228. Achieve Financial and Personal Freedom by Growing Your Brand and Business Online
In this episode, we picked the brain of Justin Welsh, the renowned solopreneur coach who achieved remarkable success as a one-person online business.
Justin Welsh openly shared his strategies for identifying valuable skills, building an engaged audience, and monetizing your expertise to gain personal and financial freedom on the internet. His wisdom provides a roadmap for ditching unfulfilling jobs to truly own your work and life online.
Having replaced his corporate income almost immediately after burning out, and then scaling to over $2 million in annual revenue with sky-high profits, Justin was the ideal guide. He covered authentic personal branding, smart content systems, and finding your own path - not just following conventional advice.
Tune in as the solopreneur expert lays out proven tactics and unique insights for experiencing the lifestyle freedom of a thriving solo online venture.
Links Mentioned:
KEY TOPICS EXPLORED:
00:01 Introduction and Background
03:49 Early Business Metrics and Transition to Entrepreneurship
06:03 Finding a Niche and Developing Personal Brand
09:57 Challenges of Defining a Niche and Building Authority
13:36 Niche Development and Business Scalability
15:35 Profitability vs. Revenue and Business Growth
17:22 Diversification of Revenue Streams
18:06 Differentiating Between Courses and Twitter's Viability
20:25 Strategic Branding in Today's Landscape
22:21 Uniqueness in Content Creation
25:53 Content Creation Process and Utilizing Learning
28:56 Developing Unique Knowledge and Simplifying Complexity
32:09 Topic Selection and Inspirations for Content
38:06 Content Creation Strategy and Audience Engagement
41:15 Overcoming Challenges and Learning from Mistakes
42:36 Personal Favorites and Inspirations
43:22 Cultivating Meaningful Connections and Building Relationships
44:34 Strategies for Growing a Following
46:39 Final Thoughts and Takeaways
Ash Roy and Justin Welsh Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy
Our guest today is Justin Welsh. Over the last decade, he's helped build two companies past $1,000,000,000 in valuation and raised $300 million in venture capital in 2019. Justin and his wife felt burned out and they quit their high paying jobs. They decided to move across the country and bought a house in the Catskill Mountains in New York. Today, Justin runs a one person business that teaches creators how to identify, develop and monetize skills they already have on the Internet.
His business owns over $2 million a year in revenue with a 90% plus profit margin. Justin is also an angel investor, a mentor to entrepreneurs. Today, I am delighted to welcome Justin Welsh from Justin Welsh taught me to the Productive Insights podcast and we are going to talk about how you, our listener, can achieve financial and personal freedom by growing your brand and your business online.
So welcome to the Productive Insights podcast.
Justin Welsh
Ash It's so good to be here, man. Thanks for having me and a heck of an intro. I appreciate that.
Ash Roy
You're most welcome. You're very gracious. Thank you so much for being on the show. I've been following your work for a long time. Justin, you have built a following from 0 to 400000 plus followers from 2018 to 2023, which is when we are recording this. Now, your business has more than $2 million in revenue and you do more than a 90% profit margin with zero ads.
So can you share your journey with us in a few sentences?
Justin Welsh
Yeah, sure. It's not unlike a lot of creators journeys where I had a very good job at a company I very much like to work for. I was there for five years as the first VP of Sales and then the Chief Revenue officer. And just to kind of sum it all up, I burned out really hard towards the end of 2018, and so I submitted my resignation.
I stuck around for about eight months to transition the team over, and in the course of those eight months, I really started just playing around online, you know, writing content, sharing what I had learned, building the business. And that turned into a consulting business and that was four years ago. And over the course of the last four years, I've just talked about what I've learned on the Internet, and that morphed from a consulting business to a coaching business to a core business to a newsletter.
And now or plus years later, I don't really talk about building SaaS companies anymore. What I did in my previous life, it's really about helping creators identify, develop and monetize the skills they have.
Ash Roy
Okay, so you've shared this publicly, so I feel comfortable asking you this. You don't have to give me the exact numbers, but approximately how does your $2 million a year break down? Is it all mainly close core sales, some of it consulting? Can you give us a high level?
Justin Welsh
Yeah, I don't have the numbers in front of me. I think I can get it pretty close. It's about 65% or sales, probably about another MN percent to 12% in subscriptions, I would say another 10% maybe in sponsorships from the newsletter, I'd have to go back and double check on that. And then I have things like I do occasional coaching, not very much.
That's probably 5%. And then I do things like affiliate deals, that's another probably 5%. And then there's probably another 3 to 5% in there somewhere that comes from partnerships or things like that. But it's mostly around course and sponsorship and subscription revenue.
Ash Roy
Wow. Okay. So Justin, how long did it take before you were able to replace your day job income and what approximately were your key metrics at that time? How many followers did you have and can you give us the feel for that?
Yeah, I was able to replace my daily income almost right away because I had prepared for that. I'll give you an example. When I had submitted my resignation to my job, I was going to be on board for the next eight months. That gave me eight months of runway where I was working, but I can also start creating.
And so I spent a lot of that eight months creating and building up a pipeline of interested CEOs who worked in the health care space, who wanted to grow their SaaS companies. And so when I went live on August 1st of 2019 with my consulting advising business, I had a pipeline full of customers. So I pre prepared for that.
So that was pretty quick. I had about 21,000 LinkedIn followers at the time, maybe a few more. I had nothing on Twitter. I wasn't active on Twitter. I wasn't active and still not very active on Instagram. So it was mostly just through LinkedIn, which is where tech CEOs hang out. There was no real metric to it. Like I didn't have like, once I hit X number of followers, then I can do certain thing.
