Build A One-Person Business As A Normal Person (From $0 To $10K)
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I talk about the one person business a lot. Now, why do I talk about this? Well, of course, it does well on YouTube. People like watching it. It's an attention grabbing topic, but it's also just the most logical option for beginners because most people have these dreams of building a startup or a software or an apparel brand or

maybe some kind of like pre-workout or supplement. But that's not the most beginner friendly. You need some capital to make that work. You need initial cash to invest in the manufacturing, the product and the development and all of those kinds of things. And so when people get into that and they start learning about it,

they kind of get discouraged because they don't have anywhere to go. They can't do that thing yet. And now you can always go with things like drop shipping, which there's ways to get around that. But I still believe the one person business model that we talk about often, and I'm going to break down in the simplest of terms in this video, is the most logical option for beginners, because with that,

You don't need any money to start. You don't need really anything aside from the skills or interests or expertise that you already have and an internet connection. The thing with this and why I recommend this style of model is because it's skill, interest, and expertise agnostic, right? It works for everyone.

all of them. And then once you get going and once you know what you're doing and you're learning the skills on the go as you're actually building the business, you're stacking a lot of high value skills doing this that you can take and do another business model with. But once you do that,

You can then increase your income, increase your cash flow to the point where you have enough to invest in starting the software business, starting the apparel business, starting the e-commerce business, whatever it may be. And another reason is I teach this because I did it. I was a one person business until I hit $50,000 a month and then I hired on an editor.

he's also my support guy so technically i'm still a two-person business under my personal brand but then cortex which we're starting right now is fueled with a lot a lot of the money that i've made so we don't have to take on vc or investors or any kind of external funding to build it and we're free to build it how we want and as i've said in a previous video sam altman the

founder of OpenAI, ChatGPT. He said in an interview one time that he has a group chat with his friends where they're betting on who's going to be the first $1 billion one-person business because there are already one-person businesses making $1 million, $10 million, and $10

I'm sure there are many others that are making much more than that. And now those numbers are like, holy crap, how is how are they doing this as one person? And this wasn't possible in the past. This is only possible right now with the things that I'm going to tell you about, which is usually thanks to technology, social media, the Internet, being able to connect with anyone, being able to attract an audience to something.

who you are and being able to distribute a digital product that doesn't take any extra effort or labor or capital to build and distribute. So I'm going to lay this all out for you in what I believe is the simplest, just

bare bones, simplest way to start making some kind of money because that's what most people want. The a common question I get in the comments, which is why I'm creating this video is like, OK, Dan, I get this whole one person business thing kind of makes sense. But how do I actually start? And after thinking about that question for a long time, I'm like, I thought I was showing you how to start, but

There's still other things on people's minds when they hear the word business. So for the remainder of this video and for quite a long time, do not worry about building a website, starting an LLC or even worrying about taxes. If you haven't made at least $10,000 to $50,000, you're fine. Now,

Side note there, I don't know about overseas people. I don't know how the tax and businesses work there. So do some external research for yourself. See if you actually need one. But in the US, you don't need an LLC. You can be taxed as self-employed forever. And when you're making $10,000 to $50,000, that is a lot to you because you're just starting out in business, but the IRS is not going to audit you. That's a minuscule amount to them. So remove those from your mind.

And let's focus on actually making money first, because that's why you're starting the business. Now, one last thing to preface is that I'm not going to teach you how to start an agency or how to start an e-commerce business. I'm going to teach you the absolute bare bones of how to just turn your skill or interest into some kind of offer so you can start making money. The beauty behind this is that you can pivot and scale as far as you want. If you start with something like it, like an SMMA or drop shipping, you're stuck in that.

you're pigeonholed in that. The only option is to either succeed or quit with what I'm going to show you right now and what I've talked about infinite times before. You can pivot as much as you want. You can change as much as you want. This is the style of business that you just build as far as you want to go with any kind of interest. If your values or beliefs change,

It can change with it. And then you use that, especially the audience portion to fuel any other kind of business you want to build. If you want to start an agency, build this kind of business first and then pivot into the agency and likewise for e-commerce or software or whatever it is.

