Welcome to The Tilt, the newsletter for content entrepreneurs from Tilt Publishing. We're also the hosts of the 2025 Content Entrepreneur Expo in Cleveland, Ohio in two weeks. If you're a serious author, creator, or entrepreneur, join us for the best CEX to date!
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Money
$10 billion: Fans have paid creators on Patreon over $10B since its 2013 founding. The platform hosts over 25M paid memberships, with $2B going every year to creators. [Axios]
Tilt Take: Patreon has grown to support the full-fledged creator business, not the individual fan transaction.
Another $10B: Creators using Kajabi have earned $10B in sales since the company's 2010 launch. That's up $1B from just five months ago. [The Wrap]
Tilt Take: A multiple-revenue-stream strategy works well for content entrepreneurs and the companies that support their businesses.
Audiences
No pie in the sky: Bluesky, the open-source alternative to X, now boasts 38M monthly active users, up from 30M in March. Growth has slowed from 5M new users a month at its height of popularity to about 1.6M new users a month today. [Social Media Today] Tilt Take: Don't add Bluesky to your mix unless your audience is already there. Check the trends and topics being discussed first.
Tech & Tools
AI influence: An analysis of 19 web properties found AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot have an impact on traffic. Total AI-referred sessions increased from 17,076 to 107,100 (527%) between January and May. Verticals like legal, health, and finance saw their traffic from those sources double and triple in that time.
Tilt Take:Monitor your referral traffic from AI-referred sources. Then, see the answers that brought them there. If the referral traffic is valuable to your business, double down on those topics.
And Finally
No wonder: Amazon is overhauling its podcast business, laying off employees at the Wondery podcast studio and shifting some shows to Audible. [Gizmodo]
Tilt Take:When multiple brands focus on a similar segment, it's sometimes best to unite them under a single brand.
How To Get To Your Business 'Aha' Moment
You work and work in your content business. One day, you take a moment, or perhaps the moment takes you, and realize it's working —and often, working really well.
So, how do you know when content business success hits?
Austin L. Church, founder of Freelance Cake, author of Free Money, and CEX speaker, offers two words: field trips.
"I had the freedom to go on field trips with my kids. Why? I want to be the dad who's always around, yet I'm also the primary breadwinner in my family," he says. "Add to that my own desire to do meaningful work while keeping control of my calendar, and that idea of field trip freedom communicates various values coming together."
Independence and flexible work hours are two of the most popular benefits of being a content entrepreneur, according to The Tilt research.
For Justin Moore, founder of Creator Wizard, author of Sponsor Magnet, and CEX speaker, the moment happened at a conference.
"Creators whom I had never met stopped me in the hallways at conferences, saying I had helped them land five-figure sponsorships because of my videos," he says.
So, how can you get to that moment in your content business? It starts with being deliberate. You'll move further and faster if you know what you want to achieve. Start with these five steps.
1. Look at the past
Review the goals you set for the business. Which did you achieve? Which couldn't be reached? Why? Which ones are no longer relevant?
If you haven't set goals, look at what you've done. Was it successful? Could it have been more successful? What have you discovered about your strengths and weaknesses as a content entrepreneur?
A reassessment like this not only helps you identify the future direction of the business, but it lets you see if why you started the business is why you should continue the business.
2. Brainstorm goal possibilities
Now, set new goals (it's OK to revise the old ones, too). List anything and everything you would like to achieve as a content entrepreneur, and what you want the business to achieve. Dream big and small.
Maybe you want to build a business to a financial level where you can quit your day job. Maybe you want to earn enough revenue to contract with a virtual assistant to help out with administrative tasks you don't like to do. Perhaps you want 100K subscribers, and maybe it's to convert 10% of your followers into paying customers. And maybe it's selling your content business for $10M.
Now, it's time to prioritize. Highlight the five top goals on the list.
3. Break into mini-goals and tasks:
Break each highlighted goal into several manageable goals (if necessary) and the tasks to achieve them. What do you need to do or accomplish to attain the goal? In some cases, you may not have the perfect roadmap. That's OK. The point is to develop the small pictures that will create the bigger picture.
Estimate the time to complete each task. It might be two days, six months, or longer. Be as realistic as possible. Entrepreneurs tend to underestimate the time a task will take, which lays the groundwork for problems down the road.
4. Reassess your top goals
With your more realistic understanding of what it will take to accomplish your top five goals, review them closely. Are they still reasonable? Do the tasks for some goals overlap with other goals, making them more efficient to accomplish? Are there other goals that should be prioritized? Should some of the goals come off the list for now?
Pick the final three to five goals. (Save your brainstorm list for future goal-planning sessions.)
5. Build the calendar
Create a timeline for your goals (and their tasks). Add a target completion date for the goal and how you will know it is achieved (establishing a success metric is essential).
Add those completion dates to your calendar.
Then, work back, adding completion dates for the tasks and mini-goals. By setting deadlines and posting them to your calendar, your goals will remain at the forefront every day.
One more thing for your calendar – schedule time every month or two to assess your progress. Are you on track to achieve the goals? What internal or external factors are affecting progress? What should change so you can achieve them? Do you need to spend more time executing tasks, or should you reprioritize your goals based on what's gaining traction? Consider all the possibilities.
And while you're doing all that work to accomplish your goals, you'll have your moment when you realize this is what you're meant to do.
Fake works: Authors say it's difficult to discern the AI-slop versions of their books on Amazon. That's bad for their Amazon-buying readers. [Insider Hook]
Unique material: Blogs aren't books, but the two complement each other. [Josh Bernoff]
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