This Solopreneur Is Quietly Raking in $1,000s/Month Through Her Content Business

Here’s her step-by-step system to help you do the same

There are so many creators who are quietly killing it — and I love discovering them.

It seems I’m not the only one.

Here’s a comment on one of my recent blogs about Louise Henry:

But in the case of today’s creator, my discovery is hardly unique.

Kristen Walters has over 18K followers on Medium, and readers love her tutorials about the creator economy — myself included. I’ve been following her for years.

She’s seemingly everywhere, and her “one-woman business” has generated over $1.4 million in revenue since 2014.

“I’m creating media assets all over the internet, from YouTube to Audible, to NewsBreak and Amazon, to Etsy and TikTok, and everywhere in between.
“Over the past decade, I’ve turned content creation into a full-time income.”
— Kristen Walters

I say everywhere.

One of the things that makes Kristen’s strategy different is she’s not an influencer or personal brand — at least not in the traditional sense. Most of her content is faceless or published under a pen name.

She’s created a large anonymous web of “mini brands”, each with its own name and product offerings, meaning she has thousands of pieces of content floating on the internet.

She thinks of each article, book, and video she uploads as a tiny virtual “employee” who goes to work for her each day.

“I’m like a phantom on the internet, lol.”
— Kristen Walters

This, of course, is great news for introverts like me who have zero appetite for fame! But how has she done it?

Part I is all about her story.

Part II goes into her strategy.

Part I: Kristen’s Story

By her own admission, Kristen lived recklessly in her twenties and early thirties. She lived on a diet of “Marlboro Menthol cigarettes, Miller Light, Moutain Dew, and exactly two McDonald’s cheeseburgers a day”.

“Back then, I had no concept of death. I felt like I might live forever. Until I was diagnosed with cancer […]”

Kristen’s cancer diagnosis changed everything.

It pushed her to listen to business podcasts, read books, and watch YouTube videos on how to make money.

And in February 2014, she quit her job as a lawyer to become a self-employed creator.

Everyone thought she’d lost her mind.

“They would say things like, ‘What about that degree you worked so hard for (and spent so much on?) What a waste!’
“And my personal favourite: ‘You’re throwing away your future.’”

But she reminded herself of the following:

“I wasn’t throwing away my future. I was throwing away a future I no longer wanted […]”

After giving up the attorney life, Kristen burned through her savings within the first six months. She picked up some freelance work to keep the lights on, but that first year was “horribly stressful.”

“If I could go back in time, I probably would have waited until my self-employment income was more stable, or until I had more stashed away in savings.”

After much trial and error, she made it work, and her content business now brings in thousands of dollars every month.

But how did she get to this point?

Part II: Kristen’s Strategy

The Early Days

When Kristen first started out, she bought into the idea of growing an audience before trying to sell anything.

“I picked a niche, and for an ENTIRE YEAR, I worked to grow an audience and ‘nurture’ an email list.
“Each week, I put out tons of free content, free lead magnets, free ebooks, and even free consulting sessions — FREE, FREE, FREE!
“I gave as much ‘value’ as I possibly could […]
“But do you know what happened when I finally tried to SELL something to my list?
“Crickets.”

It failed — but why?

Kristen identified three reasons:

Her audience was used to getting everything for free, so they didn’t value what she was selling.
By the time she launched a product, people who’d been on her list for months had either solved their problems or lost interest in the topic.
She didn’t test her product ideas before building her audience. If she had, she would have known early on that it wasn’t going to work.

“Going through this experience led me to flip this tired old strategy on its head.”

Kristen’s New Playbook

After letting the debris settle, Kristen learned the following:

She needed to understand why people buy stuff and what captures their attention. She discovered the key to creating profitable content is to find problems and offer solutions. (More on this shortly.)
She wanted to build income sources that weren’t dependent on her time. Otherwise, she’d just be trading her time for money again. She identified affiliate marketing, royalties, digital products, and YouTube as suitable choices.
She assigned an income goal to each of these income streams. “I didn’t know HOW to do any of these things when I first started. All I knew was that IT WAS POSSIBLE to earn money with these strategies.”

Let’s look at these income streams in more detail.

Affiliate Marketing

Kristen decided she should figure out how to sell before creating another product.

