. So paid newsletter, if you're sending, you can promise to send out once a month, once a week, every other week, every quarter, whatever you wanna do, honestly. It's just making a match between like what you're offering and what people are willing to pay for and how much they're willing to pay for it. That's kind of like a conversation for another day. Pricing is a major, major topic. We have a podcast episode coming out soon about pricing strategies for creators specifically. But commitment level is the thing that you need to think about. What do you actually want to deliver? What's, what's easiest for you to deliver that's also highest value for your customers to receive? So a paid newsletter, there's not a lot of like interaction. You're just sending it out. I would totally just use the promotional strategy I just described with your free version. And if once a week seems like too much, then go every other week, but don't price based on the frequency. Price based on the value outcomes and transformation that the content your paid newsletter provides. And that really spans the gamut. Like the Profile paid newsletter is $50 a year. That is a freaking steal, but there are paid newsletters in the finance community and where information is very hard to come by, very exclusive community, hard to break into. Those can be well into the thousands or even 5 figures for subscriptions. Per year. So keep that in mind. You've got to be thinking about like what the information you're providing to the people who are paying you is worth. You've got to be able to put a dollar on that. Okay, masterminds. Mastermind model, you want to be the community host, the curator of whoever is there with you, and you want to make it— you want to structure a community such that like you are the recognized expert at first, but you build the community such that everyone is contributing, right? There should be a group of peers who are constantly and consistently leveling each other up by the knowledge, expertise, and wisdom that each person brings to the group. So that's another topic. Masterminds should be priced at a premium, and typically like in the business spheres where those are going to be most valuable. So that could be a relatively low commitment. I mean, a number of masterminds have like a Slack community, for instance, and then they meet at a regular cadence. Again, whether that's Multiple times a week, weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly. Again, it all comes back down to what value can you provide that's not like too much of a lift for you to provide on a consistent basis. And then, you know, membership communities would be the next level of commitment. Once you get those set up, including like the marketing automation it takes to run them, those can be amazing growth level levers for your business. Massive opportunity there for Again, that the middle of that Venn diagram of like what you are best positioned to provide without burning yourself out and the value offered. And so you want to find the middle of that Venn diagram. But once, and especially like if we set up a membership community for you and all the marketing automation, we make it really easy and fast for you to maintain that and move forward with checklists and all sorts of stuff. And then small, small group, high ticket group coaching. That's gonna be the biggest commitment. You know, typically we're helping creators run those at like $5,000 for a 10-week program or more. And that's gotta be like a pretty high-touch program to garner that kind of a price point. Again, depending on what your industry is, but those are pretty high-touch. They're hard to run, especially the first session, subsequent sessions. There's some like economies of scale there and like it's marginally additional effort to like run subsequent cohorts because you already have the program and like curriculum. So yeah, that's kind of like how I would stair-step that, but understand the commitment that you're making and make sure you can fulfill the freaking commitment before you start like marketing it.

Yeah. Okay. So Ben wants to know, how do I know if my audience is ready for paid content?

What's their uptake like on your free content? And what's the subject of your accounts too? And so there's like, I'm big on working in iterations. Like you wanna do things that are low risks that have the potential to yield medium to high rewards. So that's kind of like the lens that I put on when I'm thinking about like taking next steps. And so there's all sorts of different like tests that you can run in order to better understand. I would start with a tripwire product, something that costs between like $9 and $39. Ask your audience first, say, hey, I'm working on this, this, this, or this. What do you think? Involve them in the process so they feel that they have some level of ownership in what you're gonna bring to the table. And then again, something that's fairly easy for you to put together, but it's very high value to those who might potentially purchase it and then offer it. I mean, if you use ConvertKit, for instance, you can host like all manner of one-off digital products on their platform, not courses. But if you were to sell a tripwire, that should be something like an email drip course, not a hosted full production course, in my opinion, a pack of templates. You know, design iconography or something like that. So do a low-risk test and see what kind of like feedback you get on that. And look at your conversion rates at each stage, right? Like how many people from my newsletter actually joined, and then can I get feedback from those people? And then pay attention longer. Do they repeat purchases? Like, do they buy more stuff from me as I offer it? And you'll, you'll know how you're doing by what they do or do not do.

Yeah. That's a great segue because we have a question here from Ashley and she said, how do I monitor the metrics and gauge success for my recurring revenue?

