Author: Kelsey Humphreys / Source: Entrepreneur

Most of the amazing entrepreneurs — with million-dollar businesses and giant personal brands — I feature here on The Pursuit and Entrepreneur.com have been building for at least a decade. Nicole Walters, however, has been in business for less than three years. By age 28, she was a highly paid executive at a Fortune 500 company, managing multibillion-dollar accounts, but felt her career was “feeding my family, but not my soul.” In 2015, Walters began livestreaming, and as her audience numbers went up so did her income. When she made $11,000 in the first three weeks of working with small-business clients full time, she knew she was onto something.

That same year she quit her corporate job — via a phone conversation she livestreamed on Periscope in front of thousands of viewers. She founded The Monetized Life, her speaking, consulting and online education business. Since then, she’s taught thousands of entrepreneurs through her regular livestreams and her wildly popular online course on monetization called 1K1Day. In recent months, two of her livestreams went viral, garnering over 20 million views and features with sites like Babble and Yahoo.

I was able to record an episode of The Pursuit with her before her keynote at FinCon, the conference for bloggers, publishers and influencers in the personal financial industry. I asked what I’m sure you’re wondering — how did she grow her brand so big, so fast? Here are her answers from our conversation, in 10 key lessons.

1. Put in the work.

Remember, you just read that Walters built an impressive career in the corporate world before starting to build her brand. She helped brands and companies increase their revenue, which built the foundation of expertise used to launch The Monetized Life.

“No one can ever outwork you,” she explained. “I looked for new opportunities, I made sure I was valuable, I spoke up, I was constantly trying to triage problems and find solutions, and making myself visible.”

Be willing to put in the hours, effort and commitment to build your knowledge before you try to build your platform.

2. Test your idea.

Walters had a side hustle blog she’d grown over the years about natural hair called Naptural Nicole. Her blog was bringing in money, and she had her corporate finance experience, which gave her plenty of wisdom to share with other bloggers. She saw the opportunity livestreaming offered even though she wasn’t sure it could actually pay the bills. Before quitting, she started livestreaming multiple times a day.

“I just went on there and I started answering questions, mostly from bloggers just like me who were saying, How have you been monetized? How do you get these gigs? I was known as the [blogging] Rookie of the Year just because it was like, who’s this blogger girl who came out of nowhere and is working with all these brands?” she recalled. “It was because I knew how sales and product development worked in corporate, so I just translated that over to my personal brand. I started giving tips and helping people out.”

Soon, she was getting thousands of viewers on her broadcasts. Followers said they wanted to sign up for her emails, so she quickly created an opt-in. From there, she was able to offer paid services and made her first $11,000 in three weeks.

Make sure you test the waters on any new platform or technology. What works for one influencer or brand might not work for you, and as was the case with Periscope, not all platforms stay relevant. If you test early and see success, jump in so you can dominate the new space early on as Walters did.

3. Stay ready for the “big break.”

Walters’ quick success on Periscope caught the eye of Chalene Johnson, who offered to show Walters the inner workings of her online business. Johnson showed Walters what was possible, and Walters made sure she rose to the occasion, but again, she’d already put in years of hard work. Later, when her livestreams went viral overnight, she explained she didn’t have to do much to capitalize on that opportunity.

“One of the biggest [mistakes I see when people have content go viral] is that they’ll immediately try to crank out a bunch of additional content that seems to be aligned with [whatever went viral]. Just because I had one thing that went hot doesn’t mean I need to change my whole business strategy up and do something else. Obviously, I was doing the right thing, which is why [I went viral in the first place] so I don’t need to revamp my entire strategy.”

Once the initial frenzy of media calls slowed down, she decided to upload her speakers reel to her Facebook page along with a link to sign up for her email list.

“People got a good, quick primer that was less than a minute long of who I really was and what business offerings I had … and that allowed me to convert, very quickly, a lot of people over to my list because I was ready. I think that that’s something everyone could do today, right now, for their next viral moment, is stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.”

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