← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Ep. 75: 6 Income Streams You Can Build From Your Phone: How I Turned Instagram Into a Full-Time Business (and You Can Too)
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If you're scrolling Instagram, wondering how creators are turning content into cash, this one's for you. Today I'm going to walk you guys through the different income streams that I've built directly from my phone. Yes, literally from the same screen you're probably staring at right now, I'm going to break down what each one looks like, how it brings in revenue, and how you can start building these too. I'm Kaitlyn Rhodes, your host of Call Her Creator. And this podcast is brought to you by Stan. Now, before we dive in, I want to say thank you to all of you that have been sharing your money walks. I hope you are on a money walk right now listening to this podcast episode. If you are, take a little selfie, share it to your stories, and tag me at Paul, her creator. You can also tag my personal one at the Caitlyn Rhodes. I'm trying to share all of these money walks on my stories too, so we can spread awareness and start a movement for us creators. So today, let's talk about why different income streams matter. Right? Because this isn't just about making more money. It's really about building freedom for yourself. Security options. For me, becoming a mom made this part hit really hard. I really didn't want to rely on one income source that could literally vanish overnight. I also needed that freedom. If my daughter was having an award ceremony or my son had a baseball tournament that we had to leave work early or something like that. I wanted my own schedule. And so that is why I went all in on Instagram. And it truly changed my life. And it worked for me. I want to create a business that I'm in charge of. And the same for you guys. Like, no one should have to rely on someone else. We should all have to rely on ourselves. And this is the best way to do that. You put your future in your own hands when you start your own business. So I'm pushing you guys to really think about what lights your inner fire. What are you passionate about? How can we monetize that? Utilizing social media. So if we're being honest, nobody taught us this, right? Like, don't want to age myself here, but what we have MySpace. When I was in high school, in college, I think Instagram just started to come out, and that was taking pictures of your food and using the ugly filters. But now, like, all of these social media channels are truly a free way for you to build a business, build brand awareness, nurture a community. You don't have to pay for any of it. You. You can pay for paid ads. But most of the time it's organic growth and it's free to you and it's right at your fingertips. So there's no reason for you guys to not be utilizing these free income streams for us to build. One other thing I wanna note here is if you talk to any wealthy person or someone who is just making the big bucks, they don't rely on one income stream, they build multiple income streams. And now with your phone and a little bit of strategy, you can do it too. So if you've ever thought, how do people actually do this? This episode is your blueprint. So let's just get right into it. Let's walk through my different streams of income. These should get your brain going on. Oh, I could totally do that too. Because let me tell you, I. I am not special. I promise you, I'm a normal person who really just had the drive to get it done and I stayed consistent with it and that's how I've built all of this. So you can do it too, if you have enough drive. And really, like, what did someone, someone said something the other day and they're like, you just haven't reached your breaking point yet then. And that was like, oh my God, she's so right. Like, all of us will have to reach a breaking point where we decide, okay, I'm not gonna do this for fun anymore. I'm gonna do this as a business. And that's exactly what I did. And so that's how I made all of these different income streams. So my first and biggest income stream is my actual digital marketing agency, Influence Marketing Studio. This was me doing a side gig while I was at my full time job and taking on clients in the background. Like, I'd work my nine to five and then I'd come home and I do social media content. For a few businesses. These were mostly like friends. More friends of friends had some kind of. Everyone knew I was interested in social. Let me start with that. If you like something or if you want to do something, you have to make it known. So I kind of made it known to my friends, to my family, to my colleagues. Like, I'm your social media girl. If you have, if you ever need any help with it, please reach out to me. So people like knew. So I started taking on those clients on the background and then it actually ended up getting to a spot where I'm like, shoot, I cannot keep doing my full time job and freelancing on the side because I'm starting to get so many clients That I can't handle all of this on my own. So I finally decided that I was going to leave that 9 to 5. If you want to hear my whole story, it's one of the first episodes I ever shared on Call Her Creator. But the writing