Good morning and happy New Year! 🎊 🍾
2022, your bar is low. Dangerously low.
It seems like every brand in existence has written a "Best of 2021" blog, thread, or newsletter - so we're sticking with our regularly scheduled programming over here.
But first, I want to say thank you for being here.
It means the world to me that you've taken the time to subscribe and read this email. There are thousands of newsletters out there and I appreciate you allowing The Loaf to occupy a small space in your inbox every Saturday morning. I hope you've found value in it so far and if you're new, here are the old editions.
The Loaf is just getting started and we've got a lot of exciting additions & developments to add over the next year - but in this week's edition:
Business: How to Sell Online Memberships: All You Need to Know [Blog]
Selling memberships is a cornerstone of the creator economy.
Whether it be a newsletter subscription, service subscription, or community membership - many creators are opting to sell some form of membership for one main reason:
Recurring revenue
Recurring revenue is simply money that's scheduled to be coming in every month (or whatever consistent frequency). Having recurring income allows you to project your income much easier, which lets you make smarter financial business decisions to continue growing.
This guide from Gumroad breaks down different types of online memberships, how to sell them, and the drawbacks of offering them.
Money: 5 Lessons from the Psychology of Money [Blog]
We all have unique relationships with money.
But those relationships may not look or feel like how we want them to.
Morgan Housel published what I believe to be one of the most important personal finance books in existence last year - The Psychology of Money - and these are 5 of the best lessons from it.
Top takeaways:
No one is crazy - “Every decision people make with money is justified by taking the information they have at the moment and plugging it into their unique mental model of how the world works.”
Getting wealthy vs. Staying wealthy - “Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.“
Define your enough - “Life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.”
Leave room for error - “The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.”
Man in the car paradox - “No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are.”
Strategy: 102 Creators (Who’ve Each Earned $100,000+) Share Their Single Best Tip for Aspiring Creators [Blog]
This blog post is like having the opportunity to interview 102 creators, getting their best insights, all within 5 minutes.
These are some of my favorite tips:
Creative Shrimp - Make something you wish was available when you were first starting out. Make it concise, make it visually cool (the first bite is with the eye), and make it something you know you'll be able to complete to a high level.
Nikki Kirk - Don’t overthink it. You have value to share, so start small if you need to but just start! You can always adjust the content, pricing, and offerings later.
Matthew Paik - A great product is created from a great community. Focus on building an audience, listen to their needs, and present them with the no-brainer solution. Focus less on trying to create something brand new and focus more on creating simply what works. People want results.
Jarry Lew - Offer so much value that your customers feel like they are stealing from you, every time they make a purchase.
Thalion - Good product descriptions should answer the most common questions of your users.
Steph Smith - Iterate like crazy. Your ability to innovate is correlated with your ability to iterate. Don't spend 5 months on a project, only to realize that you never validated whether the world needed it.
Richard Yot - The best form of marketing is to help people. Create products that genuinely make people's work or life easier and the marketing will take care of itself.
Serverless Laravel - Ask your audience about what they’re struggling with. The answers they give you will help you plan the content for your course.
Dontez Akram - Weather the storm. You’ll have good days & bad days with your business but just count on yourself to see it through.
🐳 MrBeast and Mark Rober’s #TeamSeas Campaign Surpasses $25 Million
📧 Josh Spector's Guide on How to Get Followers on Twitter
💫 Ready Player Me Raises $13 Million To Make Metaverse Avatars And NFT Cosmetics
🎥 YouTube Experiments With Letting Viewers Customize Their ‘Super Thanks’ Messages
📈 How does David Dobrik make money? YouTube star’s net worth & income streams
Tool of the Week: Poet.so (free) - An image generator that creates sharable tweet images with gradient backgrounds (like the one below)
Freelance Finds: I wrote a thread about how I went from earning $0 last December to $8,100 as a freelancer in just 12 months
Creatorbread will be hiring freelance content writers starting this month to write around the intersection of personal finance & being self-employed (freelancer, creator, etc.) so if you have any writer or creator friends who may be interested, please share this link with them.
While the main goal of Creatorbread is to provide education around the financial side of the creator economy, we want to participate in the economy by providing job opportunities, such as content writing, with first access going to our readers.
So be on the lookout for new roles popping up in the newsletter and share The Loaf with those who may be looking for freelance roles!
Keep creating,
Treyton DeVore
Content Writer | Creator