Start here. Now, before we begin, I have a soft little ad. So if you don't like ads, skip ahead maybe 30 seconds. But the one person business launch pad, I know it's right in line with this video, is about to launch by this video. The time it goes out, it should be launched. Check the link in the description. We go over what I talk about in this video and more because a video can only

It can't cover an entire course worth of material unless I make the video five to 10 hours long. But I just I just decided to put it all in one place. And this is my cheapest course yet. It's just for people that want to start. So go check that out. Link in the description.

Step one of starting a one person business is just understanding the digital tool stack that you need to have. A digital tool stack is like software. So if on your phone, if you are into self-improvement and productivity, you probably have a to do app. You have a notes app. You have other things of that nature for a business. You need something similar so you can manage everything.

the resources, assets, ideas, other things for your business. So let's go over those and also links to these as well will be in the description if you just need an easy way to access them. When setting up an online business, you need four things. One is somewhere to generate

traffic to attract potential customers two is somewhere to collect emails so you have direct access to interested potential customers and can remark it to them as an aside if you're building on social media yes you can promote on social media but that's just a bunch of random people that chose to follow you if you want to turn readers into fans

and give them more value than an email list is kind of necessary for that. Three is somewhere to accept payment and host your products or services. This is so you can promote to number one and two to make

money. Four is somewhere to save your ideas and writing for marketing, client work, product planning, and content. Now, I've tried every possible software on the market. I've tried quite a few of them. And so this list is what I deem to be one, the most reliable, the highest quality, and the most affordable with free plans that you can start on. So the first type of technology or tool that we need is somewhere to generate revenue.

traffic. And many of you aren't going to like this because social media is the most accessible. You have it on your phone already. You're watching it right now. It is zero cost. You can log on. You can post right now. And it is skill based, skill based, skill issue. If you can't grow on social media. Yes, there is an algorithm and luck baked into it, but it's

You can also learn and practice the skill of writing, persuasion, attention capture. Think of social media as a meta skill, right? Or an umbrella skill. And you acquire that umbrella skill by learning all of the other minor skills that compose of it. So when you break down a social media platform, you have a sharing mechanism. You have an engagement mechanism. You have relationships.

writing, you have designs, you have videos, you have video editing, you have comments, you have DMs, all of these communication, social dynamics, persuasion, these all come into play when you're trying to increase the impact of how you approach social media. Another thing and why I think this is a better strategy than going straight for paid ads is one, if you're watching this and you like the idea of the one person business, you don't have money. You don't have a lot of money to put into paid ads. So that doesn't make sense. You can't

test you're going to blow a hundred dollars five hundred dollars and then you're not going to have the right angle you're going to run out of money before the ads even start getting good you don't have one thousand ten thousand fifty thousand dollars like big companies to pour into paid ads to really test and refine and make it profitable so on social media you just write posts every single day you're testing ideas and angles every single day once you do this for one year two years three years you have

All of these ideas, you know exactly which ideas get engagement, capture attention, bring in followers, bring in sales. Then you can turn that into a paid ad and you start off on a much better foot. Now, with this whole social media thing, since we are going for the easiest way,

low cost and most accessible way we're going to do it with writing right writing on social media that way you don't need to learn video editing you don't need to learn audio editing and you don't need to learn graphic design anyone can write a post and share an impactful idea you text your friends every single day if you have self-improvement minded friends and if you don't get on social media so you can find them social media isn't all toxic there's actually

an entire niche of self-improvement. You're watching it right now. There's probably people in the comment sections that you can actually make friends with and build a business with. But act as if you were texting or DMing those friends. It's the same exact thing. You just post it online and people follow you. It's like, think of social media as a big internet group.

group chat, but those group chats are different niches and the self-improvement space, self-improvement umbrellas, everything it umbrellas business. It umbrellas anything valuable. It's not memes, entertainment, influencer stuff like showing off your body, being a fitness model. Even fitness people can just write and give out the education aspect. So with that, you have three options for social media, which is X,

threads or LinkedIn. These all have their pros or cons. Just choose the one that you feel like you resonate with most. LinkedIn has the most professionals on it. It probably has the most money to make on it. Threads is kind of like the Instagram culture. There's some trolls here and there, quite a few trolls actually.

