How Being Creative In E-Commerce Can Make You $20,000 Per Month

How does being creative help a business?

This is a fascinating question.

I recently read Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. In one chapter he talks about “throwing money at a problem”. The idea goes something like this: Money can be replaced but time can’t. So if you have a problem, instead of wasting valuable time to solve it, throw money at it.

This will allow you to be more productive.

It’s true that you can always make more money while lost time can’t be replaced.

However, there are more things at play here.

Why Creativity Matters In Business

Creativity is mostly inversely related to money.

The more money you have the less creative you tend to be. There’s something about being broke, or the prospect of being broke, that activates our creativity more than anything.

It might be an evolutionary thing.

If your survival is threatened you have to find a solution or you’ll die.

Daymond John calls this the power of broke. The power of broke is that creative force in us that gets activated when we can’t throw money at a problem. It forces us to think outside the box and come up with a creative solution. Daymond swears by the power of broke and credits the success of the world-famous FUBU clothing brand to it, which he co-founded.

Back when they had no money, they had to come up with creative marketing strategies.

They got influencers (way before the days of social media) to wear their hoodies, shirts and jeans. This wasn’t because they were geniuses, but because they didn’t have the money for traditional advertising. They were forced to come up with creative solutions.

Daymond argues that a lot of businesses fail when they lose touch with the power of broke. Instead of solving problems in a creative way, they throw money at every problem.

This kills innovation.

Even if a business is doing well, executives should act like they’re broke.

Or at least they should ask questions like:

• Is there a better, creative solution to this problem?
• Do we really need to spend all this money?
• What would we do if we were broke?

Another way of doing this is to hire young creative people and ask them to think of ways to put the company out of business. For example: What would need to happen to put Coca-Cola out of business? Asking questions like these can help a company stay in touch with the power of broke. When businesses are flourishing, their executives can become weak-minded.

Hubris takes a hold of the company.

Instead of solving problems in a creative and innovative way, like the founders probably did in order to become successful in the first place, money is used as a “creativity substitute”.

The bottom line is:

Sometimes it’s good to act as if you’re broke even if you’re not.

But how does being creative help a business exactly? Let’s take a closer look at this phenomenon to determine if it’s just a good sounding self-help slogan or a reality.

How Does Being Creative Help A Business? Three Actual Examples

As a digital marketer I’ve seen countless entrepreneurs pursue big ideas.

From all the people who are interested in starting a business maybe 1% actually do it. Most people simply daydream of owning their own business but are too scared to ever start.

From the 1% that start a business about 99% fail. It’s a brutal reality, I know. The odds are just against you. But there’s some good news. I’ve learned a lot from seeing businesses fail and succeed in the past eight years. As someone who runs masterminds and programs for entrepreneurs, I’m very close to what’s happening, and I see behind the scenes.

What’s fascinating is that the 1% of the 1% that succeed are highly creative.

They are out-of-the-box problem solvers.

Here are some friends and students who succeeded:

• Arturo, a 20-year old guy in my mastermind, made $25,000 in two days by talking influencers into giving him a free shoutout (He didn’t have the funds so he came up with a creative method to “frame” his promotion in a way that influencers would post for free)
• Armin, a former student from eastern Europe, used his last money to sign up for one of my programs and only had $9 left on his bank account. He purchased a domain name and then used the power of broke to recruit affiliates who would post his products for free)
• Adrian, a serial entrepreneur and friend of mine, built a multi-platinum team of music producers known as Anno Domini Beats while sleeping in the living room of his grandmother. He pioneered the “leasing” model of the beat industry by selling his music on Soundclick.

These are just three examples of creative problem solvers. I personally know dozens of online entrepreneurs who built wildly successful businesses because they thought out of the box and came up with creative solutions nobody else could see.

So does being creative help a business generate more revenue in general?

If I look at what all my most successful students and mastermind members have in common (success defined as making at least $20,000 per month), I’d say it’s clearly this creative problem solving ability. It appears that creativity is one of the big differentiators in business.

This has also been the case in my own businesses.

I built my first business in the music industry through innovative marketing strategies.

For example, I was the first person to use sales funnels and one-click upsells in the beat-selling industry. I was also one of the first to use direct-response advertising and direct marketing.

Read More: 5 Best Done For You Sales Funnels

When I started building my digital marketing agency Nexilitas, I used a creative form of social selling on Facebook to get new customers. Instead of spending money on advertising, I used creativity to get my first clients. I got my first clients without spending a single dollar.

This really seems to be a pattern.

People who become successful DON’T do the following:

• They don’t follow the “proven” path and instead come up with their own creative solutions
• They don’t throw money at everything, but instead make use of the power of broke

It’s true for small companies but also big corporations. The moment you solely follow the proven path, innovation dies. And soon after the company. And if you lose touch with the power of broke, and you let the hubris of prosperity blind you, you’ll eventually file for bankruptcy.

Does being creative help a business?

It surely does.

Creativity is free and yet it’s underutilized in business.

If you want to build a successful business you don’t necessarily need a lot of money. But as experience teaches us again and again, you surely need a lot of creativity and hard work.