Ways to Make Money As A Creator: Part 2

Hey, hey, you're listening to the Level Up Creators Podcast. Amanda Northcutt here, founder and CEO. We help digital creators build thriving, sustainable businesses they love, and we're so glad you're here. Welcome. I am joined today again by our head of revenue strategy, Natalie Williams, to help me continue breaking down all the ways that creators can make money online. Welcome, Natalie.

Thanks, Amanda. I'm excited to continue this conversation. Um, in episode 4, we talked at length about courses and also selling access to live events like workshops, webinars, summits, and masterclasses. So today let's talk about challenges. A challenge is something you quite literally challenge your audience to do over a period of time. These can be free or paid and delivered via social media, a drip email automation, within a membership community, inside of a mastermind group coaching program, pretty much overlaid anywhere, but serves as a great standalone product as well. Yeah.

And we're gonna talk at length today about examples of things you might challenge your audience to do because the options truly are endless. So we'll provide a handful and hopefully at least one of these will resonate with you or at least spur on, you know, other ideas. But the point here is I promise you, you can create a challenge for just about anything. So, okay, let's go through our list. So you could challenge your audience to write consistently if your audience is wanting to write a book or, you know, launch their blog or write on their blog more consistently. We've talked a lot about newsletters that are sent to online communities. I think that's a very, very, very valuable asset. And so you could set up a challenge to help people consistently create newsletters. Also, things like journaling. I mean, just even in home and private, but you're much more likely again to have that accountability if others in the group are doing it.

Yeah. And so you could practice gratitude, mindfulness, meditation, mantras, CBT, or anything along those lines. I use Insight Timer and use it challenge for my own meditation practice. And so there's the, the options are pretty limitless when it comes to things like that as well.

Yeah, definitely. And of course, again, we'll say the whole thing about if you're not a mental health provider, make sure that you have lawyered up on that front and are not providing any sort of advice or instruction that would be considered medical advice by a lawyer, for instance. And Natalie, you mentioned CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. That's a really excellent tool if you're a mental health professional to help encourage your community to use, uh, and leverage. And we talked about mantras as well in episode 2. So maybe we should run a challenge at Level Up on, um, helping creators change their mindset. Like that's coming down the pipe in the future. So any number of those things, obviously you certainly don't have to be a mental health practitioner to help your audience practice gratitude or mindfulness or do meditation or anything like that. Uh, another great one is to help people change their eating habits from anything to anything. So that again could be overlaid. just about anywhere. And that ties in with things like challenges to start planning your meals out and grocery lists and things like that. School lunch improvement, if you have kiddos, or any lunch improvements, actually, everybody pretty much eats lunch. A food prep challenge, food journaling challenge, and that could be shared within the community or kept private. But that's another idea.

Yeah, and other ones like budgeting, spending, saving, investing, debt reduction. I'm an avid follow-up follower of Money with Katie, and I love all of the guides and challenges that she puts out around spending and budgeting.

Oh yeah, that's a, that's a great reference. Well, we should link her up in the show notes so people can follow her as well. Yeah. Um, relationship type things like improving your— a challenge to help improve your relationship with your partner, whether that's, you know, doing random kind acts for them or taking care of their laundry or making a special meal or Saying something nice, whatever that is, you can totally build any number of challenges around that idea.

Yeah. I mean, you can do things like exercise, detox improvement, all kinds of wealth or health, health and wellness ones. But there's, you know, tons and tons of creators out there that, that have, um, you know, guides for different exercises depending on what areas you want to improve, what stage of life you're in. Um, so tons there as well.

Oh yeah. I like that brain health and longevity. All that stuff is pretty top of mind with loads of research coming down the pipe on that. Um, oh, you know, we talk a lot about Brené Brown. I was also thinking about Brené Brown, Kristin Neff, talked about both of them. And I was thinking about Esther Perel, um, as well. I don't know if any of you are familiar with her work, but, um, all sorts of relationship-related content. And so, I mean, you could literally do like an Esther Perel type challenge if that would resonate with your audience. Um, Speaking of that, also boundary setting in toxic relationships or helping your audience identify toxic relationships and teaching them step by step, day by day throughout a challenge, how to actually set those boundaries. Again, mental health professional situation there potentially. So make sure that you're not providing medical advice if you are not a mental health professional, but that's a good hot topic now as well.