But it seems like engagement is pretty good right now for beginners to start and grow. But as with all social media platforms, that goes up and down. It's the same thing with extra LinkedIn. Sometimes it's easier to grow. Sometimes it's harder to grow. Picking a platform based off of how easy it is to grow isn't a good long term strategy. So just pick a platform that you like and want to stick with the one that you log on the most.

So we have social media as the first tool in our tool stack. Second, we need somewhere to collect emails because when you're writing posts, you need somewhere else to lead them so that you can speak directly with those people. You're not speaking like in a public podium or in that public group chat. You're speaking to the people that actually want to buy from you. Your email list is where you demonstrate content.

competency or authority where you give education and insight based on your skill, interest or expertise, which we'll talk about. And it's also just a place where you can directly promote your products or services. So if you are kind of fearful of doing that on social media because of the trolls, because of the people that don't like you selling in front of their face, even though they don't get mad at the paid advertisements that are put in front of them, they just get mad when they see you making money. So maybe that's more reason to just piss them off more.

But in your newsletter where you're directly promoting there, that's probably where you're going to make the most money because that's best done with long form content where you can demonstrate that competency, where you can show you know what you're talking about, where you can show your value on social media. Social media is where you capture attention. Newsletter is where you hold and deliver value on the attention. The social media is just a bridge to your newsletter so you can speak directly to them.

Now, I'm personally a fan of just pairing a short form platform with a long form platform. And I think everyone needs an email list, right? So you could technically exchange the email list for like a YouTube channel or podcast, but then you have to learn audio editing, video editing. You have to potentially pay for equipment, short form content on social media writing plus a newsletter is arguably the highest leverage route to go because then you can always just

Use those newsletters as YouTube video ideas and scripts. And then once you record those, just post them to your podcast. So you're building by writing the newsletter, you're building up a bank of potential future videos. And it just makes sense. So I personally recommend Beehive for building your email list. It's free for up to like twenty five hundred subscribers.

I use them. I recently switched to them. I've spoken with the CEO. It's a really good company. I just love I love their culture. And if you use the link, I'm actually not too sure about this. If you if you use the link in the description, I believe you get some kind of like free thing. 14 days. I don't know. And then you get 30 percent.

Off of your first three months of payments, don't hold me to that, but I think that's there. Now, step number three, we have a way to reach customers. We have social media, we have email newsletter. Now we need a place to accept payment and host our products and services. In other words, you need a place to send the people from social media and your newsletter to a place where they can pay you. The best place, in my opinion, the simplest place is Amazon.

Stan, S-T-A-N. There's a lot of course membership community softwares out there, but arguably the simplest one is Stan. I actually met up with them recently too, last week in Toronto. I'm going to make another video about the lessons that I've learned. The Cortex engineering team went, we went in a conference room with them. They taught us a lot

incredibly valuable stuff. And they're just a great solid team with just a good set of values. And they are absolutely incredible with customer support. So if you ever need any help with them, Stan is there to help you with that. And it's just simple. If you go, you log into Stan, you have a few options. You add a product and you can see they have coaching calls. They have courses, they have communities, they have digital product downloads. They have all of these things that just

It's simple, right? When you know what you want to sell, you just go in, you put it on there, you slap a price tag on it, and you promote it to your social media or your audience or your newsletter. And you worry about the fine details later. Now, the fourth tool in your tool stack is just somewhere to save your

your ideas, your content, and your marketing. Because you can go between all of these different apps and you can write the newsletter in Beehive. You can write the products in Stan. You can write your social posts on social media. But then they're kind of lost after that and disconnected and disjointed. And when you are building these things, you're having ideas that you want to save for later. So I recommend my own product,

