How this author used email marketing to create a passive income stream and work 50% less

Dorie Clark always dreamt of writing books but didn’t necessarily dream of being a creator. 

She became a creator because all her other goals didn’t work out.

First, Dorie hoped to be a literature professor but was rejected by all the doctoral programs she applied to. Then she wanted to be a newspaper reporter and landed a job doing just that, but got laid off. Then, she decided to venture into politics and worked on two high-profile campaigns, but both candidates lost. 

The things on my top list of potential professions were not working out.

Lastly, she got a job as a leader in a non-profit bicycle advocacy organization (even though, she says, she’s a “pretty terrible cyclist”). But because it was a tiny organization, she could expand her skills more than ever before. 

I realized, ‘Oh, this is actually running a business. Wait, I could run my own business.’

Starting her own business seemed like a lower-stress option compared to managing other people and feeling worried about running someone else’s beloved company into the ground. 

Dorie gave the organization a year’s notice. And during that year, she spent all of her free time in the library reading every book she could find on running a business. 

I was a philosophy major, so I hadn’t been exposed to this kind of information. 

She was fueled by her excitement to try something new and go out on her own, and she had very little fear because she was making so little money to begin with that her expectations and needs were low.

Low bars are a great thing because it always feels wonderful to exceed them.

Her initial goal for her first year in business was to “not go broke.” For her second year, it was to make at least as much money as she did in her nonprofit job, which was $45,000 a year. And her goal for her third year was to make $100,000.

She exceeded all of those goals within the first year.

This is the story of how she did that alongside becoming one of the most admired leaders in the creator space and the author of four bestselling books.

“I don’t know what’s going to work.”

Back in 2006, the year X/Twitter started and four years before Instagram, Dorie stepped out on her own to start a consulting business.

Using everything she’d learned running political campaigns and the non-profit, she helped other businesses with public relations and communications.

This also meant she helped them navigate new communications tools popping up at the time—ones that, for the first time, would encourage businesses to engage more directly and personally with their audience: social media.

Many organizations were wary at first, she says, and very uncomfortable using social media to speak more casually with people, which was a huge contrast to the more formal corporate communications standards they were used to.

But Dorie saw potential. And for her own business, too. 

Until then, she only got new business through her network and referrals. To grow, she needed to introduce herself to new people who had never heard of her. 

She realized creating content online via social media and writing for high-profile online publications would be a way for her to do that and get access to people she otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. (She also wanted to write a book and learned that having this kind of online presence would help her get a book deal.) 

Except this time, there were no books in the library to teach her how to do this because the concept of creators widely sharing original content was so new then (though she would eventually write a book of her own teaching others how to do this very thing).

Instead, she experimented.

Now this would be called finding product market fit. But at the time, I just thought of it as, I don’t know what’s going to work, so I have to try a million things until I find something that works. 

Later in your business, you don’t want to do a million things because that gets distracting, but early on, you do want to do a million things because most won’t work.

She applied this to her content experiments and the work she was willing to do for clients. She tried everything. 

But soon, the client work took up all of her time. She knew there was a huge opportunity for content creation online, but she wasn’t sure how to find the time to focus on it. 

“I ended up cutting out the bottom 30% of my business.”

So, to make more time and have a chance to grow her business, she did something counterintuitive. 

She cut out a ton of paying clients. 

I stopped taking engagements that were below a certain dollar amount, and I stopped doing certain types of work. I ended up cutting out the bottom 30% of my business, which saved me quite a bit of time but also cost me quite a bit of money.

My overall revenue was down, which was kind of alarming. But I needed that time because what I started to do was aggressive content creation. 

I made a conscious decision that I would choose to earn less money in the short term because I felt that it would help me earn more money in the long term. 

Dorie believed so strongly in the potential she saw in online content creation that she decided it was worth the risk.

To begin, she decided to start trying to write for the high-profile online publications she knew her dream clients were reading and set her sights on Forbes, Huffington Post, and Harvard Business Review. 

She started by listing every potential publication in her niche and came up with 24 online publications. For each one, she searched online to find out if they accepted freelance pitches and looked up the email address of the correct editor to reach out to. 

She emailed all 24 editors a pitch of who she was and what she could write for them and offered to write her first pieces for free. 