Yeah, absolutely. You can have things like setting and reaching a goal. I mean, just, you know, things like writing it down, like we talked about in an earlier episode, Saying it out loud, all of those things can be part of a challenge that are easily attainable and focused around goal setting.

Yeah, and I think it's probably relevant for pretty much any creator around New Year's. If you wanted to help your community achieve their New Year's resolutions, you could run a challenge around that, even if that doesn't have to do with your content. That's such a prevalent thing in our culture. That's something that could make for good content for you for sure.

Yeah, I mean, even like running your first automation campaign. So ways that you push out those challenges could also tie into how are you pushing them out in a marketing automation campaign and the steps to, you know, set all that up and execute that could be a good challenge for creators as well.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If your community is made up of creators, entrepreneurs, any kind of business people, or people who are wanting to sell what they've made, then Revenue generation related challenges. I mean, man, there's a million of different options there. You could have your community running the same experiment on each of their own individual projects as well. Leveling up your parenting, man, there's a lot of parenting content out there, no matter how old your kids are, or if you're expecting or adopting or wanting to help your kid eat better. There's I mean, probably 1 million at least ideas on, uh, yeah, parenting and parent-child relationships and helping your kids and stuff like that.

Yeah, definitely. I, uh, I'm an avid follower of many of those. Um, and then kind of, you know, switching back into the kind of, you know, personal finance, you can, uh, do challenges for things like asking for a raise and getting paid for what— getting paid what you deserve, things on, um, challenges around negotiating your salary and things like that, which I think are really, really valuable to people.

That's extraordinary, extraordinarily valuable. And in particular to like our audience, you know, we are helping a lot of women entrepreneur creators and a lot of those people still have full-time jobs. We are obviously all very aware of the gender pay gap. And so if you are a creator who is in the position to help your audience get paid what they deserve at work, and you can walk them through step by step that process and prepare them for conversations with their manager and all that. I would love to see that. If you do that challenge, please reach out to us and let me know. We would love to help promote it.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, things like planning and booking a dream trip. I mean, people love travel. People love, um, you know, planning those, those destination trips. And so I, I just saw one the other day that was like a perfect 5-day fall getaway to the East Coast. And so, I mean, just things like that are, are so helpful. I want somebody to plan that for me. So, um, Like that, I think can be, uh, really, really enticing to people as well.

Yeah, definitely. And we're recording this in the fall. And so I thought about, uh, I would love to have some help getting organized and ready for the holiday season as that is looming overhead, um, right, right around the corner. So that's an idea as well. And again, like most people celebrate something in the holiday season toward the end of the calendar year. And so if there's So that could apply to a number of different communities is what I'm saying. That doesn't necessarily have to be your topic per se, but you can still help people.

Yeah, I've seen some great ones around planning meals for holiday celebrations and anything like that that can just take the weight off of the mental load of planning those things. People eat up, myself included.

Yeah, absolutely. Screen time reduction is a huge one. It's super easy for anybody to take Or have accountability with screen time and like see that increase or reduce over the course of the challenge. And you could have people take a screenshot of their screen time report on their phone and, you know, submit it as a comment on social media or within your membership community or reply to an email or something like that. But that's kind of a fun way to engender accountability and that sense of community, which is really important, especially in a, in a group challenge like you might run.

Yeah. And another one that's related to the holiday season and the activities that we have coming up this time of year is to Challenges around serving your community. Community, I think, becomes really important this time of year, maybe more so than the rest of the year, as we all kind of come together to celebrate various things. And I think some challenges around serving your community and how to be best helpful in your community can be really fun for people.