was on the wall and I finally was like, okay, I'm going to blow up this full service social media agency. And I did. I left my nine to five. I announced it everywhere, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, that I had quit my nine to five and I had started my own social media agency. If you need help with your marketing, hit me up. And I slowly built a little mighty team behind me. We offer social media management strategy, content creation, and we have a membership, which I'll talk about in a minute with that income stream. But this is monthly reoccurring revenue and it's a consistent client base that keeps my income pretty predictable. Like as long as I have these people on retainer, I can kind of predict what my income will be each month. So tip for you, package your skillset into a retainer offer. Even if you're starting solo, businesses will pay for consistency and results. This could, I mean, maybe you're a cleaning girl, you like to clean, get some people on retainer that you'll clean their house. You're starting a retainer offer where you know they pay you on a monthly basis and you do a service, you provide a service for them. There's so many things out there depending on what you're passionate about. But mine was social media, so I had a social media agency. If you ever want to kind of walk through some ideas, feel free to send me a dm. I love helping people actually come up with business ideas based on what they like. So that is my lane and I would love to help you come up with something. You can also grab my digital product starter kit. I'll link that in the show notes as well. It's completely free to you and what that will do is help you come up with a business idea, make sure that it's viable, tell you how to make a sales page and actually launch all of it. Literally. People pay thousands of dollars for someone to teach you this and I teach everything to you in this digital starter kit. So grab that from the show notes if you think that you would want to start some kind of retainer type reoccurring revenue each month. So first income stream is digital marketing agency. All right, next income stream, which I actually think is the smartest. Easiest, not the smartest. I think it's the Easiest income stream to start if you're wanting to bring on another income stream and that's coaching or one on one services. How it began for me, I started getting DMs asking like how'd you grow your account so fast or how are you making these graphics, blah blah blah. So I realized I could turn that into a service where someone could meet with me for an hour. I sold my time, I met with them for an hour. I helped them with their social media strategy and then I ended up creating them like a content calendar. And then one and done. I started selling my coaching calls, our coaching calls for 300 bucks a pop. Now I've doubled that since then. So now it's 600 bucks a pop. And I only open up a little bit of those at a time each month because I don't really like doing them anymore, to be completely honest. It's either you love coaching or you don't, which I love it. It actually does help fill my cup. But it takes so much time from you. Like you, you are trading your time for money there. You can't hire someone else to do that. So that's the only setback for me when it comes to that. But the revenue model there is like a launch based or evergreen. It can just sit there on your stand store as a one on one coaching call. Or you can launch it. You know, each quarter, say you're opening up a few coaching spots that quarter, whatever it is that you want to do. People also do masterminds where they coach people together in a group setting. It's fun to do stuff like this. I've done the one on ones, I've done the group coaching. Group coaching was fun because I actually packaged that into a couple different people. They all paid me like 1500 a pop and then we met for four weeks in a row. So it wasn't just one off one hour call. It was we met for an hour, four weeks in a row, once a week. The cool thing about the coaching sessions is that you can kind of build that, grow that as you please, depending on what you want to give. So coaching one on one sessions, that's another income stream. Super easy to get into and super easy to kind of get fun and creative with it. It's just not as scalable like I said, because it's really you. Unless you hire like a bunch of coaches underneath you to help you, then you're gonna be relying on yourself a lot. So that's the only thing is like you are training your time. Know this too you do not have to be an expert to offer coaching sessions. You just need to be one step ahead of the person you wanna help. Please keep that in mind because the biggest holdback I see from people is that, oh, I don't have enough experience, or no, I'm not that good enough. Yes, you are. You're probably better than Joe Schmo. And Joe Schmo needs your help. So offer Joe Schmo. Start somewhere. Start there. Digital products are the third income stream. Myself, I sell Reels Guide, I sell my Instagram growth starter kit. I have a 28 day engagement challenge. I have a bunch of different digital products. Kind of depends what season we're in, what I'm feeling like. But basically you can find what you're