Your Ultimate Guide to Building a Creator Business with Beacons in 2024

Introducing Beacons: A platform that does it all.

That’s why we’re so excited to be launching Beacons 2.0, an AI-powered platform that not only gives creators the tools they need to run their business, but uses AI to do work for them.

Creators can now find everything they need to start building a business today—our reimagined Link in Bio, integrated with native Store, Email Marketing, and Media Kit—all in one place. AI is woven into the platform to help creators at every turn, and by learning from data across millions of creators, each individual Beacons user gets personalized recommendations and better results.

Watch our founders answer questions about how Beacons takes creators to the next level ⤵️

Here’s a full list of everything you can do on Beacons today:

• Engage your audience with our link in bio, post activity, audience manager, email marketing, and store apps.
• Get brand deals with a Beacons media kit, invoicing, and our AI pricing calculator and brand deal outreach tools.
• Run your business operations with the income dashboard, W-9 generator, and link shortener features.
• Connect with other creators in our community, access exclusive content and trainings on our Creator University blog, and take a peek behind the curtain by following us on social media.
• Plus, if you have or are a creator manager, don’t miss our Beacons for Managers platform, which makes it easy and streamlined to manage and pitch creators with AI-powered one sheets, campaign reports, pitch decks, and analytics.
• Looking for a manager? View our searchable, easily filtered Top Creator Agencies list to find the vetted agency that’s right to represent your creator business.

It’s all powered by the Beacons Cortex, our Creator Intelligence Data Layer. Ready to get started? Here’s your ultimate guide to building a creator business on Beacons in 2024:

It all starts with your link in bio.

Although Beacons is now an entire ecosystem for content creators that allows you to run your entire business back end through one simple platform, we started out with link in bio for a reason. Your landing page is your hub for all the content and platforms you put out there online. It’s how you’re going to collect email addresses so you can own and directly market to your followers, sell digital and physical products, and represent your personal brand identity across the internet. If Instagram or TikTok disappeared tomorrow, no biggie - you’ve got Beacons, and Beacons has your back.

There are two main elements of your Beacons link in bio page: design and functionality.

When it comes to design, of course you want your Beacons page to look as gorgeous as possible. We have a zillion options to making that happen, from video background to GIF headers to linkable grids, video carousels, business logos, wiggling blocks to draw attention to your best content, and literally SO MUCH MORE. You can customize pretty much every single aspect of your color scheme and setup. The best way to build a beautiful Beacons page is to really just get in there, play around, and see what’s possible.

More into a video explainer of how to build the best Beacons page design? Check out this YouTube video of our team walking you through every step:

It doesn’t matter how good it looks if no one sees it, of course, so you’re going to want to dive into the 12 ways to make your link in bio convert the most traffic, too.

As for functionality, there are endless possibilities with our different blocks: you can drop in a sign-up block to collect emails (more on that below); embed your store products to make sales and your media kit to grab brand attention (more on that below, too) and embed your social content too!

PRO TIP: If you want more “big picture” advice on how your Beacons link-in-bio page can help you grow your business, check out our guides on how to repurpose content for each platform, how to grow a following on a NEW platform, and how to market yourself as a creator overall.

Perfect your email marketing setup.

If you’re feeling a little uncertain about whether email marketing is right for you, you’re not alone. Most creators aren’t email marketers, and many aren’t writers either, so it’s perfectly natural to wonder if you should really get into the email marketing game.

We’re here to tell you that YES, in fact, email marketing IS an absolute necessity for any creator building a business around their content in 2024. Converting your social media followers into email subscribers is the best way to own your audience. If you’ve heard that phrase, “own your audience,” tossed around but aren’t sure exactly what it means, here’s the scoop: it’s about having a way to communicate directly with your fans that doesn’t involve a third-party platform like Instagram or TikTok.

There are so many ways creators can wow their fans with email marketing, even if you’re not a writer. Here are some of our best suggestions:

