You saw some influencer with a ring light on Instagram explain your field to two million people.
The advice wasn’t bad. It was OK. They were just confident and had a clever hook.
You thought to yourself:
“They don’t know anything I don’t know. Actually, I know more than them.”
Not in an arrogant way either. You … just … actually know more.
You’ve felt this way for a while. That you could take your knowledge online, create content about it, and build a parallel career on top of the profession you already built.
But Instagram feels fake and performative. You don’t want to jam your life story into a 3-second hook and dance on camera to get views.
You found the answer in writing.
Not posting content, but writing essays and nuanced takes on the stuff you lived/
You’re posting now.
Figuring it out as you go.
Some land, some don’t.
But you’ve noticed the ones that land are the ones only you could have written — the case that went sideways, the thing they don’t teach you, the pattern you’ve watched four hundred times that nobody’s bothered to name.
You get the sense that if you keep writing and publishing, you have a real shot at doing this online thing. It feels different than the other times where you tried to post on social, tried to build an email list, and tried to do ‘all of the things.’
That instinct is correct. And your timing is better than you know.
I’ve noticed a quiet shift happening.
A creator economy that used to be dominated by surface-level influencers is making space for thoughtful professionals who are coming online to give their thoughts a place to live, get visible, and build online versions of what they’ve been building in the background.
It’s making space for someone like you. This isn’t just my opinion either. There’s real data on this.
Goldman Sachs projects the creator economy will roughly double from $250 billion in 2023 to $480 billion by 2027
My prediction: the people who will dominate this era and collect most of the cash are the professionals and practitioners who focus on depth over hype.
See, depth can’t be faked. Anyone can write a clever hook, but only a veteran can document what they’ve done.
You didn’t spend the last 10 years building a personal brand.
You spent the last 10 years building.
You’ve decided to take what you’ve done offline and turn it into a portfolio business that helps you get the money, meaning, and freedom you deserve.
This is the perfect window for someone like you to build.
When I open up my Substack app and scroll down the feed, I don’t see 21-year-old life coaches.
I see a metabolic food scientist with 6,700 subscribers waxing poetic about the 200,000 nerve endings in your feet.
A performance coach sharing insights from working with professionals at Fortune 500 companies, with 10+ years on Wall Street.
A Silicon Valley therapist describing how your nervous system reacts to ascending the career ladder.
These aren’t people regurgitating advice they heard elsewhere. These are skilled professionals and experts with proven track records who finally decided to take their decade(s) of lived experience online.
Not only are people paying attention to them, but they’re actually paying them. I’ve paid for coaching and consulting from experts I’ve found online. Not because they had clever hooks, but because I had real problems that I needed a real practitioner to help me solve.
More people are starting to feel this way. They reward depth, experience, and actual perspective. They don’t want the perfect coach who pretends to have all the answers. They want insights from a real human with scars who shares the answers they’ve accumulated over a decade.
Audiences are leaning in and paying attention. Professionals and experts are coming out of the woodwork to write online and build businesses at a pace I’ve never seen in my decade of being in this space.
The question is why?
One of my clients got laid off recently. But he wasn’t panicked. Actually, he was heading out for a three-week vacation in Europe with his family.
Multiple clients decided to pay him in advance for August because he only works with a select number of clients. His offer has been sold out for the past six months straight.
He started building this career insurance policy a few years ago by building his catalog on Substack and LinkedIn.
He went on to build an entire portfolio of products, from Maven courses to 1-on-1 coaching, until he found a winning product with a custom portfolio service.
He was quietly stacking away $10,000 per month on top of his six-figure job. By the time he got the notice from his company, he already had a parallel income stream in place.
A portfolio career has gone from being a nice-to-have option to an insurance policy for your future, especially for those in midlife who are being restructured out of the market and not let back in due to ageism.
Some want to abandon corporate altogether as a whole because it feels pointless — the job that’s time-consuming but completely meaningless, well-paid but completely useless some days, where everyone knows, and nobody says anything because they’ve got mortgages to pay.
Corporations will exist indefinitely into the future, thousands of people are getting hired every day; people are getting promotions and climbing up the ladder just fine, but for a certain sector of the population, they’re just done playing the game.
“I want to build something online outside of my practice. Not therapy. Something more.”
She likes her practice. She enjoys seeing patients, but there are confines to her profession.
There are other ideas she is not only fascinated by, but believes are just as useful as traditional psychotherapy. Manifestation through subconscious programming, esoteric spiritual practices, Zen Buddhism rituals — stuff that’s almost considered mysticism, but it’s not.
She realizes we are not just humans with brains, but people with minds and souls.
This so-called woo-woo stuff is actually science operating at a deeper and more interconnected level than the literature accounts for. When she sees a patient in her practice, she has to leave this aspect of her advice out and leave out an aspect of herself.
She can only make so much per hour because her rates are capped by insurance billing, and she has to be there seeing patients all day to make a living. So she’s decided to start writing these nuanced takes online and build a business that’s bigger than the confines of her practice or hourly rate.