So she found other people’s products to sell in exchange for a commission (aka affiliate marketing).

“I was lucky enough to stumble upon a few software products that offered recurring commissions. I also signed up for the Amazon Associates program.
“Once I found a product to sell, I wrote a blog post to promote it.”

How would this look?

“A quick example might be ‘3 Udemy Alternatives for Selling Online Courses.’
“The article would be about the pros and cons of the three alternative platforms (which were all my affiliates.)
“So, no matter which one the reader clicked on, I would still get a commission if they made a purchase.”

Kristen then runs Google ads for the blog post.

For the example above, she might bid on keyword phrases like “Udemy alternatives”.

“Even though I was spending money on ads to get traffic to my blog post, I was making WAY MORE than I was spending.”

There are plenty of creators making this model work.

For example, Victoria Kurichenko has made over $2,000 since March 2023 from Beehiiv’s affiliate program without running ads.

She wrote this detailed review about the platform, and because of her SEO skills, she’s got the page to rank on the first page of Google for a number of related keywords, including “beehiiv review”:

I’m also an affiliate for a number of products and use Medium to drive people to them.

For example, I’m an affiliate for Justin Welsh’s online courses because I found them helpful. So when appropriate, I slip affiliate links in my articles:

Screenshot from “How Justin Welsh Has Made $1.28 Million From Online Courses”

Last month, I made $26.25 from his program.

So it’s hardly breaking the bank, but it’s purely passive.

How do you find affiliate programs you could potentially join?

Start with the online products you use.

For example, I use ConvertKit for my newsletter and recommend the email marketing platform in some of my articles. I figured I might as well sign up for their program and get paid.

Then, whenever you mention the tool in your content — whether it’s an article, podcast or video — include your affiliate link.

Just like this:

Screenshot from “Let Me Save You $1,000s in Courses & Coaching Fees” article

Affiliate Marketing Recap

Here’s a quick recap from Kristen:

1. Sign up for affiliate programs that offer “recurring commissions” — typically software (SAAS) products.
2. Learn how to use the tool — become a “quick start expert.”
3. Create helpful tutorial-style content or aspirational/interesting case studies that feature the tool.
4. Include your affiliate links in your content with a disclaimer.
5. Post content on platforms that are already getting traffic (YouTube or Medium — possibly Substack).
6. Drive additional traffic to your content through Pinterest, Twitter, or the social platform of your choice.

Royalties (Amazon KDP, Audible, Barnes & Noble)

When Kristen thinks about writing books, she’s not trying to become a best-selling author or write the next great American novel.

Her goal is far simpler:

“It’s to build a publishing company that sells a lot of books.”

She’s discovered that selling lots of books on Amazon comes down to three things:

Finding keyword phrases lots of people are searching for on Amazon that have a high sales conversion rate
Creating a competitive product that is relevant to the keyword phrases — so, good quality books are a must
Getting your book in front of people searching for the keyword phrase

“Oddly enough, this does NOT require you to be a well-known author or to have a large following on social media or an email list with thousands of subscribers.
“Those things obviously help but are not a requirement for making a lot of book sales on Amazon.”

So how do you do each of these things?

Kristen uses a tool called Helium 10 for step one — finding high-converting keyword phrases. In this case study, she does a deep dive into a book selling over 11,000 copies a month.

Screenshot from Kristen’s case study article

Her strategy then boils down to this:

“The idea is to find keywords where you have the opportunity to rank on the first page of Amazon results organically — then create a book around those keywords.”

As Kristen notes, most people do the opposite. They write whatever they want and then scramble to find keywords. This rarely works because the book isn’t optimised for Amazon SEO.

It’ll end up on page two of Amazon listings or beyond, and people don’t get there.

It’s the same with Google. When was the last time you clicked on the second page of search results?

Exactly.

In this article, Kristen dives deep into a more advanced Helium 10 tutorial for KDP niche research to find the most profitable keywords.

So once you’ve got a book in mind with your target keywords, how do you actually write it?

Kristen recommends using Jasper AI to organise your content into a book and fill in gaps. You can then self-publish your book for $0 with Amazon KDP, Barnes & Noble Press, and Draft2Digital.

