Become a Top 1% Creator by Doing What 99% of Creators Won't

Get your head out of the clouds. Walk through the mud.

If you’re a broke freelancer, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

I use this example because as a form of monetization, freelancing is a skill anyone can make money from simply through pure effort.

If you reach out to 100 people per day, every single day, refining your process along the way, you are guaranteed to make money.

But almost no one does.

The same way almost no one will do what it really takes to make a living as a content creator.

You only see what happens on the front end with big-name creators. You see the likes, comments, RTs, views, and revenue numbers.

But you don’t see everything that has been happening in the background for years — all the little grunt work it takes to build a solid foundation for success.

You can’t get the glitz and glamour without wading through piles of shit first.

The Cheat Code to Connections and Revenue

If you want a shortcut to success as a content creator, manual outreach would be it.

Manual outreach is the process of individually reaching out to people in an effort to build your brand or make money.

Examples:

• Individually reaching out to potential clients to get sales

• Building relationships with other creators in your niche

• Setting up collaborations and deals

I did a partner promotion once with a Twitter creator who had 200,000 followers. I crafted a compelling pitch and explained what our partnership would do for him.

I won’t share the exact numbers, but let’s just say it went well.

I’ve done these partnerships dozens of times. I’ve reached out to hundreds of potential partners. Only a small percentage decide to work with me, but that’s all I need.

You can make connections like these, too, but it involves doing a bunch of grunt work you probably don’t want to do:

• Searching the web and social media for prospects

• Hunting to find people’s emails

• Crafting individualized pitches that don’t suck instead of using templates

• Following up half a dozen times just to get a response (that Twitter collab didn’t respond right way)

• And the most important part, doing this process over and over again

Making money online and building influence is simply a matter of getting enough shots up.

Thoughtfulness Goes a Long Way

Next is engagement.

The newer you are and the smaller your following is, the more you need to be proactive about engagement.

This means strategies like:

• Replying to every single mention on Twitter

• Replying to every single blog post comment

• Commenting and replying to accounts of other creators

Again, if you want to get noticed, you have to be more targeted and individualized than most people who lazily comment “nice post!”

Your comments should be so good that they come across as a stand-alone piece of content, like this:

Notice how I didn’t just say “nice post!”

I added to the conversation. I gave that creator an extra boost to his own content with my comment.

Proper engagement is yet another way to speed up your success as a content creator, but most won’t do it.

Then they will have the audacity to complain that they’re not getting results.

If you want to win, you have to be different.

It’s So Damn Simple

It’s crazy how simple it is to stand out online.

It starts with just taking the time to be thoughtful instead of being a spammer.

After that, it’s just realizing that you can beat everyone else by doing things they aren’t willing to do.

I can correct someone’s tactics and strategies, but I can’t force them to put in more effort.

Content creation is like sports.

Coaches won’t get mad at a player for making a mistake at full speed and max effort. He’ll only be upset if the player doesn’t give it his all.

The best athletes do all of the little things well — study, proper training, and iterating based on the coach’s advice.

You need to do all the little things well.

Just remember, effort and consistency are the boring yet crucial secrets to success in this game.

It’s all yours for the taking if you have the patience and diligence to take it.

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Links to other cool stuff you might enjoy

• Watch this webinar replay I co-hosted with Self-Publishing School to learn how to write a best-selling book

• Take my free 5-day course that teaches you how to make a living writing on Medium

• Buy my best-selling book - Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement

• Follow me on Twitter and Instagram because I create unique content on each platform