Cortex because it helps you connect all of these things. This is where I personally write my posts, my threads, my newsletters, my products. When I build them out, it's where I plan my days. If you join our free discord, we actually have user created templates inside of there. And I believe when you just join my email list straight up, I give you a simple life reset planner that is inside of Cortex as well. So you can fill that out. Cortex to me

I love Notion, but it's a more minimalist version of Notion that is more streamlined and built for writers and creators. So if you want to save all of your ideas in one place, like texting yourself ideas, that's how we built the capture feature. You text yourself ideas. You can connect it to anything. You can reference any kind of information. You can save all of your highlights from Kindle and all of these different things in one place so that it's just easy to keep track of all of that information.

And we have the AI synthesis feature going in soon and other AI chat features going in soon. So it can be a chat GPT replacement amongst many other things. And when you're building out a product or service, you're usually giving out worksheets or templates to your customers, right? When you're coaching someone, you're giving them a worksheet to fill out each week. Maybe if you're building a course, you're usually hosting templates alongside of that. So that's what I also build and do.

give out in my courses. Or you can just sell a template straight up in the micro product that we're going to be talking about. So if you create things in Cortex, then you're technically just building a database of intellectual property that you can eventually

package up and sell in the future as something like a template. So all of the links to those are in the description. You can use those. And remember, I just want to maintain the frame of this video where a lot of people may feel off about selling coaching, consulting, maybe freelancing or courses or templates or e-books or whatever it is.

digital products that are hyper profitable. Remember that I'm telling you that this is a beginner business model, so you can pivot into a big boy business model in the future. And if you close your mind off to these things because you have some kind of negative connotation with them, although I believe education products are the most impactful products because

Education is the starting point of everything. You're in this situation you are in right now because of your conditioning, because of your education. The creator economy is the new school system for all I'm concerned, where people can find people that they resonate with. They can purchase education from them and learn from them if they have similar goals as them. So just think it through. I believe this is a very good starting point for a lot of people to learn and practice skills with digital products.

So the question now is, okay, what do I sell? So that leads into step two, which is what are you good at?

So, so far our business looks like this. Social media content, collect emails from that, send newsletters, promote your digital product or service on social media and in newsletters, and then create everything in Cortex so it's all in one place. Now we need to hammer down what you write content, write emails, and create a product or service around. Now I can't help too much with this, but I can ask questions that hopefully provide clarity so you can make the decision for yourself. If I were to tell you, oh, go sell this exact

product, then it would be the same as me telling you to start a social media marketing agency or an e-commerce store in a specific niche, pigeonholing you into that by nature, making you a specialist, closing off your mind, you not really learning anything or feeling like you actually knowing what you're doing and not learning any of the skills that allow you to be independent and do this yourself. So I'm not going to do this.

Figure it out for yourself. From these questions, think of one main skill or interest you'd like to build this business around. What are your favorite practical nonfiction books? What do you already do for work or what have you studied? Are other people doing those things online already? If so,

Good. What transformation have you made in one domain of your life? If you had to write a paper on one interest right now, what would it be? Be decisive here because you just need a starting point. And yes, to handle the objection of, oh, I've just been studying this in college or I've just been studying this in my free time online. I don't know if I'm qualified to teach it or also share my ideas on it. It's like, what do you think the people online are doing right now? They're just sharing what they know and what they find valuable so that other people can also find it valuable.

