I'm so excited to share that today we are going to go through the highlights of ConvertKit's State of the Creator Economy for 2023. This report came out last year as the 2022 version and it was so helpful to one, understand you're not alone on this journey, but, two, you get some extra juicy insights into other creators' businesses, what they're doing right, where they're focusing their attention and some of the metrics that aren't widely available online. But they're so juicy to dive into. So let's get right to it. Welcome to the Profit Podcast, where we teach you how to start, launch and market your content with confidence. I'm your host, crystal Prophet, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation, this is the show that will help be your time-saving shortcut. So let's get right to it, shall we? I am so thrilled to dive into ConvertKit's report this year and if you want to download the full thing, go to convertkitcom. Forward slash reports slash Creator Economy 2023. So I'll have a link in the description, but I want you to go grab this and really dive into all the details of everything that we're going to talk about, because we're not going to go through. It's like a 47-page PDF. We're not going to go through every single thing and come through it, but I did want to pull out some of the highlights that I think are important for this audience to know and understand, for your own journey, but also as you set goals or you look at, what should I be aiming for? Do I need more money? Do I need more followers? What's the thing that's going to help me get to the place of me reaching success? Well, that's really what I want to dive into today. So let's go to the report and get started. So, once you download the full report and, like I said, it's 47 pages, so you have a lot of juicy details to dig into, but I wanted to first jump over, so I'm going to scroll down to, like you can see, the table of contents, all the incredible things that they cover inside this report. But there's a few key things that we're going to hone in on today, and the first one is talking about who are creators Like that's essentially you, that's me, that's podcasters, bloggers, youtubers, people creating content on social. We are all creators, and I love the definition of how they go into. It is the creator economy is made for coaches, consultants, musicians, artists, educators and so on, like it just keeps going and going. And then the next piece I wanted to hone in on is really looking at what people are doing to establish themselves as creators. A lot of them are leaving their nine to five for multiple reasons. Like I said, you can read individual stories here, but I love that they provide all of these charts. I'm a data nerd, like I really am. I tried to be. You know I'm a digital marketing nerd. I'm this and that I'm really a data nerd and I love it whenever it's data that I didn't have to pull together myself and someone else did this beautiful chart. So if you're watching on the video, you'll see that the employment status for part time creators. So it talks about a good majority of them. I would say around 47% of creators are employed full time on salary. So what does that mean? It means most people still have a nine to five and they're doing something else on the side. Then it says self employed full time, followed by employed part time by contractor hourly rate or employed full time by contractor hourly rate. So it really talks about how to look at your content creation and how you define yourself. So it says, before you take the leap of faith into full time creating. It gives you some insights into what you can do to make it either a smoother transition or make it something that's actually feasible for you. So it says calculate how much money you need to make to cover minimum debt payments for things like student loans, mortgage, medical debt and credit card debt. The next one is compare your business revenue versus profit. So so important Can you cut any expenses to take home more of what you earn? When I do this on a regular basis, either monthly or quarterly, I am looking at where am I spending my money? And we're going to get into the details of how much our creators spending on a month and what are they actually spending money on. So don't worry, we're going to get there. But it says aim to have at least six months of expenses saved as a financial runway research business financial essentials like taxes and accounting, and understand your insurance options. So before you say I'm going to quit my nine to five and I'm going to be a full time creator, these are some of the things that you should consider Now. Another important thing that I wanted to point out is it talks about time spent building an audience. I have so many of you that come to me and I think that there's so much bad information out there about people that they just started this thing and then, all of a sudden, they're an overnight success and they have millions of followers and thousands of downloads and like, oh, they're just, they're a seven figure multi-gigillionaire and it's just not the truth. So, based on this chart here of the people that responded to the creator economy report, it says the percent of total respondents and how much time they spent building an audience. So some people have less than one year, other people have one to two years, other people are three to five years, then you have six to 10 years and more than 10 years and if you're thinking crystal, that sounds like it could take a while. It could take me a little bit. Yeah, it can. Here I am. I started in 2018 and I'm still growing. I'm still investing time into my creator business. Sometimes it really pops for