You don’t build a self-sustaining business with duct tape.
If you want an online business that pays you reliably and independently, you don’t need more tools and platforms, you need fewer.
So many creators have spent years growing their audience only to realize their business is leaking money. They’re losing customers to platform hopping, checkout friction, and the sea of noise on social media.
If you’ve been juggling a bunch of tools tied together with api keys and shaky integrations, you know what I’m talking about. A website here, a course hosted there, a link-in-bio page somewhere else, and a separate community platform all completely disconnected from your social media audiences. It’s not ideal.
If you’re just starting out, but haven’t started building yet, all that can sound intimidating. But the good news is you’re here before you’ve started, so you can set out in the right direction without having to restructure a disconnected business.
When it’s built right, a centralized business with an audience of 1,000 can earn 10x more than a disconnected business with an audience of 100,000. In this article, I’ll give you a blueprint that tells you exactly how to build it right.
In a previous article, I covered three key mechanisms you can leverage to maximize your earning potential, minimize cost and friction, and ultimately create a self-sustaining business. (You can read that article here)
In that article, I gave you a framework to decide which of the three makes the most sense for you to focus on first. In this article, I’ll show you how all three pieces can fit together to become greater than the sum of their parts. And it starts with your home on the internet.
Your Home Online
Before you can integrate all three components together, you have to give them a place to live. This is done by building a hub for your digital business.
Your hub is your home on the internet. It’s where all your business assets live: funnels, offers, community, CRM, courses, live streams, blog posts, lead magnets, podcast episodes, etc. All on one domain, built on one platform.
This does a few things for you. First, it makes your life easier to be able to manage and operate everything from one place, and eliminate multiple software subscriptions. Second, it makes your customers’ lives easier because they don’t have to jump from platform to platform to find what they’re looking for. And third, it plugs the leaks that come from platform hopping and logistical friction that cause you to lose both sales and customers.
By building a hub for your business, you are essentially creating a digital ecosystem. All the products and services you have to offer are made available in one place. If people want to purchase your products, they have to come into your ecosystem. Once they’re in, they’re more likely to make another purchase.
Companies like Apple and Tesla have been doing this for decades. It’s literally a trillion dollar business model. And you can take advantage of that same model (even starting from zero) to create a self-sustaining ecosystem by integrating these 3 mechanisms into one hub.
The three high-leverage mechanisms of digital business are digital products, affiliate marketing, and online community. If you read the newsletter on maximizing mechanisms, you might remember the decision framework gives you a few options to consider, but no matter what, community is an option no matter where the flow chart takes you.
Your community is a key component of your hub. It’s the end goal for most digital businesses because it’s currently the best way to cultivate repeat buyers, raving reviewers, and serial referrers all at once. These top fans are the most valuable members of your community and contribute to a majority of your revenue. (If you’re not convinced, you can read this essay)
Integrating a community into your hub gives you a capture mechanism for these most valuable members, and multiple monetization pathways they can follow to purchase your offers and fund your business.
A good community platform enables at least 6 of these monetization pathways, including (but not limited to) paid memberships, exclusive content, course hosting, private live events, live and automated webinars, affiliate offer integration, and many more possibilities.
The more monetization pathways you leverage, the more options you give your members and the less you have to sell and pitch to them. And the possibilities are only multiplied when you start incorporating the other two levers.
Multiplier 1 - Membership Growth
Digital products are high-leverage because they maximize profit and minimize cost. Because these products are created and delivered virtually, it eliminates a whole host of expenses that come with physical products like materials, manufacturing, and fulfillment. This not only reduces cost, but eliminates much of the logistical friction as well.
But the real power of digital products is their scalability. You create it once and then you can sell it infinitely. That means the value compounds over time, increasing the profit margins until they approach 100%. But you don’t have to put all your digital products up for sale.
There are many ways these products can increase the value of your hub without being a paid product. Digital products like PDF guides, templates, and checklists make for great community lead magnets. You can give them to your new members at no cost as an incentive to join your community.
And they can be used to incentivize members to do more than just join the community. You can use them to gamify engagement within your community feed. Popular posts and comments earn points, and when a member earns enough points, they level up. Digital products make the perfect reward/incentive for engagement, because they can be delivered instantaneously as soon as the member reaches a new level.
An even more powerful use case for digital products is for referral rewards. This gamification incentive structure is very similar to engagement gamification. You decide how many new members someone has to refer before they earn that particular reward. Again, instantaneous delivery makes this reward system almost entirely automated.
Yet another purpose for digital products is as premium membership perks. If you decide to create a paid membership in addition to a free private community, you can include access to select digital products at no additional cost. You could do this by making certain paid products free for premium members, or by gating access exclusively to premium members. The community hub infrastructure not only makes this possible, but also very automatic, and one less thing for you to worry about.
Digital products are excellent for maximizing profit margins and reducing operational complexity and friction. And when combined with community, they can actually catalyze the cultivation of premium members, raving reviewers, and serial referrers. These are your community’s most valuable members.
This is the power of combining just 2 of these high-leverage mechanisms. Imagine what happens when you add in the third.
Multiplier 2 - Revenue Growth
Affiliate marketing is the revenue multiplying lever.
When you become an affiliate for a company, you recommend their product or service to new customers, and when they buy, the company pays you a cut of the profit, aka a commission.
Not only does this give you the opportunity to sell a validated product without having to create it yourself, it also allows you to promote multiple offers to the same audience. This means you’re simultaneously giving your members multiple solutions to multiple problems, as well as more opportunities to become repeat customers. This multiplies customer lifetime value which in turn multiplies revenue.
