She Turned 5800 Followers Into $1 Million Per Year
Summary
- I recently met a business owner who made $1 million in profit from just under 6,000 Instagram followers.
- She helps registered dietitians bill insurance correctly, a very niche market.
- Her Instagram reach is only around 2,800 people per month, yet she still makes 10 low-ticket sales per day and 3 high-ticket sales a week.
- She emphasizes consistent posting with one post and one story every day focused solely on her niche topic.
- Believing in the power of small audiences, she started making sales with just 8 people on her email list, which now has 2,900 people.
- She focuses only on her expertise and answers questions from her audience to create content.
- Niche content can be highly profitable; broad content may get more views but less engagement from targeted buyers.
- I've made this mistake myself by broadening my content, which decreased relevant sales despite increasing views.
- It's crucial to remember that 10 or 100 views consist of real people, who can translate into actual sales if the content is valuable to them.
- Building a die-hard audience doesn’t need large numbers—being useful to a specific group can yield high returns.
- Aim to serve and be helpful rather than obsess over follower numbers or likes; business metrics matter more than vanity metrics.
- You don’t need to be famous to be successful; understanding and serving your niche well can lead to substantial income.
- Consistency, passion, and focusing on a very specific problem for a specific person are key to success.
- It's better to have a small but highly engaged audience that leads to sales rather than chasing high follower counts without targeted engagement.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest implementing a few key strategies if you're a small business owner, entrepreneur, or someone interested in personal growth. Start with these low-cost, high-value items that you can easily implement:
Consistency in Posting
- Make one post and one story every day about your specific niche.
- Focus on providing value and answering questions from your audience. Use their questions as direct content ideas.
Their needs are your content goldmine.
Niche Down
- It's more profitable to be highly specific. Don't try to appeal to everyone. Instead, talk about one very specific problem related to your expertise.
- Broad content may get more views but less engagement from your target buyers.
Understand High Engagement
- Interact deeply with your small audience. Those 10, 100, or 1000 views come from real people who can translate into actual sales.
- Don't chase vanity metrics like likes or follower counts. Focus on the quality of engagement and the relevance to your audience.
Build an Email List Early
- Start your email list even if you have just a few people. This can become a major sales channel as it grows.
- Consistently engage your email list with valuable, niche-focused content.
Believe in the Power of Small Audiences
- Don’t overlook the potential of a small, dedicated audience. Even with a small follower base, you can make significant sales.
- Quality over quantity. A die-hard small audience can yield high returns.
Use Passion to Fuel Perseverance
- Be deeply passionate about your niche. When you genuinely want to help, your audience will feel it and engage more.
- Show up consistently even if the numbers are low. Your passion and dedication will attract loyal followers over time.
Leverage Algorithms
- Algorithms are getting better at showing your content to the right people. Capitalize on this by staying niche-focused.
- Don't be discouraged by small initial view counts. The right people will find your content if it’s valuable to them.
By focusing on these strategies, you can maximize the impact of your content, build a loyal audience, and achieve significant business results even with a small following. Keep being awesome and have an amazing day!
Quotes by Alex Hormozi#### "People are watching, people are listening"
– Alex Hormozi
"Start making content, start promoting yourself"
– Alex Hormozi
"A specific problem being solved for a specific person is how you make big money"
– Alex Hormozi
"Just toss out the vanity metrics because they do not [__] matter"
– Alex Hormozi
"The followers will make you famous, understanding business will make you rich"
– Alex Hormozi
Full Transcript
to blow your mind $1 million in profit from less than 6,000 Instagram followers what I want to walk you through is a story of a business owner that I just recently met doing those exact numbers from a tiny audience and what you can use from those strategies for yourself to get started making big money even if you have a small audience I had the most insane thing happened last night and it has had me at a loss for words I was actually at a loss for words like speechless befuddled bewildered and I was like what is going on and it took a concept that I kind of believe in and I've made some moves around it and it took it to the absolute hyperbolic extreme that you could imagine and it's still held true and I think that for business owners who are listening to this for people who make content who are listening to this but just in this is going to I mean it it has it has slightly nudged how I see the world and I'll just put it that way and I feel like a lot of the beliefs I have around the world are still relatively I I I hold on I believe them pretty pretty strongly so here's what happened so um we had a company come in um and the the the lady who owns the company is a registered dietitian and I'm not going to shout her I would shout her out because I want her to get all the Kudos in the world but I don't want it to mess up what she's doing and so that's why I'm going to keep it Anonymous so she's a registered dietician she takes home just under a million dollars a year helping other registered dieticians Bill Insurance correctly and so it's super niche in terms of what she's really good at so she knows how to be an RD and help people Bill Insurance codes properly and so the average uh I think dietitian adds like $100,000 in income using just like her kind of coding system for billing them right crazy Niche crazy crazy Niche and so um I spent I spent some time with her we talked about her business and things I was like hey I think you move this stuff