Yeah. And to piggyback off of that, a random acts of kindness challenge, potentially, maybe it's 10 days in a row leading up to the end of the year or whatever, but I love that idea. And again, could be applied over lots and lots and lots of community or creator topics. Reading more, learning anything. If, if you don't— your community has been putting off leveling up in a certain area, or you have, you know, a group of insatiably curious people, you can challenge them to put that into action, to learn something or read something and have accountability within that. in the form of a challenge.

And some other challenges related to the screen time limits or the screen time audit that you mentioned earlier are breaking or creating any habit. I think it's a good time to take an audit of, um, you know, the habits you want to change or new habits you want to start. You could take a look at the kinds of content you're consuming and maybe making some adjustments around those as well.

Yeah, I love that idea. Uh, home organization— this is not a great time of year necessarily for that. That's typically more of like a spring cleaning kind of a situation, but If your content centers around any kind of stay-at-home parent or new homeowner or anything, encourage people to clean out their stuff and donate it and do that as a group within a challenge.

Yeah. One of the things that I actually talked to my 3-year-old about yesterday was going through her toys and auditing those to make room for what she's asked Santa for. And so, um, I think ways to, to take those challenges into different parts of years, um, depending on what's, or different parts of the year, depending on what's coming down the pike.

That's true. That does make it make sense, I think, to do a little clean out this time of year. Another idea is to run an extroversion challenge. If your community is, has a lot of people who tend toward introversion, you might challenge them to, in like a laddering type of way, take more and more steps outside of their comfort zone, just one baby step a day. You could run a leadership challenge. If your community consists of people who are, you know, within the workforce or of course in leadership positions, you could put together, you know, maybe your top 10 core tenets of leadership. And then once a week, probably not once a day during the work week, you've got all the people in your community trying to implement each one of these principles within your leadership challenge once, once a week.

Yeah, and another challenge that would be a good fit for some audiences is increasing the profitability of your business. It's good throughout certain times of the year to just kind of take audit of where you stand with your business and find some ways to increase profitability. So challenges around that could be really, really great if that's your niche. And then another one sort of related to that is, is doing challenges around hiring out things at work and at home that are not within your 80% bucket. So in a previous episode, we had talked a lot about the 80/20 rule and trying to really focus on spending 80% of your time doing the things that are in your wheelhouse and your expertise and getting those other things offloaded as soon as possible. So some challenges around that could be really interesting for audiences as well.

Definitely love that 80/20 rule. All right, well, that's a ton of examples to go off of. I do hope that at least a handful of those struck a chord with you or sparked another idea that's more relevant to your specific community. Now we're going to kind of get into the nitty-gritty of actually how to implement a challenge in your community.

Yeah. And just like every other type of one-off digital product, a challenge can be sold or used as a lead magnet given away in exchange for a participant's email, like we mentioned earlier. So if you're running the challenges on social media, obviously that's gonna be free. You can even offer the first 3 days of the challenge for free, but require payment or at least an email signup to receive the remaining days of the challenge via email.

Mm-hmm. And challenges that are available for purchase make an excellent loss leader, as do webinars and workshops. Workshop recordings. Loss leaders, similar to tripwires, are relatively low-cost, low-barrier-to-entry products, digital products in our case, that usually serve someone's— serve as someone's first purchase with you. These are an important part of pretty much any product lineup because they serve as a low-risk option because it doesn't cost much for someone who's not quite sure maybe about spending money with you for the first time to see. So I definitely encourage the use of loss leaders or tripwires, like having some kind of low-cost product in your product mix.

Yeah. And as with everything you give away as a lead magnet or sell, you want your marketing automation working for you in the background to help your customers make more smart and valuable purchases from you without sales calls or any sort of high-touch interaction.

