336: Income vs Followers: What Matters More?

[00:00:00] Income versus followers. Which one is more important? Well, Let's talk about it, friends.

[00:00:11] Welcome to the Thrive Podcast, where we believe creators deserve more, more money, more freedom, and even more love for what they do. I'm Brie Pair, your coach for content creators. And I know the struggle, the long hours, the endless ideas, the feeling that success is just out of reach, but here's the truth.

[00:00:32] You've got what it takes. And this podcast, it's your shortcut to getting there from strategies that actually work to behind the scenes insights. We're unlocking your potential one episode at a time. So if you're ready to turn your creative hustle into a thriving business, let's get started. When you're comparing the two, it is like comparing apples and bananas, right?

[00:00:58] Of course we want more income, but of course we want more followers. The reason why I wanted to talk about this today. is because I was recently a guest inside of a, another coaching program. And I was talking to this group about what I'm going to be talking to you guys today, which is looking at where our time is going And how that is related to the income that we are seeing come into our bank account.

[00:01:29] And someone in the group was concerned about diverting their time because they were so focused about posting content and trying to grow their followers. And they were afraid of what might happen if they diverted their attention from that for a moment. And that really got me to thinking and really prompted me to want to have this conversation with you guys today.

[00:01:56] It is so easy for us to want to please the algorithm gods, whether that is Instagram, TikTok, Google, YouTube, right? There are platforms that we need to do certain things in order to see growth or I'll even just have our audience see our own content. The problem becomes when that becomes the focus of having more followers, more engagement, and more is not always better.

[00:02:34] Sometimes it is just more and where it can get us into trouble is if we cannot directly correlate income. To the more if we cannot directly show that we are going to make more money because we have a thousand more followers on Instagram. Now you may think, well, Brie, if I have more followers and I'm going to have more eyes in my content and I'm going to have more opportunity, a hundred percent.

[00:03:01] I'm right there with you, friend. The problem that I am having, though. Is that if you do not have things established now, with no matter how many followers, pageviews, subscribers you may have, if you do not have things optimized to increase your income, then having more, Right now is not going to help increase your income because if they come into your circle and you do not have things set up in a way for them to make a purchase, do a click, jump around on your website, watch multiple videos, engage with a brand partnership, or purchase something from your affiliate links, get on your email list.

[00:03:49] If we don't have those basic things set up, then you do need to evaluate. Why am I wanting more right now? Because I first need to optimize what I have. If you go and you look at my Instagram right now, and this episode is coming out in March, when you're hopefully going to see a little bit more activity over on my personal Instagram, at Brie Pear, if you want to follow.

[00:04:14] But I paused. On posting over there, one, because of a lack of time, and as I spoke about on other podcast episodes, meaning to make sure that I am diverting my energy into places that is going to have a direct result on income, and I did not have the systems and strategies completely set up for me to make it worth my time to invest In a platform like Instagram.

[00:04:44] So that is what I want to dive into today. Let's talk about some numbers. Let's talk about what it is going to take for you to increase your income, maybe to get to consistent 10k plus months. Let's find and fix what's holding you back. I have a guide to go along with this that is completely free. You can head to thrive together dot blog slash 10 K to download it yourself, which I really encourage you to do so.

[00:05:14] If increasing your income is important to you, you can also click the link in the description as always. What we want to look at is. Where is your money coming from? And so I want you to write down things like your different revenue streams, and I want you to write down the income, what a lot of this guide is going to help you walk through is analyzing where's your money coming from?

[00:05:42] How much time are you spending? on those things? And where do things need to be adjusted? Where is action needed? Are things feeling balanced? Does it make sense for you to be spending X, Y, Z amount of time on affiliates when a fraction of the time could make you More money. If you spent that time working on digital products, these are all examples, right?

[00:06:13] So that is the purpose of this. But the next step to this is really evaluating. Okay, I'm spending my time on creating content for these platforms. Maybe it's your blog, maybe it's Instagram, email list, YouTube, whatever it may be. How much time are you devoting to those platforms, to creating content for your audience, but also to engaging and to learning strategies to help you grow there?

[00:06:42] Is that correlating to income produced from there? Oftentimes when we stop and pause and really dive into. Where our money is coming from, where our time is being spent, do the income and the time percentages spent in those different areas make sense? Or are we spending too much of our time in an area that is not actually growing our income?

