Self-improvement of knowledge workers: How to go from offline lecturer to online knowledge influencer? (Down)

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In June’s “Leap School”, Book Fans Alliance (opens in a new tab) invited Yu Shufan (opens in a new tab), a well-known corporate lecturer and consultant in the industry, to share with everyone. After talking about his mental journey (opens in a new tab) from a senior corporate manager to a freelance worker, Shu Fan (opens in a new tab) began to talk to everyone about his experience in engaging in subscription services in the past two years.

★ Image source: gipi’s Business Thinking Notes (opens in a new tab) - “Business Thinking: Three Engines of Continuous Growth in Life (opens in a new tab)”

Before getting into the topic, you might as well take a look at Shu Fan’s self-inventory and planning of the current situation (https://medium.com/how-gipi-learn/lifelong-growth-3-engine-6b7831ec2831 (opens in a new tab)). I believe it is not difficult for you to find that subscription services are only one part of his many businesses, but they also play a very critical role.

Subscription Service not only brings him stable income, but also promotes business opportunities in other businesses, and takes this opportunity to interact with customers and students. Even better is being able to take ownership of creating content and engaging with customers (opens in a new tab), come back to yourself.

Shu Fan mentioned that the subscription service mainly focuses on the following four reasons:

1. The first reason: increase the proportion of regular income.
2. The second reason: to improve time autonomy.
3. The third reason: reduce dependence on pathways.
4. Reason No. 4: Run yourself as a company.

It is not difficult to imagine that the biggest nightmare of freelance workers is to have no meals. But since he started investing in subscription services in 2018, he earned 40,000 yuan in the first month. Later, his income became more stable, and he can still maintain a good income after splitting from the platform. Shu Fan believes that unless the subscription service is really bad, it is nothing more than a guaranteed income.

He also quoted Li Xiaolai (opens in a new tab) in “The Road to Financial Freedom: Teach you how to become more valuable!” Sooner or later, one day, you can no longer sell your time to live (opens in a new tab)》The concepts mentioned in the book Personal Business Model can be divided into three major categories:

1. One time is sold once: you earn one hour of money for every hour you spend, such as teaching.
2. Sell one time multiple times: It takes the same one hour, but you can make money multiple times, for example: online courses, publishing books, etc.
3. Buying other people’s time and then selling it: That is, you pay others to do it, and the time is spent on other people’s time, not your own. From the perspective of time efficiency, what you are thinking about is the actual output of your investment in buying other people’s time.

During last night’s lecture, I also discovered that Shu Fan had brought his assistant. He also mentioned an interesting question: “What will the first employee you hire after you start your own business do?”

Many people want to find someone to help because they are too busy at work, but it would be a pity if they just hired an assistant and left all the trivial matters to him! As an entrepreneur, what you should think about is to teach your unique skills to him and train this employee to do what he is good at. Only in this way can the maximum synergy effect be created.

Shu Fan also mentioned the importance of reducing dependence on access. After all, when your income is in the hands of others, it is often quite painful. Of course, various platforms (opens in a new tab) (for example: PressPlay, Hahow or Yotta, etc.) have their own strengths or resources, so you must also think clearly about your positioning and market differentiation.

He also encouraged the guests at the conference to run themselves as a company. Always ask yourself: “What will it be like in 10 years?”

When you can have a stable fixed income of more than 100,000 every month (https://medium.com/how-gipi-learn/become-a-freelancer-2-years-964c8132b0bf?fbc (opens in a new tab) lid=IwAR2ZOuAo76ugwnTEBmKSkrmv9Mc-vI6YTdx12Uzy4gzJheXvXPnbH5NHdsA), I suggest you start making some attempts, try to find the second and third possible products, and try to monetize them. This product may be different in content or form. For example, project management courses and presentation skills courses are two products with different contents, while offline courses and online courses are different in form. When you can own about three products that can bring in income at the same time, you can say that your life should be relatively safe.

After listening to Shu Fan’s analysis, many people may be curious about subscription service, and even eager to try it… However, there are always many gaps between reality and ideals. If you want to create a popular and popular subscription service, you will also encounter many challenges:

1. The first challenge: the paid value of the content.
2. The second challenge: content continuity.
3. The third challenge: self-discipline and discipline.
4. The fourth challenge: Facing the cruel market.

Everyone knows that “popularity does not mean buying popularity.” Is your content worth everyone’s monthly money? This is a very cruel question, but it is also worth pondering for you and me.