Yes. Because that is not scalable without an entire sales force and that becomes very expensive and kind of changes the entire nature of your business, which is why we talk about marketing automation so much. And for maximum effect, the first time you launch a challenge, it should be offered as a group challenge, as in everyone who signs up is doing it at the same time. When you do challenges at the same time as a group, it creates a sense of community camaraderie and a shared fun and important experience for your audience to experience together. And if your challenge is gated at all, meaning someone has given their email address and/or paid to participate, You'll want to deliver your challenge via daily emails, texts, posts in your online community, or as notifications within your coaching app. Choose, you know, whatever method is best for your participants and community and, you know, depending on what delivery mechanisms are available to you. The leveled-up option of a challenge would be to include a short video each day of you delivering the instructions for that day of the challenge and a message of encouragement, which is a really important piece.

It's also super important to make your challenges easy to participate in, or they, they just won't be effective. Typically each day you're at least sending out a prompt to each day's work, whatever that may be, and a note of encouragement. And if you get any positive feedback from challenge participants during the live challenge, make sure you share that with your participants to keep them on track to successfully keep, keep complete it and keep them motivated to continue going. And of course, turn those kind words into testimonial for when you turn your challenge into an evergreen digital product.

Yeah, definitely. And just in case anyone's not familiar with the term evergreen, meaning always available.

Yep. Thank you for that note. And then once the live challenge is complete, get more feedback from your participants to see if you need to make any tweaks before you turn it into a product or sale on your website. So that's a really good time just to do another gut check, just to see if there's any adjustments that need to be made according to what your audience is telling you.

Mm-hmm. So if you've got the tech that you need, it should be very simple to add a way to purchase and participate in the challenge at any time, again, like turning that challenge into an evergreen product for sale on your website. The purchase on your website will then of course trigger an email or text automation that will deliver each day's message. And obviously like prerecorded videos or whatever's included to the participant without you lifting a finger, it should all just be running in the background. Right. And for somewhat complex email automations like this, we definitely recommend ActiveCampaign, which is a really robust marketing automation tool. And frankly, if you're not too tech savvy or this is just not in your wheelhouse, we can definitely help you set it up. ActiveCampaign is, is not necessarily a tool for the faint of heart. It takes a little bit of a learning curve, but it is so incredibly effective and helpful for marketing automation. I can't not recommend it because truly we feel like that's the best option for creator-led businesses. And if you're delivering your challenges via text message, ActiveCampaign does have SMS capabilities. That work well in some instances, but you likely have a global audience and might need to use a tool like JustCall, J-U-S-T-C-A-L-L. We'll link those up in the show notes to increase your ability to deliver internationally. And then there's all sorts of different complexities that you get into and considerations when you're looking at text messaging tools. It's like SMS is text only. MMS allows you to send video clips and high-resolution pictures, but there's all sorts of nuance and not every tool offers SMS and MMS globally. Some just offer them domestically. And so please reach out if you need help looking for a tool. We should probably publish an article on this as well, but it's not incredibly straightforward and definitely requires you to read the fine print and make sure that you know what your requirements are when you're choosing any tool. But man, especially for a text message tool.

Yeah. And also it's important to remember that not only do you need to deliver each day of the challenge, but at the end of the challenge, you need to offer the right next thing in your product lineup for that customer to purchase. And we want that to happen automatically as well, which again, all comes back to having your marketing automation on point and doing your work for you 24/7, 365.

Yep, exactly. All right, let's hit workbooks and guides next. So, as I'm sure you know, because you're an intelligent person, workbooks and guides are really similar. There's some nuance here in that a workbook most certainly is intended to be interactive, kind of some fill in the blanks, whereas a guide might be purely instructional, right? Full-color PDF versions of workbooks or guides come in many shapes and sizes, and you can create a workbook or a guide for just about anything. Think back to the massive list of ideas we shared earlier in the chat about challenges. You can make a workbook or a guide out of any one of these topics or any topic, topic you came up with while you were listening.

Yeah. And the key is, as with any other product or service, is that what you create solves a direct problem for your community of followers.

