Hey badass, I'd love to ask you, how many people do you think you need in your audience To make your first 100 year in your business. For a lot of people, they are imagining follower counts in the 30K, 50K, 100K, 200K. There's this commonly held belief that in order to make six figure income in your business, you need to have hundreds of thousands of followers and beyond.
It's really not the case. Of course, you need to have a community. You need to have some numbers. You need to have an audience. And I'm not going to lie to you and say it's easier with a small audience. Of course, if you have a large audience, it does help. It gives you options. It allows you to modify your business model so that you can go to lower ticket products if you want to, and do less client work and all of those things.
If that's something that appeals to you, however, you can absolutely hit your first hundred K in business with a small audience. You really don't need the numbers to be as large as you think in order to start making good money online. And in fact, to start making your first thousands and tens of thousands, especially if you're a side hustler.
It really doesn't have to be that many people following along now, of course, when it comes to audience size, I do think there is that kind of external perception of credibility and authority that comes with a large following. I think that when people follow badass careers and they see that I've got around 200, 000 followers, it validates their choice to follow me too.
It's okay. People trust her. She must know her staff. She's got a relatively large following. Let's get involved. Okay. So I'm not saying it doesn't make things easier and there aren't advantages, but you can absolutely start making money far earlier along in your journey.
[00:02:45] Real-Life Examples and Insights
For me personally, I had my first 30, 000 revenue month, eight months into my business.
And my Instagram following at that point in time was 3, 100 people. So that's a lot of human beings. That's a lot of people, but it's not hundreds of thousands of people either. And I made my first 100, 000 in accumulative revenue. Every single dollar that I had made to date added up to a hundred thousand dollars about ten months into my business and At that point I was at four thousand followers now I am NOT saying that you need four thousand followers to make a hundred thousand Dollars.
Some people have 400, 000 followers and can't make 100, 000 because their business model isn't attuned and they haven't been doing the work, the groundwork to understand who's in the audience or maybe the audience are full of people, but not their people, not aligned people, not people who are keen to work with them, who see them as their mentor, as their guide, as their authority.
You can also have people making a hundred thousand dollars with 400 followers. Again, it depends on things like your relationship with your followers, the alignment and intimacy found within your community in terms of how strongly people feel about the mission and your convictions and you as a personal brand and an educator.
And of course, your business model and your price point as well. I have been in masterminds and group coaching programs with a lot of different entrepreneurs. And typically the way that they do it and recruit you into these masterminds is usually by income level. Okay. So sometimes you have to have made 500 K per year to get in the room because it's about a mastermind about scaling to a million.
And so I'm often with industry peers. They're not necessarily career coaches, but they are coaches or course creators or educators. Who are round about my income level and yet I'll follow account varies dramatically. In fact, I'm often the one with one of the highest follow accounts and having hit that revenue number.
And it's really interesting because there are so many different ways to do. Business models, and it depends on how much you want to do the client work and fulfillment and delivery versus how much you want to be more hands off and sell passive products, self study courses, and that kind of thing as well.
So there are a lot of things that go into your business model and how heavily you want to focus on content and marketing versus the backend. Now, badass careers eventually transitioned over a period of four years from private coaching. To group coaching to self study courses and eventually just self study courses.
And that's a decision that I wanted to make so that I could build badass empires and spend a lot of time and energy and focus over here. So because of that, I was very much focused on marketing and content and audience size because I knew that as those prices started to drop, I was going to have.
Larger numbers and that audience size to keep hitting similar or larger revenue levels with a much more accessible price point in terms of my offers. Your business, depending on what you want to do with it may go through different phases. And of course, again, having a larger audience allows those decisions to be trialed out and for you to be more adaptable, but again, completely possible to be making your first tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars and beyond with what would be considered a small audience.
So I'm going to define that, let's say today as less than 5, 000 people.
[00:06:39] Defining Your Revenue Goals
So I'll share with you three things today that can increase your chances of being able to sustain yourself and make that money with a smaller audience. And these three things are sort of principles and ways of viewing your business model that are going to increase your chances of being able to reach those goals and those financial figures that you're gunning for, despite a smaller audience size in the hundreds or early thousands.
So firstly, I need you to do the math. I need you to figure out how many clients you need to have to meet your revenue goals for the year. And based on that, you may need to do some adjusting of your price point, because the thing is, if you have fewer people in your audience, Then, you may want to design your business model so that you only need to work with a handful of clients per month or per year, even, to meet your revenue goals.
So you've got a smaller audience, but you need less of them anyway to convert into clients. If you only need 20 clients per year, then it probably doesn't matter if your audience size is only 200 people right now, because out of 200 human beings, imagine a room filled with 200 people, and they've chosen to follow you for a reason.
