It’s a common misconception that a social media account or blog following of 100,000 fans will earn more money than a following of 1000. Yes, more page views to your site will certainly earn you more money if you’re monetising your site with ads but not if you’re trying to sell your own products or services.
Although it is easy to get wrapped up in the numbers game, it is important to focus on building a solid following of fans who love what you do and offer, rather than having a huge audience of people who aren’t at all interested in what you do.
There is a concept called “1000 true followers”, exactly how we like to work. Growing a following on social media can be both costly and incredibly time-consuming. While we actively do all we can to grow my website traffic, we like to take the more natural approach with social media. We produce content that we enjoy, we ask questions to engage with followers, and we post regularly to maintain interest and grow our following organically. We know that people who visit our website love the content we produce and the products we advertise and offer, which means they are far more likely to buy. This is because our followers and readers are our true followers.
Admittedly our website gets high volumes of traffic, but collectively, our social media following is only 5000! It’s not in the hundreds of thousands or millions, but guess what? We can still make a full-time income from my social media following and website traffic. And you can too!
This is the second part of our four-part article series. Here is the first part again, in case you need a reminder: Diversifying Your Income as a Fashion Professional.
How does the 1000 True Followers concept work?
You can apply this concept to a smaller following, if you haven’t yet gained 1000 followers in website traffic or on social media. The concept is simple but genius!
Step 1
First of all, you must decide how much money you would like to earn in 1 year. To keep things simple let’s say that you want to earn £100,000 in 1 year.
Step 2
If you haven’t identified your ideal client already, it is time to do so. Who do you want to serve? Where do they hangout? How can you reach out to them?
Step 3
What do they want from you? What can you offer your audience? Useful information containing affiliate links to amazing products that they’ll want to snap up? Homemade items that you make yourself? Coaching services to help them with their problems? What do they need help with and what can you sell to them?
Step 4
Now that you know who your true follower/ideal client is, where you can reach them and what you can offer them, it is time to think about numbers. Number games have never been so much fun!
Going back to Step 1, we’ve established that you want to make £100,000 per year by selling your offering to your followers. If you have just 1000 true followers who will buy from you, here’s how those numbers look when broken down.
1000 true followers x spending £100 each per year = £100,000 per year
So that means that each of your followers only has to spend £100 with you across a whole year in order for you to meet your income goal of £100,000!
Here are other ways you can earn the same amount with different numbers of followers:
- 10 followers x spending £10,000 each per year = £100,000 per year
- 100 followers x spending £1,000 each per year = £100,000 per year
- 1,000 followers x spending £100 each per year = £100,000 per year
- 10,000 followers x spending £10 each per year = £100,000 per year
TASK
- Write down the minimum amount of money you need to earn per year, and using the method above, calculate how much money you will need to earn from each of your followers to meet your goal.
- Write down how much you would like to earn per year, and using the method above, calculate how much money you will need to earn from each of your followers to meet your goal.
See? We told you that numbers could be really fun! This method is so simple and yet highly effective!
Read on as we build on these core concepts. We begin to look at the importance of Diversifying Your Income as a Fashion Professional coming soon. Follow us on Instagram to be the first to know when the next part of this series will come out by clicking here.