people in the first 12 months. Sometimes it takes 12 years, but I want you to look at your individual creator journey and what that can look like and don't do any comparison of other people that you see in your industry or similar creators. I want you to focus on your own path. Another stat that I found pretty interesting is for the ladies, and it says women are more likely to be creators 64% of creators identified as female, and it was most common for this group to be a part-time creator. So there is a chart that is broken down over hobbyist versus part-timers versus full-timers, and it is interesting how so many of the women that took or people that took this survey were women. So I found that super interesting. I don't really know what that says about women in general, if we're just more curious about being creators or if we're just, you know, putting stuff out there. I don't know exactly what this means. I just thought it was interesting, so I thought I would share it with you. So the second thing that I want to talk about is in this report, they talk about why creators are so optimistic in 2023, and I am a Optimist myself, so I like to think about you know, I'm glass half full, and Whenever I look at this, it says most creators are optimistic about the year ahead and have their sights set on income growth and income-based Strategies. We're gonna come back to that in a second, because that is super important. But it says creators who use total revenue to track success Tended to make more last year than those who focused on follower count. Let me say this again creators who used total revenue to track success Tended to make more last year than those who focused on follower count. So so many of you will come to me and say crystal, how do I get more downloads? Crystal, how do I get more people to follow me on Instagram? How do I get more people to subscribe to my youtube channel? How do I get more people on my email list? And while, yes, all of those things are very important, they are critical to your business. I think that you first have to ask the question what is my revenue today? What are my expenses? Because I will have conversations with creators and they tell me it's a shocking number of people that will tell me how much they're spending a month on all of these tools and then I say, well, are you making enough money to Counterbalance how much money you're spending? And then, like your net positive, are you in the red? Like, are you in the red bread every month? Because that is a problem and we need to talk about it. But, as you can see here. It says those who focused on total revenue to track success tended to make more. So what I can see from this immediately is, yes, subscribers are important. Yes, you know, having followers and engagement, all those things you can't ignore those. But at the end of the day, if you're a creator and you have a creator business You're not a hobbyist, you're not just playing around, you're trying to get this thing to work Then you need to treat it like it's a business and not just put stuff out when I want oh, I don't really care how much money I'm spending, oh, it'll pay for itself. No, let's treat it like it's a business and you will actually see the results of doing it that way. So, just to back up exactly what we were just talking about, about focusing on income, it says income is a top priority for creators and there's a chart where it's showing the difference between the 2022 survey and 2023 and Growing income is like it's out there, like so many people are focused on growing their income. The next thing is growing their audience. Then, building a more engaged relationship with audience, creating new or additional digital content, automating parts of their business and expanding into a new platform is kind of the lowest tier. So I think that the first three you can't go wrong with this and those again are growing your income, growing your audience and building a more engaged relationship with your audience. Because one thing that I have found and I know other Creators and business owners who have this same kind of reaction with their audience is, if you focus on Growing your income, that could look like optimizing your funnels, making sure that you have strategic calls to action, making sure that you are selling your people the thing that they actually want. You're not offering things that they really don't want to buy because they're not converting on it. When you focus on how can you grow your business revenue, then you tend to find other ways to grow your business revenue. It's like this domino effect of oh, I'm gonna focus on this thing and it actually pays off in the long run. If you find those tried and true Strategies that work for your audience, then let's take that idea and transition into growing your audience. So the more people that you have coming into your world and you have the first priority is growing your income you will find people come into your world. They are ready to buy from you because you have great but processes in place to make it easy for them to buy from you. And then the third point, about building a more engaged relationship with your audience. One thing that I really messed up on in the beginning of my creator journey is I was always trying to find Ways to get new people into my audience and immediately get them to buy something. But over time, what I have realized is someone that becomes, let's say, they buy my low ticket offer. I have an offer, that is the podcast launch toolkit. I'll link to it below, but it's $37. It's not super expensive. So you could go grab my podcast launch toolkit and then, if you get results from that, you may be interested in my Digital