Yes, exactly. And we haven't talked much about how to define a problem that you're going to solve up to this point. So we're going to go back to a handful of the examples we provided in our challenge chat a few minutes ago and sort of like define the problem that each one of these challenges solves. So again, the prerequisite is problem definition, but for anyone who's not super familiar with how to do the exercise, if you haven't done it before, if that sounds foreign or hard or confusing, hopefully we can kind of provide some context and color here. So let's start with, I mentioned boundary setting in a toxic relationship. So the problem your community might have that would prompt you to create a challenge centering around that topic would be if you're hearing chatter like, everyone treats me like a doormat. I hate it. I'm tired of it. I don't deserve it, but I have no idea what to do to stop people from walking all over me. Create a challenge again that step by step every day leads them on a path toward identifying what boundaries need to be set. And then literally day by day, taking steps to shift that narrative from I'm a doormat to I'm a confident person and people don't treat me like trash anymore.

Yeah. And so setting and reaching a goal of any kind. So I want to do XYZ, But I don't know how, don't have enough time, I'm too busy.

Yeah, that was a super broad one that, that we mentioned, but fortunately it can be applied on just about anything, right? And so if you can create a guide, a goal setting guide to get someone from, I don't even know what my goals should be, to define the goal and then reverse engineer the process of achieving that goal. Again, chipping away at it day after day after day. That's a really valuable asset. And again, you can apply that to anything. And we just keep coming back to this. I'm so sorry. Another example was— I'm not sorry, actually, because I really just want you to take away— if you take away anything from our podcast, it's that you desperately need marketing automation to level up your creator-led business and make at least half a million dollars a year. So we're going to use the example over and over. So if you have a challenge about running your first marketing automation campaign, the prerequisite problem that might set you up To run that challenge in your community would be something like, I have amazing products to sell. The few friends of mine who have purchased them love them and always send other people my way, but I'm ready to offer this to a wider audience, but I'm just totally lost on what to do. I have no idea how to sell, have no experience in that area, things like that.

Yeah. And then kind of shifting into the parenting, um, the one that we mentioned earlier was leveling up your parenting, and the problem might be something like, I'm at the end of My rope with my toddler. Their daily tantrums are embarrassing, stressful, and I just end up yelling at them. I hate this about myself and I want to make a change.

Yes. Next up, asking for a pay raise and getting paid what you deserve. So we talked at length about, length about that and a little bit about problem definition, but we didn't say that explicitly. So if you're hearing comments like, I've been working here for 3 years and seen a lot of people who don't pull their weight around me get promoted and receive raises left and right. Meanwhile, I'm over here doing good work, receiving glowing performance but just keep getting passed over. I can't take it anymore. Help. Help your community get a raise, right? That's like, if you're looking for a sign that this is the next thing to do, that's it, right?

Right. And then on the example of planning and booking a dream trip, you might hear things like, I'm desperate to plan our 10-year anniversary trip, but I don't even know where to begin. There's so much to do to get our kids looked after, taken to and from school and after-school activities. And then we both have to request the time off work. And that doesn't even scratch the surface. I still have to book flights, transportation, Airbnbs, get event tickets, make dinner reservations. Ugh, I'm never gonna get this done or I'm going to die doing it.

Yeah. And I hear your dog like a little pitter patter in the background. You didn't even mention you gotta get dog care too.

I know, right? Boarding my dog. Who's gonna take her for a walk while I'm gone? She was concerned and wanted to make her presence known.

We got you, Luna. You're on the show.

Okay.

And then the last example we'll use here, um, creating a challenge about getting organized and ready for the holiday season again, or a workbook or a guide. You might hear a community member say, creating holiday magic for kids, buying gifts for everyone and their mother, literally coordinating with my ex and his parents, planning special meals and on and on and on is just too much. It's going to push me over the edge this time. make a workbook for that person that they can fill in the blanks and, um, have a much less stressful holiday season. So

yeah, I

hope that's helpful.