Depends on what platform, it depends on your tech stack and like what metrics are offered. So metrics that you want to track are monthly recurring revenue. It's like the repeated amount of money that you make, your churn rate. Super, super important. And so you're looking at the like number of members times the dollar amount they pay per month from one month to the next. And obviously to grow, you have to add more new members than cancel. So hopefully that makes sense. So MRR, churn rate, customer acquisition cost. How much does it cost you in like paid spend? And also like if you have a staff, your marketing person or social media marketing person, like their, their cost to you should be incorporated into how much it costs you to acquire new new paying customers. And then LTV, which is customer lifetime value. That's how much someone pays you on average over their lifetime as a customer. And we could look at that snapshot and how much they pay you within your recurring revenue product. And then the ratio of LTV to CAC, customer acquisition cost, is very, very important as well. You want that LTV, or again, how much people pay you, to be bare minimum 3 times as much as it costs you to acquire them. So, and then engagement metrics are super important depending on what you're looking at and like the qualitative side, like actual feedback. People are opening emails, engaging, attending live events, if that's relevant. But if I had to only pick 4 things, it would be MRR, churn rate, LTV, and CAC. And then that ratio of LTV to CAC.

Cool. Okay. Our next question is, can I have a mixture of free and paid products and how do I balance promoting between the two?

So typically the way that you look at free and paid products is your free products should serve as what's called a lead magnet, right? And so that's a free digital asset that you offer in exchange for someone's email address, the right to email them that free asset. And then usually there's a box that's pre-checked at the bottom of that form field that says, you know, I'm subscribing to your newsletter basically. And so there's 2 ways that people can get into your email list. One should be, they should be able to sign up for your newsletter directly and your newsletter signup landing page should be optimized for conversions, meaning very clearly communicate the value proposition, short, sweet, to the point, boom, sign up and then deliver on what you promised as with everything. And then on your, the other side of how people can get into your email list is via a lead magnet. And so they're giving you their email address and hopefully their first name in order for this like free asset that you've promised. And when you Have someone enter via just signing up for the newsletter or a lead magnet. You should be using marketing automation. That is like a series of automated emails. 3, 4, or 5 is plenty. Either a welcome sequence on the newsletter side or a nurture sequence on the lead magnet side. So if somebody, if your lead magnet is like top 50 hooks for 2024 on LinkedIn, I give you my first name, my email address that lands in my inbox immediately. ConvertKit is a great tool, very simple in order to like make that whole thing happen. And then my request there should trigger not only that first email with that digital asset, but also again, another 2, 3, or 4 emails that's leading me to purchase something relevant. And so the free product should be a taste, an appetizer of whatever products you have for sale. So this should be like a natural flow. Either from newsletter to lead magnet to product purchase, or straight from lead magnet or newsletter to product purchase. And then when someone buys one product, you wanna enter, enroll them into an onboarding sequence so that they're successful with that product. And then later on in that email automation, they should be getting emails to nurture them to buy the next thing. So the customer journey that we like the best mix of free and paid products, and we have like 7 or 8 lead magnets at Level Up Creators that we use for different audiences at different times that solve different problems. So there's a lot of ways people can get onto our newsletter list. But what we want you to do is go from social media to get a free resource from us, lead magnet or newsletter. We nurture you to buy a product. We actually have a couple of courses coming out that we're peeling off from Level Up Creator School as like a tripwire type product. So we're going for an initial purchase that we then onboard and nurture toward a recurring revenue product, because that's really the ultimate goal again for digital thought leader and creator educator businesses. And so the trick here is if you have like a membership community, you can sell into that community your small group high ticket coaching program. And so, you know, those are your super fans. They're the most likely people that you are going to be able to make successful. At that next level. And so you sell them the high-ticket program for 3 months, and then you want them not to go away and churn at that time, but go back to the membership program and promote your amazing high-ticket program to other members who are, again, your most likely pool of prospects for that higher-ticket program. And that's kind of like the customer journey that we teach at Level Up Creators and in Level Up Creator School, and is really how you maximize revenue as a creator. Like That's the formula.

Yeah, that's really good. Okay. So last question from me. You kind of started talking about this when you're talking about like, make sure that you can deliver on what you are setting yourself up to do. Let's talk about that idea of scaling. So as you start offering something, it's going to grow over time. What should creators and digital thought leaders be thinking about as they start implementing this so that they can plan to Scale.