passionate about and then build like a PDF type product around your expertise in that area. The reason why this works so well is because typically you can build it once and then just sell it over and over and over again. It's low ticket, so low tip get mostly means higher volume, easier conversions. Now, once you start selling those coaching calls that are 1500 a pop, those are way harder to sell versus a $19 reels guide. So my $19 reels guide was actually my first digital product that popped off. I've talked about this in several episodes, so you guys probably know that already. But I love digital products because they're super easy to create and you really can just sell them while you sleep. I update them frequently. But think about like, like my Reels challenge, for example. I made that and it ran for a while before I had to refresh it again because the algorithm started changing and the, you know, the Reels platform, all of that kind of started changing. The algorithm changed, so I had to update that and I continuously updated. But there's other things like what else do I have in there? The 28 day engagement strategy. My engagement strategy hasn't changed, so that challenge stays as is. I have way less heavy lifting there. Don't really do much there. I just sell it. It's there in the background. People buy it when they want. So digital products are super duper easy. Start with one PDF, figure out one specific problem that your audience is facing right now, and then create a PDF guide on that. And you can use ChatGPT to help outline it for you. Don't use ChatGPT for the entire PDF. You need to put your own flare on it. We need to have your specific, specific expertise complimenting what's inside of it. But that's it. That, that's how Easy it is. You start with one pain point and you can create it in Canva and then host it on your stand store. No fancy tech is needed. When someone buys my product off of my stand store, they input their information, I get paid and Stan sends it to them in email. I will also link my Stan store referral link in the show notes too. If you don't have a stand store yet, this is how you sell all of these things. My coaching sessions are booked through Stan. My digital products are downloaded through Stan. The next income stream I'm about to talk about is memberships, which is also hosted through Stan. Kind of two way street there. So let me get into that. So memberships, they're a little bit harder than coaching calls and digital products because you have to put time into that, right? So we probably spend like three hours a week on the membership because in our membership we supply people with content, strategy, trendy reels, ideas, Canva templates. So we are constantly updating all of the information in that membership so that it's fresh and new each week. So that is sold through Stan. But then I actually hosted on another platform called Circle. It's a little more robust. If you're just getting started with memberships, Stan is the perfect membership platform to use. I ended up moving my membership over to Circle just because it got really big and Circle had some extra features that I really wanted to use. But people still have to purchase it through Stan. Stan charges them on a monthly basis. Some other cool things too. Like if you ever want to do like a trial run or offer a trial offer where people can get into your membership for 50% off for their first month. Like Stan has that all set up too. So you don't have to know any of that tech stuff either. It's all set up for you in there. So I love that. The reason that memberships work so well, I believe is that they're scalable. You can grow them super duper big, high, low. It's a reoccurring income that deepens your community over time as well. So like all those people in there know that I'm emailing them every Monday. They can chat with me in there live. There's a board in there that they can write on. We have different spaces inside there based on like they need reels help or if they need content, calendar if they need captions or if they need Canva templates. All of it's kind of put inside of there to help nurture that community. So they know that I am the girl to go to when it comes to Instagram growth. The thing with memberships though is just remember like, you don't need a massive audience to have a successful membership. My membership is only 29 bucks a month, so my goal is to get as many people as possible in there. Very low ticket in my opinion, but my girlfriend has a membership that's like $129 a month and hers is a little more personalized, but her group of people is much smaller than my community. So depending on how deep you want to go with that audience, that can help you price your membership too. And you know, you can always test your pricing too. Like I started with a $37 a month membership and then at one point it was 59amonth because we were giving a little bit of extra stuff in there. But I had to scale back a little bit whenever I took on my podcast. So we dropped the price to match the service offerings. So just do some competitive research. If you're not sure what to price in there, find out what other people are pricing their similar membership at and then you can kind of go from there. ChatGPT