1 Million Followers… And Still Broke.
You can have 1 MILLION followers… And make $0.
If I gave you 1 MILLION followers today, what would you do?
I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to make money from them long term.
If you’re intrigued, keep reading.
It’s 2015.
My heart… is racing.
I look at my Instagram profile.
12,000.
I’ve been trying for years to build an audience and never had over 100 followers.
Now my profile shows 12,000 followers.
I found a software that would follow and then unfollow profiles related to the niche I served.
I ran this software for 3 weeks, and now I had an audience.
“What’s my first post going to be?” I thought
I had just gotten back from a tour as a drummer and I was looking to make an extra $1,000 before the next tour.
I’ve heard the stories of people making thousands of dollars overnight from their audience, and now I had cracked the code.
My content was going to show up in front of 12,000 people.
I can finally take my girlfriend to that restaurant she’s been talking about.
I had finally made it.
Or so I thought…
I snapped a quick photo, wrote a caption explaining who I was and the marketing service I was offering.
I hit publish.
There’s no way I can fail.
After a few minutes of nervously hitting refresh, I closed my laptop and went for a walk.
I’ll let the algorithm work its magic.
An hour later, I flipped open my laptop, heart racing again.
I looked at the post.
One heart.
Zero comments.
Zero sales.
Stunned, I thought I had done something wrong.
I quickly made another post — this time teaching some of the marketing principles I had learned.
Another hour later, and this post had two hearts.
Zero comments.
Zero sales.
I had reached 1,524 accounts.
So people did see the content, but not nearly as many as I thought they would…
Did I break the algorithm? Why aren’t these people engaging? They NEED what I offer.
What I didn’t know at the time is that there are only three ways to monetize an audience. And buying (or being given) an audience makes it impossible to monetize that audience long-term.
The three ways to monetize an audience are…
Option #1: Monetizing Attention
This comes from ad revenue, or when a platform pays you based on the amount of views your content gets.
Monetization of attention requires that your content gets a lot of reach.
You’re paid based on the reach that your content gets.
This reach determines how many potential views it can get.
If I gave you 1 million followers today, you wouldn’t know what types of content resonated with them… Why certain pain points connect with them… What they love or hate… Which words and phrases bring them together… Or make them scroll away.
This means your reach will drop every time you post.
By the end of a month, your content will get less and less views.
Meaning the platform (and ad) revenue will be a fraction of what it was… And it will continue to drop.
Option #2: Sell Other Peoples Stuff
(partnerships, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, etc.)
Companies and brands will pay you to talk about their product or service (pretty cool, right?)
What companies are doing is buying the attention that you can bring to their product.
And the trust that you’ve built with your audience.
When you have a lot of reach, this is great!
But when that reach drops… So does your value to these companies.
This compounds when they realize you didn’t build the audience yourself — which means you didn’t build trust with the audience…
If the audience doesn’t know and trust you, they won’t buy what you recommend.
With your reach dropping, and the level of trust with your audience non-existent….
You can have 1 Million followers, and still make $0…
Option 3: Sell Your Stuff
(coaching, consulting, events, products, etc.)
This strategy involves using your audience to drive traffic to your sales pages.
A percentage of these people buy, which leads to sales.
This means you need 2 things:
1. Reach
You need to reach a shit-ton-more people than you think (that’s a technical term).
I’ll show you how this works:
Let’s say you’re selling a $20 product.
Here is a breakdown of what would happen (I’m being generous and using larger percentages than we usually see):
- Your post reaches 1 MILLION people (1 Million people).
- Of those who saw the post, 10% engaged with it (100,000 people).
- Of those who engaged with it, 5% click on your Call to Action (5,000 people).
- Of those who clicked on your Call to Action, 3% purchased your product (150 people).
Assuming the product cost you $0 to make $0 to fulfill…
You just made $3,000 (150 people x $20 product = $3,000) — congratulations!
But here’s where the problem lies:
If I gave you 1 million followers today, you wouldn’t know what types of content resonated with them… Why certain pain points connect with them… What they love or hate… Which words and phrases bring them together… Or make them scroll away.
This means your content will be less and less relatable… and your reach will drop every time you post.
As your content gets less reach, this happens:
- Reach: 500,000 people (1/2 of what it was before).
- Engaged: 5,000 people (10%)
- Clicked: 250 people (5%)
- Purcahsed: 7.5 people (3%)
That $3,000… becomes $150.
So much for making a living from your following…
But it’s actually worse than that.
Reach isn’t everything. Trust is also required.
2. You need to have built trust
You are a new person to the audience.
The audience may know the page, but they don’t know you.
Even if I gave you 1 million followers on a page that didn’t have a face to it, the audience doesn’t know YOU.
They just know the page. Not you.
There’s no trust built.
A great opt-in conversion rate for social media traffic is somewhere between 5–6%
But if the audience doesn’t know who you are (meaning you’ve built no trust), your conversion rate will be less than 1%.
If you don’t have trust, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, you cannot monetize them.
So followers is a useless vanity metric, right?
VERY, VERY WRONG.
Being given followers is useless.
Building a following is priceless.
When someone willingly follows you, they’re saying, “I believe what you said today is valuable — and I believe what you will say tomorrow is more valuable.”
Building an audience of your First 500 Followers validates your idea.
It proves that you are offering true value to a specific audience.
This is why I created the First 500 Followers cohort.
If you hack your way into building an audience, that audience is worth nothing.
The true value comes in building it.
So I show you how to build an audience that authentically and genuinely adds value.
One that trusts you and that sets the foundation of a business in the long term.
And it starts with getting your First 500 Followers.
When you build an audience right, you can monetize your audience in ALL three ways (monetizing attention, selling other people’s stuff, and selling your stuff).
If you do it wrong, you can’t monetize it at all — no matter how large the audience is…
If you build your audience right, you don’t need 1 million followers.
You need far, far less.
If you do it wrong, even 1 million followers won’t be enough.
PS
Getting your First 500 Followers is the first step in the new writers business model.
Click below to get the full breakdown of the Writerpreneurs Business Model.
PSS
If you’re a non-fiction writer who’s struggling to make money, you’re in the right place.
Building a business and being great at writing are two different skills.
I send out an (almost) daily short email with business and productivity tips for writers — Called Writerpreneur .
