How Justin Welsh earns 193k/month

How It All Started

Justin Welsh hasn’t always been an online content creator.

He started out working in sales for about a decade. And he’s been incredibly successful at that. In fact, he was head of sales for 2 multi-billion dollar startups in New York.

But success didn’t come without a price.

While he loved what he was doing, he was constantly overworked. As a result, he ended up suffering from a burnout and a panic attack in 2018 that led him to rethink his whole work-life-setup.

He’s always enjoyed writing.

So, in 2019, he decided to take this interest online. As he was already active on LinkedIn for his previous job, this just seemed like the most logical platform to get started.

One of the reasons for his success was that he stuck to only one platform for a really long time. So, for the first 2 years he only published on LinkedIn and did so really consistently.

Only once he really understood the platform and had mastered the storytelling style, he started posting on Twitter in 2021. Later that year, he also started his newsletter.

This is his first post related to his business on Twitter:

How Justin Makes Millions As A Solopreneur

Justin runs one of those businesses where you ask yourself:

How on earth can he bring in such crazy revenue without a single full-time employee?

Yep, that’s right. He does almost all the work himself and made $2.317m in 2023.

He regularly shares his revenue. So we can see how his income is growing.

For instance, in May 2023 he was making $189k/month in revenue.

This has been about his average monthly revenue in 2023. The exact average is $193,083.

90%+ Profit Margin

As if having a monthly revenue of over $100k isn’t impressive enough, Justin also operates at a profit margin of between 91 and 94%.

This means that almost all of the money he generates is profit (before taxes of course).

He regularly shares his business costs.

He basically just uses a couple of tools (see tweet above) that currently cost him between $600 and $1,500 per month.

Additionally, he has a part-time VA that helps him with customer service. Plus, he has to pay 2,9% for his Stripe transactions.

His Secret To Success: Systems

One thing that I really admire about Justin’s business is his systems. He puts out an insane amount of written content on LinkedIn, Twitter and his newsletter.

Since starting his solopreneur journey, there has rarely been a day where he didn’t post on LinkedIn or Twitter. And since its inception, he sent a newsletter every single week.

So, how does he do it?

Pillar content

Well, the (not so) secret is that he uses one piece of “pillar content” and then repurposes that to create dozens of content pieces.

In his case, the pillar content is his newsletter. Every week, he collects ideas for interesting stories or actionable advice he could share with his readers.

Once he has written the newsletter, he creates 6 to 12 pieces of content for Twitter or LinkedIn. These can be stories, tweets, threads, listicles etc.

He then spreads all of those content pieces out over 6 to 12 weeks. This means he’ll post one piece of content about a certain newsletter topic per week until he’s used up all the prepared content pieces.

The topics that work well even get reused a couple of months later. For instance, he tweeted about the challenges of getting started with your online business on October 6, 2023.

He then linked to his newsletter post #25. This has been published on June 25, 2022.

This allows him to have an insane amount of content ready to go. No more writer's block or not knowing what to post. This system keeps you on top of your game.

He’s broken this approach down further in one of his more recent newsletters.

Here’s the exact approach he uses to produce content months in advance:

1. Brain dump sub-topics

2. Define 5 to 7 content styles

3. Use ChatGPT to build a matrix

4. Track success & repost

So, How Does He Monetize His Online Writing?

Mainly by selling courses.

He has 3 courses: LinkedIn OS, Content OS and Creator MBA. In all of his courses, he teaches his students how to write online and monetize it. That’s where the bulk of his revenue comes from.

A smaller part of his income comes from newsletter sponsorships & affiliate marketing.

These 2 revenue streams make sense for every newsletter marketer in my opinion. Because it allows you to make additional income by just talking about the brands and tools you love anyway.

On top of that, he also sells social media templates for $9/month. He currently has around 2,400 subscribers for those. So, that’s another $21,600 per month.

Chenell Basilio has broken down his revenue streams in one of her first newsletters:

Funnels

In terms of funnels, he keeps it simple:

Everything points to his newsletter.

You can sign up for it or just read it on his website.

He’ll regularly mention his newsletter in his posts on Twitter and LinkedIn. But he usually only includes links once a thread has gained some traction.

I think he recently changed his strategy for the newsletter plug a little. If you look at a couple of his recent threads, you’ll see that he just links to his newsletter in general. He doesn’t link to a specific edition anymore.

That’s probably because he’s using Hypefury’s auto-plug feature, which makes the whole process a lot more automated and faster.

He says that the newsletter is where the magic happens in terms of monetization.

That’s because he never sells his courses on social media. He only ever mentions them in his newsletter.

This is a smart move and a funnel in itself.

Because chances are that people who have subscribed to his newsletter trust him a lot more than after seeing a tweet or two from him.

They’ve taken the next step.

And if they like what they see, they might even take out their wallet and invest in his knowledge.

Twitter and LinkedIn Formula

While Justin first grew on LinkedIn, he absolutely blew up on Twitter in a very short amount of time. This is why I analyzed his Twitter strategy in particular.

What’s really interesting is that his most popular threads are basically all the same thread with slightly different hooks and posted a few months apart.

Here is a version of two of his most successful threads.

Most popular thread:

Second most popular thread:

Since these kind of threads seem to be working phenomenally well for him, he keeps posting them.

But he does it in a smart way. Instead of just copy/pasting, he uses slightly different hooks. Plus, he also only posts with a few months in between.

Here’s an example of the same-style thread as the first one, posted one year later:

He even mentioned this strategy in an interview.

He said people don’t remember what you posted a few months ago. Plus, not all of your followers will have seen the first thread, anyway. And your account will have grown within the last few months. So, none of the new people have seen it either.

That’s a ton of audience that you can reach now. And chances are that this thread style will work again if it has done so in the past.

3 Key Takeaways

Here are 3 of Justin’s key strategies you can implement today to improve your online presence by writing online.

1. Content creation system

One key element to his success is the sheer amount of content he puts out. To do so as a solopreneur, you need systems.

Start by creating one kind of pillar content. This can be a newsletter, blog post, Youtube video etc. Just some kind of long-form content where you talk about a topic in-depth.

Then, you can re-use and repurpose this piece of content into at least 6 to 12 social media posts. After a few months, you can go back and repurpose the most successful posts again.

2. Don’t sell on social media

Another reason why Justin is so successful is that he understands how to build trust with his audience. He uses social media (LinkedIn and Twitter) to funnel people into his newsletter.

That’s the only way he uses it.

He never sells directly on Twitter or LinkedIn. Instead, he waits for people to subscribe to his newsletter. This adds an extra layer of trust because you now have his information in your inbox.

Only now does he mention his digital products.

3. Re-use what’s working

Justin loves repurposing content.

And for good reason. Because his audience loves it too.

His best-performing threads get re-used after a few months with a slightly different hook. He might change the content of the threads a little as well. But often he doesn’t.

And these threads are still super popular. Because many people won’t even have seen the first edition. And even if they have, a reminder never hurts.