[00:07:10] And that is one of the hardest things to see. And it's also one of the hardest things to step back from and be real with yourself. Because yeah, you want more followers. Maybe you know, it is part of, it's okay to say that you want more followers. It's okay to say that like, yeah, you want to be a little famous on a social media platform.

[00:07:32] Like you have permission to do that. Claim it. However, if it's not producing more income for you, then it is just vanity. If it is not changing your life in a positive way by giving you more financial freedom, then what is it all for? What is the point? At that point, more is just more. The other part of this conversation that I feel like is so important is I've been on threads quite a bit lately, freaking loving it over there.

[00:08:06] I'm having so much fun and I'm in this like algorithm where it's like, yes, Brie wants to see all the content creators and chat about content creation and everything that has to go along with this industry. I love it. But one of the posts that came through a few weeks ago that I saw was somebody talking about, what are you doing until you hit a hundred thousand followers?

[00:08:31] Like, how are you investing time in it when you're not making any money yet? And fortunately, that thread blew up with people, including myself, commenting, oh honey, you should be making money far beyond you hitting 100, 000 followers on Instagram. But isn't that interesting? Isn't that something that maybe you have told yourself, Oh, I can't make money until I hit this many followers, this many page views, this many subscribers, I can't start charging.

[00:09:07] I can't start selling until I hit this amount, and that is simply not true. We've had so many podcast episodes where we've given example after example of how you can start making an income. When you first get started, when you have zero followers, all you need is a portfolio. All you need is your talent to offer and you can make money.

[00:09:33] Overwhelmed with your content biz, tired of doing everything yourself and still not seeing consistent income. Friend, it's time to shift shift is my high touch coaching program for bloggers and content creators ready to grow strategically, make more money, and finally find freedom in their business with weekly expert reviews, personalized feedback, and a community of driven creators.

[00:09:58] Shift gives you the support and tools you need to thrive. And it's a whole lot of fun inside, ready to take your business to the next level. Head to thrivetogether. blogslashshift to apply now.

[00:10:15] So if we're having mindset issues of, I need to have this many followers, I need to have this many subscribers, or I need to have a hundred thousand before I can make this amount of money, we can easily see why Brie likes to talk about mindset and in data. And how combined they have such a huge effect on your success in this industry.

[00:10:40] So let's go back to talking about a little bit of the data and what you're going to see in this free guide. So you want to look at where's your money coming from? What are those revenue streams? What is the income? And you're going to break it down for every single one. And then you're going to break it down into percentages.

[00:10:56] You're going to add up all the revenue streams to get your income. You're going to divide them by divide each revenue stream by the total income and multiply by a hundred. And that is going to get you a percentage of your income. So let's say, for example, you've got brand deals, affiliate income, and ad revenue as the three revenue streams that you currently have.

[00:11:21] Brand deals is making up 50%, affiliate income is making up 33%, and ad revenue is making up 17 percent after doing this calculation. Amazing. You're able to see all of that. What you want to do next. Is look at where is your time going? So if those are your three revenue streams, you then want to look at how much time am I spending on brand deals?

[00:11:44] How much time am I spending on affiliate income and how much time am I spending on ad revenue? And then you're going to compare, you're going to have, this is my income percentage. This is my time percentage for brand deals. Do the two make sense? Are they balanced? Yes or no. Is there an action needed after evaluating this and doing them for all of your revenue streams?

[00:12:11] So you're going to ask yourself things like, are you spending too much time on something that's not making money? Could you shift that time elsewhere? Do high income areas deserve more of your focus? Do any categories have a high income and low time? Because if so, that is a gold mine and That is showing your most profitable areas and perhaps a place where you should double down on these and grow them even further.

[00:12:39] And that was something that came up when I was in that group coaching call for some of the girls was like, Oh, wow, I'm making a lot of money here and I'm hardly spending any time. I'm not really giving it a ton of focus. Maybe it's because you've automated things or whatnot, but man, what would happen if you added just a few more hours to that?

[00:12:58] Could you increase that income stream even more? So once you've gathered all of that data, you really want to decide a few things. The first is to keep and grow it. That this content, this revenue stream is performing well and looking at how you can maximize it. You need to decide if you need to streamline and automate something.

[00:13:21] Could you reduce time spent without losing income? And the last thing is looking at, eh, is there something that needs a big adjustment or needs to be dropped? If it's not making enough, does it need a strategy change or should it be eliminated? The ultimate goal is that you're spending more time on what's profitable and sustainable while reducing efforts on the low return areas.