around and I think that the business could probably do about 3 million a year to 5 million a year in profit if she just moved some of the things around that we talked about and so I was like cool this is great and so we had dinner and I was like hey let me see your your your your Instagram so I just wanted to pull it up because I was going to make a point about something because I assumed that she had like I wanted to see what kind of con that she had assumed that she had at least a relatively large following I honestly hadn't looked shame on me and this is what happens I pull it up number one her account is not verified and I'm like this is your number one source of income and you were not paying $4.99 a month like what are you doing what are you doing and I after after yelling at her for that I then was then drawn to the next natural absolutely unbelievable thing that I'm going to say to you she had 5,800 followers her average post got 19 likes and like one comment and 100% 100% of her acquisition came from her organic Instagram with just under 6,000 followers I pulled up her account stats because I was losing my mind seeing the amount of sales that she was making off of this account her her account her reach for 30 days of her account was 2,800 that was her reach 2800 like for context I do about 20 million a month context and I was like what is happening right now like what am I what do I not what is what is going on how is this possible and so she's doing 10 plus sales a day at a low ticket price and doing 3ish sales a week at a higher ticket price and when I say higher ticket I'm talking like you know4 $5,000 um type price point and then a lower ticket thing for just like some cheat sheets of like here's all the codes and this is how you can do them whatever and a 10 a day a day okay and so this this is that's that's the big story now I'm going to zoom out and I'm going to say what I think is so cool about this so she says this and I was like how how how are you doing this and she's like you know what I I got my first sale when I had eight people on my email list eight eight and I was like that's nuts and she was like yes it was really confirming for me that like there people were listening and so I was like well how big is your email list now and she's been doing this for a few years I've not I told 2,900 people on our email list and she makes sales for emails and it was such a great reset for me it was such a good nudge as a reminder that the view count you have on the other side the 19 likes like there's a real person on the other side of this that is watching your clip that has five views there's a real person who's opening up your emails when you have a list that has 300 people on it like people are watching people are listening and the thing that was unique that I found about her I'll say two things and I think that there's a really good meta concept here one is she her content was consistent and she said yeah I do one post and I do one story every day and I like but she was like super proud of it I was like this is adorable and also crazy but the posts that she talks about 100% of them are about billing insurance as a registered dietician like could not be more Niche couldn't like you couldn't even think of one right for I couldn't even imagine one and despite that she's making the sales that she is and so I'm going to zoom out on this because I think it's really interesting so if you if you go to my Alex's homepage right like as a user of Instagram my user page I've showed this to people because people are like this is really weird all I have is philosophy stuff comedy and gym equipment like that's my whole feed I have no news I have it's philosophy comedy and gym equipment because that's what I look at and what's interesting is that the philosophy is kind of a lot of those are kind of like midsize the comedy comedians are mass market so a lot of those guys are bigger but I get tiny comedians like 5,000 follower 10,000 follower comedians get shown to me all the time because Instagram knows I like comedy and equipment dealers and Equipment manufacturers and metal fabricators not always the best marketers and so like the these accounts that I follow there have like 500 a th000 like 2,000 like they're not huge accounts but I get served everything in that space on Instagram because that's what I'm into and so I think that there's a couple really interesting things here one is that I think that Niche content will make you a hell of a lot more money if that's what you're actually selling and I have here's the thing I have learned this lesson twice so I like to you know I like to pretend that I'm you know I uh I like to think I'm a fancy businessman who learns all these lessons but I I have messed this up two times not two times and so I tell the story about how my podcast was getting you know two 3,000 downloads uh per month which is like 100 downloads an episode not a lot right but and that was for like a few years but I don't tell you this other part of the story which is that my podcast started growing in numbers when I started talking about General business it also started growing in numbers even faster once we sold the company for gym launch but there was a period of about 18 months prior to me selling where I just talked about General business because I was like I'm tired of talking about gyms I just want to talk about business in general during that period of time our organic sales went to basically zero and it took us like six months to figure out that the reason that that had happened was because I stopped talking about gym [ __ ] and gym owners were like less interested in my content than generic business cont do that make sense like if you if you're just if you're a business owner you're going to listen to business stuff in general if you're a dentist then you're going to get a lot out of a dentist only podcast right but there's not that many dentists so you're not going to get a lot of listens but the listens in terms of relevancy is going to be through the roof and so we started making less sales but I was getting more views more listens right now I ended up wanting to go in that direction so it was fine and I'm talking about General business now right I made that mistake second time not necessarily a mistake we learned right um three to six