• Start by building an email list. If you’re going to learn to send amazing emails that drive your sales and build community with your audience, you’re going to want, well, people to send them to! We have a complete guide to getting started building your email list right here.
• Keep track of everyone in your Beacons Audience Manager.
• Now, set up your welcome email! You want everyone who takes the big step of sharing their email address with you to get an immediate positive reward in the form of a warm welcome from you. With our easy welcome email setup, you can put this in place right as you start collecting emails so that every new member of your email community gets to know you personally and feel like a true member of your community.
• Build the right automations for your business.  We have tons of easy-to-use templates in the Beacons email marketing platform that can get you set up to send reminders, drive sales, run discounts and special offers, and more. WHY should you care about email marketing automations? ⤵️
• It’s the definition of passive income. You set up a great workflow ONE time, and then everyone in your email marketing universe gets ongoing touch points and sales reminders from you without your active involvement, so all those future sales you’ll make as a result are truly passive income.
• It helps you build better relationships with every new member of your community. They’ll feel like you’re personally reaching out to them! (OK, maybe not exactly, since we’re all pretty wise to automated marketing emails) But if you write your emails in a personal way, it does build a sense of relationship between you and your audience. That relationship, even if it’s automated or one-sided, psychologically contributes to their willingness to make a purchase from you in the future!
• It takes a lot more contact than you think to convert a customer. I can’t remember where I read this, but I typically send at least 7 emails about our community events because I saw somewhere once that it takes 7 reminders for someone to take action. The same goes for your sale! You can’t assume that just because you sent someone an email one time, they’ll remember to come back when they’re ready. They need constant updates, information, and education to help them get ready to become a customer of yours.
• You never know when the timing will be right for any one person. If you’re not getting a sale from someone, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep reaching out (unless they unsubscribe or reply asking to be taken off your list, of course!) It just means the timing isn’t right for them, and since you never know when it WILL be for any one person, keeping them in your automated workflow ensures that whenever they are ready, you’ll be in touch.

Once your email marketing game is a little more advanced, you might want to dive into our top six easy hacks to improve your email deliverability (or just watch this video our in-house email marketing guru made you ⤵️)

Still worried about getting into the email marketing game as a creator? Check out our article debunking the top 7 email marketing myths for creators.

Get to selling in the Beacons Store.

If you’re not selling a digital product on Beacons yet, you’re missing out on one of the best ways to grow your passive income as a creator.

→ Get our guide on how to start selling on Beacons in just 5 simple steps!

Unlike brand deals, which require a ton of work to chase down and involve getting someone else to take a chance on your content, or affiliate links, which earn pennies on the click and require a huge volume to have an impact on your bottom line, direct sales of digital products are a creator’s holy grail: other than your time, there’s no upfront investment to create a digital product and there’s no overhead, production or shipping cost like physical merch.

If you have 10,000 followers and just 1% of those followers make a purchase from you, that’s $3,000! Nice chunk of change - now imagine doing that every month 🙀

But we get it - just the idea of setting up shop can feel overwhelming or intimidating. Luckily, our team has been busy creating lots of guides and helpful information to support you in every step of the process!

Start with our brainstorming guide to figure out what digital product you should sell on Beacons. If you want to sell a product but don’t even know what to create, this guide is for you. There’s a quick brainstorming process we’ve outlined for you that will have you dreaming, creating, and selling in no time.

If you’re looking for inspiration, check out our seller guide to the top digital products to sell in your creator store and see our 7 Examples of Best Selling Digital Products for Content Creators and the 6 best digital products to sell in 2024. 🙌

Once you’re ready with a product to sell, go learn How to Easily Set Up Your Online Store. This guide walks you through exactly how to set up a digital product for sale on Beacons.

Plus, we also made you a checklist for when you’re setting up your store page to make sure you don’t miss a thing!

More of a watcher than a reader? Check out this live demo of the store on YouTube ⤵️

Now, what about pricing? Once you’re all set up, you might be wondering if you have the right pricing strategy. In our guide about How to Price Digital Products in Your Online Store, you’ll learn about value-based pricing strategies, the importance of free lead magnets and sales discounts, how often to update your prices, and everything else you need to be a pricing expert and set the right price for your digital product.

At this point, you’ll be ready to learn the last piece of the puzzle: How to Market and Sell your Digital Products. In this guide, you’ll learn about running ads, creating promotional content, and the importance of collecting reviews as “social proof.” We cover how to use our email marketing automations to make sales while you sleep and the best tricks to writing high-converting calls-to-action. Of course, you also need to integrate your selling platform and your promotional platforms, and we’ll cover that too!

With every step of the process from coming up with an idea to converting your followers to customers covered for you in detail, there’s really no excuse - get that store set up today!

3x your paid brand deals in 2024 with a Beacons Media Kit 👀

There’s nothing we at Beacons want more for our creators in 2024 than bigger and better brand deals. We know that the vast majority of creator income still comes from those elusive brand partnership opportunities, so in order to really 3x your business income, partnerships will be an important cornerstone of your operation.