Of those 24 emails, 20 people didn’t respond at all. Three followed up to ask for more information and more fleshed-out pitches. 

I thought, ‘Oh, that’s exciting!’ So I spent a lot of time putting together these pitches, sent them off, and they ghosted me.

But then, she got one email that changed everything.

It was from Forbes. They were starting their contributor network and looking to staff up quickly, so they asked her to write her first article that week. They would pay her and wanted her to sign a contract to contribute five pieces monthly.

She couldn’t believe it.

But she said yes, which began years of writing articles about business and marketing for Forbes, Harvard Business Review, TIME, Business Insider, Newsweek, and Fast Company. To date, she’s written over 800 articles across these publications. 

Pretty soon, she realized that the best way to leverage that content was to make sure that the people reading her articles also knew how to join her email list.

“I wanted at least 50% of my income from passive sources.”

At the end of most of Dorie’s articles, she included a link where people could join her email list. Eventually, she started only accepting writing jobs that would allow her to do this. 

By that time, in addition to consulting, she was making a full-time living as a creator, an author (her first book, Reinventing You, was about building an audience), and a speaker. She spoke about personal branding and how to become a recognized expert in your industry and traveled to places like Brazil, Dubai, Argentina, and Slovakia.

But traveling the world for speaking gigs left her exhausted, and she was frequently getting sick from her time being on planes. Instead, Dorie wondered if she could monetize her email audience to create passive income and not be so reliant on her time and travel alone. 

Her goal was to develop a passive income strategy to help her business become more sustainable in case anything serious ever happened to her health or changed in the market.

I created a goal for myself: for at least 50% of my income to come from passive income sources.

She also hoped being on the road less would give her more mental space to be creative and more freedom to say “no” to certain clients and speaking gigs she didn’t really want.

Her business sometimes felt reactive, and she wanted to be more proactive, to choose what she wanted to focus on instead of accepting everything that came to her. 

To start, she switched to Kit in 2016. Then, she developed her online course Recognized Expert, teaching everything she learned about building a platform and growing an audience.

At the same time, she slowed her writing pace for other outlets, shifted her attention to writing content for her own email list, and focused more of her time on building a launch strategy for her course. 

From 2010 to 2015, I was really focused on platform building and brand building. And I think it’s important to be thoughtful about that upfront. Obviously, you need to make some money, enough money to keep going, but if you try to go for the jugular too soon and get obsessed with ‘how can I make money on this and this and this,’ you don’t really have the time to build a thoughtful relationship with your audience. Because people are going to be turned off if they feel like, ‘I don’t even know this person, and they keep selling me things.’

But there became a time, around 2015, when I felt like I had reached the point where I could shift my focus.

To help her during this shift, she decided to use a strategy she’d used when writing her articles.

“I wanted to write a newsletter that intelligent people want to read.”

When I asked Dorie how she came up with ideas to write 250 articles for Forbes alone in her first three years, she explained that she simply interviewed authors and wrote about their books. 

Her long-held childhood dream of becoming an author was still there, and she quickly realized that interviewing people was a great way to create valuable content and learn.

So when she decided to shift towards monetizing her audience, she thought, why not interview people already doing this well and write a book about it?

And that’s exactly what she did. The book is called Entrepreneurial You. It came out in 2017, and she interviewed creator trailblazers such as Pat Flynn, Selena Soo, Bjork Ostrom, and Jenny Blake. They shared revenue-generating strategies for podcasting, blogging, running masterminds, and online courses. 

And then, I began adopting the same monetization principles in my own business.

She used Kit to focus on segments and automated sequences, using tags and landing pages to segment her audience based on their interests (e.g., she has one tag for entrepreneurs and another for those who work inside corporations). This way, she would only email them relevant content that they’re more likely to engage with. 

She also developed automated sequences that repurposed the old content she’d written across the internet and emailed it out automatically, each week, to new subscribers.

She says this helped bring value to her subscribers and build long-term relationships versus just getting them on her email list to sell, sell, sell right away. 

I was much more interested in playing the long game with all of this. Yes, I would love my email subscribers to buy things from me, but I would rather them respect me and, three years from now, buy a $2,500 product rather than harass them today so that they spend $50 with me and then immediately unsubscribe. 

I wanted to write a newsletter that intelligent people want to read and feel that they are being respected. Hopefully, they feel very good about making a buying decision rather than needlessly pressured into something they would later regret.