“Once you publish a book, turn it into an audiobook […]
“ACX is Amazon’s audiobook self-publishing site.
“You can either hire a narrator through ACX for a very reasonable price (recommended), or you can record it yourself.
“Be advised that you will need to meet ACX’s submission requirements if you choose to do this on your own.”

Once you’ve got your self-published book and audiobook, you can connect them to your affiliate content.

How?

Rather than including affiliate links in your books, you can link to “resource pages” on your website, blog, YouTube channel, or Medium account that include your referral links.

This makes things easier if you need to update a link or include additional products.

Faceless YouTube Channels

This is one of Kristen’s less conventional strategies.

“While the conventional wisdom for succeeding on YouTube is to focus on building ONE channel as a personal brand — where you’re the star of the videos — I’m doing YouTube differently.”

She’s created dozens of YouTube channels on topics that don’t require you to show your face, including weird facts, history, trivia, trending news, product demos, and more.

And while she doesn’t publicly share these channels so that “bad actors” don’t target her, she does share many examples of faceless YouTube channels making $1,000s/month.

For example, the channel below is making the majority of its money not from the YouTube partner program but through Amazon affiliates:

Screenshot from Kristen’s YouTube article

“Check out the description of the video above — it’s all Amazon links.”

“The other cool thing is that channels like this, which were designed specifically to promote Amazon products, do not have to wait until they are eligible to join the YouTube Partner Program to start making money.
“Instead, these videos start earning on DAY ONE because of the affiliate links in the description […]
“You could create an entire channel that is dedicated to any product, niche, or software that has an affiliate program.”

So, where should you start?

Kristen uses VidIQ to help her research video topic ideas. She likes to create content based on data:

She then uses ChatGPT and Jasper AI to:

Brainstorm content ideas based on the data
Come up with video titles
Script the videos
Create video descriptions

Next, she adds narration to the videos (“you could outsource this to a narrator on Fiverr”), before using Canva for the visual elements and ScreenFlow to edit her videos.

It’s a wild process!

To protect herself from hacks and fake copyright strikes, Kristen has built a stable of YouTube channels.

“I currently maintain dozens of YouTube channels across several different Google accounts.
“Some of the accounts are in my own name, and others are under the umbrella of an LLC.
“If you’re going to build an empire on someone else’s land, you have to be prepared for a battle.”

How to Build This System In 52 Weeks

Alright, you’re feeling pumped and want to give Kristen’s strategies a go.

But where do you start?

Kristen helpfully lays out her 52-week system. She breaks the next 52 weeks into 4-month “sprints”.

Sprint #1 (months 1–4) — Create written articles only

“Personally, I would post my content on Medium and work to get monetized through the Partner Program. However, you could also create a niche website if you want more control.
“The benefit of putting content on your own site is that you could potentially sell it later. The downside is missing out on partner program revenue.”

Sprint #2 (months 5–8) — Generate royalty income

“Compile your best content into books […]
“Upload them to the self-publishing platform(s) of your choice.
“Turn your ebooks and print books into audiobooks to create an additional income stream.”

Sprint #3 (months 9–12) — Build your YouTube channel(s)

“Turn your written articles into video content.
“Link to your articles, books, audiobooks, and affiliate products in the video descriptions. This will allow you to start making money from your new channel from day one.
“Keep working at it until you qualify for the YouTube Partner Program to gain an additional income stream.”

“If you were able to grow each of the four quadrants to $1,261 per month, by the end of your “sprint year,” you could be making a full-time income from this content machine.”

— Kristen Walters

Screenshot from Kristen’s “52 weeks” article

Takeaways

Some people think differently.

Kristen is one of these people.

Her “one-woman business” is thriving, and she’s sharing all her tips and tricks so you can follow in her footsteps — even if you’re working a traditional 9–5 job.

“In fact, if you are able to do this, it will allow you to diversify your income while maintaining job-related benefits like health insurance or a 401(k) contribution from your employer.”
— Kristen Walters

And while I’ve also turned content creation into a full-time living, Kristen has taken this to another level.

I can only salute her.

So start experimenting, solving problems, producing content, leveraging AI tools, and building income streams today.

Kristen is proof that you can make this work.

Want to ditch the 9-5? Get my free 19-page guide: Everything I Did to Quit My 9–5 Job & Transition Into Profitable, Sustainable Solopreneuring :)