Ugly (But True) Reasons Why You’re Struggling To Monetize Your Small Audience

95% of guru advice will never work for you – what you'll read here will

You’re not going to like this.

But I have to speak out for the thousands of creators on this platform who are not making enough money to pay their bills.

They’ve got a small audience. They’ve got some content. Maybe they’ve even got some offers.

But the money? It’s just not there.

Most people are sabotaging themselves without even knowing it.

Here’s how not to be one of them.

You’re not doing this every month

This might be hard to read.

But if you’re not launching a paid offer or something at least once a month, you’re wasting your time.

Once a week is even better.

I know you’re making up a bunch of excuses in your head right now:

• I can’t come up with paid product ideas that often

• I don’t have the time to create these products

• I’m afraid my subscribers will get offended by me pitching all the time

Maybe you’re right.

But you know what’s worse? Being broke because you’re too scared to ask for the sale.

The biggest mistake I see is creators who launch something, then disappear for six months. They think they’re being “respectful” of their audience’s inbox.

What they’re really doing is training people to forget about them and their offers.

Many moons back, I was one of these idiots.

Commit to not only building a list, but also making offers to that list.

Now you might be asking: how do I do that? Well, this free cheat sheet shows you how.

You’ve trained your audience like a disrespectful dog that pees on your bed

I did this for years.

I’d mail long, detailed pieces of content packed with value:

• Free PDFs.

• Free articles.

• Free webinars.

I thought I was being generous and that people would thank me by buying my products.

You know what happened? I got friend-zoned. People would sometimes thank me but buy from my competitors behind my back.

What I was really doing? Creating a list of people who expected everything for free.

I had trained them that Matt = free stuff.

The fix is simple but uncomfortable.

Plug something every single time you send an email. Every. Single. Time.

It doesn’t have to be a hard pitch. It can be a soft mention. But there needs to be a call to action that leads to something people can pay for.

When I started doing this, the freebie seekers quietly unsubscribed. Without f-bombs. Without drama. The people who stayed? They started buying.

If you’re scared to sell in every email, you need to ask yourself why you’re even building an audience in the first place. To collect digital pats on the back? Or to make money?

I wrote about this in detail here. The bottom line is this: selling is serving.

If you believe in what you’re offering, you’re doing people a disservice by NOT putting it in front of them.

You’re following the wrong playbook

I see this constantly.

People are trying to copy what the big gurus do. Classic sheep mindset.

“If it’s working for them, it should work for me too, right?”

Wrong.

You can’t make a living selling $7 PDFs or cheap subscriptions when you have a small audience. The math doesn’t work.

The gurus can get away with it because they have massive audiences. They’ve been at it for years. They have the infrastructure. Maybe the team. The traffic for sure.

You don’t.

When you’re small, you need to charge more.

And the simplest way to charge more is to either sell a done-for-you service or a coaching package.

Your engine is broken

Let me tell you about a client of mine, let’s call her Madam X.

Madam X is following a well-known guru playbook I won’t name here.

She had a few offers. A $29 workshop. A $99/month membership on Telegram. A $2,300 group intensive.

She was writing emails. Building landing pages. Creating upsells. Busy as hell.

But her list? 285 people who’ve been trained to get FREE FREE FREE.

That’s the perfect example of a broken engine.

Most creators do the exact same thing. They keep pouring gas into a car that won’t start. New funnel. New bonuses. New headlines. New everything.

Then they wonder why the needle doesn’t move.

It’s not your gas. It’s your engine.

Your audience is the engine. If you’ve built a list of the wrong people, no amount of tweaking your offer will fix it:

• You can have the best sales page in the world.

• The most compelling email sequence.

• The sexiest bonuses.

None of it matters if you’re talking to the wrong people.

Stop driving to the gas station. Fix your engine first.

This is the hardest truth to swallow. Because it means you might need to start over. Or at least pivot hard.

I see people with 5,000 subscribers making $0. And others with 1,000 making $5k a month. The difference? The quality of the audience.

You need to ask yourself: are you building an audience of buyers or an audience of browsers?

If your list is full of people who just want free stuff, who never click your links, who never reply… You don’t have an audience problem. You have an engine problem.

And no amount of optimization will fix a broken engine.

You suck at this

Sometimes the brutal truth is you’re just bad at creating offers.

I don’t say this to be mean. I say it because I see it all the time when I’m working with clients 1–1.

They’re too focused on the process rather than the outcome.

“Hey, I’m going to help you to improve your sleep.”

Cool. But people don’t want that improvement.

They want to fall asleep in less than 15 minutes. They want to wake up without feeling like death. They want to get rid of the dark circles under their eyes.

See the difference?

It’s the same thing with fitness people.

They say, “I’ll help you get in the best shape of your life.”

Nobody cares about that. What they want is to lose belly fat and look sexy when they see themselves in the mirror, taking a shower. Or fit into their jeans from college.

Your job is to articulate their pains and desires in a sexy way.

Not in the way YOU think about it. In the way THEY think about it.

The hard part? You can’t figure this out by sitting in your room thinking. You need to talk to people. Read their emails. Listen to how they describe their problems.

Simply become good at making offers sound good.