There's no reason why you can't find 20 of those people who might want to work with you over the course of a year, over the course of building that trust in that relationship and having those conversations over a year. So you've got to figure out how many people you actually need to reach your revenue goals.
Now let's take the situation of being a kind of beginner coach. You're offering your first one to one private coaching offer. And because it is private coaching and it's more of your time and more of your energy investment, and you're really alongside them for the ride and keeping them accountable and all of those good things, you are able to charge higher price points.
Just say, you offer your very first, say, 8 10 week coaching program for about 1, 500 US dollars. If you wanted to make 100, 000 that year, 100, 000 divided into 1, 500 means you need about 67 clients that year. In order to hit that revenue goal, which means you need to land six clients per month and landing six clients per month.
You're going to want to make sure that you have enough of an existing audience base and or enough followers coming in fresh new audience and followers coming in per month to sustain that goal. But at the end of the day, it's just six human beings. Okay. So that would be quite a typical beginner coaching office, six clients per month that you're playing for.
And if you're thinking to yourself right now how could I ever charge 1500 us dollars? This is a whole separate topic, but essentially you make it that valuable. You make 1500 us dollars feel like a completely reasonable price point for the amount of value. That you're offering for the size of the transformation that you're walking people through and The way you're able to package and message it up in terms of saving them time, saving them money or making the money and saving them the heartache of figuring it out all by themself.
So if we take the Korea Glow Up, for example, because 1500 USD was exactly the price point I used when I launched the Korea Glow Up for the very first time. I was helping people to figure out what they wanted to do with their career, do all of their personal branding work, so resume, cover letter, LinkedIn, and attack the job market together, go through the interview process, negotiate their salary, and so on and so forth.
was saving them time in terms of having to figure all of that out by themselves. It could have taken them months, if not years, books, podcasts, journaling, meditation, trying to figure out what their purpose was. It was making the money because I was helping them to position themselves as a higher value hire and therefore negotiate better salaries and get pay raises.
And it was saving them that heartache of doing it alone, where you get into spirals of self doubt, you get stuck, you get frozen, and you just end up staying in that same job that you've been telling yourself for the past five years you were going to leave. Even just the pleasure of giving someone that space and that time to work on themselves alongside of you and give them those hours per week where they're finally taking action on something that they had promised themselves that they would do for months if not years.
That in and of itself is such a priceless feeling for people. So there are plenty of ways where you can design an offer that would easily be worth 1, 500 USD, 2, 000 USD, 3, 000 USD and beyond. Okay. That's not an issue. It is absolutely possible for you. So figure out your numbers. Now if you're a service provider and you more so want to do things like build websites for people, that is a much more comprehensive service that's done for you.
That means you probably need even fewer clients per year because your price point can go up much further. So if you are selling the service of building entrepreneurs, online digital CEOs like me, beautiful websites on Kajabi. Let's take that as an example and please someone do this because honestly, it's so hard to make a good looking website on Kajabi.
But just say you charge 7, 000 US dollars for that service. Cause it's more intensive, takes more time. And again, custom made done for you. That's actually pretty cheap. I think I paid about 14, 000 for mine. So 7, 000 USD for a beautiful website on Kajabi. Okay. If you want to make a hundred K per year, that means you only need 14 clients per year.
That's one client or maximum two clients per month. Or maybe it's two clients per month and then you give yourself a break of a few months every year, whatever it is, but 14 clients per year is what you're playing for. So obviously, if you only need 14 clients per year, then you need far fewer followers.
Then the beginner coach who needs 67 clients per year, because typically conversion rates tend to average out to be around about the same, no matter the price point until a certain point. So you want to do this math and maybe for you, you're not doing this full time and you're a side hustler and you just want to make an extra 30 grand this year as a side hustler.
That's amazing. Again, do the math. If you just want to make 30 K What does that represent in terms of clients for your estimated price point? And you can do a little bit of jigging. So you might say to yourself, look, I might not have the time as a side hustler to work with, say five people per month. So I'm going to raise the price from 1500 to 1750, and then I will work with.
X amount of clients per month. So just make sure you have a little bit of an idea of what it will actually take. this step is really important because most people are able to step back and have a look at those numbers and say, you know what, that is actually really possible for me. I don't need a following of hundreds of thousands of people because I can only take six clients per month anyway.
I'm a starter coach. I need to learn my art, my craft. I need to hone my methodology. I'm going to do this with private coaching to get started with. And I can't take more than everyone's different five clients per month, 10 clients per month anyway. So I don't need hundreds of thousands of people following me.
