How to be the Next Big Thing

You’re young. You’re spry. You’ve seen a lot in your youth, and it’s changed you, to the point where you enjoy getting punched in the face and strangled.

But you’re not like the rest of the martial arts community. You’re not like the other girlsfighters. They’re doing it for a sense of confidence and safety in the streets, or to improve their self-defense skillset, or just to have an interesting hobby and pastime.

No. You know your potential. You’re not just learning to be dangerous, you’re here to be one of the most dangerous people on the planet. You’re in this for belts.

How to Make Money Off of Fighting When You’re Not Connor McGregor (yet)

First of all, let me just say that you’re awesome and I love you. Your willingness to actually commit to your goals and take the risk of going for broke to pursue them sets you apart from 99.99% of all people to exist.

Unfortunately, if you go for broke without having an absolutely excellent plan, you end up… broke. And, since you’re a fighter, likely also concussed. So it’s important to know what you’re doing.

It’s no secret that for MMA especially, fight promo payouts are trash. If you’re a star boxer, you stand to make decent change. If you’re not in that very specific, exclusive group right now, then you’re basically SOL when it comes to profiting directly from your sport. This isn’t the NFL, this isn’t the NBA. There’s no union negotiating on behalf of the fighters here. You’re gonna get scammed, and you can’t stop it.

You owe it to yourself and your meninges to put as much effort into your training as possible.

Problem is, if you have to spend 40 hours out of every week working a day job to put food on the table (like some MMA pros still do), you lose 40 hours of potential training time. 40 hours of rest. 40 hours of footage review. You have a massive handicap, one which prevents you from dedicating yourself to training. Which means you’re not going to be as good as the guy that is able to do that. Which means you’re not going to rise through the ranks to consistent victory, you’re not going to get known, and you’re not going to be the next Adesanya.

And of course you’re going to be suffering multiple TBIs along the way. Injuries which you may have been able to avoid or limit the effect of, had you had more time to train.

You owe it to yourself and your meninges to put as much effort into your training as possible. You need to maximize your time spent on the mats, and to do that you need to drop the day job. You need to be able to profit from your fighting, and to do so early, long before Dana White is offering you millions (to scam you out of hundreds of millions, but it is what it is).

So how do you do that? There are two ways:

• Spend tens of thousands of dollars to open up your own martial arts gym and start teaching classes (or be owned by investors).
• Build an internet following and get sponsors.

I only know how to do one of those things, so I’ll be teaching that. You’re gonna be dealing with sponsors when you’re famous anyways, so you might as well get started now.

The Secret to Branding…

is the same as the secret to fighting. It’s Stamina.

The modern internet is in a state of content hypersaturation. It’s no longer about having a unique voice (though that’s important and we’ll come back to it later), it’s about having any voice at all. Sure you can make an absolutely fire 🔥 post, but if you don’t have another one right behind it, and another one right behind that, then your fire post will get immediately drowned out by the mass deluge of tiktok dancers that everyone is following these days.

Your audience should have something new to see from you whenever they think of you.

Your brand is an engine that prints money, and content is the fuel that keeps it going. When you’re starting out, you don’t need premium gasoline, but you do need a TON of fuel.

We’re going to cover this extensively in the next article in this series, but for now I’ll provide a rough overview of objectives:

• Content will be short and sweet, but there will be a lot of it. Your brand needs to be bingeable.
• The strategies you use to make content will be ones that you can repeat and that you can spam. Making content needs to be extremely easy and require little to no effort from you.
• There will be a consistent stream of content, daily at the minimum. Your audience should have something new to see from you whenever they think of you.
• It will be video content, and you will be on every major short-form video content platform. TikTok, Instagram & Facebook Reels, etc..
• Once you’ve got a base on the super-short video-based platforms, you will expand to longer form content on YouTube and Facebook, and possibly stream training sessions on your streaming service of choice.
• During all of this, you’re going to be adding value for your audience, and looking for more ways to help out other people and get helped out (financially) in turn. Once you’ve got a decent backlog of content, the algorithms will bring the followers to you.

That’s it. That’s all you need to do. In the next article we’ll talk about why you’re not going to be able to do it (and how to fix that).