How to write your own creator playbook with Glo Atanmo
How does a 5-year-old hustler selling cough drops turn into a multi-passionate solopreneur creator who lives out of her suitcase while making millions of dollars?
She leans into the weird, the wonderful, and the creative paths not taken by the majority.
Meet Glo Atanmo—“the go-to coach for multi-passionate people”—who began exploring the online world when only 7% of the real world had access to the internet. As an introverted kid, Glo lit up when she found blogs in the early 2000s, and turned into one of the first online creators out there monetizing blogging.
This is not Glo’s only claim to fame, however.
Glo has ventured to almost 100 countries across 6 continents, and built a life exemplifying creative risk-taking, nomadic business-building, and smart pivoting as a solopreneur.
Her digital storytelling has landed her in Oprah Magazine and Forbes, and she’s partnered with brands like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Target, Delta Air Lines, GoPro, and Adobe on marketing campaigns that went on to reach tens of millions of people.
Now, Glo runs The Life Leap (a program that guides people in making big life transitions), records The Glo Show podcast, and shows up however the heck she wants on Instagram.
If you’re new to creating, blogging, or online business, or simply feeling stuck, overwhelmed, lost, or burnt out—Glo’s playbook on leaning into your unique qualities to power your business, showing up authentically, and putting inspiration first will help you to reset your mindset.
The goal
Growing up, Glo wanted badly to fit in, but knew in her gut that she stood out.
She also never saw the stories of what was possible for herself—an introverted kid from the Bay Area with Nigerian parents who expected her to become either a “Doctor, Lawyer, or a disappointment.”
Eventually, she changed her mindset to “If I’m going to stand out anyway, I might as well do it in a way that fulfills me. I allowed myself to pioneer my own path.”
Following an unpredictable path—with no “playbook”—can be stressful, but the truth is that there’s no playbook that will work for everybody. And following a playbook can lead you to the same places as everyone else… stuck, unsure, and misaligned.
You have to chart your own path to do your best work—and set up processes and experiments that work for you… not anyone else.
The assessment
As a creator, you’re your own CEO, CCO, CMO, CFO…
Which is a lot of pressure on your livelihood. You’re scared to be fully yourself, to pivot if you’re unfulfilled, to make the wrong choices, etc.
You’re plagued with this-or-that’s:
- Should I start making video content? Though I heard that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket.
- That Creator had a massive hit on TikTok, maybe I should go on TikTok. (Even though I can’t dance for beans.)
- This Successful Person has a course. Maybe I should make a course.
How do you know what to do?
How do you avoid analysis paralysis?
How do you decide which ideas to pursue?
While there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, seeing how others navigate these decisions and choices in the road can be helpful.
The playbook
One of Glo’s favorite quotes is:
Which means—there’s no trick.
But there are tactics and lessons learned from 20+ years of Glo showing up and posting on the internet—so you can build and live a rich, fulfilling life on your own terms.
Let’s dive into them below.
Tip 1: Executive produce your own life
Everyone sets goals.
But keeping yourself accountable and seeing your goals through to completion is the challenge.
That’s why Glo’s advice is to treat yourself like an executive producer.
Decide how you want your year to go—instead of just letting life happen to you. Set up themes, experiments, mottos, and projects.
Align your work and attempts based on those themes so you stay consistent in striving for better outcomes—without overwhelming yourself with too many changes at once.
“When you experiment, you also gain experience,” says Glo.
Glo’s example: She joined Instagram in 2011, and currently has 246k followers and 6,050 posts.
This means that she posted an average of 1.27 posts/day for 13 years. That is a lot of experiments.
“If you treat your creator business as an experiment, you can take away all the anxiety of having to be perfect and get everything correct,” says Glo. “Because all it takes is getting an experiment right once.”
In 2020, Glo went viral and gained 200,000 followers in the span of 2 weeks—and she’s continued experimenting ever since by creating value-driven content that truly helps people get unstuck and unlock different parts of their brains.
Tip 2: Find your money-resource balance
Money is just a medium of exchange.
It’s not something you should be shy about.
It’s not something to be scared of.
It’s not something that should limit your dreams.
And… you’re probably leaving money on the table.
What you should do is ask yourself: what are you willing to exchange or offer for money?
There are a few categories.
There are things that you’ve done, or things that you know, that people are willing to pay for so they can skip the headache, the learning, and the years that you spent on that problem—you just have to decide how much to give away vs. how much you want to earn.
What’s the right balance for you?
Get rid of limiting money mindsets
“I didn’t see a lot of money growing up. I thought you had to work really hard to get a little of it because that’s the story I saw being told around me. That was everything I saw,” says Glo.
As a child of high-expectation immigrant parents, Glo had to rearrange her mindset around money to break through the barriers holding others back.
