🔴 Building a 6-figure creator business as a team of one

Our mission is to help creators build sustainable businesses. On our podcast, we intentionally curate conversations to surface valuable, tactical insights from our guests. Some questions, however, are better suited to written correspondence, giving our guest more time to gather their thoughts and assemble specific details and data they might otherwise gloss over in a live conversation.

It’s why I’m especially excited to introduce our newest column, Self-Timer — a fresh look into how successful creators run their businesses.

In each send, our guest will share thoughtful, considered answers to:

• The origin story behind their project

• The state of their business today

• How they produced their best-performing piece of content (or content series) and the specific results that defined its success

• Their revenue, from first dollar to biggest single deal

• The media diet that informs their work

For our inaugural feature, we're spotlighting Sophie Miller, founder of Pretty Little Marketer, whose LinkedIn-focused marketing community has garnered over half a million followers across platforms.

In this issue:

• 🎯 The process behind a post that generated 1.9M impressions

• 📱 How a one-person team built a 600,000+ community

• 💰 Evolution from charging £2.50 webinars to signing a £24,000 contract

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

P.S. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this new column and suggestions for creators you'd like to see featured. Leave us your thoughts in the comments!

Sophie Miller is a leading marketing community expert and content creator who has built a global following of over 600,000 across platforms. As the founder of Pretty Little Marketer, she specializes in making social media simple while placing community at the heart of her marketing strategies.

Sophie's community-focused approach has earned her partnerships with major brands including Adobe, Meta, and YouTube, along with speaking engagements for organizations like Semrush, ASOS, and L'Oreal.

Subscribe to Pretty Little Marketer’s weekly round-up  
Learn more about Pretty Little Marketer 

The below answers have been lightly edited for clarity. Bolding and italics our own.

Creator Spotlight: How did Pretty Little Marketer come to be? What was the initial vision, and how has it evolved?

Sophie: Pretty Little Marketer was born in June 2020 during a moment of clarity while I was lying on my sofa as a second-year student. Looking ahead to graduation in a year, I felt overwhelmed by the marketing industry and noticed a significant gap; there wasn't a space that made marketing accessible while providing the comfort of community, so I decided to create it myself.

After graduating in 2021, I continued freelancing as a social media marketer and consultant until 2023, when I made the decision to go all-in on Pretty Little Marketer. This moment led to launching our membership — The PLM Insider’s Club — as our main offering, while I simultaneously developed my work as a creator and speaker.

Wild milestones have marked the journey — from one of my favorite brands, Lounge Underwear, reaching out to me to manage their LinkedIn strategy, to building ground-up strategies for major companies like Kraft Heinz and Frasers Group. Perhaps the most surreal was signing a creator contract with Meta this year — an achievement I still can't quite believe.

CS: What does Pretty Little Marketer consist of today? (team size, communities, media formats, etc.)

Sophie: Pretty Little Marketer operates as a lean, impactful one-person team (that's just me!). I manage all our social media presence across LinkedIn and Instagram, execute our email strategy, and nurture our community membership program. 

CS: What daily steps do you take to engage your LinkedIn community and maintain their trust?

Sophie: My approach to community building on LinkedIn centers on consistency and authentic engagement. I post daily content on the Pretty Little Marketer profile and maintain my personal LinkedIn presence with about two posts weekly. While video content is trending on LinkedIn, I've found that carousels and well-crafted copy consistently perform best for my audience — people want information that's quick and accessible.

I don't strictly adhere to commonly touted engagement formulas like the "80/20 rule" or "engage before you post" mantras. Instead, I rely on deep audience insights to understand what resonates, then create content and conversations people genuinely want to be part of.

Perhaps most importantly, I respond to all comments and messages (to the extent possible as a team of one). This commitment to engagement is non-negotiable for relationship building — every touchpoint matters in fostering trust and connection with my community.

CS: What metrics or indicators do you use to evaluate community health beyond standard engagement rates?

Sophie: Looking beyond standard engagement metrics, I do regular deep dives into comment sentiment to understand not just how much people engage but also how they think and feel about the content, which helps me shape future content decisions and gauge the emotional resonance of what I share.

I pay particular attention to saves and shares, as these actions indicate that someone found genuine value, enough to want to reference it later or share it with others. One particularly meaningful metric I track on the Pretty Little Marketer LinkedIn is tags in comments — when someone publicly tags a friend or colleague with a "hey, take a look at this" message, it’s a powerful endorsement and signals that the content is truly worth someone else's attention.

These deeper metrics help me focus on creating genuine value rather than chasing surface-level engagement. I want a healthy, supportive, and genuinely beneficial presence on social media.

CS: What single piece or content series has performed best for you?

Sophie: This post from June 2024 is still unbeaten in every way! I wrote it on a whim the night before, and posted it as I was boarding a plane to head on a summer holiday. In five minutes, it had hit 500 likes, and by the time I’d turned off airplane mode two hours later, it was at 5,000 likes. Twelve months later, it still gets shares, saves, and likes!  

CS: Walk us through your content creation process for this post.

Sophie: The inspiration came from noticing a pattern emerging across several articles and social posts I encountered throughout the month. Rather than adding to the noise with another opinion piece, I wanted to create something truly valuable by synthesizing everything I was seeing on this shifting landscape — exploring how the influencer space was changing, why these changes were happening, where the transformation began, and most importantly, how marketers could prepare for what comes next. My goal was to transform scattered industry observations into actionable insights.

My research always begins with exploring thought leadership articles to understand the broader sentiment around a topic. For this piece, once I had a sense of the conversation, I focused on finding concrete evidence and data points to support or challenge the prevailing narratives.

While I don't follow rigid frameworks, I consistently structure my content to:

• Introduce the topic

• Provide evidence

• Explore implications

• Conclude with actionable steps or examples

With complex topics like the evolving influencer landscape, I ground myself by identifying one key message I want readers to take away — this becomes my North Star.

TOOLS: 

• I create all my content independently using Canva for visuals.

• My writing process starts in Notion, where I draft and refine my copy before moving to design or production.

• While video isn't my strongest format, when I do create video content, I use either my iPhone 16 Pro Max or my Canon G7X Mark II camera. 

Sophie’s income is split between brand partnerships, speaking fees and her PLM membership income. For the past three years, she’s been a multi-six-figure earner, and she’s set to double last year’s numbers this year.

• Her first dollar as a creator: I charged £2.50 for a LinkedIn webinar, and apologized for charging in my announcement post — it felt wild taking money from my audience. Everyone in the comments was so kind, telling me they wanted to pay (and to charge more next time!)

• The most she’s made from a single piece of content or deal: I signed a £24,000 contract this year. Screamed!

• Her most successful revenue stream as a creator: My monthly membership brings in six figures a year, and money aside, it is my pride and joy!

1. One newsletter you never miss: ICYMI by Lia Haberman

2. One creator who inspires you: Brianna, @SociallyyBri on Instagram

3. A podcast you regularly listen to: The Colin & Samir Show

4. Any books, courses, or resources that have significantly impacted your creator journey:

   • Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

   • The Hubspot Blog

   • Semrush Academy courses