course, which is the next thing that I would offer to you. And then, after you have success with the digital course, you get it launched. It's out there and you're like well wait, crystal, I want your help in taking things to the next level. Maybe you're ready for my coaching. So someone goes down like they're on a whole journey with me. It's not a one-and-done. They just buy this thing and I'm looking to sell a whole bunch of 27 37 dollar products. No, it's. How do I get the people that already know me, they like me, they trust me. How do I get them to invest more, more time with me, more products with me, or learning from me in new ways? That has been game-changing for my business. So, when it comes to building a more engaged audience, that also has a domino ripple effect If that is something that you are using as a priority for your creator business. So this was another great stat that I want everybody to hear. Okay, because this is one where people are like it's just me, I'm a solopreneur, I don't have anybody else helping me. Well, according to this, it says half Half of the creator economy works alone. 50% of creators didn't have any employees or contractors last year, so it's common for creators to wear every hat in their business. Creator teams tend to be small, with 26% of creators only having one to two employees and just 4% of creators having more than 10 people on their team. So if it is just you or maybe it is just you an occasional contractor or a VA that works for you part-time, you are really in like you're half the population of creators. So don't stress out and say, oh my gosh, I need a team of 20 people, because what happens and I often see this is creators will start to have some success and they immediately start hiring a huge team of people to support them, but then they haven't done the first thing, you know, focusing on that growth and revenue and so they have this big spike and then all of a sudden, they can't replicate it. Maybe it was like a one-time brand deal or a one-time promotion that went really well, but then they can't replicate it and it's not something they can duplicate on a monthly basis, and so they eventually have to start letting people go, and that gets sad, right? You don't want to hire a bunch of people and then let them go in six months. It's not a great situation for everybody. So if you are in a place to hire someone and you're wondering what does that look like? I have hired contractors that have worked for me part-time. I've hired people that help me on a project basis, so it could be. I hired a graphic designer for my course profit podcasting. I knew that I wanted to take my Word documents basically that's what they were, my PDFs and make them beautiful and make them look so much better. But if I would have done this myself, it would have taken me years. I feel like I mean, it probably would have taken me a few months, but it would have taken me so long. I hired a graphic designer to do this. She did everything in like a 48-hour period. They're gorgeous. They're beautiful Shout out to Sydney Eve because they look incredible. But those are the types of situations where I find a lot of creators is you don't have to have full-time employees. You don't even have to have four or five part-time employees. You can do really well with having part-time virtual assistants, part-time graphic designers or project managers that you hire on a regular basis. But I just wanted to point this out because, if it's just you, that's how it is for a lot of other creators. So there you go. So the third thing that we need to cover today is where creators see the best audience engagement, and this was so interesting. It's probably not going to be a shock for you, but it says short form video is a rising star. I think that we already know this, but what surprised me is how high because it's actually the highest articles, blog posts and books are still at the top. Like top creative outputs in 2022 were articles, blog posts and books, and then the next one is social media posts that are short form videos. And then the third is emails or newsletters. Now, I love video. I actually prefer long form video, but with long form video you can chop it up into short form videos. So if you have something that's long form first and you use that to create short form videos, then it's definitely a lot easier. But I just found this really interesting that articles, blog posts and books are still up there at as the highest today. We'll have to see what happens over the next 12 months. I already said this earlier, but I'm a huge marketing nerd and this says Instagram is the most popular platform for marketing content. More than 55% of creators use Instagram to market their content, making it the most popular place to share what they're up to. Now, who knows, maybe this? You know this whole thing is biased because it's mostly convert kit creators, convert kit users, but I think that it's pretty true. I mean, I know that TikTok has been like the thing that everybody's been talking about for a while now, but it doesn't rank as the highest for marketing your content. The first one is Instagram, the next one is email newsletter, the third one is Facebook. Fourth blog post, fifth, youtube, and then six is TikTok, followed by LinkedIn, twitter, pinterest, podcast and Twitch. So it's really interesting that this is what people are using to market their content. But it's what I teach people in my community. I'm like, hey, you should absolutely use Instagram to put your sound bites, to talk about your podcast share behind the scenes and Instagram stories. It is the platform where I am most engaged with a social media audience, so this just falls right in line