I think the disconnect there is that you are paying attention to the gap between you and other people online rather than realizing that they're a human too. And if you were to meet them, they're just a human that decides to speak well to a camera or write in a serious way. Side note there, man, intensity, taking things seriously. I think it's unfortunate that people think it's just

a bad thing to try hard right now or it's just a stigma like, oh, you're a try hard, don't try hard. I don't think you get it. The only way to see any kind of success in anything is to be serious and to try hard. Do you think comedians, people who joke all day, just don't try hard? Do you think it just comes naturally to them? Or are they sitting down writing and scrapping jokes every single night? Even something like comedy.

you have to take seriously. You have to try hard in order to make it work. The whole chill guy or don't try hard thing that is going on right now will just make you complacent and dumb. Now, from there, back to the questions that I just asked on uncovering what your skill or interest that you want to sell is, I want you to do a few things here because this is going to help you with ideas. First is write down five authors, creators, or

experts in that skill or interest two is save five quotes or ideas from each of them inside cortex you can just connect with readwise and do this on your kindle if you want to highlight them or you can just put them in capture and then you type at

and then the author name of the source, and then it's captured and connected to that thing. So you can reference it and find it later. And third, study what digital products or physical products they are selling, books, courses, or coaching. If they're selling something like a physical product, let's say a pre-workout, I'm assuming it has some kind of philosophy behind it. If they're selling a pre-workout or supplements, they're also giving out education. They're also probably selling training programs, digital products. They're probably also doing...

fitness coaching or they're giving out a template for tracking their nutrition or whatever it may be you're just trying to get ideas here now i'm going to throw up a screenshot of a template that i use for this where i break things down into mentors or the people that i want to study into topics i break those down into pain points and content ideas so that's what i want you to do i want you to take your main topic of interest

Write it down and then break down three to five bullet points of real world pain points that topic can solve. And then from there, three to five content ideas. So if you want the full template and like nine or 10 more, check out the one person business launchpad. As I said, new course launching. Now, a pro tip here before we move on to the next section is that nobody has original ideas.

Absolutely nobody. If you understand how the mind works, how it soaks in information, how it comes up with ideas, you need other ideas in order for another idea to exist. But the thing here is in writing, in your products, in the ideas that you see in the world, the ones that get the most attention are the most well-known. But think of it this way. There's writing that you see online and you're like, wow, that's an original deep thought. But I can guarantee you they're just combining ideas

from sources that you are just not aware of yet think about that now step three is finally micro products and services so the easiest way to start in my opinion we have a way to generate traffic we have a skill or interest to write about and now we need to turn that skill or interest into something that people can pay for there are two ways to do that the first is the micro product there's a difference between products and services

A product is like a consumable. It's something you can grab or hold or consume. It's not someone helping you do something. A service is something like freelancing, coaching, consulting. So there's do-it-yourself, which is product, and then there's done with you or done for you. So freelancing, agency services, that's done for you. Done with you is something like

tutoring or like a boot camp or coaching or consulting, things like that. Now, I want to tell you a quick story to help nail in the point of what a micro product is. So as I mentioned previously, last week I had a call with the CEO of Stan, the the

creator store platform. His name is John Hugh, and he got his start on TikTok as a creator. But before that, he worked at Goldman Sachs. Now, as a creator, he decided to talk about career advice because that's something he was good at. Over time, he got the hint from his audience that they wanted his resume, the thing that helped him get the job at Goldman Sachs. So he's like, okay, I'll just

throw it up put ten dollars on it and see how it does and surprisingly it did pretty well so he ended up making a thousand dollars in a short amount of time but after talking with the stem team and them seeing a lot of people do this on their platform many people have made millions some have made

Thousands, some have made hundreds. It really depends on the audience, how much traffic you're generating on social media and your newsletter, and then promotions, promoting the micro product or service and how well that does and you improving based on how well you want it to do. The lesson here is that you probably already have something you can upload to the Internet, put a small price tag on, create content around and build a side income.