[00:13:46] So you can see how this conversation has so many layers of that mindset and the data combined and how when you stay, On that content creation, hamster wheel and stay almost in that scarcity, or maybe a little bit of fear based mindset of, I have to feed the beast. I have to keep producing content. I have to do this.

[00:14:10] If I pause for just a small period of time to focus on some of the CEO level activities, am I going to be in trouble? Is it going to get mad at me? And it's all my effort is going to be gone. Oh, friend, if that's you. I want to send you the biggest hug and tell you it's going to be okay and that is a scarcity mind thing.

[00:14:32] Let's actually talk about some of the biggest growth blocks real quick. One is the undervalued creator. Maybe you're undercharging and you're leaving money on the table to fix that. You need to raise your rates, right? We talk about this all the time. We talk about pricing. You guys can go and download the pricing guide to make sure that you're charging enough.

[00:14:51] You need to offer your packages strategically and stop saying yes to low paying work. If you are an overworked creator, which is. I feel like freaking all of us, right? And you may be stuck in that more content equals more money trap. But when you go and you stop and you do the data and you research this information with your own data, you're going to uncover so much that is going to help you streamline your systems, automate where possible and focus on those high impact tasks.

[00:15:21] Or the third growth block that we see a lot is the stagnant creator. You're creating, but you're not growing. And so to fix this, it looks like diversifying your income streams, doubling down on what works and refining your audience strategy. So we just need to find what is our biggest bottleneck. If you're undervaluing yourself, if you're overworked, if you're stagnant, not growing, we need to figure out what those bottlenecks are and then look at the strategy to change those.

[00:15:51] And I've got some tips. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I've got some tips in this, um, guide for you guys. It's on one of the last pages. Step five, fixing your biggest bottleneck, but this next step that we all need to take is really making a shift in what we're doing. I've talked before about how I'm the type of person that likes to just work really fast.

[00:16:13] I don't, I don't know what has created this mindset for me, but if I slow down, it feels like I'm doing something wrong or it feels like I'm not being as effective or I'm wasting time. And sometimes doing these little things like slowing down to evaluate my data or look at, Hey, why am I feeling this way?

[00:16:32] Or why am I thinking in this direction? Why do I feel like I need to be doing this? Who, who or what is telling me that? And is that valid? I often don't stop enough to do that, but man, when I do, it makes such a massive difference. In my business. And that's the ultimate goal where we're wanting to increase our income.

[00:16:55] We're wanting to increase our financial stability. We want to increase how much time we have to go and do the things that we love to live the life that we love. But if we don't slow down for a moment. And do the CEO tasks, put our CEO hat on, we really need to make an actual hat that says my CEO hat or just CEO, something purple or pink, right?

[00:17:22] Or black. I love me a good black hat. Anyways, I digress. If we don't take the moment to put that CEO hat on, how are we going to keep growing? How are we going to grow long term and this is a long term thing, right? I don't know about you, but my goal is to make a certain amount of money, be able to retire and then go.

[00:17:44] I personally want to go be a full time artist. That is like a little insight on Brie. I, I want to retire young and I want to retire young and be a full time artist. Go and do something completely different. What is your end goal? What does that look like for you? What is your living your best life? We only get one life.

[00:18:03] What does that look like? And does that require you to pause for a moment and to do the CEO work? There's a lot of mindset data heavy podcast, but I'm really excited to hear from you guys on this one. I would love your comments, either in the Facebook group or on this post on Instagram, and to really have some conversations with you guys about it.

[00:18:30] So leave me a message somewhere, tag me. And if you feel like, you know, I really want some personalized coaching with this. I need some strategy and freaking accountability to make it happen. Then we have two programs for you shift and bold fluence, just depending on where your income level is at right now.

[00:18:53] One of those, we've made sure that we have two programs that will fit everyone in our audience. So make sure you go and check those out. We'll leave the link in the description below. So go and download this workbook, the content creator's guide to consistent 10k plus months that it's going to help you find and fix, but holding you back thrive together.

[00:19:10] blog slash 10 K one zero K is going to get that into your inbox for you. And I'll see you guys back here as always in a few days with a new episode.

[00:19:26] If this episode helped you help us grow, leave a review, share it with a friend and tag us on social media. We can't wait to cheer you on.