Why launching your own products increases the number of your followers

July 8, 2021July 8, 2021 by Christian Kläs

How you can get more followers with your own products and become financially independent at the same time

Whether you are blogging, podcasting, or creating content on social media. Short-term monetisation of your content will depend considerably on your reach and your followers’ engagement. But regardless of your reach, the right offer and the right mix of products or services can lay the foundation for a sustainable, long-term revenue stream while you keep building your audience.

It does not really matter if you are selling an online course, a customised t-shirt, or a beauty set. You must provide something that creates and delivers value to your customer or your community.

Why you should avoid becoming too dependent on centralised platforms like YouTube or Instagram

SocialMedia_Calculator — https://lickd.co/blog/social-salary-calculator

Your reach dictates your value and hence your monetisation options. This is particularly more true if you earn your money primarily on

a centralised platform. Income opportunities may vary depending on the platform, your niche, and the kinds of brands you work with. In any case, your reach remains your currency. (for more info on this, I recommend trying the social media income calculator, a playful tool that tells you how many views and followers you need to give up your day job.)

Platforms benefit from your content to generate their own earnings. You and the platform win. But you could win so much more…

It’s about time that you leverage the actual financial value of your content as well as the true potential of your community for yourself.

Whether you are a blogger or an influencer: use your reach to launch your own products

Many of your followers are fans: and fans want to be close to their idol. The product establishes the link between the idol and the fan.

The basic idea behind influencer marketing is that brands pay you because they assume that their products are more likely to be bought by your followers simply because you recommend them. There is plenty of empirical evidence that Influencer marketing works. The same principles apply to brands paying for guest articles or banners appearing on your blog.

“Word of Mouth” existed long before marketing did.

What works with other manufacturers’ products works even more with your own products. Your reach will help you just as much to market your own products.

Own products even without much reach? How do I prepare a good product?

Whether you already have many or just a few followers, readers or listeners, you can create a successful product even without a broad reach.

Whatever you create or develop, It is essential that your product fits your central message and simultaneously satisfies a need or solves a problem for the buyer.

Whether your community is large or small, focus on them when choosing the right product and deliver both the quality and price your followers expect.

Here are a few basic principles to consider when it comes to product development:

Problem recognised, problem solved

Your product should be desired. A desired product solves a problem or satisfies a need that the buyer has. But how do you know what the problem (or need) of your buyer actually is? Check out my blog article How to start your next project with success in which I have addressed the principles and tactics of truly understanding problems that are worth solving. Key take: talk and listen attentively to your potential customers and shy away from assumptions. If you have a real problem that you can solve, you have achieved the first major milestone.

Creativity: Become your own child

Finding the solution to the problem. There are no limits to your creativity here. Creativity thrives when breaking down boundaries. We adults often find this process difficult. We don’t manage well to free ourselves from assumptions and give ourselves the space we need. My tip: Watch the kids in your surroundings and try to think as they act. As Pablo Picasso once put it: “I could draw like Raphael at an early age, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw again like a child.”

Once you have passed this step, check with your potential customers whether your solution appeals to them.

Profitability – Time to hit the numbers; otherwise, it will be expensive.

After the creative process, it’s right back to reality. Apart from the necessary positive feedback from potential buyers, you should become clear about whether your idea is also economically viable. How much will the project cost you? How much can you charge? How much do you have to sell to make a profit? Is the market big enough? Be honest with yourself. Fooling ourselves is human but can quickly become expensive.

Is it doable? – it’s never been easier to create and launch a product than it is today

It has never been easier to create a product. But you should be clear about the tools and suppliers you want to work with as well as about the potential pitfalls. How do you create your product? Which shop do you want to use? How to ensure that your product reaches the right customers?

I’m not saying that’s all there is to it. A successful marketing and brand strategy are additional components of a successful product. But for the conceptual design, these points clearly are fundamental elements you should rely on.

Satisfied customers pay, come back again and again, and recommend you

A product is successful when it sells well and when you gain and keep happy customers.

The product or service must create value. Your customers will return the value in the form of money. But they will also recommend your product to others and, if satisfied, will come back again and again.

