Discover the Power of Your “1,000 True Fans”
I’ve got a few numbers for you:
There’s at least 10,000 Internet “gurus” out there, all claiming they have the magic tricks you need to succeed online.
Those gurus churn through 100,000 new tricks and tactics every year. It’s hard to keep up!
All this has led to millions of invisible, stalled and failing websites.
Here’s a better number: 1,000.
What if the only thing standing between you and the life you want to live was making 1,000 new friends?
A lot of that traditional “internet marketing” advice was based on an outdated mass-marketing model.
They told us that our sites had to attract “millions of hits” and “lots of traffic” to make a living online.
And that might have been true for the old-school mass-marketers. Fortunately for all of us, the Personal Web has changed everything.
Problem is, a lot of online marketing gurus don’t know this yet. They’re still marketing as if mass marketing still worked.
It’s working less and less. More people are just turning them off.
- You don’t have to try to sell the same stuff everyone else is selling to make it online.
- You don’t have to spend a fortune in ads “mass marketing.”
- You don’t have to have a big “product launch” to an email list of hundreds of thousands to succeed online.
- You don’t have to become an expert at Internet marketing to succeed.
- You don’t have to sell your soul to make a living online.
You’ve already got a life. You’ve built your business or practice, or devoted your life to expressing yourself as a creative professional. If you’re like most creative solopreneurs, you have very little interest in learning how to become a “professional internet marketer.”
You have an interest in online income if it’s on your terms, if it supports your lifestyle, not replaces it with endless hours in a dark basement in front of a computer monitor.
What if you didn’t need to market this way to make money online?
There’s great news: The era of the Big Internet Guru is ending, as we speak.
The Personal Web era is already under way: search engines are now personalizing each web search, people are turning off emails to all but the most trusted of contacts, and more adults are finding and joining online private social communities based on their interests.
You have options: You have something to say, and the Personal Web has made the personal story scalable. You can get an audience. You can make a living online. And most importantly, you can love what you do.
What does all this mean for you?
If you’ve ever wanted to succeed online doing what you love, there’s never been a better time to jump in.
Here’s why:
Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly started an online firestorm in a 2008 post on his Technium blog entitled 1,000 True Fans. Here’s just a taste:
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
Mr. Kelly is writing about artists. What if you’re not an artist?
Seth Godin answered this question perfectly a year later in his blog:
But what if you’re not an artist or a musician? Is there a business case for this?
I think the ability to find and organize 1,000 people is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to change your world (and make a living.)
From our experience in over a decade of working with creative solopreneurs, we’ve found that anyone with expertise and the motivation can create this kind of opportunity. At the very least, we’ve found it requires:
- A willingness to discover where your audience is and what they want.
- A desire to learn how to talk about what you do in a way your audience can understand, and find you online.
Here at TransformNation, introducing you to your first 1,000 true fans is what we’re all about.
What kind of living are we talking about here?
How does $100,000 a year sound? While that’s certainly not typical or even average, we think a good place to begin this conversation is by quoting Kevin Kelly’s article we referred to earlier:
Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.
If you’re an artist with a unique vision and a willingness to communicate with your fans, The Personal Web could be the perfect venue for you.
And if you’re a solopreneur, knowledge-professional, consultant, coach, therapist or doctor, we think you can find your place online, too.
Try this exercise:
Consider what you have an expertise in, or what you have a passionate interest in, and ask yourself these questions:
- How many people are there in the English-speaking world? How many millions?
- How many of these millions of people have an interest in what you’re interested in? If you talk about it in the right way, we’re betting there are plenty.
- How many of these people are searching right now for the kinds of solutions you offer?
- Or, if they were introduced to you and your work online, how many of these people would resonate with you and stick around? We’re guessing there are enough.
Out of the multi-millions of English-speaking people online, can you imagine that at least 1,000 of them need exactly what you have to offer and find buying it from you the best possible fit for them?
You only need 1,000 people from the multi-millions of English-speaking people online to become “true fans” of your work to maintain a thriving business online.
Now imagine that this income was mostly automated online and that you spent most of your ‘work’ time researching, reading, writing, talking, and thinking about a topic you absolutely love in order to earn this income.
What’s Next?
Take a look at our TransformNation model for an overview of the basics we’ve found are required to draw your crowd and make a living online.
