Tech has eliminated the barrier to entry for celebrity entrepreneurship (making money off your personal brand).
Now, with a very small audience, you can sell merch, write books, and connect with your fans in cities around the world.
In the past high fixed costs made these impractical for all but the largest of celebrities. To write a book or start selling clothing you had a reasonably high break-even point. If you had 2000 fans it wouldn’t make sense to do either.
But now with easily accessible print as you order the break-even point is extremely low. Maybe even a handful.
The same holds true for putting on events. A small Youtuber or author can use social media to connect with his fans in a much more efficient way. A great example of this is the story of Chris Guillebeau’s book tours for his first books. He went to every single state in the US and had small meetups with fans of his blogs. He may not have had more than 50 fans in some of those cities, but because of the coordination power of social media, he was able to fill up events all over the country.
An example of this is the merch explosion on Youtube over the past year. From a combination of examples of popular figures doing it successfully and the massive drop in ad revenues on the platform, creators had to get a whole lot more entrepreneurial. Now even small channels are selling t-shirts and merch related to their content.
Logan Paul makes millions selling clothing to his fans, but even if you have a very small audience you can help support yourself with a few sales a month.
If you are a yoga teacher, without internet fame at all, you still have an audience of people that come to your yoga classes and you could market your own clothing to them using a site like TeePublic. This may only make you a couple thousand dollars a year, but in a profession where the supply of teachers is driving down the wages of teachers, you need to think like a hustler.
With print on demand merch shops, you can have your own mercy and make money even if I’m a handful of fans buy it.
You can self-publish books.
You can sell course online teaching what you know.
You can start a Patreon.
You don’t have to be a massive movie star to build a business around your brand. You can do it as a popular yoga teacher, a popular college professor, or a small-time creator on Youtube.
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