Love him or hate him, Kanye West knows how to stand out.
Did you see his Super Bowl 2024 commercial?
If you haven’t, he’s basically recorded himself saying he spent all his money on buying an ad spot in the Super Bowl and didn’t have any money to record the commercial.
Instead of a fancy ad, he invites people to go to his website where he offers “some shoes.”
Here it is if you want to watch it.
The 30-second ad spot on which Kanye spent his money reportedly cost around $7 million. The ad cost $0, obviously.
What was the result of this bizarre decision? The ad brought in 19.3 million dollars for the rapper, who revealed the accumulated revenue in an Instagram post on his personal profile.
But that’s not all. Marketers remind us that the huge revenue he got out of the ad is just the tip of the iceberg. Kanye also has millions of shoppers who’s been to his website and who he can now retarget through online advertising at a lower cost.
He also has abandoned shopping carts that he can follow up on and convert in the coming days. Plus, he has amazing marketing data about what his customers like.
Weird as it was, his decision to spend money only on exposure — instead of a quality ad — proved smart.
Today, we’ll talk a little bit about how you can get more exposure as a solopreneur, even if you don’t have $7 million for a Super Bowl ad.
Secret to Success: Get more exposure
In this newsletter:
Why you need more exposure (even if you’re not selling anything yet).
Re-focus.
How to get more exposure.
Why you need more exposure (even if you’re not selling anything right now).
The best way to start a solo business is with a simple helpful idea.
But!
Most beginners don’t have simple helpful ideas, or they have way too many simple helpful ideas, which makes things anything but simple.
The second best way to start a solo business is by building an audience. You can build an audience even before you have a specific business idea. In fact, your audience can “tell you” what business idea will work for them.
Exposure is the ultimate way to build an audience. The other day, one of my Medium stories got boosted. It’s been seen by 5000 people. It attracted 250 new followers and 70+ e-mail subscribers.
Even if I didn’t make money out of it and didn’t have a paid newsletter subscription to sell, this is still a huge boost for my business.
And when you are ready to sell something, you’ll find it much easier (and you’ll see much bigger success) if you’ve invested time and effort in exposure.
But before I tell you how to get more exposure, let’s address an important question that might come up for some you:
Does focusing on exposure mean you should ignore the quality of your output?
Re-focus.
There are two ways to grow your business:
Get better at what you do
Get better at marketing & selling it (which includes getting more exposure)
We’re all naturally inclined to pay more attention to one or the other. Some people are artists. They make sure everything they do is perfect before anyone can lay eyes on it. Others are amazing marketers. They follow trends, use all available platforms and know how to attract all the attention in the world — but often struggle to create a core offer of high value.
As a solopreneur (in fact, any kind of entrepreneur), you have to keep your eyes on both.
If you have an amazing product or service, but no one knows about it, you suffer. If you have an alright product or service that you keep pushing to an uninterested crowd, again, you suffer.
Instead of wondering what to focus on, or how to do both at once — just get better at refocusing.
When there’s no exposure, focus on that. Give it a few weeks. When you feel like you can improve something in your core offer (be it a product, service or content), focus on that. Give it a few weeks.
Don’t multi-task. Instead, shift priorities slightly to push both parts of your business forward.
Now that we clarified that, let me tell you how to get more exposure with zero ad budget and no experience.
How to get more exposure as a solopreneur.
I know you do some things to get exposure.
Maybe you post somewhere every day. That’s a good strategy. Maybe you look to other successful people for ideas. That’s also good.
The problem with these strategies is that even though they increase your chances of getting bigger exposure, they don’t guarantee big exposure.
So what can you do to guarantee exposure? What can you do that can put you in front of lots of people? Here are a few ideas.
Offer exposure and ask for exposure.
Partnering with other solopreneurs online is crucial for success. Wherever you’ve chosen to create content, find other successful people on that platform, preferably people who are just a bit ahead of you, and build partnerships.
Here’s how to do that in 3 simple steps:
Get in touch and genuinely compliment them on their work (after reading some of it, of course)
Mention them in your stories or posts. Offer exposure before you ask for it. Endorse their work or simply use them as positive examples. Invite them for an interview or to write a guest post for your newsletter. If they agree, they’re sure to share that post when it’s out.
Ask them for exposure. Make it specific. Maybe they can recommend you on Substack, or re-share a specific post, or you can ask to write a guest post for their newsletter (if they do guest posts).
Go deep instead of wide.
The common advice for creating content online is to create a lot of it. I think some of you maybe take this too far.
Instead of going wide (like posting every day), try to go deep. Here’s what I mean:
Instead of posting on Medium daily, post 3–4 stories per week, but give it your best to write stories that get accepted in top publications and get boosted. Yes, there’s no guarantee, but the more you work towards that, the more you’ll learn, and soon, you’ll get more exposure with less articles.
Instead of posting daily on LinkedIn, why not participate in more collaborative articles? This will get you a “Top Voice” badge. Plus, you can sign up for a free LinkedIn class to learn how to optimize your profile and what content work best. I’m currently subscribed to the free Chase Dimond LinkedIn e-mail course and I love it.
Invest time and money in learning the features of the platforms you want to use. Go deep here and you’ll make the best of each platform, instead of posting into the void.
Learn SEO.
Solopreneurs who know the basics of SEO have an unfair advantage. You don’t need to go all technical either — you’re not looking for a job in SEO, after all.
But even only knowing the basics can drastically improve your rankings, and Google is still the Golden Goose when it comes to exposure.
I find Justin Welsh’s SEO for Solopreneurs 101: A Beginner’s Guide very useful. Go over and read it when you have a few minutes. Then, choose a few strategies to adopt.
Become your own publicist.
Getting featured in big media does two things:
Puts you in front of their huge audience.
Gives you powerful credibility which makes you more noticeable in any environment.
Beginning of this year, I got featured in Business Insider, and I plan to leverage that and show up in Fast Company and a few podcasts I like.
I’m not going to lie to you — it’s not easy to be featured in big media, but it is possible.
You can find the submission guidelines for Business Insider here, and you can find the submission guidelines for Fast Company here.
You can also read my story about how I got featured in BI after trying for one year here — it was quite the experience.
And one last thing…
You can get massive exposure, but the only way to build that exposure into a strong business is to have a call-to-action.
If you’re not selling anything, your best bet is to invite your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, even if you don’t have a clear concept for a newsletter yet. Just make sure you send an e-mail once a week to the people who subscribe. If you let them subscribe and them send them nothing for months, you may as well consider them cold leads.
If you really have no idea what your content/business is about, read Clarity for Solopreneurs.