It's sitting somewhere on your hard drive, in your cortex, or still stuck in your head waiting to be written as a short 10 page e-book or guide. So think about that. That's the micro product. And the thing with the micro product is, is that in order a lot more people pay for a higher priced service from you that we're going to talk about once they've already invested in you. Some people don't want to go all in

on a high price product or service they want to pay something small so that they can trust you and know that you know what you're talking about and then inside the micro product you just link to the service so people that go through it they see that they click on it and then they're more likely to buy so you don't need a micro product per se it's probably lower priority than the microservice i would build the service first so you can make money faster

But if you have the time and the idea comes to mind, just build out the micro product really quick so that you can have some other income stream. So moving on to talk about the micro service, and we've talked about this previously in the fastest way to start a one person business. The thumbnail says something like make your first $1,000. We go over the micro offer in there, but in reality it's a micro service. So what is a micro service first?

The problem is that freelancers, coaches, consultants, or other service providers think they need everything in place before they start selling. The landing page, the logo, the program system, and teachings. Wrong. You literally just need to be able to teach your skill or interest. So yesterday, someone in the Cortex Premium community, they made a post saying that they were a bit lost.

when it comes to monetization. They said they've been a systems analyst and programmer for over 10 years. And as they've been learning online in this self-improvement or online business space, they felt like the only thing they could sell was like social media management or ghostwriting or some productivity coaching or something like that. Then I stopped them and I was like, okay,

Why don't you just teach coding, basic coding or systems analysis and sell it as a way for people to acquire this skill that allows them to break into new career opportunities? And his response to that was, well, I just didn't think of it. So you don't have to overcomplicate it. You probably have a skill or interest that helped you get a job or advance your career or improve your health or improve your mental health or improve your relationships. You have something.

that you have done, that you just need to teach. If you need help with this, go on to Udemy or Skillshare and just look up what it is, the topic of interest that you can talk about. Look at those courses. Now, not everyone knows those courses exist, and this is an entire topic for another video, but that's from search-based intent. People go to those websites and people go to YouTube based on search-based intent. If you just take

very similar product make it a tiny bit better sell it under your own personal brand and attract an audience by persuading them that this can help them improve their skill set or something of that nature they're not trying to search for that course on udemy skillshare or youtube you're the only option for them because you're the one teaching about that thing that may need me i may need to create another video on this because for some people that clicked

For others, it didn't really click. So just understand that you can sell a similar product as someone else. There's 8 billion different planners on Amazon and most of them do well. You can go and create a planner right now and you can put it up on Amazon and if you market it correctly and if you have an audience, which most people on Amazon don't,

You'll probably make a good amount of money. Depends now the micro offer that we talked about in the other video, the fastest way to start an online business is a pack of four calls that you charge $1,000 for. Now, how do you turn that into an actual service?

you break out four calls put it on paper call one call two call three call four you have one every week so it's one month long that you're helping someone now you think of where they are now where you can help them be your topic of interest and the exact steps they need to take in order to get there then you organize those steps by talking points on the call and then after each call you give them a worksheet in something like

cortex in order for them to fill out. You ask them questions, you give them homework, you give them a project to build. They fill it out the next week on the call. You go over that, you go over their pain points, and then you go over the next talking points that you need to teach them. You do that over the course of four calls. It can be more or less calls depending on how much you need to teach. That's worth a thousand dollars. Fitness trainers do that all the time. You don't need any kind of landing page or service. You just need the ability to DM people and attract leads via the newsletter. Just have people join your newsletter and

at the end of each email, ask them to reply to the newsletter if they want to work with you on that one thing. Then you talk to them in there, then you send them to the link to your product on Stan and they potentially purchase it and you go from there and all you need is five people. Or you can do the same thing on social media. You write

a social media post, then you add a comment and you say, if you want help with this, DM me. And then you go through that. Yes, you're going to have to filter through some people. Yes, it's going to take a decent amount of time, but you only need to land five people to make $5,000. If you DM or message 100 to 200 people a month, five people isn't that much. And yes, it's going to feel demotivating because five

You're only landing five people out of 100 to 200, but that's just how business is. It's called conversion rate. Once you build an audience and don't have to do it manually in the DMs and people just buy from your promotions, then you're in a better spot. That's why you build an audience on social media and your newsletter. And no, you don't need a large audience to do this. The last thing here, and the reason I recommend four calls is because one, it costs, you can charge $750 to $1,000 with that.