is very, very, very helpful too as far as coming up with a membership idea. Your pricing for it, making your sales page for it, definitely lean on ChatGPT for help with that. The membership is actually really fun to us and I also coined that called Club Influence. My marketing agency is Influence Marketing Studio, so it just helps nurture and build my community. So I really love the membership aspect. Next income stream is affiliate marketing, which is probably one of the easy peasy income streams too. Out of all of these affiliate marketing, if you don't know what that is, it's basically when you earn a commission for recommending a product or a service that you already use and you already love. So instead of just telling your audience, hey, I love this tool, you actually share a specific link and if someone buys buys that thing using your link, then you get paid for it. So like, think of it like being the friend who always has the best recommendations. Except now brands are thanking you with real money. When people take your advice and actually buy it, you don't have to create the product, you don't have to ship anything, you don't have to handle customer service. You really just suggest it to your friends, promote it in your stories on your post and you get paid. I do this with tools that I genuinely use like Stan Store, obviously manychats in there. Mavely. I've talked about Mavely before, they're really cool affiliate app they're very similar to like to know it. I also have a like to know it as well. But I make reoccurring income just from being helpful to my friends and colleagues. So that's the beauty of affiliate marketing. You can build a revenue stream just by sharing what's already working for you. The easiest way to weave in your affiliate links too is like posting reels, podcast shout outs, tutorials maybe you're on your stories and you're linking what you're wearing for that day. So it's super easy. And once that link is live, you keep earning every time someone clicks on it and uses it. Pinterest is a really good referral traffic pusher for your affiliate link. So like if you are handy in canva, you could make this collage with pictures of like, I don't know, like my favorite top summer picks for Florida style or something. And you're linking all these outfits that you wear for the Florida summer. You pin that on Pinterest, people find that pin, they click on it and it goes to your media account or you're like to know it account or your stance or whatever it is and you make money cuz they clicked on it. So super easy. I will suggest only promoting what you actually use, what you love, what you trust, because your trust is your currency. And when you start promoting things that don't make sense for your business, your audience will look at you and be like she just trying to make money. Or they'll be very confused. So don't do that. All right. The common thread here is that every one of these income streams I've talked about started the same way. It was me on my phone trying to figure it out in between school pickup line, client meetings, everyday chaos. There was no perfect plan for me, no huge team. I just had this desire to want to create something more. And I learned as I go. And if you want this too, you don't have to wait, you just have to start. I want you to know as well too, like if you go back into some of my podcast episodes here, I've got a ton that will walk you through launching some of these ideas. Like I've got stuff on launching your own first digital product, your email marketing, when it comes to launching that product, content that you can post to promote that product, all of that stuff is inside of this podcast. Call her creator. So I really hope you'll go dig back deep into some of those podcast episodes. But if you have any questions, feel free to send me a dm. I also want to suggest grabbing my Instagram Growth Starter Kit. This is gonna help you build an audience that you can sell to in the next 30 days. So say you're planning to launch a business if you grab this Instagram Growth Starter Kit first just to start building and nurturing this audience, then you'll be able to sell to them in the next 30 days. This kit's gonna include an Instagram bio checklist so you can optimize your profile and you will get discovered through search. I'll provide you with a 60 day reels challenge so that you can reach as many people as possible. And then there's also a stories challenge in there to help you start selling your offer so you can show up in stories with your affiliate links or your offer or your service or your digital product and actually make money. All right, guys, if you like today's podcast episode, please do me a favor. Leave me a five star review on Apple or on Spotify, wherever you're listening to your podcast. I also would love for you to send this to two friends, two business besties, two people that you know have an inner fire inside of them. They just need someone to light it up. Please send it to them. Sharing is caring. And if you're on your money walk right now, snap that selfie, share it to your stories and tag me. And let's get more people paid from Instagram from social media. All right, guys, thanks so much for tuning in today. I will see you next week.