Yeah, we all, we all would like that. So make that workbook, somebody. Um, and then these are the kinds of things we say to ourselves, to our best friends, and even in our online communities. Hint hint. These soundbites are from real humans in your audience, and they are gold mines for clues about what's troubling your audience the most. Listen, read, ask questions, dig deep, look for commonalities and trends in these soundbites, comments, quotes, and reviews. If you can understand with a great deal, a great degree of clarity what your community is up against in the real world, you can match these problems up with what you are uniquely positioned to sell and help your community solve through a manner of products and services.

And I've got a quick anecdote I thought of as I was preparing for this episode. So a great example of a ridiculously successful creator consistently helping her audience solve big problems is Rachel Hollis. Rachel is a lifestyle influencer and creator who has at this point a treasure trove of books written for a very specific subset of women. I'm sure you've heard of her. She wrote Girl, Stop Apologizing, Girl, Wash Your Face, and I'm sure you've at least passed by one of these at Target, right? Mm-hmm. Regardless of how you feel about Rachel, Rachel Hollis and her POV doesn't matter. Just hear me out on this. I was listening to an interview with her a few years ago, and the interviewer asked her how she's been able to crank out bestseller after bestseller after bestseller. And what she said really struck with me. Obviously, it's still here after a few years. She said, "I know my girl," and that was it. And then like probably proceeded to drop the mic on the interview, and. In case that doesn't sound significant, please think about the last time you read, heard, or watched something that resonated with you on an entirely different level. Like as if someone broke into your brain, stole your thoughts, feelings, motives, deepest fears, and published them for all to see. When you consume something like that, it is rarely an accident. Moments and feelings like that are carefully crafted and curated for their intended audience. I cannot even begin to tell you how many billions of dollars are spent each year, all the way from the biggest global brands like Coca-Cola, for instance, all the way down to creators just like you to nail messaging for a specific audience in order to engender things like brand affinity, trust, loyalty, and hopefully, of course, purchases and eventually referrals from those customers. So what does this mean for creators like you? Ultimately, the creators who know their girl are going to rise to the top of their field and stay there if they keep their ear to the ground and listen intently to their community.

Yeah. And so where does this leave us with workbooks and guides? Well, define a problem that a critical mass of your audience has that is best suited to be solved through a workbook and guide— workbook or guide, and then just make one. So just like with the course, you're taking your customer on a journey that ultimately leads to problem-solving, to a problem-solving transformation. Define the steps it takes to get them from where they are now to where they need to be and reverse engineer the product to get them there.

And on the logistical front, we can't recommend canva.com enough for creating beautifully designed workbooks, guides, and I mean, anything you can think of that needs to be designed, Canva has templates for. And Canva is actually a woman-owned billion-dollar company. And it's only $13 a month for their pro subscription, which gives you, which gives you access to like, you know, ready-made again, templates for anything you need and all sorts of cool features. So, you know, if you don't have an account with them, go get a free account and then obviously you can see if you need to move up to the paid version, but that's the tool that is way easier for you to use. You no longer have to have Photoshop or Adobe, you know, suites of products and things like that. So. Thank you, Canva. We appreciate you. We use it as well. Yeah.

And I mean, having design skills is a plus, but Canva or a designer with experience and well-branded page layouts is what you need. That's something that we can also help with too at Luck.

Definitely. And what you can charge for your workbook will vary pretty widely based on a bunch of factors we've already covered. But one rule of thumb to go by when you're pricing something out is to consider how big and expensive the problem your product solves. Is for your customer. Obviously, the bigger, more expensive problem you're solving, the more you can charge for the solution. Similarly, if the information you're selling in this product is very important and also hard to come by, you can put a multiplier on your price point. Other things on pricing would be always take into account industry norms and do competitor research, but please do not price your product like 20% lower than your closest competitor just because you think That will increase your sales. It probably won't unless what you're selling is a widely available commodity, which it probably isn't. Again, we can't stress enough this like creator mindset of valuing your own work. Take pride in your work, make it excellent, solve a real problem, and your loyal followers will pay what you ask.

Yeah. And of course, you know, products like these make for excellent evergreen offerings on your website. So make sure you promote them there and strategically within your evergreen marketing machine. AKA your marketing automation system.