It was just I happened to have 20 K. I happened to write a lot about SaaS companies and when I went on my own, I announced it and sold the pipeline.
Ash Roy
So do you recall approximately what the follower count was? And I understand this doesn't apply across the board, but if you had to guess what is the escape velocity in follower count to enable somebody to earn, say, 150, a couple of hundred grand a year off the back of that following?
Justin Welsh
It does vary, right? Because I know people with 100,000 followers who can't monetize. I know people with 10,000 followers making six figures. I really do think it's about the quality of your audience and followers are a great metric, obviously, because they do say like, Hey, my my stuff is getting traction. But so many people look at followers as the be all end all metric, and so they get involved in retweeting all their friends who then retweet all them and they get 1000, 100,000 followers that are meaningless, right?
They just like they're not known for one specific thing. But if I had to, like, really put a hard number on it, a great proxy might be like, nail the audience, the perfect audience for you. You do it consistently for 6 to 12 months and you have 30 to 50000 followers on a social media platform. If you can do that, you may not be able to monetize a low cost product to 100 grand, but you can probably monetize a service business.
So you could probably do consulting or coaching or ghostwriting or SEO work or landing page design or any type of service business. You should be able to make six figures. If you have a really strong following, it'll be the 50 K again. Some people do with five K.
Ash Roy
This is very interesting. Now you just said something that was quite magical to me as you touched on the idea of a niche and you teach this in your course subnet. This is something that I struggle with a lot and I know a lot of people watching this and listening to this will also relate to this question How does a person know when they have found a good sub niche and what process did you use to arrive at your sub niche?
And it be great for context, if you gave us a little bit of a feeling of how you would describe a sub niche today?
Justin Welsh
Yeah, today I would describe mine as generally people who have corporate 9 to 5 skills that they've developed over the course of a decent career, let's call it five years. What I try and do is help people find those very particular skills because some people can't even identify what they're good at, identify it, develop it and monetize it as a one person business using social media.
There are a lot of people who talk about creators. There are a lot of people who talk about online businesses. There are very few people who are really niched into the one person business space. It's become significantly more popular since I started talking about it probably a year ago. But Solopreneur Ship is really where I thrive. I don't build Big Ten person businesses or 20 person businesses or 50 person businesses.
It's all about identifying, developing and monetizing the skills that you have as a one person. That would be basically what I would consider my sub niche. And I think there's a lot of talk on the Internet about whether or not niches are good or whether or not you need them or whether they're antiquated or whatever, regardless of your take.
Here's how I would address it. Let's say you do SEO for people and you just say, I do SEO for companies. Sure, you might land a few clients, but if you say I do SEO for online fitness instructors, every time an online fitness instructor needs someone who does SEO, it's going to be so easy to pick your business if you have in fact generated a ton of content that is helpful to online fitness instructors who are looking to improve their organic reach.
Right? So that is just an example of being a little more niche than being extremely general. And in order to find your niche, it's not like something that you go on a treasure hunt for. You don't like uncover rocks and like, I found my niche. And I think a lot of people like, think about it that way.
What I would recommend is start talking about the things that, you know, if you just start talking about the things that you know that you're really highly competent in, people are going to start to ask you questions on social media, especially if you're really educational, if you teach people how to do things, you're going to get questions over the course of time.
Something really interesting is going to happen. You're going to find a group of people that generally look and feel similar that you enjoy working with in that same group is going to enjoy working with you. And when you put them together, the skills and knowledge that you have are going to serve them really effectively. That's how you quote unquote find a niche, in my opinion, because you talk about a lot of things and you find the intersection of people you like, people you can serve, and people who like being served by you.
Ash Roy
That's very interesting. So I remember going through some training at one point and they talked about a couple of ways you can build a niche. One is based on product, another one is based on audience. Clearly, you, at least at this stage, appear to have chosen the audience path and you've zeroed in on solopreneur. So here's a further challenge or further question to that.
Sure, Someone like me, I have the curse and the benefit of multiple skills. So I trained in finance, I did a CPA, then I did an MBA, but I'm quite an artist at heart, so I do a lot of writing. I'm a trained writer, as you can see from the background. I play guitar, so I've got a lot of different skills and I find it really hard to say to people when they say to me, What do you do?
I can say, I'm a digital strategist, I'm a digital marketer, but I find myself bouncing around from one thing to the other. Like at the moment my LinkedIn profile says Brand Builder because I feel that brand is really important. But few weeks ago I think it said I have six figure businesses, so I helped the seven figure businesses grow using digital marketing strategies.
So how do you know when you've landed on that niche? What would your advice be to someone like me?
Justin Welsh
I think my advice to you would be you can almost create your own niche right? I think people often come to me and they say, I have this curse. Like what kind of like what you just said. It's like I have all these different skills. It's like we all do. I have lots of different skills to write. My wife has totally different skills, but what I generally try and find is what are the things that I like the most and I also find is my unique selling proposition.
So for example, Ash, I can't compete with Mark. Roberta's the former CEO of HubSpot. He built a much bigger SaaS business than I ever did, right? He will always be more authoritative in that space than I will be. I can't compete with Gary Vaynerchuk because he's built a massive agency worth millions and millions of dollars. I've never done that, so I don't talk about that.
What I try and do is talk about the thing that I've done and the thing that I've done really successfully over the course of the long period of time has changed. It started as SaaS businesses and as I started talking more about SaaS businesses, something really interesting happened. My audience came to me and said, Yes, we think SaaS businesses are cool, but we're much more interested about how you're writing effectively on LinkedIn.
So I was like pivoted right over there as soon as I heard that same thing 20, 30, 40 times. Start talking about, Well, here's how I use LinkedIn, here's how I use social media. And that was really interesting. And then I started sharing. My business is growing via social media. People are like, That's interesting. What makes your business unique?