with what I do. So that's just a beautiful coincidence. Okay, the next piece is talking about one of my favorite topics email marketing. Of course, convertkit put this out. If you don't know this, they're an email service provider. I am a proud partner with them. You can go to crystalprofitcom forward slash convert kit to check out all the amazing things that they do. While you're at it, I would love it if you would give this video a like and subscribe, if you have not already, or follow us on the podcast, because this type of content and nerding out about digital marketing and content creation it is my jam. It is what I do. But it says here professional creators prefer email marketing for audience engagement, and it says email newsletters are a popular channel for all creators. Over half already have an email list and 16% of creators plan to start a newsletter this year to grow their business, and I have found this to be true, that my emails like that's where I really get connected with my people. Of course I can put stuff on Instagram, but I mean, I'm kind of at the mercy of the algorithm as to who's actually going to see it. I put up my YouTube videos. That's great. It gets to a certain percentage of the people that I'm subscribed to, but I have, you know, 7,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel and I don't get 7,000 watches every time I put out a brand new video. Sometimes it's a few hundreds, sometimes it's less than that. So when it comes to email, I know that if I'm going to send an email to my list, then there's going to be several hundred people that are going to read that email because I see it. I see it every week. I have roughly around like a 42% open rate. So as soon as I press send on an email, I know that around 40% of my audience is going to open that email and at least read it and look at it, and it cannot say that for other platforms. So you need to have an email marketing strategy, and I'll link in the video description and the podcast show notes for my favorite resources for growing an email list and things that you can do to get your email list game in check. Okay, we're here. We're at the juicy details. The fourth thing that we're covering today is the behind the scenes of creator income, and I know you all have asked me you're like how much money do people make? Like, what does that look like? How much can I expect if I'm just getting started? And so it says running a creator business has a lot of perks. You can explore your interests, connect with new people and learn new tools and skills oh, and earn a living online. So let's talk about what it looks like. And it says more creators are making more money. So they pulled people and said hey, are you making more in 2022 than you did in 2021? And it says that almost 50% of people that responded were making more money in 2022. Most of them said my income is about the same. Other people said they didn't generate income at all in 2022 and some made less, but almost half the people that responded said they made more money in 2022 than 2021. And I fell into that category as well. I made more money last year than I did in 2021. So this is where things get really interesting, because when people ask me, well, how much money can I expect to make? Of course I can't estimate that as a generalization because I don't know. You know what you're doing specifically, I don't know your business, I don't know your audience, I don't know where you're doing things, what's going on, and so I don't like to generalize and that's why I like letting the numbers do the talking, because it says here total income generated from creator businesses in 2022. Among those who reported. So it says 55% of these creators made less than $10,000 annually from their creator business and 20% of creators made more than 60,000 and 12% of creators made more than $100,000 from their business last year. So it's really interesting. So about 55% of people are making under $10,000, which, hey, $10,000 is, you know, $7,000 a year. That is incredible If you can add that to whatever else you're already doing, especially if this is your part time gig. But when people ask me, like, how likely is it that I'm going to be making $100,000 or $200,000 beyond in my first year, I just don't. I can't promise you that, that that's going to happen. I don't know that. Anybody can promise you that that's going to happen, even though there's a lot of people online and say we can do this. I'm going to show you that it's snake oil in my opinion, and you know, that's. That's for another video, that's for another topic. But I think it's really important that you look at what people in your genre of content are doing and how they're making money, because what you can do is follow their path of success and decide well, do I want to do that? Also, do I want to write books and sell them? Do I want to create podcasts? And, you know, have a lot of downloads and get sponsorships, and I love following what other people are doing to get ideas, and then from there I can decide oh, I'm interested in that, or maybe I want to pursue it, but I want to put my own spin on it and have my own way of doing things. All right, so now let's break down how these creators are actually making money, because it says the income streams creators plan to add to their business, and one of the top ones is digital products. That actually is the top one and that is my favorite because it's passive income once it's created. And you have it. I already talked about. I have the podcast launch toolkit. I have one year of podcast content in one hour. This is another low ticket offer that I have. I have my digital course that's on evergreen. And I have a book. That's