I only need enough to make that happen. And you'll see how much more tangible and realistic that feels. Now you've got your numbers in mind. You know what you're shooting for.
[00:14:49] Building a Strong Community
The next question on your mind is probably how many people do I need in my audience then if I know that I need six clients per month out of my audience, how many of those people are going to become paying clients per month, right?
And isn't that just the golden question? I don't have the answer for you and no one does. Don't believe them if they say that they do. However, I do know what influences it. And it will depend on your conversion power. And this is how you can have people making millions of dollars with 3000 followers on Instagram.
And you can have people making 20 grand a year with 300, 000 followers on Instagram. There are different types of audiences. There are different types of communities and there's a spectrum. And there are many different spectrums happening at once. But if we think about on one end, An account you follow.
They've got 500, 000 followers, but it's deeply impersonal. You don't really know who's running the account. Maybe it's a faceless brand or you've never taken the time to understand who this person is. They don't share anything. They never on stories. They put some interesting tips and tricks out there, or maybe some relatable quotes or some inspiring quotes that make you think, Oh, that's nice.
But they don't stay on your mind, right? They don't take up headspace. They don't take up real estate in your life. It's just an account that's maybe feels good to follow. It's a bit lukewarm in terms of how much it makes you feel. Compare this to a community of 1500 people where You all believe in the same kind of thing.
So maybe you suffer from endometriosis and in this community, it's about using really natural, healthy food based techniques to improve your nutrition and move your body and. Do whatever it takes to reduce that pain of endometriosis every month. But for you, it's really important to do that in a very natural way, using natural products and, working on your body, working on your mind, working on what you are putting into your system.
And it's a community around that topic. And it's all of these women who come together to support each other. So much empathy. It's a place you like to spend time and you have this mentor. You have the coach who is so aligned to the way you like to do life. You really relate to their personality, you enjoy the way that they share their information, and they call you out, and they make you think, and they inspire you, and they help you to take action, and you've implemented some of their tips, and they've already helped you.
Made you have really exciting results in your life. And so you keep coming back for more. And if you haven't checked them out in a while, you look them up proactively and you binge their content again, and you always enjoy spending time in that community. And you've gone so far as to send DMS to this person and voice notes to this person.
And maybe you've even gotten to know some other people in the community. Maybe they have a free community where you exchange with other people, or maybe you've. Take their mini course or their masterclass and you really do view them as an expert and you love their content and you love their stuff and you love the way that they think.
And this community is buzzing with this energy and these raving fans and it's almost like you found this really cool corner of the internet where you get it and they get it and these are your people. And so obviously when it comes to conversion rate, how many people in a certain audience will convert into paying customers who trust you and want to work with you and are willing to pay you big money to invest in themselves?
Yes, but invest in your program to do so out of the hundreds of solutions that they could choose from. It's much more likely to come out of a smaller, tight knit, intimate community, and if you can keep that energy and scale it up, then that's just million dollar business territory. But it comes from that energy, and you'll have more conversion power in That more connected space, that human space, that space where you feel seen that space that makes you feel.
And so if you can do that as the coach and you can make other people feel seen and you can offer your empathy and offer your listening and offer your understanding and offer those micro wins and those transformations and those solutions and those mindset shifts that help people. And I really appreciate you for it.
You're going to have obviously a lot more conversion power than a huge account. And this is why, I've met other career coaches in my space and they can have hundreds of thousands of followers and struggle to sell a 29 ebook on negotiation. Whereas, as I said, I had my first. 30, 000 a month with just 3, 000 followers.
And it's because I had done so much work connecting with people and building that empathy and that storytelling and that movement behind Badass Careers. What influences this conversion power? It comes down to things like the content you make, so not just generic tips and information, but authority content.
So using storytelling, sharing your experiences, yes, giving them tips and advice, but through stories that illustrate that you've been there, done that, or your clients have been there, done that, or that your methodology works. You want to be busting myths. You want to be explaining your convictions and opinions and helping them to understand why there's a better way and why you can reject the status quo way of doing things because your way is going to get them results faster.
It's all of that stuff that creates more of a movement. It's more so around the mission, the values, the convictions that make people feel like they're in a space where they feel seen and understood. And they want to join your mission and your movement compared to the generic status quo way of doing things.
And then in terms of the content you make as well, it's really important not to stay at the level of superficial content that gets a lot of views, but doesn't get a lot of engagement, doesn't make people feel anything. Instead of constantly putting out videos like three hacks to get more reach on Instagram, it's important that you create content around things like this is why Instagram hacks won't do shit for you long term and strategic messaging will.
