Work on that following first, then sell the courses and books - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

Hey folks I was just thinking about something that yeah, I get questions
about how do I break into the content creation world and stuff like thatpretty regularly and something just occurred to me that I thought was kind
of interesting and that is that I occasionally will see people with ahandful of followers on Twitter and and like no sense of a newsletter of
any kind or anything publishing books and making courses, you know, paidcourses and things like that.
And I think that I mean, I'm I'm not sure maybe that is working out okay
for them, but IThink that's a little bit backwards You need to be able toearn the trust of the people that you're asking money from before you start
asking money from them. And it's indicative to me that they haven't
actually done that if you don't have any sense of a following of people or
some sort of newsletter or some sort of tribe I guess of people who arecommitted to you and your content.
And so what I'd recommend for people is before you start going out selling
content, I mean feel free to do whatever you want and you can sell contentmaybe make.A couple backs but if you want to be successful at this you need
to find a way to get the trust of the people that you're trying to reach.
And the best way that I found to do this is to create a silly amount offree content. And because people, you know, this is their hard-earned money
and they want to know for sure that this is going to be worth their time.It's not just their money. You can offer like a 30-day money-back
guarantee, which I do.But still people are like, it's not like everybody takes it to to see if
it's gonna work out for them because it'sIt's not just money It's time It's
the amount of time that it takes people to go through the material to seeif it's worthwhile for them. And so what I would suggest is you spend a lot
of time creating free content and this takes a lot of time.If you're like if you've been working on this for a couple months and
you're frustrated because you only have a 300 followers or something keep
at it, it takes a multiple years really to build up a following but it's if
this is what you want to do, then it's worth your while I think.
So yeah, we're work on creating.Really good high quality free stuff as much
as you are able and then you'll gain the trust of some people develop some
sort of tribe. I actually there's there's this book that's like tribes why
we need you to need to follow you or something like that that I wouldrecommend but yeah get a base of people who trust you and share your
material and then once you have that base then you can go and start askingfor money from people and they'll trust you they'll know you that your call
your content is good.So, I hope that's helpful. Good luck. See ya.

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