months ago we were like let's experiment with some wider content and by experimenting with wider content we sure as hell got more views more more a bunch of other vanity metrics but the number of business owners that was watching and the way I I measured that was uh our cpms on our videos on YouTube the amount of people who opt in it out acis.com people who buy our books all of those all of those metrics were actually down despite our views being up and so this little story that I have of the dinner that I had last night blew me away because it just showed how much you can really make if you have a DieHard audience that doesn't need to be big less than 6,000 followers her account reaches less than 2,800 accounts per month and she's taking home almost a million dollars a year that's income not Revenue I'm just talking profit and right now if she just take makes the couple of obious VI changes that she can make she'll probably make somewhere in the $3 to5 million a year range income income and if you're looking to make your first dollar online or monetize your audience no matter what the size is school.com games is the easiest way that I know how to do it I take a call once a week inside of that Community to answer questions for people who are getting started I have a step-by-step course that lays out what exactly to do to make your first dollar online and once a month I drop 8 hours of training from the top 10 community business owners showing exactly what they're doing to scale their communities today school.com s/ games you can start for free and I say this because there's there's two angles on this right on on one side people are like well I don't want to start making content because what if I have low numbers I believe now the algorithms are so good that if you make it about one specific type of thing it's going to show it to those people and right now Al by the way like the guy who runs uh Instagram talked about he's actually favoring smaller creators now so that's a good thing if you're if you're trying to get into it but beyond that I think there's so much power in and when I talked to her she's like I just want to show up she's like I show up whether there's no one there's one person and I just I I show like like it's a whole Auditorium she said this thing and I have just noticed this with [ __ ] winners right it's like they're doing it because of what they because she's a missionary she just genuinely wants to help regro dietician she's like I get it I worked at the hospital do 100 hours a week and like I was under you know under staffed underbuild and I had to start making this business work on my own doing one day a week so I had to figure out how to do this quickly in terms of all this spilling stuff and she's she gets so passionate when she was talking about it I I've confidence she's not going to change industry she been in 20-some years like she's not going anywhere she loves this stuff and the people who stay in the game the longest like the game they're in and so I have this thing that I I I heard from last dance which is the Michael Jordan documentary which if you haven't seen you should totally see it and they're they're interviewing Jordan and they're like why do you br you like you bring such a high intensity every single time you show up to the arena and he says this line and I remember getting ch when I heard it he was like I just never know I know that there's one guy who's bringing his son and they saved up for months to go to this one Bulls game and that's the one it's not going to be some prime time night it's just going to be a random Tuesday game in a series he's like and that's the only time they're going to see me play in their lives he's like and I want I want to perform for them for that kid for that for that Dad who wants to impress his son and like that that like I almost get choked up when I tell that story because um like that's so real for me um and the way that she brought the energy like the energy she brought in terms of how she wanted to show up when there's eight people on her live or two people on her live or when there were eight people on her email list and she made her first $39 sale I was like this is real and people need to hear this which is why I wanted to tell the story because I think it's absolutely insane and it just it put like I say what I say right which is hey guys like start making you know start making content start promoting yourself if more people know about your stuff you're going to make more money period period fight me right that's that's what it is but you just forget sometimes that like when you have 10 views on a YouTube video that's 10 people and I remember when I was in the gym world if I had 10 people that I could talk to I was stoked right in the fact that we can do this from home behind a camera my God how amazing is that and so like if I had 25 people my God that's like that's like a talk that's like a that's like a workshop you a lunch and learn that you do as a business owner try and get business the fact that you can make a niche content Instagram will serve it to only people who very interested in that I only like gym equipment and I get gym equipment stuff all the time got like 13 likes on it but I see it right I see it because Instagram knows and the algorithms only get better and so um I wanted to cover all that stuff because I thought it was really important um and from a from a how do you how do you make this she has endless sources of content because she just literally answers their questions they just keep she was like I was like so where do you get stuff for she's like oh they all have questions and so I just I just make my posts answering their questions that's it and I will say this I think she could do a lot of things better to be clear but like she just had every other post just had a by the way there's a link in my bio that has more stuff that you might like that was it that was the whole strategy and she was doing a million dollars a year take-home just under and so I was just blown away by this and I I find it actually one of the most hopeful messages that I have seen in in person in a very long time and so people have you know like unless I have 100,000 followers not be able to make money unless I have T the thing is is that people seek the followers with the idea that the