The only marketing tool you need to start a profitable side hustle

What I'm going to be sharing with you today is the tool that is arguably the most important in my creator kit, the one that I have been using the longest. This year will be 7 years that I've been using this, and it's also a company that I have worked for in the past, was employee number 5. You may have guessed it by now if you've been watching for a while. I'm going to tell you all about how to use ConvertKit to run your creative business and why it might be the only tool that you need. If you watched my video, 10 Tips for Creators, then you know about the simple 3-step flywheel that you can use as a creator to build an audience. And that is to create content, share it with people, and then learn from the feedback that you get on that content so that you can better understand what to create next time around. Over and over again, I see creators of all stages and audience sizes use this simple 3-step flywheel. And you can do each of these things in ConvertKit. A lot of what I'm going to show you in the rest of this video is a how-to inside of ConvertKit for what you need to do to go through each step of this flywheel. The first thing that I want to tell you about in ConvertKit that is a must-have for creators is a landing page. Now a landing page for me is a kind of a combination between you're creating something but you're also sharing it with people. But what you can do with this landing page is you have now a link that you can point back to from any social handle that you have, from any emails that you're sending out to people, whatever you want to use it for. You have a homepage now for your email newsletter that you can use to start to build an audience. So in your Twitter bio, Instagram bio, whatever it is, go ahead and put this landing page link in. ConvertKit has so many beautiful, well-designed landing pages, and that makes sense because Nathan Barry is a designer at heart, and they also have a very talented creative director in Charlie Prangley, fellow YouTuber and YouTube mentor to me. So let me show you how you can set some of these up. Now, I think the best landing page to start with is something that's either a newsletter landing page or a profile landing page. So if we sort by these, then like you can just go through and look at some of these and see what pops out, what pops out to you. The two that I like using the most are the Hudson right here and the Abbey right here. Now the other two that I would look at is if you're used to seeing like these Linktree pages on people's YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram bios, ConvertKit has a better solution for that that will subscribe them to your email newsletter while also sharing the links to your other social profiles. The Canyon landing page is a good example of this and You can see a different view of it right here. So just a little bit different of a color palette. The landing page that I recommend most people start with on ConvertKit is either the Abbey page, but I'm, I'm going to show you the Hudson page. It's a really crisp, clear, simple page that constrains the number of things that you can say because we just want to get something out there so people can learn more about you and subscribe to your email list. So the first thing that you're going to want to do is just go ahead and click on this, change it with a picture of your own. Let's go ahead and select that for me. There I am. Change the name. Obviously, I'm not going to go through and make you watch me type, but I would change all of this. Matt's Weekly Newsletter. And then if I want to change the background, just come back here to General Styles. And click on this. And one of the things that I love, you don't have to like upload your own images. I can also come here to Unsplash. I could connect my Instagram if I want to, but let's just say I wanted to type in productivity. Then hey, look, it's me. That's actually my, my picture. So I can set that up right there. And we're going to change the name of this. Okay. Profile demo. We're going to save. And now if you want to use this link, all you have to do is click right here on Publish and you can copy the link right here. So you don't have to set up your own domain. Now you can customize this link. You can customize your CKPage domain in the settings. I can also come over here to the page settings, click on Domain Name, select MattCKPage obviously, and just call this Demo. Now I'm not going to worry about that for this example, but it's something you can do. So now if I click on this and I open a new tab, now there is a page that you can set up that you can start to share with people so that they can sign up to your email list just like that, totally for free on ConvertKit. Now let's get into the pure creation of an email newsletter. And this is something you can do for free in ConvertKit with broadcasts. What broadcasts allow you to do is send a one-time broadcast newsletter to all of your subscribers. Let me show you how to send a broadcast newsletter. This is like a one-time send on this day at this time type of email. The follow-up emails in ConvertKit are known as sequences. So these are multiple emails that are sent in order whenever the initial trigger is met. So that could be signing up to your form, that could be buying a product. Now the sequence emails are not available in the free plan of ConvertKit, but the paid plans start at $29. And if you're really serious about email marketing, then it's absolutely worth it. All you would do to send a new broadcast is just click here on new broadcast, obviously go through and write your content here. There are different templates that you can use, but I just like using regular plain text only. You can add images really easily. You can add buttons just by clicking on that. So if I want to talk about my podcast, I could just add that image right there. And I said, there is a really Really useful editor. So I can just start typing and it's great. I can also, uh, you're going to change— if I wanted to change it to a second level header, change it back to a paragraph, if I wanted to make a button, I could do any of those things. So you can play around in here. But then I go all the way through and what I'm probably going to do at this point, if I'm new for this, all I want to do is just send this newsletter to all subscribers. Okay, now I'm not going to do that. That would be a disaster for me, but all I always do— this is the default— is to send to all subscribers. Now the thing