Welcome to New American Dream, our weekly email series where we learn about 3 tactics and 3 tools from Creators earning over $100,000 annually with under 100,000 followers.

Nicole Ramirez earns $300,000 annually with just 52,000 followers by coaching people to build personal brands on LinkedIn through her firm, NR Digital Consulting.

She started in journalism and spent about 15 years in marketing. In 2024 she was laid off as director of marketing at Forbes. She then built a brand around her own name on LinkedIn, growing from 2,000 followers to 50,000 in two years. Looking back on corporate life: "I got to the top of the corporate ladder and looked around and went, how do I get down from here? I hate it."

Today she runs one-on-one programs and cohorts, writes a column for Inc., hosts the Talk Digital to Me podcast, and is launching the Audacity Society, a community for women leaving corporate jobs, with her co-founder Aparna.

Annual earnings per follower: $5.77

The top 3 tactics Nicole uses to earn outsized income per follower:

Nicole talks about her personal brand in banking terms. Posts that educate, entertain, or inspire are deposits. A cohort or workshop announcement is a withdrawal, and her audience accepts it because she isn't going into debt with them. She’s the “Queen of ToFu” (top of funnel), and a lot of her clients find her through entertaining wide-net posts that go viral, like her toddler humor.

Her profile works as the landing page: it shows anyone arriving from a funny post what she does for a living, and the ones who are interested stick around long enough to get caught in a “withdrawal”.

How to use it:

some Creators avoid collaborating with others in their niche out of fear that they might lose their own audience leads to these “competitors'“ offers. Nicole takes the opposite stance, because she sees her audience as having a variety of needs, including many she doesn't fill. By sending them to others who whose offers fill the gaps in her own, she then creates opportunities to get leads from peers that might fit her own offers.

For example, Molly Godfrey works in the same personal brand space. People from Molly's Impressions community join Nicole's one-on-one programs, and Nicole sends people to Molly when they want to sell through newsletters. Nicole also co-hosts a workshop with Kait LeDonne and brings peers like Jillian Richardson into her cohort as guest experts; there are lots of touchpoints where she turns competitors into collaborators.

On borrowing audiences, she added: "Borrowing people's audiences is perfect, 'cause then they borrow yours."

How to use it:

Creators often opt not to go to big events, or don't feel that they got any value out of them if they do go. Nicole has a strategy to prevent herself from falling into this trap.

Nicole paid her own way to Cannes - in the South of France, so not cheap! - so she set a goal of one client to cover the trip and worked her network and cold outreach on LinkedIn to get meetings with prospects.

She closed three. A dinner there turned into a brand sponsor, and it looks like next year's trip won't come out of her pocket.

She also asks her way into rooms. In New York, she asked a contact for a seat at a dinner for CMOs. About six things came out of it, including a closed deal, a brand deal, and podcast guests.

How to use it:

The three tools Nicole says she'd keep if she lost everything else:

Her whole business comes from LinkedIn, including $25,000 in brand deals this year from text posts and images alone.

Claude is one of the Big 3 AI LLMs from Anthropic. Nicole has it connected to her business tools.

Slack is how she talks with her team and all of her clients. Clients in her 90-day program get Slack access on top of bi-weekly calls.

Also in her stack: MagicPost, Monday.com, Notion, Tally, Granola, and AuthoredUp.

You can find Nicole and her work here:

Thanks for reading!