This is a client example that matches a situation a lot of traditional practitioners with extracurricular knowledge find themselves in.
There’s a conversation happening in your field. You want to be a part of it, share the insights you’ve earned, and get paid well to do it. You also want to be able to have a business that doesn’t have to fit inside the neat container your traditional discipline constrains you to. Something new, different, revolutionary even.
And then there’s scale. One of my clients went from having to see one-on-one patients all day to building a psychology school with dozens of clients she only met with once a week on group calls.
She doubled the money she made at her practice while working fewer hours to serve her clients. This is what life can look like when you package your decades of knowledge and turn it into digital real estate that pays you at scale.
She’d been making six figures a year as a coach, with 100+ successful clients, a decade of experience, and a proven track record. But something changed in the last 18 months. Nearly 100 percent of her clients came from referrals and word of mouth, but the referral well dried up.
Nothing changed about her marketing. What changed is the market.
I asked her if she knew where her next client would come from. She said no. So we went to work and started building a marketing system that didn’t rely on the kindness of strangers — posting client-attracting writing, running campaigns, learning how to engage with her audience and turn them into buyers.
A lot of existing coaches, who didn’t really need to spend much time online to get clients, are building personal brands because they need a way to create demand, especially when there is more competition and the market sophistication is higher.
Buying behavior is different now. People want to feel you out before they work with you. They’re going to look you up, read your work, watch your YouTube videos, and understand your philosophy before they pull out their wallets. Having a web of influence in the form of information people can consume gives you a competitive advantage.
Also, some coaches who’ve been quietly building offline are building online now because they just have . . . a lot to say. If you’ve spent a decade quietly working with clients in the background, there’s just a deep well of stories and insights begging to be shared.
People are coming from different entry points, but they’re all ending up in the same place, in front of a blank page with decades of things to say and skills they’re figuring out how to package and sell.
The personal brand coaches aren’t dominating the market as they used to, thanks to the age of the microauthority — a solo operator with a tiny empire based on niche knowledge that people are seeking out more often now.
You are sitting on a decade of stories, insights, and knowledge that feels obvious to you but that others find mind-blowing.
You don’t need to become a content creator or a professional writer to make this work.
You just need to be you, but packaged properly. in order for you to take advantage of this $500 billion opportunity, the one thing that you need to figure out, the one thing that you need to do, is solve the packaging problem.
The main thing that I see with a lot of experienced professionals is that they have a large body of knowledge.
They’re good at getting the information out there.
The information they have has depth and nuance, but there’s packaging in what they’re writing that needs a little bit of help and polishing, especially the way that we’re talking about what they do.
The first thing is you want to be able to clearly articulate exactly how you can help people in a way that’s easy for them to understand and buy.
Most practitioners and experts know a lot, which means they have a lot of jargon and a lot of insider terminology, but the customers, the people they’re trying to help, are normal everyday folks.
This means they have to translate from that academic style to a more colloquial style that’s meeting people where they’re at.
Instead of talking about your insights and your terms, talk about your potential customer or buyer’s problems.
Instead of talking about your methods, talk about their symptoms.
Instead of talking about your big body of knowledge, talk about the moments that your readers find themselves in their lives so that they will want to reach out and pay you.
Learn how to package your knowledge into offers. Nobody buys coaching, and nobody buys expertise.
They buy a solution to a problem. Saying, “I’ll give you one-on-one calls for career coaching,” is different from saying, “In the next six months, we’re going to find you a $150K data analyst job or work for free until you do.”
Phase one: we’re going to get you from being invisible to recruiters to having recruiters calling you.
Phase two: we’re going to get you from a lack of energy and confidence to walking into an interview calm and confident.
Phase three: We’re going to get you from not passing through rounds to accepting the final offer. That’s an example of how you take what you know is structured into an offer.
The last thing you need is a way to turn that attention into cash. The way that makes the most sense is having conversations with potential clients.
The biggest thing that is going to hold back most otherwise skilled practitioners is the fact that they think that their skills alone are going to be enough to get them clients and build their portfolio of careers.
That’s not true.
You took 10 years to get good at the skill of knowing what you do, but the skill of talking about what you do, promoting what you do, reaching out to people, and creating conversations to create cash is the final skill that you need to turn this all into a profitable business.
Related reading to help you implement at a deeper level:
I’m looking to help a small handful of experienced professionals and experts add an extra $5,000-$10,000 per month over the next 8 months by packaging their knowledge into a buyable offer, writing articles that attract clients, and creating connections with readers that turn to cash.
The next step? Book a 15-minute $10K roadmap game plan call below:
Book Your $10K Roadmap Call Here
We’ll brainstorm your next 3 moves to hit $10,000/mo, and I’ll tell you whether or not I think you can hit the mark in the timeframe.
If I can’t, you’ll walk away with a game plan, and I’ll point you in the right direction. If I can, I’ll explain the next steps in detail.
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