The Creator’s Blueprint: Iteration, Impact, Income

The creator’s journey is a tumultuous one. But here’s your cheat code to the madness.

The creator’s journey resembles a game of Monopoly. It’s perilous, confusing, and rigged. Yet in this deliriousness, there’s a blueprint a creator can follow to clarity: iteration, impact, and income.

Many are unaware of this layout. They rush into the creation process, letting income and influence guide their general sense of direction. They ignore iteration. They value income over impact.

This is like playing Monopoly without a strategy or having the faintest idea about WTF you’re doing. The end result is a losing game: An empty audience. Subpar content. An inability to make a living from your creative talents.

Fear not. We’re going to give you the cheat codes to win this game. We’ll distinguish between each step — iteration, impact, and income — and explain how you can make the dice roll in your favor.

The Power of Iteration

Google defines iteration as “the repetition of a process in order to generate an outcome.”

In the creator’s manual, understanding iteration and its nuances are critical. There are two types of iteration, the first one being iteration with consistency.

Iteration With Consistency

Here, the process a creator repeats is producing content consistently. Whether it be articles, TikToks, Youtube videos, whatever. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is if the creator follows the formula: A+ consistency, B+ content.

Replace “email newsletters” with any other form of content creation. It works because the formula is universal. If you’re producing content on a social media platform, you’re playing a game with an algorithm.

All algorithms reward consistency.

The more content a creator makes, the higher likelihood the right people will see their content. Each piece of content a creator puts out compounds over time and snowballs into something immense.

To visualize this, imagine little dots. Each dot represents a piece of content: Article, Tweet, podcast, etc. Over time, these pieces of content (dots) will add up. The end result is a massive library of content.

Iteration in the form of consistency is how a creator will win the first level of the creator’s game.

It’s how a creator will build an audience. Consequently, this audience will reveal insights that will help the creator produce more unique and relevant content. The creator will then be able to leverage the audience as distribution channels for paid services.

If you’re wondering about the second part of iteration, hold your horses. We’ll touch on it towards the end.

Impact

With consistent creation, impact naturally follows.

Interestingly enough, creators seldom take it into consideration. The “striking of one thing against another,” people see impact as a byproduct of income.

In reality, the inverse is true.

As a creator, your goal is to be prolific. This is a fancy word meaning fruitful and productive. The more content you churn out, the better you’re able to understand your audience.

Using analytics and spending the time to get to know your growing audience base, you can pick up on pain points or common interests of your audience. With this information, you can then double down on content that is directly relevant to the audience’s needs.

The surge of paid newsletters is a stellar example of this in action.

Impact With Paid Newsletters

People are willing to pay good money for written content. Substack’s highest paying newsletter racks in over a million dollars.

Phew.

Yet, we have to ask ourselves: Why would anyone pay when you can find almost anything on the internet for free?

Because consumers want to cut through the noise.

Absolutely anyone with a laptop and a wifi connection can begin creating and posting content online. The barrier to entry is null. While the removal of the gatekeeper is something to celebrate, it means there is a surplus of mediocre content out there.

On top of this, almost all content is plagued with advertisements. After all, the ad-based model is how content is able to be free in the first place.

Consumers are exhausted. They’re willing to pay to cut through the clutter — the ads and fluff content — to find what will impact their lives.

If you’re a creator who wants to impact people, you’re not going to succeed by charging money right away. You’ve got to prove yourself first.

Creator Anne-Laure was able to pull this off. She began by first sending out a newsletter on mindful productivity. In March of 2020, she launched a companion membership service.

It made over $5,000 in its first month.

The membership service included exclusive articles and research reports, a private community, virtual meetups, and workshops.

People pay for these services because they know Anne-Laure for her content. If she hadn’t showcased her knowledge in neuroscience, creativity, and entrepreneurship, why would anyone have bothered to sign up for her exclusive membership?

Her main acquisition channel is the free weekly newsletter and Twitter. AKA…all free content.

When asked about she grew to this number of subscribers, she replied,

“I write my daily article, then I post it on Hacker News and on Twitter. The first month, four of my articles hit the front page of HN. It brought many visitors to the website, with a fraction of them converting to newsletter subscribers.”

Again, notice how her main acquisition channel is by providing free content on a consistent basis. Her initial strategy doesn’t include monetization, because Anne-Laure understands the power of impact first.

Income

Income is the outcome of iteration and impact.

Income comes to those who regularly post relevant, engaging content. They’re members of communities and make friends. Ultimately, they give more than they take.

If your content provides value by helping people in some way, you’re golden. People are willing to pay for content that will help them make money, save money, and save time.

Income is the equivalent of temporarily “winning” the game. But it’s far from over.

Iteration Never Ends

Let’s circle back to iteration. Remember it?

Iteration doesn’t only take place at the beginning of a creator’s journey. It also takes place towards the end.

The second kind of iteration is with presenting and selling content.

Iteration isn’t exclusively a linear process, where you repeat the same process on a loop. Iteration also includes adjusting, tweaking, and playing around with what you have.

In short: if you can make it work, you can make it better.

Iteration applies to creators who are:

• Selling products, services, or digital assets.
• Launching an app or website.
• Building an audience, subscriber count, and community
• Attracting new business inquiries

The work isn’t finished once the project is uploaded and ready to be distributed.

Many creators leave money on the table by thinking the work is done once their product, service, or item is first distributed online.

What a missed opportunity.

Iteration takes on many forms, and its advantages are often ignored. You can iterate on:

• A call to action (CTA)
• Header image
• UI/UX
• Copywriting
• Landing Page
• Headline

The list goes on. As a creator tweaks each thing, they observe and learn from each iteration. When successful, the effects of iteration are astounding. See below.

Repeat after us: incremental optimization will never let you down.

Conclusion

The creator’s journey is a long, tumultuous game. It requires strategy, focus, and consistency. Yet, there’s a simple blueprint anyone can follow: iteration, impact, income, and full circle back to iteration.

If you’re a creator currently on this path, we can help you out every step of the way. Our platform, Officeparty, is a place for creators to begin building communities and hosting content.

With built-in analytics, you can see the real-time effects of your iterations.

With a strong, involved community, you can see how your creations impact your members.

With sharelinks and streamline marketing initiatives, income has never been easier to track and scale.

If you’d like us to lend a hand, come sign up for free with us here.