that I could do is I can define, I can target who I'm sending the email to based on what tag they have or maybe what form they signed up to. So if I only wanted to send it to people who had signed up to that page that I just showed you, I'm just going to type in profile demo right here. Now there's not anyone signed up to that, but as people sign up, if I only wanted to send an email to people who had signed up to that page, then I could do that. The other thing that I could do is I can also target by product. So as I start to have these products— so this is a product. Yeah, this is a product that I have in ConvertKit that I'm going to show you that you can set up for free. There is a transaction fee, but it's very low. And so this ebook right here, I can send this email to everyone who had bought that ebook. So I can target my email sends very specifically based on product, based on form, based on tag, and many other things. But those are the 3 that you'd most need to know about at this time. Now, if we move into the share phase of the creator flywheel, there are 2 different ways to do this. One, again, is just kind of naturally by sending that broadcast email to your subscribers. But the other cool thing that you can do in ConvertKit is now you can also create a newsletter feed. This is very similar to Substack if you are familiar with that tool. But with ConvertKit, I really love the layout of it. It's very very clean. It has great design. You can customize a couple of pieces of it. But what this allows you to do is now people who aren't even subscribers can now see the emails that you're writing and of course sign up to be subscribers themselves. Now the learn phase of the creator flywheel is not something that you do directly in ConvertKit. People can of course reply to your emails, but they'll just go to your normal email inbox, maybe something you use like Gmail. Now the other thing that I would do in terms of sharing and learning, getting feedback from your readers is go ahead and take the link from that public post and share it on Twitter. Take a picture of the first part of your post and share it on Instagram, share it on LinkedIn, wherever you want to share it. Now you have a link to do so. So then you can start to learn through comments on social media and engagement to see what are people liking about this post? What is maybe one piece of an idea that I can expand on that I can create a whole nother email about? So you can see we're going through the creator flywheel just using ConvertKit. I have a landing page that people can sign up for so they start to get my emails. So that is going to create and share right there. But I am creating those emails in the broadcast. I'm sending them out. That's sharing with my subscribers. I'm also posting that public link so that people who aren't subscribers yet can have access to it. And then I'm learning from the feedback, from the engagement, from social media, places that I share, and from email replies. I'm learning from that feedback and engagement so that I have a better idea of what I need to do next time I start at the top of the creator flywheel with being able to create a new piece of content. In this case, obviously, broadcast newsletter in ConvertKit. Another way that ConvertKit helps creators earn a living is by offering one of the best tools I've ever seen and used for selling digital products. So if you have ideas for something like an ebook, a meal planner, any other kind of digital download, if you want to do something like a paid newsletter, you don't have to use tools like Gumroad or Substack for those things anymore. You can sell them directly in ConvertKit. So you can see that I have a few products that I've set up in ConvertKit. Let me show you how easy this is to do. All I would do is click here on New Product. There are a few ways that you can actually charge for your product. This can be a standard one-time fee. Used to this. You can charge on a recurring basis. This is something that would be more of a newsletter, let's say. You can also set it up as a pay-what-you-want model. So if I wanted to say this product was $10, I could also say that customers can choose a price. And it can either— the minimum can be zero, so free if you want it. Or I could say pay what you want as long as it's at least $5. So there are a couple of things that you could do there for like a regular type of digital download. The second product type is a paid newsletter. So instead of using something like Substack, you can use ConvertKit and you can charge readers to get access to your newsletter. Now you can obviously have a free section of the newsletter as well, but you can send extra or VIP or premium issues directly to your paid newsletter subscribers. The other thing, this members-only newsletter. So if I was doing something like that, it could still be a one-time fee, but usually what you're going to do We're gonna do a subscription. So it's $5 a month or $15 a quarter, or you give a discount if they sign up for a year, say like $100 for the year. That math doesn't all work out, but you know what I'm talking about. You could even add additional pricing plans if you want. Let's just say newsletter subscription, $5 a month, or it's $5 a month. I could also say then it's $50 for the year. So you do get a discount on that one. Okay, so those are the two options. Next. This is a newsletter. Next. And then I would go through and I would say this is the product URL. The third product in ConvertKit is coaching or consulting sessions. So all you do for this is you set a price for your hour of time or for your session of time, and then you can sell that as a product type in ConvertKit. The fourth product that you can sell in ConvertKit is what they call the tip jar, which is more like a donation strategy that you can have for your subscribers. So it's really easy to set up, just like everything in ConvertKit is easy to set up. And this way it will basically ask for a donation or for a tip for any broadcast newsletter that you send out. So if we come in here and I actually haven't set this up, so this is brand new for me as well. So let's go ahead and add in a tip jar right here. And you can see you can always change these later. So next. Tips. So what I can do right here is I can certainly add in that image that I showed you before. So after customizing the tip jar page, you can also customize the checkout page, the confirmation, the receipt email. All these can be customized. You can also pretty much just leave it as is because ConvertKit does