Being recommended is a value in itself as it creates new sources of income without additional marketing efforts and can easily exponentiate if the third person recommends your product yet again to someone else. If you want to dig deeper into this topic, I recommend reading The Customer Factory Manifesto by one of my favourite authors, Ash Maurya.

Use your product to increase your reach

There is no denying that an extensive reach can strongly influence the success and sales of your own product. But with excellent positioning, and if you are addressing a real need or desire, chances for success are great. – regardless of the size of your community. With the right strategy, great products sell even without much reach.

The whole thing can even have a reverse effect: new, successful products are an extra source of income: But they also help you increase your own reach and favour the growth of the number of followers, as long as the product fits your core message.

Take a typical merchandise sales cycle: one of your followers buys your custom-designed t-shirt and starts wearing it. Not a standard off-the-shelf product, his or her friends will want to know what brand is behind the shirt. By wearing your shirt, your followers not only promote your product but your entire personal brand. At least five of the friends will look you up on social media, initially triggered by the shirt.
One of the friends buys your shirt and starts wearing it “offline”, and the process repeats itself.
Four of the friends may not buy the shirt, but they are on your page, consuming your “online content”, and are likely to turn into new followers.

Your “offline” product increases your “online” reach.

The regular income – products – loop

A good product will give you an additional source of income. Should you manage to link the consumption of your product to a specific contract period, you will even generate a regular income out of the product.

Hence, a good product can have a direct growth impact on your reach. The thus increased reach and the income from your first product enable you to launch new products and distribute them together with your existing products. Each new market launch then becomes easier. You create the security of sustainable monthly income thanks to a variety of revenue streams.

What are you waiting for?

You don’t have to wait until you become the top influencer in your niche. Start developing your products now. Each market launch becomes more seamless.

Conditions have never been better for creating and launching new products or services. As a content creator, you are in an unequally advantageous situation. Not only can you leverage your own expertise, but you have an entire community that can help you during the process. Thanks to your community, you already have the most competent and loyal customers and brand ambassadors one can imagine.

How to successfully launch your next project

July 6, 2021March 5, 2021 by Christian Kläs

You want to offer a new course, launch a new clothing line, or bring something new to the market?

If so, the following article will hopefully save you from making the same mistakes I did in the beginning. At the start of an idea, you usually feel like you’re on cloud 9, just like you’re in love. When I quit my corporate career, I was eager to finally devote myself to my own new projects. What I didn’t know was how to properly start them. It was painful….

However, YOU have a distinct competitive advantage. You’re on social media and may even run your own blog. You have your theme and your community. You also generally know what works and what doesn’t. Nobody knows your people better than you!

Still, all of us repeat this one mistake when starting something new. We focus on our idea and what we want to build. It’s inside us. We LOVE what we do. We are completely infatuated with our own idea of how things should be one day. And that’s a good thing, because if we didn’t, how could we possibly be motivated to do our thing?

The following are principles that I have tried out myself and are based on “Lean Startup” principles. In this context, I’d like to particularly recommend the book „Running Lean“ by Ash Maurya to you, an excellent guide that has helped me get on track. You should also check out his excellent blog. There, you will also find the example of the artist below. His work saved me a ton of time while figuring out what works and what isn’t.

Is my new idea really that good?

Starting something new means, by its very nature, taking a risk. Most endeavors fail because you offer something that not enough people want to buy. Unfortunately, by the time you realize it, you’ve invested time, money, and effort into, say, writing your new book, branding your collection, or creating your workshop. The fact is: If it’s not bought enough, your effort was (partly) wasted.

We often act like artists. We think that, by the time we’re ready, others will also see what amazing thing we’ve been planning all along. Unfortunately, that only works out in the fewest cases. An artist doesn’t know beforehand whether they are painting the next “Mona Lisa.” And they certainly cannot plan it. Statistics show that most products fail. Unfortunately, often it doesn’t even matter how great your new book is.

You don’t have to invest much unless you are certain that your idea is going to turn out to be “it.” You can actually minimize the risks before starting to build if you keep a few things in mind.

Time is more valuable than money – set yourself free!