And I was like, Well, it's just me. Like, you don't have like writers or social media person. You're responding to comments by yourself, you write your own newsletter. I was like, Yeah, that's interesting. So I was like, Well, that's interesting to me too. It's kind of cool. I'm looking around and I'm seeing most of my friends have teams that work for them and do there.
And I was like, maybe I'll start talking about that. So I started talking about that and that gained a lot of traction. And so it's just been this fluid journey. If you were to take finding a niche and set it aside, the easiest thing is talk about the things that you're generally interested in. Other people are also interested in and will pay for.
Like I'm interested in eating pizza, but no one will pay me for that. So there has to be a fine balance and.
Ash Roy
That helps a lot. I think what you're saying to me is what Seth Godin said to me in a sense, you know, just begin, take a few steps forward and you'll find yourself at a new vantage point, and the answer will probably present itself at that point. Don't kill yourself trying to figure out what your niche has before you take a step, because part of finding a niche is walking a bit down the path.
Justin Welsh
That's right. And like a lot of people that I have jumped on a call with, for instance, might they'll come to me and they'll say, I help seven figure businesses improve their SEO. I say, Cool. Can you give me some case studies or examples? Well, I haven't actually done that yet. Well, then it's not the thing you do, right?
You don't do that thing if you haven't done that thing. And so if you want to help seven figure businesses, do SEO, for example, the easiest thing that you can go out and do is learn as much as you can about SEO, become thoroughly obsessed with it, use it, teach yourself and use it on your own site. Get really good at it.
Help someone make $100, then help someone make $1,000 and help someone make $100,000. And by the time you've done all that, you can go back and say, I helped people grow six figure businesses through SEO. And if you ever, by golly, get a six figure business and you help transform it into a seven figure business, and you can do that on repeat, well then great.
You are truthfully saying what you do now, but just like announcing, it doesn't make it true.
Ash Roy
And that's a good point. Announcing it doesn't make it true. You know, speaking of SEO, I spoke to my friend Neil Patel. He was my very first guest. I've known him for like ten plus years on the Productive Insights podcast. He's now doing about 100 million a year and I think he was in the SAS space as well because he used to own KISSmetrics and after he sold out, he went into full blown agency.
So now his agency does just about everything. I'm an affiliate partner with NP Digital. Would you say he has a niche, someone like him or would you say him or Gary Vaynerchuk? These guys don't need a niche because they are so big now. Yeah, they.
Justin Welsh
Don't need one. Look at Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk has been doing this for 20 years. It doesn't make sense to suggest that he and myself and other people are in the same category. We're certainly not. Back in the day, Gary Vaynerchuk started out on YouTube rating wine bottles.
Ash Roy
I was just going to say with the wine, that was his name.
Justin Welsh
That was where he started and he was like one of the first people to do that very interesting and unique thing back then. And that made him popular. And as you become more popular and you have a wider audience and broader appeal, the things that you talk about and how you service businesses can get wider, but even people who aren't paying close attention missed the fact that he's still doing a good job of niching down.
So for example, he's got Vagner ex. He also has the Sasha group in the Sasha Group is focused on smaller businesses that are right around $1,000,000 in revenue while Vagner X and I might be misspeaking, is focused on much larger enterprise clients. So even Gary Vaynerchuk, with his popularity and fame and notability, has split his businesses up to serve individual businesses with people who work at those companies who have individual relevant skills.
So you can see even with this broad appeal, you're still building businesses that are focused on a core customer.
Ash Roy
Gotcha. Yeah, that's very interesting. Let's switch over and talk a little bit about profit versus revenue. This is one of my pet peeves because I notice the market is obsessed with revenue and to me putting on my CPA hat, although I don't practice one, revenue is a meaningless number if you're not profitable. In most cases, you could be doing $10 million a year, but if you're spending $11 million a year to make it, then you're worse off than the guy on the corner of the street with a cardboard box.
And then cash flow is important too. So it's cash flow, then profit, then revenue. But people keep talking revenue numbers and I think that's misleading. I spoke to Rand Fishkin about this in episode 159, about Silicon Valley being obsessed with revenue as well. You are doing outstanding profit. I mean, we're talking 90 plus percent margin, a one person business with $2 million annual turnover.
Talk to us a little bit about how you managed to make that happen, because this is a unicorn.
Justin Welsh
Man Yeah, And it's it's funny. It just sort of happened over the course of many years. But I can give you sort of the roadmap, which was I built a successful consulting and advising business, which was probably doing about 750 to 800 grand in my maybe second year. I can't remember exactly, but that sounds about right. And when I was doing that, I was spending a ton of time coaching, mentoring, advising, consulting.
I was always on Zoom meetings and my goal was to sort of disconnect from that, that reality and build something that was a bit more automated. As I grew on LinkedIn in 2019, I released this little piddly $50 course and I had like 30,000 followers and I sold 75 grand of it in 18 months, which is not what I want to make as a household person who makes the money in my household.
But it was cool to see that I made 75 grand from that course, and I just kept building and building and building and building my LinkedIn audience. And then I rereleased it as a new, more modern course in 2021 at $150. And I started doing about 50 grand a month with that course. And I was like, Whoa, this is really big.
And so I doubled down on top of funnel. I kept growing my LinkedIn audience. I kept adding to the course in that course started to grow towards 100 grand a month, 120 grand a month, while my second course, which I released, is more kind of focused on Twitter users and things like that newsletter writers that got up to about 7080 grand a month in between the two courses.
