Creators, what's that one thing you need advice on? 🤔
Figuring out making money? Burk, the creator behind The SoloCreator Hub, teaches creators all about monetization. ✨
We had a conversation with him to understand his content journey, and he's got some advice for creators starting out.
But, First: Who's Burk?
Now, let's dive right into the chat! 👇
Thousand Faces Club: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and what made you start SoloCreator Hub?
Burk: My name is Burk — a short nickname I got as a teenager, and my full name is Burkhard Rosemann. I am from Germany, born, raised, and still living there with my wife and kids. Up until now, I have been a full-time computational linguist, working in the tech industry for ten years. My passion has always been writing, though. That’s one reason I started the SoloCreator Hub. I had already grown a substantial following on Medium and wanted to dive deeper into newsletters. So, I created a Substack newsletter and began publishing.
Thousand Faces Club: How long have you been creating content?
Burk: I’ve been blogging since 2009. But until 2021, this was exclusively in German. In 2021, I found Medium and began writing in English. This has worked out amazingly for me, with over 12K Medium followers and now about 3K subscribers over a few newsletters I run.
Thousand Faces Club: How did you get your first 1000 newsletter subscribers?
Burk: I didn’t do much marketing to grow my newsletter. The main traffic source has been my Medium profile and the digital products I create and sell on Gumroad. Some growth has also come from Twitter, which is my major focus in social media. More recently, collaborations have played a significant role as well. More on that in a minute.
Check out Burk on Gumroad. 👇
Thousand Faces Club: What challenges do you face while running The SoloCreator Hub?
Burk: One challenge is the choice of the best platform to run a newsletter on. I chose Substack because I loved (and still do) the simple interface, writing-focused system, and ease of use. It does have limitations, though — like no API access or integrations with other tools. That posed a problem when I started utilizing newsletter referrals via SparkLoop. SparkLoop doesn’t work with Substack, so I started using another email marketing tool alongside Substack to connect Sparkloop with. That means a lot of manual-subscriber imports and exports from one to the other tool. Another challenge is to figure out what, when, and how to publish content in my newsletter. I repurpose a lot from my Medium blogs, but I don’t want the SoloCreator Hub to be just a copy-and-paste newsletter. I try to write exclusive content from time to time, add multiple pieces of content, and more.
Thousand Faces Club: How important are collaborations, and how do you approach them?
Burk: Collaboration is huge. I am a member of Lettergrowth, a fantastic community to discover cross-promos for newsletters. These cross-promotions have brought in many subscribers and even sales on digital products. All for free.
Then, I have SparkLoop — a great service to earn for recommending other newsletters and to get recommended. I enjoy collaborations a lot.
Thousand Faces Club: Do you remember the time you made your first dollar?
Burk: Yes, it was 2021, and I sold my first Gumroad product. It was an amazing feeling! Then, I made my first dollar on Medium for writing, and it was even better. I was sold on creating content online right there and then.
Burk
Thousand Faces Club: Got any advice for beginner newsletter creators?
Burk: It’s amazing and frustrating to be a new online creator. You see so many things you could do and dozens of people who earn incredible amounts doing it. It’s easy to get caught up in that, and be bumped out too quickly. So, the main thing is playing a long-term game. Overnight success is pretty much impossible. Think long-term. Months, years. Not days or weeks.
Thousand Faces Club: What does the future look like?
Burk: For me? I will be a full-time content creator very soon. That’s exciting! I'll write, create Notion templates, design new digital products, and try new things.
In general, content creation is booming, newsletters are huge right now, It's the perfect time to join the fun. AI will continue to be humongous, of course. That will open up many new opportunities (and close some as well).
Subscribe to The SoloCreator Hub. 👇