a digital product. It's an audiobook or an ebook. So I love digital products because these make me money every single month and I only had to create them once. Now they're out there and I am making income that is coming in without extra effort. Now I will have launches from time to time where I do special promotions for them, but in reality, the thing is already created. I'm not recreating it every month every time I go to promote it. So I love digital products. I talk about, you know, amy Porterfield. I've learned from her about how to create digital courses. I have put together other types of trainings and workshops that people can buy on demand. So love, love, love digital products. The next ones are subscriptions and paid memberships, then professional services, coaching and freelancing. I love this. I love coaching, coaching one-on-one like. Let me know in the comments if you're interested in coaching one-on-one with me. I can get you more information about that. I Also love affiliate marketing and giving links, because this is how I got started. This is how I started making money online. Back in the day, whenever I started blogging Unsuccessfully always tell people I was very unsuccessful blogger. But whenever I started, I would share book recommendations on my blog and I would use my Amazon affiliate link and that's how I started making money. It wasn't a ton of money, it was like a dollar here, two dollars there, five dollars, whoo. But I was making money and that's how I got started. Now, today, I make almost half of my revenue from affiliate marketing. It's from promoting other programs. It's promoting services that I love, products that I love and things that I know this audience needs. So don't underestimate affiliate marketing. You should absolutely try it out, but at the end of the day, I don't think that you can go wrong with any of these. So, again, go download the full Convert kit report so you can dive more into the details of how creators are Making their income. Okay, so we talked about income. Now we need to talk about investing, or some of these are gonna be Expenses. So you are investing in your business, but some of these will be expenses and we're gonna talk about how much people are actually Investing back into their business every single month. So it says average monthly expenses for content creation. There's a lot of people that are spending less than a hundred dollars, but most of those people are categorized as hobbyist. Then you have part-timers that are spending, you know, under a hundred, and then some full-timers. Now Then you have the category of a hundred to five hundred and of course, the hobbyist shrink down a lot. You're not gonna spend a lot that much money on something that's just a hobby and maybe you're not making any money. But I can see that part-timers and full-timers the full-timer one really jumps up more in the one to five hundred dollar range. The next one is 500 to a thousand dollars a month. Now this is where my business currently sits. My monthly expenses for everything that you see me doing is in between 500 to a thousand dollars a month. Why am I sharing this with you? Because I like to be transparent. If I add up, I have kajabi, I have convert kit, I have other expenses like Calendly, my virtual mailbox. I'm trying to think of all of these off the top of my head and it's a little hard to put myself On the spot. But the Google, you know, my Google workspace, all of these things. And then, of course, I have my yearly Subscriptions. I pay for the yearly probe plan for Canva, I have my website hosting, I have my website theme. So there's some of these things that you can categorize either in the monthly subscription column or the yearly Subscription. But at the end of the day, I like to break it all out, whether it's monthly or yearly, and examine it that way like how much am I actually spending a month? And right now, mine is between the 500 to a thousand dollars, but it's because I'm doing this, as I mean, like I'm here, I'm in it already told you I've been doing this since 2018. I have Invested money. I am also making money in my business, and I Tend to creep up a little bit more in my expenses as my revenue grew. But I think it's something that every creator has to kind of evaluate for themselves. But as you keep going down the list, you have between 1000 and 5000 and then more than 5000. Those are all the four full-time creators that likely also have other you know overhead expenses that are a lot more. Maybe that's fancy equipment, maybe that's whatever, but I actually have this next slide. If we go to it, it says the largest expenses related to content creation in 2022. And guess what? Number one is software. This was no surprise to me whenever I saw it, because I absolutely, absolutely spend the majority of everything on my monthly basis on software and subscriptions, even the annual subscriptions. Those are all software related. So if this is my podcast editing tools, my graphic design tools, my accounting tools, like it's subscription, it is so much software subscription of my business. The next one is cameras or equipment courses and the courses piece I really put up to continuing education. So I do look at that not necessarily as just an expense, like, oh, I bought this other course just because I could. I do look at it as an investment and when I'm looking at investing in a course, I always commit to if this is how much this course costs. This is like I give myself a timeline to implement the things that you know the course cost and then make that back and then some within a quarter. So a 90 day period of when I buy something to whenever I'm gonna see results and I hold myself