I felt depressed convincing locals they needed other locals products/services (especially in industries like the beauty, weight less, fashion industry) and began teaching the business owners I was helping how to use AI to automate most the tasks I was doing to see if they could continue their success.
I realised you can create an effective strategy and market your own business even with few technical skills using tools like Bard and ChatGPT. After some research I saw other people were also making money teaching people similar, though more broad, uses of AI. I compiled my content into a series of videos, created a workbook, and made a course!
But my first ad didn't go as well as I hoped, not a single ad click after 2000 views. Suddenly my confidence is knocked in terms of this whole thing. I know I'm offering a TON of content and value for just $9, but my heart isn't in the marketing of it... Though I want (for example) people to spend $9 on the course and $240 on their business (through ads and content) as opposed to $249 on a marketer who takes most of that for their own fee.
I've wanted to post about a new business here for a few years but only recently felt stable enough to steadfastly pursue my goals. It took me a while to realise WHAT I want but now I know when I've been happiest in life.
1) Travelling with semi passive income. Earning an effective $100-300+ an hour was amazing and being able to travel knowing I only need to do a day or less of work to cover the costs made everything stress-free! This is my ultimate goal.
2) Creating and selling products! Though I only made simple products, it made me happy knowing a physical, tangible, thing I had a part in creating was out there in the world. When I had to physically send products, I felt limited to earning $50-100 an hour but it was so rewarding I didn't mind.
3) Creating entertainment products. I liked how scaleable this was, and because the 'product' was attention, providing things people wanted to see made it not very soul-sucking. My positive news business especially was extremely rewarding!
Obviously, marketing comes into all these things. I spent probs 10% of my time selling products working on the marketing, but I didn't mind because it was an enjoyable goal (to get cool products into people's hands). I spent about 20-25% of the time working on my websites and social media pages on marketing. You obviously have to grow a large audience (my main marketable skill, tbh) to entertain a lot of people - but because the focus was on entertaining and marketing was secondary I didn't mind.
That said, I see the potential of my AI course, even if just a passive income stream.. but I can't commit to an entire brand around marketing. Does that leave the idea dead in the water? I have a lot of experience marketing services, websites, and products but marketing marketing itself online seems like a whole other ball game. Getting IRL contracts was a case of going face-to-face then switching to email or phone.
Has anybody grown a businesses selling business services in a meta way, such as using ads to sell ads, what were the challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?
My goal for the next week is a single sale
I'm really curious how high (or hopefully low) my CPA will be. I'm reaching a lot of people for a low price (literally the part of marketing I'm best at, ironically) that if I only need an unimpressive 1% ad CTR and 3% conversion rate to break even.
What else I'm working on...
I previously made business aimed around large audiences (100k-2M) but the market was different up until a few years ago and now I think a niche-focus is better.
Building a moped audience!
Mopeds are increasing in popularity in Europe. I recently began riding and FELL IN LOVE! A lot of the content and info, especially on old school mopeds, is in Dutch, German, Italian, etc. I've spent 6 of the past 13 weeks in the Netherlands and I'm back again at the end of the month. My moped audience is small but growing, the good news though is that they tend to be older and have more discretionary/disposable income than my gen Z peers.
There biggest English-speaking moped influencers and content creators don't have massive audiences, so I feel like my timing is great to build within this niche!
Revamping my personal audience
My personal audience fell from 13k followers to 7k on Instagram and 125k to 111k on Tumblr whilst I was in recovery, and worse, my engagement fell by over 75%. My audience came for a bubbly, happy-go-lucky, 'normal girl' who spent a lot of money on makeup and fashion. They don't care that I spent a lot of time and energy on editing myself and presenting a fake image, they just liked what they saw.
THAT SAID, I feel stable in my authenticity now. I only had a following on a couple of social networks so I'm working on expanding into new territory. It seems like people on social media are craving unfiltered, real, people. I definitely feel confident that I could reach a broad audience when I start sharing more of my personal story as a detransitioned male, non-confirming person, and entrepreneur.
Once I can reach 25k unique creative weirdos, I don't think it'll matter than I'm not reaching almost 150k people from a broadly 18-35 age group anymore.