followers are going to make them Rich the followers will make you famous understanding business will make you rich she understands business she's like I'm just going to talk to the people that I want to serve and I'm only going to serve them and I'm going to answer all the questions and the way she talked about she's like I just want to be useful she's like I just want to help him out and so if you're coming into the frame rather than like I want this piece of content to perform and think there's eight people on either side I just want them to be better off and hopefully answer their question from this piece of content they making you will get raving fans even if your audience is 5,000 people but there's a there's a book I can't remember the guy who wrote the name of the book but he says you only need a thousand true fans and I think that so like a thousand fan like you can you can do whatever you want with a thousand fans even at 10 bucks a month right like you can make $100,000 a year if you just do that right thousand true fans that are die hard and you can make a lot more than that with a thousand true fans and so people think because we have this 8 billion people in the world that you need to be you need to be the Barack need to be Kim Kardashian need to be Mr Beast and sure with massive numbers like those like you're going to get famous those things are are required but like you can make an absolute killing just talking about what you're really good at and that's the other piece here is that I I'm I'm half I'm shatting this at myself too which is like we we we made piece of marriage content a couple you know a couple relationship stuff a little bit of Fitness stuff and the thing is is like there's there's no relationship billionaire like the the only objective measure of if your marriage is good just from a society standpoint is that you are not divorced that's it and then it's that measured by how many years you put up with each other that's it and I don't like that because it's one of those it's one of those crappy things where everybody's been in a relationship so everybody has an opinion and there's no objective proof that one thing is better than another and so like I hate I don't like making content in that space we tried it out because like we have a unique relationship Lea and I and we like what we do and it's worked for us well but um I would say that I have more credibility uh in business and so she has credibility in not just she doesn't talk about nutrition at all she just talks about how to be a restro dietician and Bill Insurance properly and get credentialed and do this whole process that apparently is a big pain in the butt and so if you are somebody who has a very specific Niche that you're that you're good at I would highly encourage you to just make the content that gets 40 views that gets 100 likes that you know for sure will help a very specific person because when you do help that very specific person they will like you a lot more than many people who like you a little bit and the people who like you a lot are the ones who buy from you and that's the thing and I I I'm making this because I need to remind myself of this which is like you can either be rich or you can be famous you can obviously be both but honestly sometimes it's a lot faster to just just get rich and many of you get in the game because you want to make money from social media from making content from things like that from advertising the business you want to do more of that get your face out there whatever but you start chasing the views because the views is what the algorithm right encourages but the business side this is why I'm trying to make this point is that the metrics don't necessarily follow the van your business metrics don't follow your vanity metrics there and so just because you get more views doesn't mean you get more Revenue just because you get more subs doesn't mean you get more optins right for your website or for whatever it is that you that you sell you don't get sales from that stuff subscribers don't mean sales and so there are there are tons of stories of tiny channels we have uh we have an insurance brokerage that we own um and the the the head of the insurance brokerage has like when when we when we invest in the company had I think like 5,000 followers on Instagram or Sor not on Instagram on on YouTube and the business is doing many millions of dollarss a year I'll just be that be very clear there many millions not just one or two and it's because he talks about a very complex structure of insurance that that he specializes in he's one of the foremost experts and his videos get like 100 to 500 views but those 100 to 500 views are people who are looking for incredibly high-end very specialized Insurance products and so don't be afraid of the empty room very low views doesn't mean low Revenue it just means that it's more specific and that you're talking to a more specific person and a specific problem being solved for a specific person is how you make big money and so I want I thought this was one of the most hopeful messages that I had seen in real life in a long time and it was really confirming for me it also doubled down on the direction that we're doing which for those you said I said mistake made the mistake twice um we have come back to going back to business baby only business uh only Alex only business only for the fans just kidding um and uh and I I hope you I hope this at least encouraged you to just divorce yourself more and more from the vanity metrics around it because I am now leaning so hard to this because our business metrics and I have a big long thing that's coming out soon um have skyrocketed since we stopped going anything that's not business and so I feel so confirmed in this direction that I want to encourage as many of you as humanly possible to just toss out the vanity metrics because they do not [ __ ] matter if you're trying to make money if you're just trying to get famous then yeah but I means it's great metric for fame right um and so yeah just do that be willing to have a th000 fans make stuff that has 19 likes because you know that the 19 people who liked it were like this was unbelievable for me and they will take the next step and they will purchase from your business keep being awesome have an amazing day bye