It's maybe less easy and less consumable and less light and relatable at that sort of superficial level, but it actually gets people thinking. So the kind of content you make is important. It's also really important how you treat your existing audience. When people say to me, I only have 500 followers, how would you feel standing At the front of a lecture theater right now and having 500 people looking at you and every single day for free.
Thanks to social media, you get to educate these people. You get to speak to these people. You get to inspire these people. 500 people is a lot of people. And I want to know, are you treating your people that are already with you already following you? Are you treating them like gold? Are you voice noting them?
Are you getting to know them? Are you sending them messages asking who they are? They're going through right now, where they're at on their journey. How can you help them? What kind of content would they like to see? Are you responding to every single comment? Because I can tell you, for years on Badass Careers, that was my standard that I would reply to every single comment and every single DM.
And while I may have a few that slip through the cracks these days, at around that 200, 000 follower mark, I'm still pretty good. I'm still responding to at least, it's my team now as well, but at least 90 percent of them. Are you showing up on stories? every single day When you're starting out it'd be really good to take five minutes a day for your existing community and talk to them and connect with them it doesn't have to take much just five minutes a day to connect with your humans who are already there and Already showing an interest in you.
Are you going live to them from time to time? running free trainings for them running workshops for them Are you giving to them and being generous to them and adding a lot of value to their life to show that they're so appreciated for being here? Because those 500 people are going to be much more likely to convert, or at least 10, 20 of them to convert, compared to always chasing new people, fresh people, absolute strangers who haven't even started to consume your messaging and your content and understand what you're all about yet.
So why is there that huge priority on more, more, when. You haven't necessarily even started a conversation with the people you already have. And another thing that will really help with that conversion power is putting a nurturing system in place that's automated so that you have a system that's constantly working for you.
In the background so that by the time you do pitch your offer or launch your offer and you put it in front of them, people are already problem aware, they've been educated, they've had the mindset shifts that they get it and it's an easy yes for them. So do you have your things in place, your strategic lead magnets, your email list?
Your DM automation, whatever it is, do you have your structures, your nurturing systems in place that are working for you so that it's adding to the value that you're already giving them in real time through stories, through content and all of that good stuff. And this is why starting your business from absolute scratch as a side hustler is a really good thing because.
It can take time for these relationships to build up. I was selling cheap coaching packages and, CV and cover letter and job interview packages and things like that on my website for a while for the first six months of my business. But I didn't actually launch The Career Globe and have that first 30K month until I was eight months into my business.
And so I'm not saying that it needed to have taken eight months because I learned so much and I could have achieved that a lot sooner, but I am saying that's a decent amount of time where yes, I was making sales and I was able to pay my bills and get some money in the door. Thanks to the other stuff that I was selling on my website, like a little bit here and there, but over time, it took me months on Instagram to get to know people, to refine my messaging and badass careers was a side hustle to begin with, because.
I was also working on my personal YouTube channel, not even French. And I was consulting for L'Oreal as well, and I needed that income. Badass Careers was something I was only able to work on part time anyway. Sometimes it's good that it takes time until you are able to launch that offer to them.
Because remember, these are real people with real problems and real priorities, and they've got busy lives and they've got things going on. So it takes time to be exposed to them enough and connect with them enough and respond to those comments and message them and get to know them. It does take time, but it's so worth it.
So those are just some tips for increasing that conversion power of your audience. I suppose if I had to put a number on it, I would say that you can expect, at any one time about 2%, 2 to 5%, I would say of your audience, this would just be very generic numbers, but typically. To convert into clients and then maybe around 10 percent of your email list numbers as well.
So you want to make sure that you're always building that email list. You're treating your audience like gold and means that if you need five clients per month. If you have a hundred people in your audience, you can probably find your first five clients, and then you might want to concentrate on growing at a rate of about a hundred new followers per month, if possible, to keep up that conversion rate and, or treat your existing followers like absolute gold so that your conversion power can increase beyond, industry averages.
Now, I hate putting numbers and conversion percentages on things like that because industry benchmarks are general. What do they even mean? Who knows how special and unique your niche is? Who knows how rare your education style is? there are so many things that you can do to exceed the average.
If you forced me into a corner and you absolutely made me share with you a conversion rate kind of percentage or what to expect. Yeah, I guess I would say about two to 5 percent of your audience at any one time would be ready and willing to buy right now. Again, it doesn't always have to be fresh people coming in as well, because maybe next month the people who weren't ready last time are ready this time.
Again, it's an art and a science, right? It's not ever going to be exact, In terms of expectation management, I'd anchor my expectations around that.