Using a Beacons Media Kit is the best way for creators to easily stand out to brands. Our designs are top-notch and you can easily feature past brand partners, show (or hide!) your rate cards, and embed partner-sponsored content so brands get a real sense of what you can do. Most importantly, our AI-powered analytics linking makes it literally effortless to pull the real-time data that brands care most about, like your engagement rate, your audience demographics, and your follower count. Speed is often key when getting in front of a brand opportunity, and having to take the time to manually grab the info you need every time a campaign comes up is so 2023 😉

Plus, it’s a link to a website - which may not seem like that big of a deal, but is actually huge when you’re dealing with emails and managers or brands who receive interest from tons of creators. We LOVE Canva, don’t get us wrong, but I promise you no one wants to download your Canva portfolio, lose it on their desktop, and re-download 7 versions of it over the next week. Not having an easily accessible media kit is the fastest way to lose out on a deal, and when Beacons makes it so easy to create a beautiful page with all the right information, why wouldn’t you get a leg up on the competition?

Got more questions about brand deals? Check out our Ask A Manager sessions, where real creator managers answer questions from Beacons Creators on everything from the right growth metrics to track, how to stand out to brands, winning at cold outreach, negotiating higher payments, and beyond:

Putting the AI in Beacons.ai

Our cofounders met as PhD students at Stanford doing research in machine learning, and have been working on AI for almost a decade. Beacons is built on the belief that AI can, and will, help creators scale themselves and build smarter businesses and better relationships with brands.

In addition to our AI Pricing Calculator, we’ve already started rolling out generative text and image applications across Beacons to help creators build their websites, sell products, and email brands that they want to work with. Emails and product descriptions are written in the creator’s tone of voice, image generation is at their fingertips wherever content is needed, and key insights are automatically surfaced.

‍It’s no secret that generative AI is hot right now, but the potential for AI to help creators goes much deeper than these early applications. AI can—and will, someday soon—surface previously unseen insights, suggest actions creators wouldn’t have known to take, and even do work proactively on behalf of creators while they sleep. AI is a powerful technology to help creators scale themselves—what we’ve done so far at Beacons is just the tip of the iceberg of how AI will eventually flow throughout our product and help you scale your creator business in 2024.

Business operations aren’t boring with Beacons.

We love building for and working with creators like you because creators are entrepreneurial trailblazers with incredible ideas who love to bring their creativity to life.

What many creators often don’t love is the “boring” but all important side of running a business - things like keeping track of your creator income, getting paid on time, learning how to invoice brands, and shudder doing your taxes as a creator.

Within the same platform where you build your link in bio, manage your audience and email marketing, create an amazing media kit and sell digital products, Beacons has made it possible to quickly and simply handle these less-favored tasks like invoicing brands, generating W-9’s, and creating tracked links. We also share educational resources and opportunities to connect with excellent professionals who work with creators on things like taxes and corporate business formation through our community webinars.

Beacons is a true community of creators.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, Beacons does so much! How can there possibly be more?!” hold on to your hat, because we haven’t stopped at building an incredible creator product. We truly care about each and every member of our community and work hard to address the needs creators have outside of business operations and content creation.

In addition to advice from creators like the anti-work girlboss Gabrielle Judge and social trend forecaster Coco Mocoe, our guides to things like how creators can take care of their mental health, how to set goals and track progress, finding your niche as a creator, avoiding burnout, and finding your community support our Beacons creators in life beyond work.

If you’ve ever wondered how to plan and manage your workday, how often you really need to post on social media, how you can make writing captions and emails more fun, or how to find great brands to work with, we have content for you. We even have content for finding the right pathway to monetization, including an exploration of UGC vs. brand deals and a whole webinar with a UGC expert to give you all the details you need to know for a successful UGC career ⤵️

Our community helps us take care of our creators and connect you with each other for the support and education you need to find both success AND happiness in your career - join us there today!

Don’t forget about Beacons for Managers!

For many creators looking to grow their team, their first teammate is a manager who can help them with brand deals. To help creators succeed, we need to help their managers succeed too.

We launched our Top Creator Agencies List earlier this year to help every creator find the right manager or management company that can help them grow. Now, we’re taking it a step further with Beacons for Managers, a set of tools for managing a roster and pitching creators for campaigns:

• Creator CRM: Managers can manage all of the data on their talent in one place
• Rosters and pitch decks: Managers can generate beautiful, automatically-updating pitch materials in one click
• Custom social feeds: Managers get custom, aggregated content feeds across their roster, with real-time analytics
• Campaign reports: Instantly compile comprehensive reports for every campaign, ready to send to brands

Ultimately, when you build your creator business on Beacons, you can go further, faster. What are you waiting for? Get started today!