It’s not often you run into a solopreneur who can manage a seven-figure business, but Justin Welsh is no ordinary solopreneur. By leveraging social media marketing to sell individually tailored products to educate the public, Welsh has amassed a company that regularly sees seven-figure income. Yet he wasn’t always this successful.
Burnout Led To Founding His Own Company
In what is probably a tale as old as time, Welsh spent decades helping to build two corporations into the billion-dollar range. After so long, he faced severe burnout, and things needed to change.
After getting to what most would consider the pinnacle of success, Justin and his wife quit their jobs, bought a house in the Catskills Mountains in New York, and went out to live the life they always wanted. The burnout slowed him down, and he realized he needed to find a new way to see things.
Reaching Out To An Audience On a Single Channel
The first thing Welsh did when he opened his solopreneurship was start building his followers and his reach. He picked writing as the format he would use since he knew how to leverage this medium and dove right into it.
Before he even started doing this, Welsh was an everyday writer, but doing this over time made him hone his skills and better communicate ideas to the people reading his content. With time, he started appearing in people’s feeds as an expert.
Offering a Service To The Right People
Once people started noticing what he did and his experience, he began getting requests from other companies to teach them what he knew. Instead of many small business owners who delegate this task, Welsh knew that he had to do this in person.
He answered every single one of those messages that came into his inbox and found out more about the clients who wanted his services. This helped him tailor his offerings and how much he would charge the company for teaching them what he knew.
Consultations Change The Nature Of His Business
The more he did work for companies, the more companies came in to ask him about certain things. Yet there were a lot of signs that many of these companies didn’t really need advice about their companies as they needed help with LinkedIn.
The two question areas he dealt with the most were SaaS and LinkedIn. At this point, his current LinkedIn audience was around 20,000 people. Leveraging this audience, he threw together a short course and charged people $50 to access it.
LinkedIn Growth Course Breaks the Bank
Over the next fifteen months, this course netted $75,000, but after a while, the course was becoming outdated, and people were asking for an update. Welsh knew that listening to his audience was the best way to grow and improve, so he did, but with one addition.
The new and updated course dropped, and Welsh leveraged the trust that his first course created. He raised the course price to $150, waiting to see if it would be as successful as his last one. The popularity of the course took off in a way that even surprised Welsh.
Building a Loyal Community with Social Proof
Aggressive marketing is how Welsh managed to scale his business almost effortlessly. Once he had gotten people into his course, he would prompt them to leave a testimonial and sign up with his affiliate program in the middle of the course.
The affiliate program sought to monetize these students who were seeing success with his program. Since they were making things work, it was obvious that they would be the best proof that his methods worked. Asking them to market for him rewarded his and his students’ success.
Developing a Second Course to Follow the First
Content creation has always been effortless for Welsh, and he has spent most of his time doing marketing, not content production. On a podcast with a fellow entrepreneur, people were surprised at how much he had done in such a short time. He responded by developing his second course.
The Content Operating System is an attempt to teach people how to leverage effortless ways of making valuable content. Many people signed on to and learned from his program, but he wasn’t done with his foray into content production.
Monthly Subscriptions Are Better Than Single Sales
While any entrepreneur will tell you making a single sale is fantastic, having a solid series of incoming subscriptions is much better. Since he would be building content templates for himself, Welsh wondered if he could also monetize this portion of his business.
In short order, he had set up a subscription service where he would charge subscribers $9 per content template. Since he was doing these templates anyway, he decided it made sense to sell his subscribers’ templates and set up another constant income stream.
The Newsletter Is The Icing On The Cake
Now that he was familiar with the subscription system, he decided that having a newsletter would be the best way to get his content out in front of the right people. In January 2022, he launched The Saturday Solopreneur newsletter, which quickly became popular among many people seeking the freedom of a solopreneur’s life.
He changed his model from a subscription-based model for the newsletter and decided to use the massive reach he was getting to promote some of the top names in the business. These days, $2,500 for a feature in his newsletter is a small price to pay to get the right eyes on someone’s story and their goals.
Constant Refinement Is Something Welsh Always Preaches
Welsh says that four years of constantly looking at what works and changing it to make it better helped him develop this marketing idea into something impactful and profitable. As a solopreneur, he defines the best of the business, giving back to others as much as he enjoys sharing his knowledge. He’s also got a knack for valuing his knowledge – something many solopreneurs lack. There are many things others could learn from this genius solopreneur.
