How Emily turned her blog to $1 billion business
In this article I'm going to share with you the case study of Emily Weiss and 3 takeaways - how she has followed the the profitable learner simple framework of: Input + output + monetization to turn a <$100 blog to $1 billion business.
Emily Weiss started the blog, Into The Gloss, in 2010 when she is still a fashion assistant at Vogue.
She writes about the real world beauty routines of fashions celebrities and influencers, which a lot of people are curious and interested about what products the celebrities use the inferences use and how can they have glassy skins.
Two years later, by 2012 and the blog was receiving more than 200,000 visitors per month.
Takeaway 1: Again from this case study of Emily Weiss, you can see that she also followed the profitable learner formula of: Input + output + monetization.
That is like the framework that almost anyone who started with nothing can come to a significant amount of wealth within our lifetime.
But it's not again rich quick scheme, even Emily Weiss has tapped into a theme and topic that many people are interested and and that grabs eyeballs relatively easily, she still needs two full years of grinding before her has accumulated a significant amount of traction that is necessary for her to move on to the monetization step.
So if one's thinking I start this today and after a month or three months or six months, I'm going to be rich, unfortunately this is not how the framework works it requires some patience and persistence and consistency. But it works...every time if you follow the framework and persist through follow through the process and you get the results.
When Emily Weiss he has accumulated sufficient traction, she launched Glossier, a beauty brand and a makeup and skincare company that is now valued at over 1 billion dollars (at $1.2 billion).
From accumulating enough traction to actually having the company valued at over 1 billion dollars it to take her 8 years in the monetisation step.
Yes, a 1 billion dollar company can be born from just a little low-cost blog.
Takeaway 2: A lot of people when they think about monetisation all the online products and digital products will come to mind like courses, coaching program, consulting package, etc.
Those are of course legitimate services and products to offer (and this is level one monetization that we can tap into first for some relatively Quick Cash) but also monetization can be much more than those (I called that monetisation 2.0).
There’s a lot of potential that hasn’t been tapped into as far as monetization goes.
I’m not here to ask you to start the blog right now and in two years time you can launch your business like what Emily does - of course this is a proven path and you can do it if you want, but I’m just here to give you the formula and framework so that you can pick whatever fits you.
If you’re not good at writing, if you are better at graphics or videos or audio, feel free to choose your own formats.
It’s important to know there are more paths within the profitable learner framework and you can have no experience at all or no network or just having a little bit of know how but not much and you can still continue to learn and grow and make money in the process.
Of course it may not an easy path, Emily has to overcome a lot of difficulties and stretch herself out of her original comfort zone. For example, when she planned to launch the business with just four products and needed $1 million to do so. Out of the 12 venture capital firms she visited, Emily was turned down by 11. Nothing worthy is easy.
Emily was 28 years old when she started the beauty company from her blog (monetisation) and she didn’t have any MBA or business school background.
So in the monetization process, we need to be mentally prepared for things not going and we expected to be , and have the mental capacity to still solve the problems on hand and to overcome it, rather than stop and quit.
A lot of times we can’t see the whole path or the destination standing where we are (because it could be too remote now) but as we walk towards the right direction, the scenery will reveal itself.
Have some faith.
Takeaway 3: Although the input and output process can be relatively boring repetitive and requires a lot of discipline and intention to keep it going and it could feel really hard to persist and continue at times, they are the perfect steps to your millions and billions of dollars.
With thousands boring hard work input and output process and steps, the millions and billions of dollars would be out of reach.
In Emily's case, Glossier is so successful because they leverage Intothegloss.com and their various social media channels to truly make products for their audience.
Her blog Intothegloss.com is essentially Glossier’s focus group, and they can find out exactly what their followers want by simply asking, ‘what is your favorite scent?’.
I've also shared another case study of Reese Witherspoon's book club that makes 900 million dollars - it's actually basing on the same framework that Reiss is using her free book club as the leverage and focus group for her to know which books would be a success but for turning it into film or TV adaptations.
So all the inputs and output process is not wasted when you know what you doing.
They are more than something that attracts the eyeballs, but they can be scripts and recipe for wealth.
In summary, I hope that this case study gives us some more inspiration as to the extent of success that the simple framework of input + output + monetization can achieve, even if you started with little resources or experience, as long as you willing to keep learning and growing and following the process sticking with the process and framework, there's really no limit as to the money and success that you can create:
1. Note that though it's not the get rich quick scheme, especially when you are in the process it could look tremendously dull and boring, but looking back it could feel like quick success.
2. Monetization can be much more than digital products, there are still a lot of untapped opportunities and potential that most creators are missing and leaving money on the table
3. the input + output would be the best springboard and leverage for the monetization stage, it would allow you to gain such valuable insights into your audience for free, if you do it right.
To your success,
Connie