Dorie was excited about launching her first online course because she already had an audience who was interested in what she taught. And because she’d built so much trust with that audience already, being incredibly transparent about her sales process was essential. 

In the early days when I was investigating online marketing, I would sign up for a webinar, and someone would promise something like, ‘Hey, in this webinar, I’m gonna show you how to X, Y, and Z.’ And then you’d be sitting there for 90 minutes and at the end you’re like, I did not learn a thing. 

It’s just disrespectful. And so when I’m doing a launch, I try to be super clear.

When she begins a launch, she lets her audience know what the course is about and that if they’re interested, they’ll learn more over the coming weeks. At the bottom of that email, she provides a link for people to click if they aren’t interested in getting more emails about the launch and uses that information to segment her list. 

That way, they don’t have to unsubscribe from the list because they’re getting irrelevant information. They can make a choice.

And those strategies paid off. 

Dorie launched her first course in 2016 and then another course in 2017. Within 18 months, she made $269,000. 

After building her platform, growing an audience, writing a book, creating courses, and scaling an email list, she could build a sustainable income stream where half of her income wasn’t reliant on travel. And she didn’t know then how valuable that would be in 2020 when all her speaking income dried up.

And even though she’d invested years into building other online income sources, she was still incredibly nervous. Who would spend money on a course during such a scary time?

She didn’t think anyone would buy her course, but she needed to keep her business afloat now that all of her speaking gigs had been canceled, so she launched her course again, using Kit, in May 2020.

I’d considered canceling it but figured, hey, might as well see – this will either be the best launch or the worst launch ever. And it was the best one. On average, the launches usually bring in about $125k, but this one brought in about $250k. It was the biggest launch I ever did. 

She found out people wanted her content now more than ever because they were struggling with the massive changes brought on by the pandemic and looking to learn strategies for building an audience and income around sharing their own gifts as a creator. 

“We all have to be mindful of changing circumstances.”

Today, Dorie has a place in Miami and New York, but she still remembers the (very) small place she used to live in during the early days, a place she’s grateful for because its low rent gave her the freedom to take risks like cutting out 30% of her clients. 

But the real dream come true for her was becoming an author, a dream she’d had since she was a kid, as well as finding ways to create passive income streams that allow her to live a more sustainable creator life—one where she can choose when she wants to travel (and when she doesn’t) and gives her time and space to keep dreaming and creating. 

Like in 2016, when Dorie saw the musical Fun Home on Broadway and became so inspired that she decided to write a musical herself and set a goal to get it to Broadway. 

Next, she did what she always did: research. 

She learned it typically takes seven years to get a show to Broadway, so since she was inexperienced, she gave herself ten years. 

And so, for the last seven years, she has devoted 20% of her time to this new creative realm.  

Dorie isn’t writing a musical because she thinks it will be the secret to her future financial success, but it also isn’t just a random thing she’s doing only for fun. 

I think of it as part of my overall career portfolio, and we all have to be mindful of changing circumstances. We have to recognize the world will be very different in five or ten years, and we’re going to be very different in five or ten years. Things that are exciting for us today may feel boring or tired in a few years.

We just may get sick of it. And even if we still love it, it’s possible that market conditions may change, and the skills that we’re making money on now may no longer be desirable. 

Her goal is for her lesbian spy musical Absolute Zero to make it to Broadway in the 2026 season. It’s still in development, recently having a staged reading at an Off-Broadway theater with two other prominent showcases in the works. She’s also written another show, The Philosopher of Love (a modern-day retelling of Plato’s Symposium), that was recently workshopped in Malmo, Sweden.

Dorie encourages all creators to consider how they can use 20% of their time to develop in a new area they’re interested in, not only to be ready for changing times but also to continue to grow and feel inspired.

Even though she never planned on becoming a creator, she’s glad she did. And so many other creators point to her as their inspiration for getting started and continuing to grow and create new things.

For Dorie, being a creator isn’t about one business, one business model, or even one brand. It’s about one person’s ability to follow whatever sparks them, have the humility to learn all they can (and hire a coach when needed), try everything, and share what they create with people who just might need it more than they’ll ever know. 

You can connect with Dorie via her Creator Profile, subscribe to her email list, or learn more at dorieclark.com.