I think on average I probably do today steady state, maybe 160 to 170. And so I was like, this is really good revenue. And so I was like, How can I make more? Maybe some recurring revenue to add a new and unique revenue stream? So because I have so many followers, I have so many students in my courses and now I have a one click upsell on my course that 25% of people activate, which is a subscription for $9 a month, where they get an email from me with social media tips and tricks.
Ash Roy
Which I.
Justin Welsh
And that is $24,000 more our business. That is me sending one email. It doesn't matter if it's one subscriber or a million subscribers, it's still just one email. So that started to add some recurring revenue to my revenue stream. Then I built my newsletter up using my top of funnel audience to over 100,000 subscribers, and pretty soon when you have 100,000 subscribers, you can make five six grand an issue in sponsorships.
So then I was getting paid to write my newsletter. I had the recurring revenue subscription, I had two courses and then every once in a while here and there, I might fill a little 30 or 40 minute blocks of my time with one on one coaching, consulting or advising. So that is how the business has added up. And then you throw in affiliate deals and things like that.
I have a run rate of about 2.25 million annually this year, I think.
Ash Roy
Wow. Now you have two courses linked in O's and content O's. Full disclosure, I'm an affiliate on both and if you want to know more about them, just go to productive insights dot com slash LinkedIn o's or productive insightful com slash content advice. What's a difference between the two courses and I know content O's touches on Twitter a little bit more.
A related question is do you think Twitter is still viable? Because I'm finding very little engagement on it.
Justin Welsh
Yeah, I think Twitter is super viable. I enjoy it. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and I think I've done a pretty decent job of figuring it out. So I like it. I use it differently than I use other social media platforms. I consume a lot more there than I do on other platforms, but the difference between the two courses is pretty simple.
The LinkedIn course is not really a LinkedIn course, it's a branding course. It's about how to build a brand for yourself. LinkedIn just happens to be the vehicle that I'm most familiar with. I wrapped it in a LinkedIn shell and there's some tactical stuff that is relevant only to LinkedIn, more so than to other social media platforms. But all in all, you can take the course and you could apply what you learn and use it on Twitter or YouTube or Instagram.
It's a branding course. It's how to tie to sell yourself. That's basically what it is. The content OS is a bit more tactical, so the content only solves the number one problem that I hear from people on social media, which is how do you come up with so many ideas? How do you publish so much content, How do you not miss?
How do you stay consistent? So the content OS was born from that challenge. And so what I teach in that is essentially a nine step system that I use to start with a big idea, get it into a longform piece of content, chop it up into 6 to 12 smaller pieces of predictable content, and then push those through templates that generally work to get engagement.
So that's that course. Whereas the LinkedIn course is more of a high level strategic branding course.
Ash Roy
Okay. Very interesting question about the LinkedIn course or the strategy. You talked about the branding thing when you started in 2018. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, I have the impression that you forged a new path and you created this path that you now follow, which several other people are now following, including me, Would you say? That is correct?
And if so, if you were starting again today with a Justin. Well, already, who's forged this path? Would you follow these steps and would you get the same results or you stepped into the stream back in 2018? The stream has changed now the algorithm is changed. What is your advice to someone starting today? What should they do? Should they just follow LinkedIn as well that work for them?
Justin Welsh
Generally? Like I said, it's a branding course. I think there's a really important distinction here. It's a great question. I think there's a really classic distinction, which is the courses that I build in the knowledge that I share is not algorithm specific. Every once in a while I might say like, here's something interesting I learned right? Don't do this.
The algorithm seems to hate it. I won't suggest that. I've never said that. I certainly have. But for the most part, it's not like, Hey, what worked in 2021 is that significantly different than what works in 2023? It's about branding and selling yourself. It's about becoming a person that's interesting that other people want to follow. It's not about how many slides go in my carousel or what time should I post that or do I leave a comment here?
That's all piddly wink stuff. That stuff doesn't make or break a big brand. A big brand is made through strategic decisions, understanding the modern, you know, its own brand on the Internet, understanding how to find your tribe, acquire your audience. Those are all the things that I want to teach in the course Not. I post at 815 or 818, which is like the number one kind of question I get from people.
What tools should I use, what time, what image. None of that stuff matters. Learn how to become a holistic brand and get to all the tactical mindset stuff that might give you a half percentage point improvement down the road. So to answer your question in a very long winded way, yes, I would follow the same branding strategy because I believe most branding principles are pretty timeless.
If you take a look at my wife, use her as an experiment started started last year. I think January, I was like, Hey, you should just go on the Internet and talk about personal finance because you like that. 12 months later, she had 130,000 followers, was a LinkedIn top voice that was following my guidance. And so I look at her and thousands of students that I have.
I got 30 LinkedIn top voices in the course who have been students and gone on to become top voices. I like to think that I'd follow Same.
Ash Roy
So what is that secret sauce? Why I used to follow Bull. And what is it that you told Jennifer that made her that follow to side note I love your banter by the way, the two banter you guys have. I just love this.
Justin Welsh
Yeah, there's so many different things. Branding is not just like, what's the lever that you pull and become like a really big brand? That's more than just one big thing. But a couple of things stand out for me. I think one of them is your unique value proposition. So for example, Jennifer comes at it from a very unique perspective.
She's not a financial advisor. She's just a woman who had a lot of credit card debt when she was younger, made every financial mistake possible, learned from her financial mistakes, dug her way out of debt, and became a success story. That in and of itself is interesting to most of her target audience, which is usually women who find themselves in a similar situation.
Right. So she's relatable. Right? Being really relatable, I think is really important. Financial advisors are not relatable in general. I'm sure there are some that are relatable, but most of them are mechanical and very automated and very rigid, whereas Jennifer tells stories, so she's relatable. That is a big part of being a brand. Your audience needs to see themselves in you when you're telling stories, talking.
