Why most creators stay broke

99% of the small to midsized creators you follow are broke.

Many of the large ones are living paycheck to paycheck.

Interestingly, the reason actually has nothing to do with their content.

It’s because of their monetization strategy.

Most people reading this have a goal of one day building a business that generates $1M/year in profit ($83K/month in take home pay).

At these levels, you could pretty much live any life you’d want in almost any city in the world.

The good news is…hitting that goal is actually very achievable.

But the hard realization is that content alone isn’t enough to get you there.

To build a $1M/year internet business…you need traffic + funnels + offers all working together.

• Traffic → awareness from customers

• Funnels → a bridge for them to go down

• Offers → something for them to buy

The unintuitive part about internet business as a beginner is that these are 3 distinct skillsets.

If you want to win, you have to learn all three.

The reason all of those small/midsized/large creators are broke, is because they never mastered the funnels/offers side of the equation.

They get significant awareness, but are only capturing a fraction of the value.

Despite being known as one of the top voices on the content/traffic side, I actually have more passion and interest for funnels and offers.

This has become a secret obsession of mine of the last 3-6 months, as we completely rebuilt all of our funnels and offers in the Kallaway ecosystem.

Now, to make sure you get megavalue from this post, here’s a super tactical “funnel-based” reframe that will help change the way you think about content.

Every time I post a video, I see it as a vehicle for driving emails. That’s it.

I don’t care about the views. I don’t care about the engagement. All I care about is the conversion off that single video to email subs.

To be able to measure this, I need to do two things:

• Every single video must have a trackable call to action (I call these “value ramps” and run them as comment-to-DM flows via Manychat)

• I use conversions per video as the #1 guiding force for deciding which topics to double down on

Almost no one I follow in the content/personal branding space is thinking of content with this level of maniacal obsession towards conversion.

Most people bias towards generating traffic assume rising tides will lift all boats.

Maybe…but I’d prefer to know exactly which specific wave lifted which specific boat at which specific time.

This is super important because we’ve observed that views and conversions don't always move together.

In my first batch of 10 videos on my @kallawaymarketing account, the 3rd best performing video for views was by far the #1 performer for conversions.

If I was only watching the view count, I'd have completely missed that learning. That insight alone changed how I designed my next batch of content.

If you’re not attacking content with funnels in mind, you’re likely leaving a lot of your content strategy up to chance.

PS - If you want me to help you install my exact data-driven content system (content + funnels + offer, all driven by data), reply back with “system”