That's a decent chunk of change, right? If people are paying for that, then you know if you turn it into something, a more fleshed out coaching program or course or whatever it may be, digital product or even software, right? My two-hour writer course turned into Cortex. It's just a good way of validating whether or not people want the product or service and you haven't built anything out. You haven't invested anything.

time into building a website, a landing page, and all of this other stuff before you know if it works or not. The question now is, okay, I have my topic of interest, I have my digital tool stack, I have my micro product or service, but how do I attract people so that they pay me?

That's step four. So we're going to go over offer driven content. In previous videos, I talk about writing about whatever you want. I talk about you are the niche. I talk about writing about multiple interests and none of that goes out the window here. But if you want a good place to start, you just want the simplest place to start. You don't want to learn all of that. You don't want to talk about multiple interests. You just want to make money. That's your goal. That's what this video is providing. If you have a different goal, then

Pick apart what you can get from this video and apply it to your goal and forget the other stuff. So to reiterate, the simplest, most accessible, low cost route to do this is social media and writing on social media. You don't need to pay for ads. You don't need to learn SEO. You don't need to pay for newsletter sponsorships or podcast sponsorships to promote your product or service.

you build an audience and that is the highest leverage thing you can do because when you pay for those sponsorships or pay for those advertisements, you don't gain a following from that. You don't gain a newsletter from that sometimes unless you're sending people to the newsletter. With the audience, you can remarket to that audience time and time again. Every single week that you send a newsletter, you're more likely to land more clients. Every day that you post an email, I mean every day that you post a post on social media, you're more likely to get people into the email list. It's just a

constant cycle that gets more powerful with time. Now we need to choose what topics to write about. First, take the topic of your product or service and break it down into one, your personal story. So where you were before, middle, and after relating to the topic, what was your transformation? Two is the pain points people face. And this is going to be how you start 80% of the content that you write, your newsletters, your posts, whatever it may be.

They can all start with pain points. Your hook can be a pain point. Your introduction can be a pain point. The introduction to this video is a pain point. And three, content topics that have already done well. So you can search for topics on YouTube and write down the best performing videos. Watch them for content ideas and write down content ideas as you watch them. That's it. Create a new document or note.

and write down five to 10 points for each of those. And once you start, then you can worry about how to write and structure your content. For now, act like you're texting a friend and they're asking you questions about your topic of interest. Write your answers in public on

on social media. Now, with all of this stuff, with writing content in newsletters, social posts and newsletters, just start with frameworks. I personally learned to write not by studying writing, but by studying what works on social media. I just would scroll the timeline and I'd look not from the

creator and be like, oh, okay, he used this as the hook. He had bullet point list of these points. And then he had one last line that tied it all together. Let me try and write one similar to this with my own ideas that I've written down. And I just repeated that process time and time

Again, the way I started writing my newsletters was by studying other people's newsletters. The way I started creating YouTube videos was just starting, honestly, and then slowly watching YouTube videos and being right and realizing, OK, I could speak better this way. OK, I could include a text screen here. I could include B roll here. I could include a quote here. I conclude a graphic. And so that starts to shape how I write my newsletters as well. The point here is that you study the structure of the content that you want to create.

The structure is not the actual words, but what the words are. So the first line, it's a hook. Okay. Why is that important? Okay. Then it's bullet points. Okay. Then it's a last line. You choose a...

