This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Today's caller wants to enter the world of personal finance experts and influencers. I think she wants to be a creator. She'll explain a little bit more. I'm not sure if she wants to do TikTok or YouTube or some other network, could be a blog, podcast, lots of different mediums. Basically, she wants to be a person of influence in this world.
It can be a rewarding niche or topic or category, personal finance. There's lots of different ways to monetize it. There's also a really big community writing and speaking and sharing on personal finance on just about every social network and platform, even Reddit, I should have mentioned. There's a really big community there. So this started way back in the day with blogs and now it's gone to other mediums.
So leaving aside the question of medium, if you want to break in, if you want to go into this world and build your influence and get paid for it, what should you do? What are the first and next steps? I'll do my best to give Melissa a helpful answer, her detailed question and my response coming right up. [Music]
Hi, I'm Melissa from Denver, Colorado. I've been to listen to episodes when I'm in the gym and I've been hoping to start my own project soon.
So here's my idea. Personal finance is a huge industry with lots of bloggers, YouTubers and podcast are all putting out a lot of content every day. It's crowded, but there also seems to be an insatiable demand for this content. I'd like to break in, but I just don't know where to start. And if it helps to know my background, I recently graduated college and did some side hustling to pay my way through.
I think that's a good angle, but I'm also not sure it's specific enough. How would you go about entering this market? [Music]
Melissa, great question and good thinking. I think good timing, we first talked about being an influencer or a creator in the world of personal finance a long time ago, but it is still good timing. It is still one of these industries in which it's very crowded.
There is a good amount of saturation, but there's also still a viable path to entry. In fact, there are multiple paths. This is for two reasons. One, as Melissa pointed out, there's a lot of interest. So there's a lot of room for different voices, which I do think is key.
It is really important to be a different voice to find a very specific target market to speak to. It used to be that you could do personal finance for college students or personal finance for queer people. We actually had multiple episodes for both of those target markets with people who had created a really substantial business doing that. But I think now you need to be even more specific in niche just 'cause it is so crowded. But second, there is also a clear revenue model, which is probably why people want to get into this.
So it's different than being an expert on celebrity gossip, for example. There are lots of people posting on TikTok and YouTube about celebrity gossip. And they can monetize in some ways with ads and such, but it's a very low value kind of business. Whereas personal finance, people who are interested in that topic, they want to learn about bank loans and credit cards and savings accounts and all of these tools and resources that companies are happy to pay a lot to acquire customers for. You've also got investing like Vanguard, Robinhood, all these companies.
So that's why it's a significant market. So as for breaking in, you definitely need an angle. Melissa's off to a good start. I would just go much further in terms of thinking about what you have to say and to whom. Like who do you really want to serve?
And to give you some specific advice, I think this is really helpful to think about the person you used to be because you are uniquely qualified to serve the person you used to be. This may not be Melissa's specific angle, but I think for anyone when you're trying to figure out, okay, I want to go into this topic, whatever it is, whether it's personal finance or something else, but what is the specific message and who am I actually trying to reach? Think about the person you used to be before you had the knowledge in which you're now going to impart. What does that person need to hear? And how do they need to hear it?
What's the way that you could speak to them that they will relate to? The more you approach the challenge from that angle, the higher your odds of success because you're not the only one. There's other people like you who can learn the same way that you do too. That's what I think about that. Listeners, let me know if you have a question or a comment or an experience, sidehustleschool.com.
Notes, pages for every episode, 3,300 plus, all completely free. Download, stream every episode all completely free. Subscribe, follow wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes coming out every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
