By Ty Ward, Founder of the Advocate Accelerator
KEY #1: THE AUTHORPRENEUR MENTALITY
(This is article #2 in a 6-part series. Start from the beginning here. Or Watch, Listen or Download the entire series here.)
The mentality of a thought-leader is a beautiful thing. It is what got you to where you are today! However, building a sustainable business around your writing demands an entirely different mentality — an entrepreneurial mentality.
I’ve seen this mentality be a linchpin of success for authors, time and time again. I’ve also seen the its absence be the greatest limitation of growth.
Cultivating this mentality within your approach online starts with a subtle and surprisingly vital shift from:
An author creating a brand online...
To an entrepreneur building a business online.
Early on in my journey as an author, I believed that creating an audience and brand online was synonymous with building a sustainable career.
Yeah, I was wrong.
After reading a book on tribe-building, I published a blog every week for over a year. I somehow acquired between 3 and 4 million unique impressions on my articles, convinced 28,453 people to give me their email addresses and made exactly $0.
(Yes, Zero with a Z.)
Granted, I didn’t try to make money, but that wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I thought the same thing several of even my most successful clients have assumed: If I build the tribe and brand, the money (a.k.a. sustainability) will follow. HINT: It never did. ;)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a believer in tribe-building and the power of social media, email lists and even PR—but only when integrated into a more entrepreneurial approach. More specifically, when integrated into a three-dimensional approach:
The Authorpreneur Mentality is a balanced and three-dimensional commitment to platform, profit, and people.
—> Platform: The pursuit of creating quality attention around your message and cultivating a depth of relationship with a highly relevant audience.
—> Profit: An intention towards, value for and plan to see a return on your financial, time and energy investments.
The goal here is to develop and commit to a profit plan—rather than stay busy with things that don’t accrue into what we really want: lasting, supported, scalable impact. Grow your profit, grow your impact!
—> People: A commitment to helping people grow.
Arguably the most important of the three, our commitment to growing people will determine the sustainability of our impact and business. As we’ll see in key #3, if we can do this well, it is the single largest determining factor in our audience’s loyalty, and therefore, customer retention!
MEET DANNY.
I’ve never seen the power of shifting from an author to Authorpreneur Mentality more than when working with Danny Silk, an author and speaker in relational intelligence.
Danny came to me with a decent amount of attention in his niche, but a strong hesitancy towards trying to sell and monetize his message. He had real commitment to platforming and people, but his fear was the same as most influencers I work with:
"I don’t want to compromise my impact by selling and trying to build a business."
Danny adopted the Authorpreneur Mentality and saw that a focus on sales and R.O.I. (return on investment) didn't hurt his impact, but only enhanced and sustained it!
He launched the The Life Academy—an eLearning University—and quickly went from an email list of 4000 and zero online revenue streams to a list of over 70,000, nine margin- rich eCourses and a subscription-based learning community.
As Danny has seen, this mentality shift from author to Authorpreneur is not just another new requirement to add to your list. It is the unprecedented opportunity of the modern era to align with!
Read Part 3 of the series to find YOUR ideal eLearning product stack.