[00:28:42] Creating Irresistible Offers
And the third thing that you can do to make sure you're making big sales, even if you have a tiny audience is concentrate on making the offer. So your course, your program, your coaching offer, whatever it is.
Making it so sexy, such a no brainer offer for your audience. And the key to this is something that so few people do. It's designing and building something that they want, not something that you want to sell. Of course it has to be something that you want to sell, but I'm assuming that you wouldn't have built an audience up around your niche if you weren't passionate and excited about your niche, right?
But listen to people, understand where they're at, understand what they want and use that intel to build your offer and custom make it for them. Don't just pull it out of your brain and get inspired and draw it out and say, that would be really cool. I think. You can design it out, but I want you to talk to people and see if it's actually something that would solve their problems.
If it's something that would excite them, if it's something that they would be interested in and co design it with them, co design it with your community based on the questions they ask you, the conversations you're having, the market research you're doing, just make sure it's something that your audience in the market actually wants.
And make sure that it's rare, right? If you're going to have an account, that's based around growing on social media, please don't just put out another course on, accelerate your Instagram audience growth. There's 20 teaching modules and five cheat sheets and three swipe files. And it's 499.
Everyone's doing that. How are you making your offer? Rare, different, unique. What's your angle? What's your edge? Is it around the methodology? Is it about the way you teach and get them into action? Is it the way that you're rejecting the status quo and experimenting with a whole new way that's getting really exciting results?
Is it the only course on the internet right now that uses nutrition, for example, or I don't know, protein or whatever it is to help relieve the symptoms of endometriosis. Do you have some kind of unique way of getting the results? So you've got to make sure that you're It's exciting and new and fresh, and you do this by custom building it for your audience and doing that deep social listening and using their words and their language, that sticky language to sell it.
So instead of saying, I get it, you're burnt out by my anti burnout course. You're going to use their language when you're having conversations with them and someone says to you I feel like my work is Stealing everything from me. It's stealing from my life. It's borrowing from my life. It takes my energy It takes away from my relationship.
It takes away from my health. It's stealing everything from me and they say that Instead of saying, I feel burnt out today, right? It's about using that language and messaging and packaging up this offer in a way that's not only going to get them results in the areas that they want to get results in, but when you're explaining what it is and how it works, they feel so seen and they realize that there is nothing else on the market quite like your offer.
So that's another really tangible way that you can make a lot more money with a small audience. Thanks. So to recap, making more money with a small audience, get really clear on your numbers and what you're shooting for. It will help you to position how large of an audience size you actually need. And it's often a lot smaller than you realize, increase your conversion power, really love on the people you already have and nurture them.
And I'm sure that a bigger proportion of those people will become paying clients because they know and trust you. And design, co design with them a really sexy no brainer offer that they actually want. Badass.
[00:33:07] Conclusion and Next Steps
I hope that you are seeing how possible this is for you now, even with a small audience.
I hope you can understand that It is possible for you to make great money with fewer people in your audience. And it's actually a really exciting and beautiful phase of business. It's a phase of business that I genuinely miss in so many ways. Because it is simpler, it's less complex, and it teaches you to be a fantastic empathy driven, human centered entrepreneur who cares about people while building up your skills, your confidence, and teaching you so many valuable lessons so that if you can make sales with a small audience, it's going to be so easy getting it done with a large audience.
Now, I would love to hear from you. Please send me a message over on Instagram and let me know what is one concrete action that you are taking today in service of perhaps your tiny audience, your small audience. And how are you going to increase your conversion power and love on your people when they come into your world?
Let's have a chat about that. And even if you have a much bigger audience, you can learn from this. How are you going to love on your people today and treat them like absolute gold? Because we never want to lose touch. That every single follower represents a human being who you could probably help in some way.
You can educate them, you can inspire them, you can work with them, you can hold them accountable to their dreams and help them reach their goals, get results. These are real people and they need you. Keep taking that bold action badass. Keep building that empire of yours. Don't let things like follow account, audience size, discourage you from the insane amount of impact you could be making.
There are no rules in this game. We are here to play big, so keep playing big and we'll keep having this conversation next week in a brand new episode on a brand new topic, building your empire. One week at a time. So until then stay badass. And we will talk very soon. A shit ton of income, crazy impact, a business that you adore.
Just by listening to this episode, you will one step closer to your very own badass empire. Now I want to hear from you. Tag me in your stories or send me a DM over on Instagram so I can learn what resonated with you most. Oh, and if you're the kind of badass who is willing to help us out big time and take a few minutes to write and review this Make sure you send us a screenshot of that review at helloatbadassempires.
com so I can send you a juicy freebie to say thank you. Until next time, keep showing up for your future and we'll keep smashing goals in the next episode.