We need to like look at the transcript of this and say how many times, see how many times we've said marketing automation.

Yeah, our keyword density percentage on that, that phrase is probably significantly higher than most.

Pretty big. All right. And next we're going to talk about templates and those kind of go with workbooks and guides. And Canva is also a great tool to use to design templates among other things, but I came up with a really broad definition of templates, which I couldn't really find one on the internet. They're all kind of about like woodworking, tangible templates, which if that's your thing and you work in like the makerspace and that's what your community wants, please make physical, tangible templates and send them. But, um, I'm defining a template as something that is like a shortcut that helps you make things. And that's simply all it is. It can be applied on so many different things. So let's, yeah, let's hit the list.

Yeah. So on the digital side of things, templates come in many, many forms. And some examples that we have listed here are a newsletter or landing page template offered by an email marketing tool like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign, as we mentioned before.

And then there's loads of templates. Again, I mentioned this a second ago, but you literally will not believe the number of templates that are on canva.com if you've never been on there. And so you can actually create and sell your own templates. Templates on canva.com.

Yeah. And on the finance side of things, or just the kind of professional side of things for businesses or for your, you know, career search, things like that. There's resumes, invoicing, slide decks, all manner of things like that.

Yeah. And you mentioned finance spreadsheets. Like if you've got, you know, really complex math that you need help with, somebody who's put out a really awesome Excel or Google Sheet template can be a massive shortcut to achieve Many ends like profit and loss statement forecasting, cash forecasting, revenue forecasting, blah, blah, blah. I mean, the list goes on and on really can be applied to business templates. Uh, what else?

Um, I think another great one is a meal planning template. I mean, you can use this for your family, you can use this for the kids. We mentioned kind of talking about like lunchbox ideas. One of my favorite ones is an account from Feed or from Feeding Littles where they have a lunchbox template for, you know, so you don't have to think about what you're packing your kids for lunch. You can just follow the template, get the groceries, and there you go. It takes some, uh, takes some pressure off there for sure.

Mm-hmm. Definitely. Oh my gosh, I need some meal planning templates around

here.

Um, also forms of all kinds, uh, even contracts. I'm thinking about website terms of use, privacy policies, and things like that. You can buy all sorts of legal templates as well. Or if you're a lawyer and that's what your community is based on, make some templates that are unique to your community.

Yeah, I mean, there's also things like website templates. I mean, I think just starting a website and doing these things, the initial just kind of of starting the project can be so overwhelming, but there are so many things available, um, that can make that so much easier, like templates.

Definitely infographic templates make great lead magnets, and they're really fun to read and visually interesting if you get the right template. But again, you can also use those templates that already exist, but you can also make infographic templates if that applies to your audience.

Yeah, and what another one related to that is, is white paper templates. So a lot of times those kind of longer form pieces of content can seem a little bit overwhelming, and so you can create a white paper, white paper template for your audience. Or if you're looking to build a white paper template, you can find a number of them as well.

Uh, annual review templates comes to mind. That's a big thing in the business world. If your community is centered around maybe like Uh, HR-focused stuff, then annual review templates can be incredibly helpful. Uh, also like hiring scorecards for specific roles would be great. Um, budgeting templates, we kind of already touched on how that might relate to business and P&L forecasting and things like that, but home budget templates are also very helpful. I can't even tell you how many times I've had discussions with friends about budgeting templates and I would love to have a better one. I've been using the same one for like 10 years that I literally, I mean, it's an Excel template that I uploaded to a Google Sheet several years years ago, uh, and still use it. But things like that can and do have a lot of value for the right people, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. And, uh, my husband Travis is a software engineer, and I was kind of talking to him about what this podcast episode is about, and I didn't even realize this— there's loads of templates for coding and web development and software development. Uh, I just never— I mean, honestly, never even occurred to me because I I don't really live in that world anymore, but that's a very interesting thing. I think that would be super helpful if you live in that world, for sure.