There is another question that needs to be considered when investing in marketing: Maybe there will always be a group of people willing to pay for my content, but I don’t know who they are? As a result, it is impossible to provide them with more in-depth services.

Shu Fan also reminded everyone to have the courage to break through the stratosphere. Don’t just promote it within your own stratosphere, because the data you get does not equal buying momentum; in other words, the phenomena or data we see are not necessarily equal to the whole market. So, don’t just test the water temperature in the stratosphere, but try to explore the world outside the stratosphere.

For example, many course platforms now encourage everyone to fill in a questionnaire before launching a fund-raising campaign for an online course to understand market trends and the voices of potential customers. In fact, collecting the needs of the target audience through questionnaires is only a secondary goal. The most important goal is to test the appeal of the teachers who start the class - how many questionnaires can be collected inside and outside the stratosphere? According to the rule of thumb, if less than 300 questionnaires are collected, this online course may be difficult to launch. Having said that, you need to collect at least 500 questionnaires to feel confident. It may also be worth investing a little more marketing resources to get better results!

Next, Shu Fan talked about the key to content production (opens in a new tab): Can you produce content that subscribers are interested in for a whole year? Can you produce three articles per week? To be honest, both of these problems are not simple. After all, investing in a subscription service is like “putting on golden handcuffs (opens in a new tab)”. Don’t just be secretly happy when you see the number of subscribers and the amount. The huge responsibility you face next is worth pondering.

The so-called “golden handcuffs (opens in a new tab)” refers to the fact that these people know that the treatment they receive at work is much higher than the reasonable treatment they can get in the market based on their abilities.

When you are ready for content production, you have to face the last challenge, which is - can you accept the market’s criticism? Honestly, unsubscribing is a piece of cake! What’s even worse is that you may face a lot of blunt and cruel criticism, or even a bunch of unreasonable abuse. Therefore, Shu Fan also suggests that friends who are interested in investing in subscription services must first arm themselves and face it with a positive attitude.

When we avoid any risk (opens in a new tab), the greatest risk will arise in the end.

Shu Fan told everyone that as a knowledge worker, you must overcome many difficulties… For example, if you want to get rid of the problem of unstable financial income, you first need to find customers who can pay for the long term. If you want to get rid of the dilemma of “having to sell your time at a low price in order to make money,” you need to find something with a higher price per time unit.

Of course, if you want to achieve dual freedom of wealth and time, you must find a way to sustain leveraged income instead of continuing to use the methods you were used to.

After listening to Shu Fan’s sharing at “Yuanjian Private School”, it also reminded me of another lecturer friend Liu Yiyou (opens in a new tab). He is in “One-person business model for knowledge-based self-employed people: What to do with lecturers as the initial market entry point? (opens in a new tab) mentioned in the article that just having one professional skill is not enough, knowledge workers (opens in a new tab)’s profit model (opens in a new tab) must meet four conditions: product, market, customer and content.

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★ Image source: Staff Briefing and Business Thinking (opens in a new tab)——“[One-person business for knowledge-based self-employed people” Model: How to use lecturers as the initial market entry point? E8%AD%98%E5%9E%8B%E8%87%AA%E9%9B%87%E8%80%85%E7%9A%84%E4%B8%80%E4% BA%BA%E5%95%86%E6%A5%AD%E6%A8%A1%E5%BC%8F-%E4%BB%A5%E8%AC%9B%E5%B8% AB%E4%BD%9C%E7%82%BA%E5%88%9D%E6%9C%9F%E5%B8%82%E5%A0%B4%E5%88%87%E 5%85%A5%E9%BB%9E%E8%A9%B2%E6%80%8E%E9%BA%BC%E5%81%9A-64a214493eb7)》

See 奕光 (opens in a new tab), and then thinking about Shu Fan (opens in a new tab)’s own inventory and planning, really inspired me a lot. Knowledge workers must keep pace with the times, so they must constantly improve themselves.

Finally, I present to you the visual image record drawn by “Cindy Visual Image Recorder x Xinxiang Shicheng (opens in a new tab)”. Thank you Xiao Xin (opens in a new tab)!

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💡 Want to learn content production and management? Come and sign up for the online course “Content Power: The Super Power of Building Brands (opens in a new tab)”.

💡 Photo Credit: Photographed by Vista

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Further reading

• Self-improvement of knowledge workers: How to go from offline lecturer to online knowledge influencer? (Part 1)
• [“Grasping New Business Opportunities in the Rapidly Growing Subscription Economy: Taiwan’s Practical Combination of World Trend
• What is the “subscription economy”? Create the strongest business model and shift from price competition to experience improvement