Easy Steps To Start Earning On Substack

Welcome Inner Circle and Circle members, paid subscribers of the Transcendental Entrepreneurship Substack. You are here because you signed up and have indeed showed up for this workshop, the Substack Sales Engine. You're in the right place if you are a writer, creative, teacher, healer, coach, or freelancer who is interested in seeing how you might leverage Substack to become part of a reliable revenue generation system. As I was just sharing before we started recording, this is effectively now has become the third in a three-part series that has begun with Clients and Customers on Purpose, and then further unfolded in the How to Avoid the Niche Trap training. And this workshop will review the essential components that we covered in that, those workshops. And then I'll share how I'm leveraging those concepts, principles, and practices into my Substack sales engine. So in the previous two workshops, we really talked a lot about philosophy and principles. This workshop will apply a little bit more of the strategic, tactical, and tool-oriented components. So what you should do next is I would go ahead and make sure that you're taking notes. I would recommend that you click on the links that I'm going to provide to get you to other resources. And after we're done with the presentation, which I again will endeavor to be about 45 minutes, I actually have plenty of time afterward for Q&A. So although we are a small group, I'm happy to hang out for as long as you all need for some Q&A afterwards. So let's dive in. So here is what I call the situation, and this is based on my conversations with people that are in this room that are Inner Circle or Circle subscribers, paid subscribers to the Transcendent Solopreneurship Substack. Many, several of you are currently clients, and others, uh, there's many other clients that are not here. And in those conversations, and with conversations with all of the subscribers that I've been able to speak with, what I have learned is that we have all started our business in part— yes, we want to make a difference, we want to have an impact, we want to do meaningful, fulfilling work with and for people we care about— but we also built our business to fund and fit our ideal lifestyle. And what has most frequently arose is what happens in the, in the pursuit of building a business is that we end up getting caught in this, what I call the compensation obligation equation trap, and it gets all out of whack. So, what I mean by the compensation obligation equation is that you are getting compensated in a way that is makes sense for the amount of time that you're obligated to be in your business. And what I mean by the compensation obligation equation being out of whack is you're, you're probably spending a lot more time, maybe a lot more money, definitely putting in a lot more effort than you're actually getting compensated for. The return on investment for the investment of your time, attention, money, and effort is not in accordance with the amount that you're investing. And so what ends up happening is we get— as solopreneurs, we get frustrated, we get exhausted, and we quickly find ourselves heading toward burnout and blowing ourselves up. This has certainly been something that I personally have experienced, and we'll be talking about this, uh, in an upcoming Substack post. But the problem that we're bumping up against in this Compensation Obligation Equation is that as solopreneurs, our biggest constraint is not that we don't make enough money or that we don't have enough time. Our biggest constraint is that there is actually a limited amount of time, attention, energy, and money available to us. It's not an unlimited supply. We don't have the resources and can't leverage the compounding effect of employees or financial resources to expand the resources of time, attention, and effort. So there's 24 hours in a day. You can only go for so long in, in any given day. You can only stay focused for so long in any given day. And so if you are doing too many things and spending too much time in your business and not getting a return on investment that is worthwhile, you will get frustrated. You will get exhausted. You will burn out. You will blow up. And so The key takeaway here about the situation is the situation frustrates us because it defies a simple solution. Problems can be solved. Problems are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And situations are not. But we often get caught up in solutions that treat the situation of solopreneurship as a solvable problem, and it's not a solvable problem. It's a solopreneur dilemma, is a, is a bunch of problems that are all added together. And so the challenge is how do we solve the right problems in the right order at the right time and so forth? And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit today. So how we arrived at this situation where we are in a situation where we are spending way too much time, way too much effort, maybe too much money spent and, and giving too much attention to our business as opposed to the lifestyle that we want it to fund and fit around is what we addressed in the workshop, I guess, 2 weeks ago called How to Avoid the Niche Trap. The niching trap is a result of what I call the form over function fallacy. What I mean by that is we've all heard the phrase form over function, and what I addressed in the workshop— and, and I'll drop the replay link here in the chat in a minute— is that it never actually was expressed as the idea