Yeah, definitely. I also wouldn't know where to start with that. So a template could be very helpful and make that a little bit less intimidating. And you mentioned makers before. I mean, there's tons of templates for makers. It can be sewing patterns, craft templates, any kind of jewelry design, things like that. So in your audience, I mean, I'm for my own, you know, art that I do, I'm always looking for templates. I think that's kind of a great place to start. And so if you're able to create some templates for the makers that are everywhere, that would be really excellent too.

That was actually my next question for you, Natalie. I know you do this incredible beadwork and make lots of jewelry. Do you use templates for that?

Sometimes I do, yeah. And there's actually some challenges, so you can kind of like pair a template in a challenge that they do. I'm a beadwork artist and there's a challenge. I'll tag the account in the show notes because I can't remember off the top of my head, but they do a beading challenge where they have a template and it's a challenge. So you bead together with fellow artists and you use a template. So it's kind of a double whammy there, which I think is a really excellent idea.

Yeah, I love that. I never would have thought of that, but yeah, that's a total 2 for 1. Exactly. Wow, that's so great. That could be applied to so many different things too. It's like facilit— I mean, it's just like—

Absolutely.

It's almost like enablement to complete the challenge. You're making it easier. And the lower that fruit is hanging, the more likely your audience is going to be to complete it. So that's a great example. I love that. Um, Instagram Reel templates. If your community happens to center around social media growth or any kind of social media template really, but Instagram Reel templates are great. And business operations templates. Oh my gosh. So marketing plans, sales playbooks, sales battle cards, how to handle objections in sales. I've been in sales for a long time. Content calendar templates. I mean, the list is endless. So we hope that this is helpful and spur some ideas for you. But again, build templates to help your community make things that are high quality, provide consistent outcomes and results. And of course, Solve a problem. Yeah.

And depending on the value you assign to your template, industry norms, and what your audience might be willing to pay for, you can choose whether to charge for your template or to use it as a lead magnet.

And also templates can be packaged into bundles when it makes sense. I mean, I can rattle off probably 10 templates that could be used in a sales process, and that would be a really high value thing. Anything that helps salespeople sell more. Sales managers will definitely pay for, and just like with workbooks and guides, templates make a great first purchase for someone. For some of the people in your community, again, they provide a low barrier of entry to show how good your products are. And but again, if you're going to charge, you want to like drive up what you're able to charge. I would ask you to consider making some kind of a bundle.

Yeah, and I mean, I hope it's painfully obvious now that you'll need to incorporate any template or other new products into your marketing automation ecosystem to. Maximize sales and therefore the value you're providing to your audience.

All right, that's a wrap for today. We're going to put a pin in it. We'll pick it up next time with ebooks, I believe. But we are going to spend a lot of time on this, um, one-off digital product category because there are a plethora of options. And honestly, when I was thinking through this series in our season 1 of our podcast, I thought that we were going to be able to fit all 8 buckets Of what we call monetization pathways at Level Up Creators, it's just like eight different you know categories of ways that you can make money as a creator. And I think we're going to end up with three episodes just off of one-off digital products, which is bucket number one. So this will reach further into the season, but we really want to kind of lift the veil or peel back the curtain or whatever you want to talk about and make this information or whatever you want to call it and make this information super accessible and hopefully easy to understand. But if you have any questions or anything like that, please DM us any. Anywhere, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever. You can also email hello@welevelupcreators.com if you have any questions or would like us to address any specific topics within an upcoming show. But in any case, that's a wrap for today. And please join us next time as we continue our series. And we know that your time is precious. Thank you for sharing yours with us. Level Up Creators exists to amplify the voice, reach, and impact of creators like you making a positive impact in the world. With your expertise as the focus, our team of strategists, marketers, sales pros, product developers, administrators, and tech gurus Handle the heavy lifting of building and optimizing a profitable business that will transform your life for good. Check out welevelupcreators.com for more info and resources for creators just like you. See you next time on the Level Up Creators Podcast.