If you look at your bank statements from the past six months, you can see that sometimes you had more and sometimes had less money. Time, on the other hand, trickles away like sand in an hourglass. It’s not worthwhile to invest a lot of time in something and save money at the same time. In reality, you should try to generate income as fast as possible and grow it. Each project requires only a few core tasks that are really important for your subsequent successes. Focus only on those. Core tasks that need to be done, but not necessarily by you, you should delegate to cheaper online tools or external consultants. You don’t save money if you do everything yourself. Focus on what will keep you moving. Your time is a precious treasure. Many things aren’t important anyway. You can simply ignore them.

Minimize your risks. What good is the most beautiful house if it is built on sand?

If you want to minimize your risks, you should tackle them right at the start. If you can’t minimize them right at the outset, pause and reevaluate. Imagine you’re building a house. If the foundation isn’t suitable for building one there, simply don’t even start constructing in that place. The ground surely won’t change itself overtime time. It’s similar to a product. Before you waste time, money, or other resources, you should collect evidence that enough people will buy your product or service. It’s better to test that right away, not only after writing your book or building your house on sand. The greatest risk is always like the weakest link in a chain. The chain is known to break at its weakest link.

If you can’t manage to get these risks out of the way, you just have to change your plan. Nothing is lost! Think about whether you can find another plot of land to build your house. Anything is still possible! You have avoided making a huge mistake.

Your competitive advantage: You have a community. Use it!!! But beware of traps!

Many are jealous of your starting conditions! You have expert knowledge, a niche, and all attention is on you. Many can only dream of that. If it wasn’t so, no one would follow you on social media, listen to your podcast, or read your blog. Plus, you already have an idea about what works and how it works. Your community will not only help you in promoting you and recommending you and your product. They will also support you with your project—man, how I would have loved to have had that when I first started. Talk to your community and find out if and to what extent your project will be met with positive feedback.

But beware of the following trap: Don’t rely on group discussions, nor on surveys!

Group discussions, clubs, and workshops are excellent. You can achieve and learn much more together! But a group is inevitably prone to thinking like a pack. This can even start with two people. Look at the show “Come Dine With Me” for example, You often see that the second person, who really liked the beefsteak, doesn’t dare to give a great verdict after listening to her neighbor’s damning verdict first. Her verdict will be influenced by the previous statement. She will say something like. “My steak was quite good, but I also think that it has been served too cold.” Avoid group thinking!

In one-on-one meetings, we also tend to tell well-intentioned lies, either because we don’t want to offend our counterpart or because we don’t devote enough time to the topic of our conversation. How often have you heard in your circle of friends statements like, “Hey, your idea is terrible. It won’t work out that way.“? Often, we, as humans, want to support others simply because we like them. We just politely nod along.

Therefore, dig deeper when you talk to your people! Your goal is not positive feedback but to learn.

„Love the Problem, not your Solution” (Ash Maurya)

First, ask your people about specific problems you need to solve. Your idea of a solution should stay in the background for now. It’s best to have already formulated problems and ask about them one by one. Why? Now you can clearly see how people react to your theories. After a few conversations, you can then adjust the “problems.” You can always talk about other problems in more detail afterward. Your goal is to find the problem that people respond to. You should pay attention to what group of people give you the most positive signals. You should have that group in your mind when you make your plan a reality. And of course, you should ask everyone how they would solve today’s problem. Can you compete with the solutions they are currently using?

Stay alert, stay alive! You’re done with these conversations when you notice that everyone is just nodding their heads frantically when you ask them about their problems, and when you’ve identified the group, that tells you, “Yeah, it’s the same with me!”

Do I continue? Set clear, measurable criteria for success.

If you put your time and money into something, you should get something out of it. It could be that you don’t want to make money with your project but that you just want to make a difference. Cool! It can be that you want to earn money. Also cool! Maybe you even wish to achieve both: Even better!

So, set clear criteria for success for yourself. How do you imagine your project in five years? And how many readers, buyers, participants for a class do you need for it to be worth starting? Start selling even before you start building your solution. Make your people an offer they can’t refuse. Only when you have reached the minimum number of interested people, you know that your project is ready to go.

As I said, the abovementioned principles are proven “Lean Startup” principles. I want to recommend the book Running Lean by Ash Maurya and/or his blog once again. This is not an affiliate link but a genuine tip for a great book! His work has helped me to make sense of it all.

Do you have a new project? Are you also like me, in that it is challenging to start something new? Let me know how you are doing.