a good job of setting all these things up to be pretty much set it and forget it. When you're done, just come over here to publish, copy that link, and you can add it to any landing pages you've set up in ConvertKit. You could add it to your website, you could add it to any social pages that you have, you could put in the description of your YouTube. I think the tip jar is really interesting and helpful for people who are just getting started with monetization, because you're not doing anything extra, you're not creating an additional product per se. You're also not going through the whole launch cycle of promoting that product, but it does give people an opportunity to pay you for the work that you're creating just as a way to say thanks. The 5th product type in ConvertKit is a little bit of a workaround, but I wanted to share it with you because it's something that does require the full ConvertKit plan including automations, but it's the product type of an email course, like a paid premium email course. Now you may think to yourself, well, like Podia does courses, and yes, that's what I use for my courses,. But if you're not ready to do that just yet, and you just want to test out an email course that still has a lot of written content and can act like a course, then doing something like that in ConvertKit is really simple and easy to set up. Because essentially what you're doing is you're selling the digital download receipt almost of the email course, and then you're using that sale to automatically kick off the buyer's only email sequence that's in ConvertKit. So like I said, there's a little bit of a workaround that comes with doing something like an email course in ConvertKit, but it is 100% doable and you can set that up as a trigger in a full ConvertKit plan. Everything that I've described to you up to this point in ConvertKit is free. Broadcast newsletters, landing pages, listing products— you can do all of those things in ConvertKit for free. The only charge of everything that I've mentioned to you up at this point is that they do charge 3.5% plus $0.30 for the products that you sell. All that means is basically if you sell a $10 ebook on ConvertKit, then you are charged 3.5% plus $0.30, which comes out to $0.65. That's your fee to be able to do all of this on ConvertKit for free. And you may think to yourself, with everything that's going on with social media and YouTube, why does email still matter? And the reason that email still matters so much is because it is engagement at scale. It is targeted connection at scale. When I publish a video on YouTube, you may or may not see it in your feed. I hope you have like notifications turned on and rang the bell and did all those things, but you may or may not see my video. Most likely, if you're on my email list, you see the email that comes into your inbox. Now you may not, but open all of them, but you're going to see them. The visibility is much higher, even if the numbers can be lower. But let me give you an example of the power of this email connection that you can have with your audience. When I launched the Productivity Power-Up, in fact, this is borne out for every single launch that I've had for the Power-Up Cohort course. At the time of this recording, I have 60,000 YouTube subscribers. I have nearly 15,000 combined Twitter and Instagram followers. So we're talking about 75,000 social media followers between those 3 platforms. On ConvertKit, I have about 7,500 email subscribers. So a tenth, a tenth of the size of that audience. Now granted, there is a lot of overlap between those audiences. A lot of people who see me on social media, on YouTube, are also email subscribers, but The way that sales break out between just social media, YouTube, and just email is insane. The discrepancy between the two, even though my email audience is 10% the size of my social media YouTube audience, it drives 90% of the sales. That's right. So 90% of the sales come directly through email in ConvertKit. I track who buys from each platform. And again, only 10% of you join my courses like Productivity Power-Up after seeing something about it on YouTube, on Twitter, on Instagram. But 90%, 90% of sales come from 10% of the audience size on ConvertKit. There's so much that you can do with ConvertKit's free plan. You can build landing pages, you can send your broadcast newsletters, and you can create and sell products for a very, very low transaction fee. All of those things are free to do in ConvertKit. Now you can also upgrade to the paid plan, starts at $29 a month, and that will give you full access to all of the automation features that ConvertKit has that makes it the best platform platform for creators on the internet. I want to make a connection between like what we've been talking about with ConvertKit and building creative business and the productivity systems and frameworks that I talk about most of the time on this channel. It's okay to start small. It's okay to start with one landing page, with sending one newsletter per month, and then one newsletter every other, every other week, and having a tip jar so that people can contribute to your work. That's a good way to start. That you can set up in literally a single day. There are lots of different things that you can actually write, things that you already know, things that you're already interested in that people will also be interested in. When it comes to sharing a newsletter, I can help you with that. I have some resources that I can share, but you only need to use ConvertKit to do all of this. You only need to use ConvertKit to grow your audience, to share ideas with them, and to start to sell products. Okay, it's okay to start small. ConvertKit can be there with you every single step of the way. And of course, I'll be helping you out as well with some of these videos about building a creative business. Thank you for watching this video. I do have an additional free training on ConvertKit about how to set up your first landing page, so it'll walk you through every step of the process. Go ahead and check out that link in the description below and a link to sign up for your free ConvertKit account. Start to set up that landing page, send your first broadcast newsletter, and and go ahead and put that tip jar out there so people can start contributing to your work. Thank you ConvertKit for sponsoring this video and supporting my work, and also for employing me for a few years. I appreciate all of you. Thanks for watching this video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.