Being a creator is one of the most fulfilling things you can do.
It gives you the freedom to build a life aligned with your values, control your schedule, and do work that resonates with you on a fundamental level every single day.
But too many creators abandon their journey early on.
One reason is that they can’t figure out how to make money as a creator. It doesn’t matter how passionate you are about your work or how much potential you have—those bills still have to get paid every month.
So even if you can push past all the fear and uncertainty of being a creator and take your first few steps down that path, you’ll abandon it within a few months if you can’t find a way to quickly generate income as a creator.
Otherwise, you’ll be forced to find another job and create part-time. Hopefully, you can slowly build up your creator business to go full-time, but how many aspiring creators do you know who—even after years of “building” and deeply want to go full-time—haven’t figured out how to make enough money to make it viable?
It’s easy to dream about scaling your creator business to tens of millions of dollars. But before you optimize for scalability, you have to optimize for viability.
And the quickest (non-sleazy) way to make money as a creator, aka, a viable income…is to coach.
Hear me out before you click away.
My most recent coaching client signed up for coaching after reading an article from 7 months ago.
No templated social media posts.
No Chat-GP-Whatever.
No cringey paid ads.
Just solid content.
So if you’re a creator and you’re not coaching, here are 3 huge opportunities you’re missing out on right now…
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Make Money Fast While Building Your Reputation
Before you can thrive as a creator, you have to survive.
Offering a valuable service is one of the quickest ways to start making enough money to stay in the creator game long enough to gain real traction—and coaching is one of the simplest services you can offer.
Why?
Because as a coach, you don’t have to be the expert in the room.
Your job is to guide your client to develop the clarity, strategy, and accountability they need to move forward. Coaching isn’t like consultation where you have to prepare presentations, print out handbooks, or be expected to know all the answers.
If you can learn to listen well, ask insightful questions, and share useful mental models with your client, you’ll be highly effective.
Coaching is cool because you can start out offering it to a few people for free or super cheap, collect testimonials, then slowly increase your price as you collect—and leverage—more testimonials.
This is exactly what I did when I lost my job in 2020 and couldn’t practice therapy anymore.
I offered it to a few people for free, helped them get great results, then kept iterating.
As my reputation grew, so did my rate.
The most I made as a psychologist was ~$45/hour.
I nervously charged my first paying client $250/hour and he didn’t bat an eye.
Then I moved to $400/hour, and no one said anything…
After a few months, I quoted a client $500/hour and he literally laughed in my face. “I was ready to pay three times that!”
Now?
I can work two hours a week and make the same amount I did working 40 hours at my old job doing therapy—which is insane.
Not sure what to charge starting off?
- Think of the minimum amount of money you need to make each month to be a full-time creator.
- Think of how many hours you’re willing to do client work.
- Divide how much you need to make by how much you want to work and that’s your hourly rate.
Then start charging that rate after you’ve collected a few testimonials to show you can help people get results.
Again, the name of the creator game early on is surviving—so calculate the minimum you need to bring in to have a viable business.
The sooner you can cover your costs, the sooner you can go full-time.
The sooner you can go full-time, the sooner you can reach your creator potential.
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Get Paid for Market Research
One way to succeed in business is to anticipate your ideal customer’s needs and deliver a solution.
But how do you actually do this?
You can pay a consulting company to do tons of complicated market research and send you a report that takes a Ph.D. to understand…
Or you can coach people.
Think about it…
As a creator, you write to a specific kind of person (your “niche”).
As a coach, you tend to work with a specific kind of person (CEOs, mid-career tech professionals, content creators, etc.).
Well, every time you coach someone, they’re telling you exactly what they need help with and they’re paying you to help them develop a solution.
You’re literally getting paid to learn.
What’s not to love about that?
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Create 10X Better Content
Creating content that stands out is hard, but differentiation is another key to succeeding as a creator.
People have to trust you and your content, so it has to be valuable.
One simple way to ensure your content is valuable, trustworthy, and different than every other creator in your niche is to coach.
Let’s say you create content for CEOs. Every time you coach a CEO, you learn more about specific problems CEOs deal with and specific solutions that help them.
You can take what you learn from coaching CEOs and create content for CEOs that’s super specific, valuable, trustworthy, and different than every other creator targeting CEOs.
That content can be articles, videos, courses, books, a podcast, etc.
And in turn, this content attracts more clients who want to pay you for more market research you can turn into more content.
This is exactly how I turned an insight from 1:1 coaching into an article then a cohort-based course that generated $27,000 in a month.
Check out this video if you want a quick breakdown.
If you already create content, it only takes a few tweaks to position your content to generate inbound leads for coaching clients.
People hire coaches for clarity, strategy, and accountability.
So when you build content that facilitates these, people will happily pay to work with you 1:1.
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Final Thoughts
Everything I’ve built as a creator comes down to two skills: writing and coaching. But I even write from a coaching perspective (asking thought-provoking questions, sharing insightful observations, and helping people develop clarity and strategy to move forward).
Most of my income is from either directly coaching 1:1, live courses (aka, group coaching at scale), or self-paced courses (based on what I do as a coach).
Even this piece you’re reading right now started from a coaching conversation with someone.
And even if you don’t want to get paid to coach (full-time or as a side gig), you can still leverage coaching skills to be a better leader, entrepreneur, and creator.
Because fundamentally, coaching is about facilitating someone’s desired transformation. What do we do as creators every day but create content and build businesses that facilitate transformation in some way?
Learning to coach can help you make a livable income through service work, productize your knowledge, and create content that inspires and empowers others to reach their potential.
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P.S.
Through coaching, I’ve been able to:
- Turn my ideas into income
- Attract life-changing opportunities
- Go from unemployed to entrepreneur
- Build a business that supports my lifestyle
- Develop a deep relationship with my audience
- Become friends with people who inspired me for years
- And so much more…
And it all started with learning 10 essential coaching skills.
I created a free course that will teach you these 10 essential skills in under 60 minutes.
It’s called Coaching Made Simple.
If you want to take your first steps toward becoming a coach and take advantage of these opportunities, and many more, pick up the course today.