I think the other thing that separates sort of a follow a bull person from someone who is in is there's a lot of platitudes on the Internet. Work smart, not hard. Sure, I've said that before, but in general, we're smart, not hard to be a great person. All these just worthless platitudes and clichés that we've heard a thousand times over.
Whereas if you go and read my content generally, I will teach you how to do something pretty tactical in a matter of 2 minutes. So you can read my stuff and then you can apply my stuff and you can fix a problem that you otherwise had been unable to fix. If you mix relate ability with solving your audience's biggest problems, it's really hard not to grow a following.
But people are so interested in clichés, platitudes and tear jerking stories. You got to solve people's problems at some point in time.
So I got to say, if I had to say you had a USB, I would say it would be that your succinctness, your preciseness and your usefulness, the content, it reeks of that and I couldn't agree more. There's a lot of meta content out there, and I do see you putting out very actionable stuff. So kudos to you for that.
Ash Roy
Thank you. Sorry you were going to say something.
Justin Welsh
no, I just said thanks. That that's my goal. Like, it's it seems easy, but I realize that it is a trained muscle, much like riding a bicycle. It's like if you don't know how to ride a bike. Riding a bike seems hard. If you do, it seems pretty easy. One thing that I've gotten into the habit of doing is when my audience asks me a question on a comment or on a tweet or they reply back to the newsletter.
I store that as a nugget and say, Do I know how to solve that problem that they just asked about and if I know how to solve it, what is the easiest way to solve it? What is the most basic? I think everyone knows this. The trick is they don't. All the things that seem easy to you or easy to me are very complicated to somebody else.
That's just because we've learned them over time. Much like riding a bike seems easy to you or me, but to someone who doesn't know how to ride it, it's very complicated. And so teaching them the basics comes across as like succinct or easy or simple, when really it's just everyone else is so focused on getting complicated and complex and I'm just like, here are the three easiest things you can do to solve that problem.
And people say, Well, that was really helpful. And so I just keep doing that for lack of a better description, you know?
Ash Roy
So let's talk a little bit about your content creation process, because I think that's quite amazing. And specifically, I remember you actually sending me this in a comment or something. You're telling me this, you spend 15 to 30 minutes every day looking at what you've learned and accomplished, and that leads you to create unique knowledge, which I'm going to ask you about next.
But just give us a view, a quick snapshot of your content creation process and how do you use that 15, 30 minutes learning every day to tie back into your content?
Justin Welsh
Yeah, I'll give you an example. I think this example will really help shine a light on that process. One challenge I was having as a creator was understanding where my newsletter subscribers were coming from. So are they coming more from my Twitter profile, my LinkedIn profile, my LinkedIn featured section, my actual tweets, my actual LinkedIn post, the LinkedIn comments like there's a million different places that people can visit and subscribe to my newsletter.
And I thought one thing that I've never done is tracked all of that by the link, right? So I went out into my analytics platform and I created Trackable Links and I said, like, this one's for LinkedIn profile, this is for Twitter, this is for my featured section, this is for my June 9th post. This is from my June 10th post.
This is for my June 11th comment. This is for my Twitter thread. And I started tracking where all of my stuff was coming from. And after doing that for 30 days, you learn a lot about where you acquire a newsletter. Subscribers, you learn a lot about what works and what doesn't, what's a waste of time, what's a great spend of time.
And so I can double down on those things. Why am I telling you the story? Telling you the story? Because it's a pretty complicated process, but it's something that I'm assuming lots of other creators struggle with. So that's an idea. I just learned that last month. I can take that idea and I can go and I can write a newsletter about it.
Here's a way to analyze and grow your newsletter audience, Right? Just write a quick newsletter describing that process. Once I've done that, I have obviously a newsletter, which is great, but I can chop that up into 6 to 12 pieces of unique content. What's an observation I had when I was building this tracking system? How can I tell it in story form?
What do I think the future of tracking looks like? What's a contrarian viewpoint on tracking your analytics on newsletters that the world thinks is silly? That I think is true, right? There's a million different format styles and structures that I can put content into that I learned from doing this one experiment. I can chop that all up, drop it on Twitter.
Once I've dropped on Twitter, I can take those Twitter screenshots and I can repurpose them onto LinkedIn. I can add some context on LinkedIn, capture the context, rip it over, put it on Instagram, add the photo. I've got an Instagram, a LinkedIn, a Twitter post, I've got a newsletter. And then as I continue to pump out those micro pieces of content, someone might say, This is my favorite micro piece of content that came from that newsletter.
Great take. That little piece expanded into a bigger newsletter, then go through the cycle. All again, I call it think once published ten times.
Ash Roy
Yes, that was today's post. I absolutely.
Justin Welsh
Right. It was top of mind. Yeah.
Ash Roy
Yeah. You know, you seem to have this remarkable ability to cut through all the complexity and the noise and go to the simplest, clearest path forward. And that is not only the case with the content that you put out, but clearly is also the case with your thinking based on what you just said to me. Like for you to have explained what you just said, I was listening to you and I was thinking, Man, I would have been tripped up about 25 times by the third thing that he said, and I would have chased another 12 rabbits by then.
You're an exquisite thinker. How did you become that way?
Justin Welsh
First of all, thank you. I don't I don't consider myself to be that. This is going to sound really arrogant, So please pardon my arrogance for a moment. The longer that I do this, the more I like to think that maybe. Maybe I am good at simplifying stuff. Like if a thousand people have said it to me over the course of my career, maybe there's some truth to that, but I've never really considered myself to be a great thinker.
