Quick heads up that Justin Welsh has launched his Black Friday Sale!
His Content OS changed my approach to Twitter and led to my first-ever product sales.
Get it now at the lowest-ever price.
Justin Welsh, the content Daddy himself, inspires people worldwide to run their own solo businesses with massive profit margins and minimal time.
But the problem is, you can’t look at how he currently runs his business to know how he got there. You have to look at what he was doing before he had a huge audience.
Lucky for you, I’ve taken care of it.
Here is a look at Justin Welsh's business before it was successful:
He was massively accomplished at scaling businesses
Before he became Justin Welsh, the brand, he was the guy who helped scale two healthcare SAAS companies to billion-dollar valuations by building their sales teams. In other words, he knows his shit.
When he became too burnt out to continue in the corporate world, he made a transition—not a content creator, as you might expect, but a consultant. He began consulting with SAAS companies that needed help scaling. He got those clients by posting on LinkedIn.
He never intended to become a content creator and course seller as he is now. He started by selling the knowledge he had from his day job.
He was posting content before he quit
Welsh started posting content late in 2018 and managed to reach 20k followers because he was an early adopter of content creation on the platform.
Then, in 2019, he knew he was going to quit his job, so he began doubling down to see if he could attract clients.
He did not quit his job and then start looking for useful work—completely the opposite, in fact. He built a following, then when he knew he wanted out, he got clients, and then transitioned into his new role as a solopreneur.
He started with consultancy work. Then niched
And so, as Welsh got his first consultancy clients and continued posting on LinkedIn, he noticed something: questions were coming in. He lists them:
- How do I grow my social media following to make money online?
- Where do I find the motivation to create content consistently?
- What steps should I take to monetize my LinkedIn account?
- Is it possible to generate income without capital?
- Why should I establish an online presence?
- Where and how do I get new clients?
And so he began experimenting with content about content creation and social media.
But one day, he was on Dickie Bush’s and Nicholas Cole’s podcast and talking about his system of content creation. The show aired, and he was flooded with questions from people asking how to replicate the system. And so a course was built…
One low-price course
He then created the LinkedIn Operating System, which details how he had grown from 2,000 followers to over 400,000 followers on LinkedIn.
But do you see the key here? He had done the thing, and the proof was in the pudding. Just look at his profile, and you'll see it works. That proof is what has driven the 25,000 sales of his course.
- There was demand and customers waiting
- He had the skills and the knowledge
- He had the social proof that it works
Combine those with the low price of $50 he began selling his course, and he was off to the races.
It was two full years later before he began work on his second course, Content OS. That’s two years of promoting one offer to one target market. That focus and commitment is what compounds to bring real results.
Master of one and then branch out
He was the king of LinkedIn before he moved to Twitter. He didn’t try to be on every platform, make videos, or anything like that. He wrote on LinkedIn and mastered how to get attention there before he ever set foot on another platform.
Now, he has over 500,000 followers on Twitter, but had he tried to grow both at once, it seems unlikely he would have the success he does now. He also only came to Twitter once he realized his new audience of content creators was hanging out there.
Only then did it make sense for him to start on a new platform and figure it out with gusto.
Figured out a simple funnel
Here's my $8.3M funnel for inexpensive products:
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Justin Welsh |
@thejustinwelsh |
It's amazing how many people create free lead magnets and complicated email funnels to sell an inexpensive product because they think that's what you're supposed to do.
If your product is affordable, just write content and position it for people to buy when they are ready.
1:9 PM • Sep 11, 2024
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From there, he uses a simple social media funnel to drive sales.
He writes longer articles for his newsletter, which he then turns into short-form content (which he teaches how to do in this course). Those short-form pieces then link to his website.
From his website, he then funnels people to his course pages, and boom, he makes sales. In other words:
- Post on social media
- Link to website
- Funnel through to the sales page
- Make sales
This is similar to Sinem Gunel's simple funnel: posting on Medium to attract people to her email list, where she then promotes her live course once or twice per year.
You don’t need to diversify your traffic before you’ve got steady traffic. People say to diversify once you rely heavily on one platform, but if you are starting out, you have to master one before you can branch out.
Relentlessly tests his ideas
There are countless articles from Welsh that explain how he ruthlessly measures the success of posts, CTAs, sign-up pages, and sales pages. The man is a machine, but he follows through.
Focusing on the wrong area is an easy mistake. Testing your sales page doesn’t matter if no one clicks on it. You need to focus on the attention side.
Conclusions
The idea of investigating Welsh’s backstory came from the man himself.
In a podcast, he talked about how, when he started on Twitter, he would spend 10 hours a day scrolling through popular users' accounts to see what sort of content they posted when they started out.
He’d scroll through years and years of tweets to see how those initial posts got the ball rolling.
Because looking at where they are now doesn’t help unless you are already at their level.
You must go back to their origin and build up from there.
Much love from my screen to yours,