Post that you see on social media, you copy that over to your cortex. You just embed the tweet in it. You open that in the side and then you just try to emulate it with your own idea. It's going to be hard at first, but eventually you'll get it. Now, this isn't copying because you're taking the structure, not the content. You're not taking the idea in the exact words. You're changing it completely and trying to emulate the structure. Now, for newsletter writing, what I like to do is use the pain and process framework. Pain and

and process. Pretty simple. I have a document in Cortex that I can link under this video too, but it's simple. You choose the topic to write about. If you don't know what to write about, go research the YouTube videos and just find a topic to write about or choose a pain point. That's the topic. And then the first two paragraphs, the first five lines, you just state what the pain point is. If you want to make this easier, use the personal experience. When was the time where you faced a

that pain point and walk them through the story and what changed. And then the second section of the newsletter is just a list of steps, step one, step two, step three, step four, step five, however many, or this can be tips. This can be quotes. This can be lessons. It can be steps. It can be whatever, just a list of things that resolves the pain point for them. And then for each of those steps, you give another one to two paragraphs of information that goes over the what

the why, the how, so that it's a full point. That's it. That's how you write your first newsletter. Go write it. Step five, please, for the love of God, promote yourself. I've been doing this a while. And the only reason people don't make money is because they don't promote themselves. They start on social media, they start writing content, then they're like, oh, why am I not making money? Or I'm not making enough money doing this. Then you go and look at their profile and you look at their newsletters and absolutely nowhere have they linked their

their products or services and they haven't hit on pain points that would make people want to go and pay for those things. Yes, you want to do this too, even if you have zero followers or zero subscribers because you want to show people that you have value to offer. More people are going to follow you if you are selling something. People think selling is bad when it's the thing that builds your authority and people actually want to buy from. The people that think selling is bad

Ignore them. You'll be fine. The thing here is, is if you don't promote your products or services, one, you don't have an incentive to improve your writing because it's a lot easier to give up when you don't see the point of writing to build an audience. If you don't see a way to make money, your product or service linked in your writing, then you won't try to make any and you'll see it as pointless. I wrote my first e-book at 140 followers and made $3,000 by the time I hit 500 followers. This happened because I wanted it to happen.

and tried to get as much traffic as possible to my product that's extremely important if you don't

promote. You don't have an incentive to continue. You're just going to go back to the comfortable job. Number two is that people won't know that they can pay you because I still have people tell me after years of following me that they had no idea I had products they could pay for. I think I'm pretty good at self-promotion. I think I'm not too in your face about it, but I think I do it enough and consistently. And people still tell me, oh, wow, like I've been following you for three years. I didn't know you had the two hour writer course. So why

As much as it may turn some people off, other people don't know. The people that want to buy half the time just aren't paying attention. That means you have to do it consistently so eventually they find out. The third thing is that you'll never get over your fear of selling. There's a vocal minority on the internet, the 1% of people who despise advertisements and self-promotions, even though they claim to support independent artists. They'd rather you beg for donations or sponsorships rather than create your own product and pitch it to them.

ignore these people you'll see them in the comments of posts and think that nobody buys that person's product and i can tell you for every one negative comment i get 50 to 100 people buy my product they just don't say anything because they aren't idiots now i'm not saying that all products are good and that everyone should buy my product i'm just saying you don't need to on a product simply because

It's not for you and you don't see the value in it. That's just what it is. You see the value in eating every day for $10, but you don't see the value in something else that costs $10 that could benefit some other area of your life rather than just sustaining your body. If the product is bad, then yes, by all means, go.

go crazy. But even then, at the same time, you're just wasting your time. And four, you can't improve what doesn't exist. So if you never promote your product or service, how do you expect to get better at marketing and sales? You don't have any data to improve from. The same goes with business, writing, or any other project or skill. You will suck at first, then you get better, but you don't get better unless you suck at first.

So to end this video, you have my full permission to suck. You technically don't need anything more than the advice that I gave in this video. You really don't. You can figure it out on your own. It's going to take trial and error. That's how you do anything. But if you want to avoid some of that trial and error or just move in a better direction, again, the one person business launchpad is available now. That's it for this video. I hope it was helpful. Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe, new Discord channel for Cortex if you want to join that.

A lot of people asking questions and they're having fun. So see you in there. See you later.