I guess sometimes when I look at stuff, I think through my coaching cap from my SAS days. So I used to run a sales team of 150 people in that ranged from experienced ten plus year sellers down to kids who were just coming out of college and becoming sales development reps. And I had to train a lot of those kids who had never learned their first thing about selling or the first thing about making cold calls.
I had to train them in. The easiest way to train them was with the basics. You had to simplify everything. You had to make it easy so a fifth grader can understand it. And I don't mean that in a mean way. I just mean that that's how most people learn. And so I think I've taken a lot of that coaching and managing and training aspect from my previous life and brought it into what I do today.
And then last but not least, when I first write something, it's not simple. It looks crappy. I spend a lot of time editing it to make sure that I'm taking out every unnecessary word. So when you read it, it feels like you're just getting a lot of juice and not a lot of fluff, you know?
Ash Roy
Yes, absolutely. A lot of magic happens in the editing. So you talked about choosing a niche versus embracing an obsession, and that's what leads you to being able to find unique knowledge. Can you tell our listeners about that? Because I think that's a really important thing.
Justin Welsh
Yeah, sure. Here's another great example of that. Let's take James clear, which is who I write about in this example. There's a million people on the Internet and in the world who talk about habits. Build good habits. Your business will be as good as your habit. So if you have good habits, you'll be in physical shape, all clichés, all not a lot of like you're not getting a lot of value from those.
But like James Clear was so obsessed with habits, I have had a chance to speak to the guy. He's as obsessed with habits as you might think.
Ash Roy
From reading to I spoke to him on 75.
Justin Welsh
Super smart guy, super obsessed with habits, and because of his obsession, he went and analyzed thousands of people's habits, hundreds of stories, all kinds of data points. And he was able to pull together some really interesting things. I think there's something of latent potential habit stacking.
Ash Roy
Latent potential? Yep.
Justin Welsh
That's right. These are all unique terms, processes and systems that James Clear created because he was obsessed with habits. And when you're obsessed with something and you analyze it and you create things that work from a data perspective, suddenly you're the owner of this very unique knowledge. You'll never hear James Clear go out and be like, The best way to build a habit is just stick with it.
He knows that doesn't work. So he's like, No, here's how you have it. Stack It's very, very specific, very, very tactical. That is a unique piece of knowledge that James Clear owns. So now he can write about it, he can trade market, he can use it in comments, he can link to it. When people talk about habits and when you read it, you're like, This is the habits guy, right?
This is the guy I want to learn about habits from because it's unique knowledge. I love that.
Ash Roy
Yeah. And that's how you have developed your unique knowledge. What would you say is your unique knowledge through your obsession, through what you've been doing over the last few years?
Justin Welsh
Tons of things like the thing we just talked about with the utme and the tracking. That's a unique piece of knowledge. You probably haven't heard that from someone and I'm sure there's someone doing that somewhere on the earth. I'm not suggesting that I created the idea of tracking where your newsletter subscribers come from, just to be clear, but that very particular nugget, I can go out and I'll write a newsletter about it and it'll be potentially the first time that 116,000 of my subscribers have ever read about that particular way of tracking your analytics, because I'm going to do it differently than someone else does.
So that becomes a unique piece of knowledge. I wrote a blog post about something I call the Creator funnel, which is how I think about people and how they make buying decisions on social media. I think I created the term, I don't know, maybe it existed before, and the idea of moving from trust to authority expertise to community building to monetization is certainly not fresh or new, but my perspective on it was fresh and new.
So it becomes a unique piece of knowledge that I now own and can repurpose my hub and spoke model how I think about creating content, using longform, chopping it into short form. Again, I'm certainly not the first person to think of that. Gary Vaynerchuk has his pillar strategy. This is my unique strategy. It's different than his. It's I own it and so it becomes a unique piece of knowledge by creating all of those things.
When people interact with my brand, my hope is that each day they're like, Damn, this is really unique and interesting. I haven't read that before. And so I hope sort of this consistent value add or on social media which should at some point people will go, Yeah, I'll spend some money to see what else this guy knows in his courses.
Ash Roy
That's my hope. Another one of your unique pieces of knowledge, in my opinion, is how you talk about in your course how to create a scroll stopper, a hook and a call to click, and how that ties into the LinkedIn funnel as you describe it, starting with your profile and beautifully describe how you can get someone who's a visitor to your LinkedIn profile to eventually become a paying customer.
Could you talk to our audience a little bit about how that is set up and how you explain it so beautifully in your course?
Justin Welsh
Yeah, I'll try and remember the whole thing, but I think I'll give it a shot. Here goes. So LinkedIn is interesting. LinkedIn is very different than Twitter. Twitter, you scroll through your feed and you get full tweets. You see the whole form 280 characters. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you come across a thread in the thread is essentially a trailer.
It's a preview for the movie that they're trying to get you to watch. So you see the tweet and it's like they're trying to get you to click through and read the whole thread. That's every post on LinkedIn, LinkedIn has a 3000 character limit. I think there's 300 characters on what I would call being above the fold. So before you click See more, you've really got 300 characters worth of room be compelling and interesting.
So I call that the trailer. It's like a trailer for a movie. It better be compelling and interesting or people aren't going to show up to the theater, you know, rent it on Netflix or whatever. There are ways that you can create compelling copy above the fold in less than 300 characters using some whitespace, some copyrighting techniques, things like that.
I won't go into the mass of details, but essentially that's the most important part of the post. The second most important part of the post is what the call to conversation or call to action is for your audience. Do you want them to repost it? Do you want them to leave a comment or ask a question? Or subscribe to our newsletter?
Go to a website page so you have to be strategic about your ask. How many asks usually just one. How specific? Why are they going there? All these different things. I say it's the least important part, but it's not. It's still very important to third parties to meet. Like, what are you actually saying in the post? It's not clickbait in the headline if you deliver.