Yeah. So the cool thing about these automated customer journeys, like the one that I just described, is that you can automate them through marketing automation, which is basically like the backend of your business. And the customer is always in the driver's seat on the types of content that they see. They can always unsubscribe. It's very permission-based. It should be highly personalized and based on actions that the subscriber does or does not take. And so implementing this infrastructure over time, we can do it basically overnight for a client, but something that usually happens over time where you've got the flow in the funnel that I just spoke about. And so all that can be automated. We do definitely recommend like one-to-one sales on moving to that high-ticket program, but everything else can be automated. And so the cool thing about marketing automation systems is that they can handle 10 customers, 10,000, or 100,000 at the same time with the same level of inputs, right? The same level of upfront work. And so you're sort of, when you follow our methodology, you are naturally positioned to scale with the least amount of work possible on your part. Like our POV is to do the work that you hate doing, which business operations, marketing automation implementation. Implementing an evergreen marketing strategy where, you know, here's your content calendar on how you're promoting your first paid product, or, you know, those tripwire products in your newsletter and in your social media. If you have a podcast, if you're a guest on podcasts or you're a guest on newsletter, do paid ads, right? Like, these should all be very focused efforts to get people used to buying something from you, right? And so not all of that can be completely automated, but you can implement systems where you're sort of naturally promoting what you have to offer where you already are, like the channels that you're already using online. And so we kind of can overlay a system that works very naturally as a natural extension and inclusion of what you're already doing. And you can scale that as fast as people will, will join because the infrastructure is, is there. Does that answer your question?

Yes. Yes, it does.

Okay.

Um, and I just want to say, remember that a newsletter and an email list is built off of valuable content, right? Audience engagement fostered through trust over time and a clear monetization strategy. And we've said this literally every single time. The hardest part in this is getting started. It really is. And so if you haven't already, or if you are wanting to do this and you're not sure where to start, I'm going to drop a link We have an Own Your Audience Challenge that literally holds your hand through the process. And yeah, literally step by step, we have it for you. You don't need to worry. So I'll drop that. But that's pretty much a wrap for us this week. Thank you for joining. We do have something exciting. Oh my gosh, I can't believe I almost forgot this. We are launching a giveaway to our school. which is pretty awesome. Amanda, do you want to give some detail on what all our school includes and the valuable, the value of this giveaway?

Yeah, definitely. So our company started as a consulting firm, Level Up Creators, and a natural extension of that for us is taking our consulting team and model and the value providing for clients and moving it over to a one-to-many model in a membership community called Level Up Creator School, which you can check out levelupcreatorschool.com. The core value proposition there, of course, like we're doing exactly what we teach, and that's we have half a dozen courses in an ever-growing library of courses and other like static resources that you can pick up 24/7, 365. We host a discussion forum community full of creator peers and our entire team. We have every area of business expertise covered on our team. I have assembled this amazing team of people Aaron, of course, included, who have by and large like followed me around to different executive posts when I was like in Silicon Valley and before this. And we have got all the bases covered. So the primary value proposition of Level Up Creator School is you get access to myself and my entire team way more than any other membership community I've ever seen and helped build. And there are a lot of those examples. So we have live events almost every weekday within the community where you have access to us, whether we are teaching something, we're doing work together, uh, Q&As, office hours, ask me anything sessions, workshops and webinars for— with people from around the creator economy and our partners, uh, names you would certainly recognize. And so it's, it's access to us and getting direct feedback from a full-stack team of experts for $200 a month. Um, and so it's a tremendous amount of value, and it's still like pretty early days. We just launched March 1st. We've got like 3 dozen members in the school. And so everybody's getting a truckload of attention and value. And so we're very happy with how it's going. But our giveaway, we're giving away one full year in Level Up Creator School, which would be transformational for your business. And Erin can tell you about how to enter the giveaway.

Yes. So to enter, you need to be following Amanda on LinkedIn if you don't already, on Instagram, subscribe subscribe to our newsletter. And then for every post from Amanda that you repost or Level Up Creators on LinkedIn or Instagram, it counts as 5 additional entries. And tagging— you can also get another entry by tagging a creator on one of our posts or this post or any, anything on Level Up Creators or Amanda's personal LinkedIn page as well counts as an entry. So There are tons of ways and different commitment levels that you can join and get into the giveaway. But yep, we're gonna raffle it off in 6 days now. So it's gonna be the last day of April. We're gonna announce the winner and we'll do that on a live here on LinkedIn and on Instagram. So make sure to join for that to know who's gonna win. And yeah, thanks for following. That's a wrap for this week. So thank you so much. We count it as an honor that you spent some time with us on our live. And so we are so grateful for you. Thank you for joining, and don't forget to join next week. Bye, we will see you then.

Thanks, everybody.