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Travel back with me to a magical time.
A time when social media was a content creator’s best friend.
A time when search engine optimization actually worked for regular people.
Content constantly went “viral” on these new social media platforms, resulting in traffic and email subscribers for publishers.
The exposure on social media led to links from other publishers. Those third-party links enhanced website authority, which catapulted content to the top of Google search rankings, resulting in… you guessed it… even more traffic and subscribers.
This was the beginning of the audience-first business model. Attract the audience, figure out what they want to buy, create it, and… profit!
Fortunes were made, seemingly out of nothing but words published online.
The idea that you “can’t make a living writing” was discredited, although it was more accurate to say that entrepreneurs who could write were the ones who made the money.
Then, in 2010, Mark Zuckerberg became the first to turn the lights out on the social media content marketing party. As Facebook implemented an advertising model, publishers on the platform found that they couldn’t reach the audiences they had accumulated without paying for an advertising “boost.”
Since then, social algorithms have routinely been tuned to keep people on the platform, stifling posts that link to off-site content.
Meanwhile, the jockeying for ranking position via SEO became insanely competitive, and Google’s top ten results are now quickly losing ground to the succinct answers provided by generative artificial intelligence.
And yet, with all that change, the audience-first model is more entrenched than ever. And that’s a good thing.
That’s because content marketing, whether text, audio, or video, has always been first and foremost about making a connection with people that leads to a conversion from prospect to customer/client. The fact that it once brought easy traffic as well was a happy but temporary bonus.
While most people struggle to build an audience organically, some still succeed wildly with the approach. One way to succeed is to be already famous — a celebrity, star athlete, or well-known journalist.
The other way is more old-fashioned. It’s the way the offline predecessors of today’s digital marketers did it, and thanks to the ruthless evolution of social and search, we’re returning to it.
How to Become a “Guru” in the New Reality
So how do people seemingly come out of nowhere and suddenly have an audience of tens of thousands, becoming the new “it” guru to that throng of fans?
Simple… they pay for it.
In other words, they use paid advertising to quickly attract what I call a minimum viable audience. Once you get to that tipping point and beyond, the audience itself starts helping you grow, while social proof signals to new prospects that “this person is worth following and subscribing to.”
When I tell people this, many seem shocked. But it’s completely sensible from a return-on-investment standpoint.
Think about it: If attracting an audience can lead to seven- and even eight-figure companies as it did for me and many others from the early days, what would that be worth?
Would you be willing to invest $10,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 to get that outcome? Any sensible investor would take that deal. I’ve even heard tales of individuals willing to spend a million dollars upfront, calculating that they’d earn at least that much back every following year.
It’s important to note that these people aren’t spending on a wing and a prayer. They are deliberate. They work with skilled copywriters and consultants to dial in their conversion process before they even start and make rapid adjustments based on ad performance and audience feedback.
This is not some new, radical development. This is a return to how things used to be before the brief anomaly of easy “free” traffic that lasted roughly from 2005 to 2015.
Back before the commercial internet, people used direct response marketing to make millions of dollars. But that meant paying for direct mail, radio spots, billboards, commercials, and infomercials designed to prompt an action, such as a toll-free call or reply-card response.
These marketers often lost money on the initial sale. But they had a ladder of increasingly higher-priced offers that converted at a higher rate with people who had already bought something from them.
Starting in the late 90s, direct marketers added website visits as a desired action. It took them a little longer to grasp that online, you build permission-based email lists. They were used to buying lists of prospects, which was disastrous when applied to email (aka spam).
At the same time, people like me figured out how to generate traffic with content that built a permission-based email list, and then promote relevant products and services to that list. Attracting an audience was much easier then; the trick was figuring out what to sell.
Once early social media platforms emerged, their first job was to reach a critical mass of users. So savvy publishers like me realized that building up a Twitter following was creating an army of people who would like and share my content, leading to more reach, more subscribers, and ultimately more profits.
It was fun while it lasted, but it was never going to last.
Because Google and the social platforms knew exactly where they needed to go. Once they reached their critical mass of users, they monetized that base. And that’s why they are now the largest and most powerful providers of direct response advertising in the world, and in the process have become some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world.
Once Facebook switched the bait of free audience building on the platform, things changed. And a different game started to be played.
The Power of ROI Advertising
There was once a Golden Age of Facebook advertising, too. When the ads were new in the early 2010s, they were cheap and highly effective.
This led to a much more efficient way to build an audience. Savvy internet marketers would use paid ads and “self-liquidating offers” to quickly build an audience.
First, let’s define what a self-liquidating offer is. It’s when marketers buy traffic through advertising and immediately sell a low-priced product, allowing them to break even on the spend while retaining the audience asset.
That entry-level offer, made immediately after opt-in, was called a “tripwire” product, designed to offset the cost of the advertising. This enabled marketers to build an email list at essentially no cost and without spending ludicrous amounts of time creating tons of content.
The problem now is ad costs. The tripwire model — a low-cost ($9–$29) product designed to break even and build your list for free — assumed cheap traffic. That era is also over, especially (and ironically) in the space where people teach internet marketing.
To give you a concrete example, when I returned from sabbatical in 2019, I launched an online course priced at $495. I consulted with several Facebook advertising specialists about running ads to sell the product, and they all said the same thing: You’ll have a hard time making a profit at that price point.
Put another way, I was trying to hire these people to help me run the ads, and they declined the work because they knew they couldn’t successfully do it on a return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS) basis. And it’s only gotten worse since then.
In addition to increased costs, the quality of the traffic and opt-ins from Facebook has also declined substantially. And Google AdWords is even more expensive than Facebook for those who don’t have money to burn.
Lastly, this approach assumes you already have a digital product to sell — and usually more than one — so you can profit from the upsell. But the biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make is creating a product first and then trying to find people to buy it.
Today, there is one group that can effortlessly make ROI advertising work for them. Not only can this crowd afford to build an audience on a “self-liquidating” basis, but they can also make a significant profit if their services are priced appropriately.
These people sell client services. And as we’ve explored, this may be the only highly profitable revenue model that remains viable as we move deeper into the age of AI.
A Self-Funding Audience Attraction Model
Most people selling client services never advertise. As a result, those freelancers, coaches, and consultants with relatively high-ticket offers struggle to stay afloat.
They network. They ask for referrals. They post on LinkedIn, hoping someone notices. They create content and pray it goes viral.
Meanwhile, course creators with $297 products are dumping thousands of dollars into Facebook ads every month, losing money on every sale, hoping the funnel pays off eventually.
The problem is that people who can’t afford paid acquisition are doing it. And the people who can afford it aren’t.
If you’re charging $5,000-10,000 for client services, you have unit economics that make paid customer acquisition not just viable, but strategic. You can spend $1,500 to acquire a $5,000 client and profit $3,500 immediately.
And the best part?
You still have the audience. You’re not paying for one-shot leads, and the first offer you make doesn’t have to convert everyone. Some people will become clients later, join a group coaching version of your process, or buy something else you offer.
Most service providers never think this way. So they stay small and stuck in feast-or-famine mode. They remain referral-dependent and hope the ne