So you got to deliver that. The meat, the story, the tactic, the strategy, the learning. And so I kind of crafted in that order trailer first called a conversation, second meet third and I try and drive people to my profile, and my profile is set up in a way that is very similar to a landing page. Again, you have real estate that's at the top of the page, which is generally your banner image, your headshot, your tagline, things like that.
So you got any of those things, professional headshot, looking the way that you want to come across to your audience, your banner image, talk about either a problem that you solve or a value that you give. Your tagline should talk about What do you say on the internet and why should someone pay attention to you? What's interesting about you, why should they follow?
And it pays to be clear, not clever. I see so many people trying to be clever and it's so unclear if you can do that above the fold. You get people below the fold and below the fold is where the gold is, where your featured section is. You can take them to your website, to your newsletter, to your product, to your one on one coaching call, whatever it might be.
And so that's like a high level overview of how I think about those two things.
Ash Roy
Working synergistically to do you have a specific approach to topic selection or do you just kind of let them come to you?
Justin Welsh
I have six pillars that I like I don't share publicly, but behind the scenes I have like, these are six sort of things underneath the umbrella of solopreneur ship that I like to talk about. And very candidly, like, I don't I go online on Monday, sometimes every day for 30 minutes, I watch YouTube videos, I see what's trending.
I read Morning Brew, read the Hustles newsletter, and I just try and see what's interesting. I got a great email today from Jason Freed from Basecamp and he wrote about how advice expires and there was a paragraph in it that talked about Whenever I get advice, I first find out if the person giving it has ever done the thing being suggested.
And he talks a little bit about fake gurus like business school professors who have never actually started a business. And I was like, that's really interesting. It's not a unique thought. It was not the first person to say we should pay attention to people who have done what we want to do. But I have a take on that and I have some thoughts and feelings on that.
So I'll probably extract that idea and start putting my spin on it into a tweet and then I'll see where that tweet goes. And if it's interesting, maybe I'll turn it into my own newsletter. That particular thought. So no real like strategic process. More so being inspired.
Ash Roy
Did you create your courses first and then write about those topics on your blog or was it the other way around?
Justin Welsh
It was the first one only because I didn't have blog at the time. I think I'd probably do it the opposite way. Like I like to buy courses because I like to see what my competition is, how other people are producing them. So I buy a lot of things and one thing that's very clear is that many courses are simply the aggregation of someone's blog that they put into a course, much like many books are, that are just an aggregation of someone's blog.
That's probably the easier way to do it. And so as I'm thinking about future products, what I'm trying to do is produce content that I think would be useful for a future product. Or I can take that content, tie it all together, put it in the correct order, and then dive deeper on everything. I think that'll save me time and make me quite a bit more efficient.
Ash Roy
So I see that you publish your newsletters on your blog and you also send those newsletters to subscribers. What I find fascinating is your subscriber list is growing at rocket speed, but you are publishing all your newsletters on your website anyway. So can you talk to us a little bit about that Now how come that's working so well?
I mean, I'm very happy for you, but I'm just interested to understand that.
Justin Welsh
I do things as a creator that I would want to see someone doing as a consumer. For example, there's nothing frustrating than when I come to somebody's web page who I respect and I want a piece of information and they force me to barter for it. So they're like, I have something behind this curtain and you can't have it unless you give me an email address.
Even though I say it's free, it's not free, then cost me my time. It cost my inbox, like make me pay for it. I'm happy to pay for things that are unique pieces of knowledge. I'll pay for those all day. But if you tell me you have a free newsletter, allow me to make the choice that I want it in my inbox or allow me to make the choice that I'd prefer to come to your website and read it.
When it comes out, I meet my readers where they want to be. If you want to schedule time to come to my website every week to read each issue and you don't want to give me your email address, I'm not going to force you to do it if you'd prefer to have it when it comes out every Saturday around 8:40 a.m. Eastern time and you want to do that, awesome.
You also have that option. So that's just how I guess my brain is always thought about meeting my where they are. I want to provide an incredible user experience, not a bartering experience.
Ash Roy
You just talked about two things that my friend Seth Godin said that really touched me when we spoke, and that is generosity and empathy. And you're clearly trying to embody those qualities in what you just said.
Justin Welsh
Yeah, it's not even trying. It's just I like to think that both my parents are very empathetic and charitable and kind, and I think that's a differentiator on the Internet today.
Ash Roy
You know, I spoke to Rand Fishkin about this in episode 38, the first time he was on the podcast about kindness as a competitive advantage. And I believe that kindness and generosity, like Anjana says, why do you do what you do?
Justin Welsh
Why do I do what I do? Yeah, it's because I get about a thousand emails a year that tell me from people. I quit my job, I built my first side hustle, I paid off my mortgage, I paid my car. I could spend more time with my kids, with my partner. I love the life that I live in, the freedom that I've created in my biggest gift that I could give to other people is the same thing.
Ash Roy
Okay, so, Gaius, what is the best strategy for posting weekly on LinkedIn? If you have only one hour a day, say.
Justin Welsh
The same thing five different ways. That's what I would do. I would write an idea, say it five different ways, and stagger it once a week for five weeks. And I would do that every day. So you have a ton of content every time you write one piece.
Ash Roy
Kunal US What were your two or three lowest points in your journey?
Justin Welsh
I have panic attacks, which is, which is problematic. And so I had a panic attack at the start of my journey and then I had a panic attack three months ago in Portugal. And so that was a really low point for me. I got too wrapped up in my business. I worked a bit too hard while trying to balance vacation, and that culminated in my second my third party.