I will post updates with numbers on my AI course and other projects, twice a month here!
I realised you can create an effective strategy and market your own business even with few technical skills using tools like Bard and ChatGPT. After some research I saw other people were also making money teaching people similar, though more broad, uses of AI. I compiled my content into a series of videos, created a workbook, and made a course!
But my first ad didn't go as well as I hoped, not a single ad click after 2000 views. Suddenly my confidence is knocked in terms of this whole thing. I know I'm offering a TON of content and value for just $9, but my heart isn't in the marketing of it... Though I want (for example) people to spend $9 on the course and $240 on their business (through ads and content) as opposed to $249 on a marketer who takes most of that for their own fee.
I've wanted to post about a new business here for a few years but only recently felt stable enough to steadfastly pursue my goals. It took me a while to realise WHAT I want but now I know when I've been happiest in life.
1) Travelling with semi passive income. Earning an effective $100-300+ an hour was amazing and being able to travel knowing I only need to do a day or less of work to cover the costs made everything stress-free! This is my ultimate goal.
2) Creating and selling products! Though I only made simple products, it made me happy knowing a physical, tangible, thing I had a part in creating was out there in the world. When I had to physically send products, I felt limited to earning $50-100 an hour but it was so rewarding I didn't mind.
3) Creating entertainment products. I liked how scaleable this was, and because the 'product' was attention, providing things people wanted to see made it not very soul-sucking. My positive news business especially was extremely rewarding!
Obviously, marketing comes into all these things. I spent probs 10% of my time selling products working on the marketing, but I didn't mind because it was an enjoyable goal (to get cool products into people's hands). I spent about 20-25% of the time working on my websites and social media pages on marketing. You obviously have to grow a large audience (my main marketable skill, tbh) to entertain a lot of people - but because the focus was on entertaining and marketing was secondary I didn't mind.
That said, I see the potential of my AI course, even if just a passive income stream.. but I can't commit to an entire brand around marketing. Does that leave the idea dead in the water? I have a lot of experience marketing services, websites, and products but marketing marketing itself online seems like a whole other ball game. Getting IRL contracts was a case of going face-to-face then switching to email or phone.
Has anybody grown a businesses selling business services in a meta way, such as using ads to sell ads, what were the challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?
My goal for the next week is a single sale
I'm really curious how high (or hopefully low) my CPA will be. I'm reaching a lot of people for a low price (literally the part of marketing I'm best at, ironically) that if I only need an unimpressive 1% ad CTR and 3% conversion rate to break even.
What else I'm working on...
I previously made business aimed around large audiences (100k-2M) but the market was different up until a few years ago and now I think a niche-focus is better.
Building a moped audience!
Mopeds are increasing in popularity in Europe. I recently began riding and FELL IN LOVE! A lot of the content and info, especially on old school mopeds, is in Dutch, German, Italian, etc. I've spent 6 of the past 13 weeks in the Netherlands and I'm back again at the end of the month. My moped audience is small but growing, the good news though is that they tend to be older and have more discretionary/disposable income than my gen Z peers.
There biggest English-speaking moped influencers and content creators don't have massive audiences, so I feel like my timing is great to build within this niche!
Revamping my personal audience
My personal audience fell from 13k followers to 7k on Instagram and 125k to 111k on Tumblr whilst I was in recovery, and worse, my engagement fell by over 75%. My audience came for a bubbly, happy-go-lucky, 'normal girl' who spent a lot of money on makeup and fashion. They don't care that I spent a lot of time and energy on editing myself and presenting a fake image, they just liked what they saw.
THAT SAID, I feel stable in my authenticity now. I only had a following on a couple of social networks so I'm working on expanding into new territory. It seems like people on social media are craving unfiltered, real, people. I definitely feel confident that I could reach a broad audience when I start sharing more of my personal story as a detransitioned male, non-confirming person, and entrepreneur.
Once I can reach 25k unique creative weirdos, I don't think it'll matter than I'm not reaching almost 150k people from a broadly 18-35 age group anymore.
I will post updates with numbers on my AI course and other projects, twice a month here!
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