How to make money online, I guess… (Simple)

Hey Engineers,

Here’s a SIMPLE guide to building and monetising an audience online.

Let’s be honest, this whole thing has become wildly overcomplicated, so I like to strip things back to first principles in order to get clarity on what actually matters. I find when I simplify things, I get more clarity and they seem more achievable.

Really, you only need to do 3 things to build and monetise and audience online:

1. Attract new people into your audience (attention)

2. Build trust with that audience (trust)

3. Make them an offer (conversion)

Do each of these well and you have an infinite stream of opportunity (and cash).

Here’s how to do that + a visual to help.

1. Create attention

You can get in front of new people with outreach, ads or content.

Content is my favourite because it’s high leverage and free. But the other two still have their merits.

To do this with content, you should post widely targeted, engaging, sharable content.

You want to get as much engagement with your audience as possible. Challenge, inspire, enlighten, entertain.

It should appeal to your whole industry.

2. Build trust

You do this through targeted, educational content (as well as conversations in DMs and comments).

This content should appeal to your niche (more specific).

Appeal to goals and desires, pains and problems, fears and concerns.

Show why you’re worth listening to with results and stories.

3. Convert

Now you have a trusting audience, you need to provide an opportunity for them to buy from you (crazy how many people miss this).

Create hyper-targeted content for your ICP and offer to provide further help at the end of it.

Ultimately, that’s all you need.

Everything else - the tricks, the hacks, the psychology, is all bells and whistles that adds the final 20% on top.

But this right here is 80% of the battle.

The simplicity is beautiful.

Sam

ps. If you liked this, you’ll love my Skool community where I teach you how to use simple systems like these to make lots and lots of money from LinkedIn (without having to cringe or spam your network every day).

You can check it out and choose whether to join here.