In the previous article, I recommended starting with affiliate marketing if you haven’t productized a solution of your own. And it’s true, this is one of the best places to start in that case, because it allows you to earn while you learn. You can find a product that solves your problem, and recommend it to the people who have that problem. When they buy, you earn a commission.
And like we talked about in last week’s newsletter, selling is all about serving, and serving is just education and problem solving. Tell them about the problem, show them the solution and say, “if you want the solution I personally recommend, it’s this.”
But affiliate marketing is also a great addition even if you do have your own products for sale. Your products are focused on solving a specific problem, but there may be other problems adjacent to the one your business focuses on. By finding adjacent problem-solution combos, you can help more of your members solve more problems, and earn more money at the same time.
When possible, I recommend affiliating with and promoting digital products due to their innately higher profit margins. Physical product profit margins are often as low as 20-40% which means any commission you earn from the sale of that product is going to be less than that. Meanwhile, digital products have profit margins that often exceed 90%. With so much profit left over, your partner is much more likely to pay you a higher commission.
Does this mean you absolutely shouldn’t affiliate with physical products? No. Sometimes that makes sense based on the industry and the solution. But when given the choice, earning 50% commissions on a digital product is usually preferable to earning 5% commissions on a cheap physical product.
For the most profitable affiliate offers on digital products, I personally recommend checking out Vault Alliance. They have lots of offers to choose from in varying price tiers, and the best part is, you can embed these assets into your digital business hub and sell them right from your community. This means your members get access to valuable products without ever having to leave the community, making it that much more of a destination.
Sell Without Selling
Community allows you to integrate your affiliate offers and digital products by embedding them into your ecosystem. Your community becomes primarily an education vehicle with embedded monetization pathways. It takes your members through the 5 stages of awareness naturally, so you hardly have to pitch your offers, just mention them as the natural recommendation for the solution to whatever problem they solve.
This is often referred to as “selling without selling” or “inception marketing,” and it’s what I refer to when I talk about selling by serving.
For instance, in the Future of Freedom VIP community, I give all the information away for free and only charge for help with implementation. I create free products and newsletters that educate the audience on the problem and how to solve the problem. Then just casually mention the offers that might help them get there easier. No need to do a whole mid-roll ad break, just drop it and leave it.
(If you want to see for yourself, you can join the VIP community for free)
And believe it or not, the opportunities to sell by serving don’t stop there. Cutting edge community technology takes this even further by opening up even more customer pathways for your hub, like exclusive content. Similar to digital products, your exclusive content library makes your community a destination members come back to. Your content can act as à la carte digital products, premium membership perks, or just free community value.
And speaking of premium memberships, I recommend building your hub on a platform that allows you to create multiple channels within your community. This opens up tons of possibilities like having a free private membership and an exclusive paid membership. You could also use an additional channel for private cohorts or group coaching. Or you could use it to manage your team of affiliates or even to manage your production team as a Slack alternative. There are lots of ways for additional channels like these to create value for your members and your business.
The best community platforms also enable live streaming directly from your hub. No need to send your members to an external platform like Youtube or Twitch, and no need for third party meeting apps like Zoom or Google Meet. You’re able to host private live events, right in your community, exclusive to your members only. Or host public events and webinars to grow your community.
This is one of the most underrated benefits of hosting a community online and I’m betting private events, public webinars, and livestreams are about to explode in popularity. In the age of AI noise, live events are one of the most foolproof ways to prove you are a genuine human being.
On top of that, it’s one of the best ways to create compounding value inside your community. Host an event once, and it’s valuable for all the attendees, once. Post a replay in your community and now it’s valuable for all your members, forever. That’s why the best hub-building platforms enable instant replays and automated webinars directly from your hub. A one time event creates long-term value. It essentially becomes a stand-alone digital product you can use however you want.
These are just some of the many ways the hub-centric business model can be leveraged to create an ecosystem of your own. An environment where sales happen naturally, without selling.
The three main mechanisms are not only powerful on their own, but they’re even more powerful when integrated together in the same hub. And you can take it even further by leveraging exclusive content, premium memberships, and live events to really increase that customer lifetime value and create a sustainable independent income source.
So how do you actually create your own ecosystem?
Building Your Home
Pick a lane. Figure out what your business is about. What problem are you going to focus on solving? Do you have experience or expertise that can help your members solve the problem?
Build your hub. This is your home on the internet. Consider building on a platform that doesn’t require you to duct-tape your assets together. I personally recommend ESTAGE.
Find your offer(s). Turn your solution into a digital product, and/or find affiliate offer(s) that are relevant to your community.
Integrate your offers. Integrate your offers into your hub and your community to open up monetization pathways for your members.
Deliver value. Build value inside your community. Post regularly, host events, run giveaways, create exclusive content, premium memberships, and engagement rewards. Make your hub the place to be.
Expand your reach. Cross post your content outside your community on other social platforms.
Invite your members. Social media is a great way to grow your audience, and your community gives them a home.
So now hopefully you can see how the three high-leverage mechanisms come together to be greater than the sum of their parts. These three components create capabilities that none of them possess individually. This is the hub-centric business model at work and I’m more bullish on this being the future of digital business over the next decade than I am about anything else.
If you’re looking for more direct guidance, come join us for an entire workshop dedicated to building your digital business hub and growing your community to 1000 members and beyond. The workshop is designed specifically with the hub-centric business model in mind, and it’s completely free to join. Grab your free seat here
If you’re ready to build a hub of your own and turn it into sustainable income, this event is for you.
See you there,
Tim