Ash Roy
Then.
Justin Welsh
Yeah, it sucks, but I got through it.
Ash Roy
I've had them to come, Common says. What's one piece of advice you received that you wish you'd never listened to? And what's that one factor contributed to most of your LinkedIn success?
Justin Welsh
The one piece of advice I received that I wish I had listened to was running automated webinars to try and sell things super inauthentic. It felt it felt wrong. I did it because, like, that's what everyone told me to do back in the beginning when I was starting, and I look back on that and feel foolish about that, I wish I wouldn't have listened to that and.
The thing that's contributed most to my success is showing up daily. I haven't missed a day of posting on LinkedIn or Twitter in two years.
Ash Roy
Okay. Ligaya, as I think it's religious or religious, what are your favorite movies and books?
Justin Welsh
My favorite movie is The Big Lebowski, my favorite documentary. It is a heart wrenching. My wife and I cried our eyes out at it was Dear Zachary, Very, very difficult documentary to watch. If you have kids, don't watch it. That is a documentary I didn't enjoy but was very good. And then my favorite book is probably Die With Zero by Bill Perkins.
I love the idea of using your money to live a great life. That book really resonated with me and I love the book. Fact Fullness by Hans Rosling, which is just a book that talks about as much as we think the world is getting worse, it's getting better.
Ash Roy
I love that. That's a wonderful principle. I think Ali Abdallah talks about David's hero as well. Isabelle asks, How do you strike a good balance between providing valuable content to your Lincoln audience and promoting your personal brand? How do you cultivate meaningful connections while having a large audience base.
Justin Welsh
Providing value to your LinkedIn audience is building your personal brand? Brand building isn't like a thing that you do outside of providing value for your audience. The value that you provide is the brand that you build. I try and provide value every day, right? Which is another cliché term, but like I educate, empathize, inspire, challenge. Those are things that I do on a regular basis.
It's more difficult. I have done that mostly at this point through introductions. If a creator friend of mine says, Hey, this is a guy or gal that you should definitely spend some time with or meet, I almost always take take that meeting. I'll give you an example. A guy named Luke Shalom has written a lot of complimentary things about me on LinkedIn.
He is in my comment section quite often, and so I just reached out to him and said, Hey, I like the stuff that you're putting out. Thanks for featuring me. I'm honored we should get to know each other. So I scheduled some time with him. I met a guy, Jay Alec, yesterday and chatted with him over in Bosnia, and he is just making noise on the Internet and doing a really great job of that.
And so I reached out and said, Hey, we should get to know each other. It's really targeted mostly by me at this point and by introductions from friends.
Ash Roy
Actually, a lot of people with these huge followings. I feel very anxious reaching out to them, especially asking them to comment on my post because why would they? What's in it for them? What's your advice around that?
Justin Welsh
When I was a smaller creator, I never reached out and asked people to do that. Like I wanted my content to stand on its own. I wanted to know that my content was working because the message was meaningful and not because Cyle Bloom commented it right. Like, that's not why I want my content to thrive. Now, over the course of becoming a bigger creator, I've built relationships with other big creators.
We've become friends. And when I see my friends write something on Twitter, LinkedIn, I want to help them through. I drop a comment, right? Hey, you launching a course? Cool. I'll comment on it and help you get some more sales. That's just human nature. Do it for someone offline. Do it for someone online. So what I would suggest instead of saying like will you comment on my post is what Jack Butcher coined Permission less apprenticeship, which is like take someone's content and make a visual out of it and share it with them or shared online, like doing things that help somebody else.
I think this is the old How to Win friend Dale Carnegie. Do you want to make friends? And people want to help. If you want to help yourself, help other people, that's the easiest way. Don't ask for a favor the first time you reach out to somebody.
Ash Roy
absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last question from Adriana. How did you reach your first ten KS followers.
Justin Welsh
Writing a bunch of content about how I built a 50 million or $75 million air or SAS business? Like I just dropped a new tip each morning for like eight months and people who wanted to build SAS companies and build sales teams started following me. There was no big gotcha or trick or hack. It was just writing content, publishing it every single morning, sticking around, engaging with the audience, and becoming someone that people could expect some value from every morning.
Ash Roy
Okay, let's just do a quick wrap up. We running out of time. We've talked about a ton of different things, which has been fantastic. How you built your business to $2 million, how you replaced your full time job. The difference between LinkedIn, OHS and content is you broke down your revenue by product. You talked about Twitter kindness as a competitive advantage, the LinkedIn funnel.
Wow. How do you spend 15, 30 minutes a day observing what you've learned and turn that into content? We've covered a lot of stuff, so is there anything else you want to add before we say goodbye? And how do people find out more about you?
Justin Welsh
Yeah, the last thing I would add is all advice is contextual, mine included. So like a lot of people, when I write content or when I go on a podcast and people listen, they're like Justin said, to do this very specific thing, or they take whatever I did as like the gospel. And it's not. It's not just because I say something doesn't make it right.
I'm just an average dummy on the Internet, right? Like the easiest way to grow an audience or grow a business or build your Twitter LinkedIn following is to try a bunch of stuff and figure out what works. Most people want to follow someone else's piece of advice, go Try your best, like learning from your mistakes, learning from what works and what doesn't work will be your unique path and unique journey, and that will be the most helpful thing you can do.
Justin Welsh
If people still want to learn about what I think, which might be helpful, they can go to Justin. Well, start me. That's Justin.me
Ash Roy
Justin. I'm struck by your authenticity, your humility and generosity. Thank you.
Justin Welsh
Thanks, man. And thanks for having me on. I appreciate your. You're a good interviewer.
Ash Roy
Thank you. That means a lot to me.