that form is more important than function. It was actually the opposite. Louis Sullivan, the father of the American skyscraper, said, "Form ever follows function." And meaning the foundation, the utility, the, uh, of, of a structure comes first, and all the beautification comes afterwards. And he got that idea from a Roman, ancient Roman architect named Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. Scott Perry, who said that every building needs to be solid, useful, and beautiful, in that order. And so when we're talking about niching, we're talking basically about building a business upside down, because niching is not a fundamental philosophy of business. It's not a fundamental principle of business. It's not a fundamental strategy of business. It's a tactic. And if we think about the Clarity Hierarchy, where tools and tactics are at the top of the pyramid and philosophy and principles are at the bottom, and strategy is the link between the two— if we're starting with niching as a tactic, if that's where we're starting our business, we are building an upside-down pyramid. And I don't think it takes much imagination to think about, well, what happens if you build a pyramid upside down. It's not going to be very stable. It's eventually going to come crashing down long before you can get to the underlying principles of philosophy that support that structure. And so in the How to Avoid the Nietzsche Trap training, I talked about how you can invert the process and start with philosophy Start with fundamental principles, construct a strategy, a plan for implementing philosophy and principles through tactics and tools that actually help you collapse time to target and build a business that you want from the ground up, from the foundation up. And so what I showed you in— well, I'll just illustrate this with a personal example. When I built the business that came to finally earn $10,000 a month, right? This is always the dream is that we want to, we want to build a business that earns us a consistent $10,000 a month. I had the dream just like everybody else has the dream. And what I did was I followed the advice of digital marketers and online gurus. They said, you have to start with a niche, meaning you have to start with some sort of narrow slice of a market. That is defined by demographics and psychographics. And in order to create a niche, you're told that you have to define an ideal customer avatar. This imaginary person that's the perfect customer for whatever it is that you're selling, perfect client for whatever service you're providing. And then after you have an ideal customer avatar, you've established your niche. Then you have to construct a funnel that's fueled by, you know, some sort of lead magnet that you promote through content generation, or better said, content grinding on social media, blogs, podcasting, YouTube channels, etc. And, and then all of that is fueled by some sort of launch schedule. So when you are starting with niching and when you are starting with ideal customer avatars and funnel funnels, which are inherently leaky, content grinding, which takes a lot of time, and wasting time scrolling and on social media and getting involved in all these silly DM conversations. You're investing a ton of time, effort, and perhaps money, because it only really works if you fuel it with ad spend in Facebook, YouTube, or Google. You're spending most of your time doing digital marketing stuff and not doing the work that you actually started your business for in the first place. Which is why it leads to burnout and blowing yourself up because you have limited time, energy, and financial resources to invest. So what I showed in the Clarity Hierarchy is that after I did exactly what I said, built a business upside down, starting with niching and tools and tactics, I decided that I was going to explore on Substack this idea of how do I build a business from the ground up? How do I start with philosophy and principles? And how do I come construct a strategy that is informed by the, that philosophy and principles so that I can find the necessary, uh, few tactics and tools that will allow me to start collapsing time to target and build a business that funds and fits my life, not the other way around. And so what I shared in the, the niching workshop was after I blew up my financially successful business that was killing my soul and burning me out, I decided I would just start talking about things that were important to me philosophically. This is what I believe. I, and I was sharing ideas that come from Stoicism and the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching around the idea of purpose-driven living, living in accordance with your values and virtue, hearing and heeding the call of vocation, not pushing the river, going with the flow. I talked about the virtue of starting with who as opposed to starting with why. All these things that are very philosophical and kind of principle-based, they're the fundamental truths that, although falsifiable, have not yet been falsified. And what ended up happening was I was attracting readers who resonated with the philosophy and principles and started to ask me if there was something I could do to help them accomplish a goal that they had or solve a problem that they had. So strategically, I just started engaging in these conversations with people to learn more about what they were being challenged by or what they were trying to accomplish and applied fundamental principles that I had learned from ancient philosophical