Your guide to growing and monetizing creator-first businesses.
For our monetization survey (published last Friday!), 427 creators told us what they’re focusing on beyond content production. Three priorities dominated:
🌐 Reach
💰 Revenue
🤝Community
So we went back through a year of interviews to decode the strategies behind the numbers — how top creators built owned audiences, scaled with help, and consistently converted expertise into income.
This is the playbook.
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
The winning formula for audience growth
Last week, we shared findings from our 2025 monetization report. Out of 28 questions and 427 creators, three main patterns defined the top earners:
Ownership compounds. Creators who own their audience are 2.7x more likely to earn $31K+ than those building entirely on rented platforms.
No one scales alone. 68% of top earners work with a team, compared to just 28% of all respondents.
B2B niches pay more than mass-market consumer content. Six-figure creators in our survey overwhelmingly operate in B2B categories — consulting, marketing, finance, SaaS, and media. LinkedIn is a top priority (top earners are nearly 4x more likely to prioritize it) since it’s where professional, high-budget audiences already are.
Together, they tell a simple story: top earners have mastered their content offerings and are furthering sustainable ecosystems around their businesses.
But most creators are still building their way there. When we asked where people are focusing their energy beyond producing content, three focuses surfaced:
37% want to expand audience reach
Increasing audience size was also the single biggest challenge preventing better monetization — cited by 26% of respondents, ahead of finding sponsors and converting followers to paying supporters.
25% want to build more revenue streams
20% want to build community
The quick tactics below come from creators and operators who've closed these gaps.
Owning and expanding your audience
The difference between a hobby and a business often comes down to one thing: do you have a way to reach your audience that doesn't depend on an algorithm? In our survey, creators who own their audience are 2.7x more likely to earn $31K+.
The top earners in our survey treat their email lists as infrastructure. They use them to launch products, test pricing, fill speaking gigs, and build leverage with sponsors. An algorithm change can tank your reach overnight, but no one can take away your list.
Lex Roman launched a $500/month membership by emailing past clients the offer directly; 10 said yes, forming their founding class.
Nathan May built his newsletter growth agency by DMing executives on LinkedIn one at a time, inviting them to a private newsletter. He told us how he pitches it: "Here are two or three people you know who also read this." When he launched an accelerator with beehiiv, 45 of the 50 major newsletter companies he was targeting signed up before the public announcement — all from a single email to his list.
Seamus Hughes, who writes Court Watch, sends a personal thank-you note to every new paying subscriber — a tactic Lex Roman referenced in our interview with them. "I find that keeps them around longer," he’d said, "because they know me and they can come to me if they have questions."
Ownership is only part of the equation. Another is about engineering every touchpoint to move people toward engagement, and eventually, a transaction.
Sydney Graham launched her first sewing pattern while still working a full-time job. Three weeks later — helped by a single short-form video on Instagram and TikTok — it had generated enough revenue to quit. Today, 85% of her revenue comes from digital pattern sales, not views or brand deals. Her YouTube videos are engineered to convert: her breakout tutorial for duping a $200 designer top ranked for a search term she knew people were typing, then positioned her own pattern as the better solution.
Collaborating and building teams
Nearly 70% of six-figure creators in our survey have support, and those who scale their support system — whether through formal teams, collaborations, or community — are the most successful.
The breakdown among top earners:
41% have small teams (1-3 collaborators)
22% have established teams (4+ collaborators)
32% remain fully solo
Kaelyn Grace Apple, whom we featured earlier this fall, grew Accepted Society, her six-figure education community, from 8 people in 2020 to over 500 members, then made an unconventional hire.
A former coaching client applied for an admin role on her team. She was a Google lawyer pivoting back to academia and embodied exactly what the community stood for — now they're 50/50 business partners. The community also shifted to a member-led model, in which members run study sessions around the clock, something Kaelyn says only works after years of trust-building.
Quynh Nguyen, another former Spotlight guest, runs the Paper Talk Podcast with two co-hosts in her paper flower niche: Jessie Chu, an attorney turned fine artist, and Sarah Kim, a social media specialist.
After six years and 174 episodes, they've developed a natural division of labor that plays to each person's strengths. Jessie, the "word spitter," handles all writing. Sarah runs marketing. Quynh manages the technical production and editing.
"Being able to hand off major components has allowed me to focus on mine," Quynh told us. They now co-teach multi-month courses, run a mastermind together, and are planning international workshops in Korea and Italy.
"One brain is not as good as three brains. By having three brains, three perspectives, you get to solve all these different problems."
Leveraging the B2B niche
On LinkedIn, the person scrolling past your post might have a $50,000 marketing budget to spend this quarter (this is also true on other platform, but it’s more ingrained on LinkedIn). The platform’s audience has major purchasing power — they're decision-makers and buyers who can approve budgets, hire vendors, and sponsor creators.
Brands are following that power shift. B2B influencer spend surged 250% last year, and 61% of B2B leaders plan to increase creator investment. As TikTok adoption dipped amid U.S. uncertainty, LinkedIn video viewership is now up 36% year over year, and the platform now offers creator revenue sharing, borrowing directly from YouTube’s playbook.
Our survey data reveals a pattern worth noting: LinkedIn creators who also run newsletters have the winning formula.
35% earn $81K or more
73% own their audience via email
Only 4% are fully platform-dependent
LinkedIn creators without a newsletter:
19% earn $81K or more
43% own their audience via email
26% are fully platform-dependent
That's nearly 2x the rate of high earners when LinkedIn is paired with email. The creators who treat LinkedIn as a funnel are the ones making real money.
Taking a look at the $151K+ LinkedIn users in our data:
A creator in Melbourne pairs LinkedIn with a newsletter and Circle community.
A creator in Washington, DC, runs a newsletter alongside LinkedIn presence, and a podcast.
A creator in Cardiff runs LinkedIn alongside their newsletter.
All of them own their audience.
Brandon Smithwrick runs this playbook masterfully, using his LinkedIn posts as the top of funnel for his newsletter, Content to Commas. While working as a content director at Ralph Lauren and Squarespace, he began posting fundamental strategies attracting creators, founders, and marketers — exactly the people brands like Adobe, Amazon, Notion, and Hootsuite want to reach.
At the time of our interview, Brandon averaged $30K per month, with brand partnerships contributing $20K+. Two simple ways to replicate his tactics:
Mine your real work for content. Brandon's ideas come from actual conversations with creators, founders, and marketers. He drops notes into Notion mid-workout at the gym. Twice a week, he blocks time to expand those notes into posts. His newsletter feeds his LinkedIn; he extracts shorter lessons and republishes them throughout the week.
Funnel everything to owned channels. His newsletter grows by roughly 1,000 subscribers per month through organic LinkedIn content alone. No paid ads. That list is where the leverage lives — it's how he nurtures sponsor relationships and launches new products without depending on the algorithm.
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