accountable. That way, I'm not just buying a bunch of courses, like so many of us have, and I want to see a return on my investment when it comes to continuing education in my business. Now there are some other ones on there, like travel and lodging. Yeah, I'll spend some money on that, but it's not on a regular basis. Like I went to podcast movement earlier this year, I went to Craft and Commerce, which is converts kit conference, so I had conference expenses and travel and lodging, but over the course of the year, that is not gonna be the most expensive thing that I've spent money on. So, yeah, very interesting. All right, we're getting into the final few things that I wanted to talk about, and we could not end today's episode without talking about AI, because this is the buzzword of the year and it says how creators are using AI to streamline their business. Ai is a hot topic online and creators are testing the new technologies themselves. So 34% of creators incorporated AI tools last year and 51% want to try them this year. So what are people actually doing and what does this look like? So which creators use AI tools and it's really across the board, like how many people are using it, how many people aren't, and it's really going into helping mid-sized creators automate their businesses and grow, and I would say that's kind of where I'm falling into. It's like I want to use automation as much as possible so that I don't have to think about some of these tasks and I can just hand it off to AI and let it do all the things that I don't want to do. Let's just be really honest. I don't want to do scheduling. It's why I use Calendly to set everything up and schedule the Zoom calls and have everything on my Google calendar and it just it makes my life so much easier and it's like the assistant that I never knew, I always needed and it's so helpful. But let's dive into some more of the details. So it says what can AI do for creators? The most common way creators use AI is editing. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, this is how I use it. So I recently did a video about the three tools for AI that podcasters can use, and it was ChatGPT, buzzsprouts, cohost, ai and Grammarly, and all of those are related to creating content and editing content. So go check out that video if you have not watched it. But it says that generating written content is one of the things generating audio content and scheduling and organizing. So if you are interested in learning more about AI, go again, download this report and find out other ways that you can use AI in your content creation. Okay, now we need to talk about the creator experience. How happy are you as a creator? And I love that. This is something that they focus the study on because it's so important our creators happy? And it says generally yes, and I have a really fun fact that I'm so excited to share with you. We're gonna get there in a second. But it says creators are a generally satisfied bunch. So they took a poll and says overall satisfaction scores across creators and it says about 12% of creators report an average satisfaction score of 10 out of 10. So this is great. Go check out this specific chart, but this is the one that I wanted to share with you. When I saw this, I was like my audience is going to love this statistic. I love it. I love seeing this as a podcast coach, because it says the average satisfaction scores by creator type. Who is at the top? Podcasters? We are a happy bunch of people, aren't we? I think it has to do with we get to connect with people and interview people and learn new things and get to investigate and like oh, it's just, podcasting is fun, right, it's fun. You have fun podcasting, don't you? I want you to tell me in the comments. Well, yes, crystal, I love podcasting. It is so much fun. The next one is a digital content creator or influencer, such as YouTube, instagram or TikTok. Then you have photographer or filmmaker, author, like. It just keeps going on and down the list. But I think it's so important to look at these are all creative endeavors. You are a creator, like it's in the definition. It's a creative endeavor because you are a creator, so you are using your brain, you're using the skills that you have to create something from essentially nothing, just based on your knowledge and skills. So I thought this was so fantastic. I'm a happy podcaster, I'm a happy creator and I just loved seeing this. But I want you to go grab convert kits, reports. I want everybody to go grab it. I think it's so fantastic to have this information at your fingertips. Dive into the details and all the things we weren't able to cover here today, because it's so fun and again, like I started at the very beginning of this episode today, sharing that you're not alone and it can feel a little lonely sometimes If you fall in that 50% of people like it is just you and you don't have friends or family that do a YouTube channel, they don't have a podcast, they don't try to create content on Instagram. You feel a little lonely, and so I want you to know that you're not alone. And here are some numbers that you can use to measure where you stand in your creator journey versus all the other people that took the reports or submitted their survey results for the Convert Kit State of the Creator Economy report for 2023. But that's all I have for you today. What a fun episode. This was fantastic. Again, I'm gonna have the link to go download Convert Kit State of the Creator Economy, so go check it out and, if you have not already, make sure you like and subscribe wherever you are listening or watching to this episode today and, as always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.