and spiritual disciplines around reasoning from first principles, microstepping, and system reliability and system thinking. And I started to just create these offers and started to work with clients. And over time, I found myself talking to more and more solopreneurs, business owners, freelancers, creatives, writers, writers, teachers, healers. And so what happened— and this is one of the fundamental lessons from this workshop— is the niche emerged from my positioning. My positioning is, this is who I am, this is what I stand for, this is what I believe, this is what I do, this is what I don't do, here are my boundaries and guardrails. And I was attracting people who shared my values and needed my talents and skills to help them achieve aspirations or solve problems. And that has enabled me to, to build a much stronger, stable business that earns a consistent revenue. Uh, and I've talked many times about how I've been able to leverage all of this to earn my annual revenue goal in less than half a year. So that, that is the lessons from how to avoid the niche trap. When we talk about The Clients and Customers on Purpose. This is where I got a little bit more into the strategy. Uh, and so what I arrived at through continuing to, to just post and interact with the community here on Substack is I created a simple business system that optimized for conversation. That was kind of my strategy. Right. I had this core belief starting at the bottom of the pyramid that I could build a business that expressed who I am, what I'm good at, and where I belong, that didn't have to resort to any digital marketing hacks or tricks to flourish, survive, and prosper. The principles that I built it upon were the idea of reasoning from first principles, system reliability, and microstepping into possibility. Testing and tweaking and iterating and improving as I go in low-risk ways that required less effort, less time. And then strategically, it was how do I leverage the power of conversations, human-to-human connection, to start having conversations with the right people that helped me understand their problems and their aspirations. And then tactically, how do, how do I put my offer in front of the right audience? And what are the tools that I'm using to get those conversations going? And what I arrived at was this idea of a forever offer promise instead of being a power offer or no-brainer offer, which again is part of the, the usual digital marketing approach. You know, I help X kind of person get X kind of result without doing X kind of thing that they hate to do. I was just— my initial forever offer was pretty much I help people get from where they are to where they want to be. And that was good enough for a long time. As it evolved into more of a solopreneurship niche, it became, I help solopreneurs optimize their business to fund and fit their ideal lifestyle. And it's been further simplified to Solopreneur Cornerman. And so this idea of a forever offer is instead of being this explicit, I help a specific demographic psychographic in a specific domain achieve a specific result without doing a specific thing that they hate. It became just a way of, of creating intrigue and interest in what I might be able to do for someone by simply showing up and doing my work out loud and in public. And so the Forever Offer promise coupled with a Be a Blessing marketing web which is just having a central place, Substack in my case, for having conversations, but also a distribution channel for sending out these nodes out to social media, YouTube, podcasting platforms, blog platforms, etc. And then the Close the Gap priority and success path, which is just a system for establishing short-term objectives and very easily defined, effective, efficient success paths for achieving them. And what I arrived at by employing these principles, you know, that, that now make up the core framework of the Purpose-Driven Prosperity Model, is that in order to build a sustainable, prosperous, flourishing business that provides me with lots of fulfillment and joy is I, I have this conversational flow that's very straightforward. Icebreaker questions to start a conversation, some sort of free assessment diagnostic conversation to help clarify where someone wants to get to, where they are and what they're starting with, and helping them craft a success path made up of just the 2 or 3 things that need to go right to achieve that goal. Then I lead them into a low-ticket continuance conversation, which is, is the inbox Catalyst offer, coaching by email to help them start to craft the path that we arrived at through the diagnostic, which is called the Catalyst Exchange. And then from the low-ticket inbox Catalyst, I can move folks into a mid-ticket or high-ticket partnership through either the Voxer Velocity or the Cornerman Coaching program. And so that, that it, those are the specific examples of starting to apply this approach, right? I'm building a business that funds and fits the life I want, that is in alignment with who I am, what I'm good at, where I belong. I'm using the first principles of all I need to succeed in businesses. I need an irresistible offer. I need to find an audience that's eager for the offer that I have, the solution that I have, or the aspiration I can help them achieve. And I have to have a way, a means of putting that offer in front of that audience, which I have established as a way to start conversations. So let's get into the meat potatoes of how I'm taking all this and leveraging it through Substack.