So what kind of beliefs do you currently have about money?
- Money is hard to make
- Money is everywhere, but I feel unworthy
- I’m not in enough “pain” to try harder to earn it
- Money is a mix of luck, preparation, and opportunity
Because most people believe that money is hard to make because it’s what they’ve seen. So you have to start looking in different places to change your reality.
Now, Glo has a money mantra she likes to refer back to on the regular:
Most importantly?
Do not confuse your self-worth—your innate worthiness that no one can argue, change, or take away—and the market value of your business, which is based on your packaging, positioning, and program promise.
As Glo says, “You could lay around in bed all day, burp and fart, and STILL BE WORTHY.”
Tip 3: Align your problem > project > product
The most profitable niche for many solopreneurs and creators is… themselves:
- their brain
- their learnings
- their experiences
They see problems, turn those into a “how do I solve that/help them” project, and end up with a product they monetize.
That’s the reality of the digital economy, and it depends on your attention, passions, hustle, and commitment—nobody else’s.
Because if you’re not experimenting and tapping into your own knowledge (and instead following trends)—you’re going to get left behind.
That’s why you have to:
- Have a powerful brand story, which makes it 10x easier to make money.
- Create content as a way of documenting your learning— “It shouldn’t be a grind,” Glo says. “It can be a way to process in public, to think, live, and be out loud.”
- Build products from your POV—that make sense in your reality. “I had a very colorful (or expensive) imagination as a child. I believed that everything I wanted, there had to be a way to get it,” says Glo.
Here’s some examples of how Glo might go through this process as a coach and a creator:
Tip 4: Protect your precious time
Most creators operate as a team of one (or few), which means the “too much to do, too little time” saying is all too true.
But to be a creator… you need time to get inspired, think, process, and create.
That’s why Glo tries to only be “on camera” and filming 3 days—max—to protect her creativity.
Here’s her ideal creator schedule:
- Sundays are for coaching calls.
- Tuesdays are private clients, podcast interviews, and group coaching.
- Thursdays are for overflow anything.
- Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are for
- spaciousness,
- creativity,
- ideation,
- researching,
- watching content,
- getting ideas and being inspired,
- then cataloging and categorizing content ideas into collections so you can create it later.
The results
As a child…
Glo never saw black people traveling for fun. (Only immigration.)
Glo never saw nomadic business owners that made making money look easy.
Glo started pre-med in university to make her parents happy.
Glo had no idea you could earn money on the internet, on blogs, or on online products.
Until she decided to try. Experiment. Lean in to her uniqueness, her curiosity, and the way her brain worked.
Leaning into her own strengths has helped her become an online creative entrepreneur, travel for joy as a black woman, and earn millions of dollars while pivoting her business as her interests and her life changed.
She has shown up exactly as she is—for over 20 years—and built her business by following her heart. As her life expanded into a relationship, or travel, or inner wisdom, so did her business.
As a result, Glo has grown from relying on brand deals and partnerships as a travel blogger, to having multiple income streams (digital products, coaching, mastermind, courses, and speaking engagements) that bring in 7 figures and help her live her life authentically, and with joy.
Glo’s learnings:
- It’s okay to do things your way—as long as you experiment and find what works for you. “If I don’t belong or fit
in, how can I use my differences to stand out in a way that makes me feel valued?” - Glo
- She’s anti-niche and pro-pivot. When she gets bored, or her life or the market changes (like with travel blogging during COVID) she adapts her business to focus on that.
- For example, when she posted about her new relationship, people asked a million questions—so she created an eBook called “Love at Next Swipe” that took her several weeks to create, but earned her 6-figures in the first month she launched it.
- Think about your career, not just the next launch. Glo knew that travel blogging was winding down, so she started coaching “in secret”. She felt the pressure of brand partnerships, so moved into creating digital products and courses that would give her more control. She created a brand around herself in certain themes that grows with her on her life journey.
- Diversify your revenue—Glo’s current revenue “pie chart” looks like:
- 20-30% digital products
- 20% mastermind that’s specific to her current journey: “How to show up as an educator on Instagram” “How to go from 6-7 figures as a personal brand” “How to be a speaker”
- 20% coaching courses or programs like the Social Educators Academy or Life Leap
- 25% speaking engagements (3/month is typical, 1/month is slow)
- The most successful businesses are unique, they’re not first or the best.
- Those who are for you and the stories you share will stick around—so try not to hyperfixate on follower counts, etc.
Key takeaways
- Set inspiring goals that put you in control. Don’t just take what life hands you—dream big, follow your passions, find the problems, and solve them in your unique way.
- Money and time are an exchange. Decide how much of your time you’re willing to give up for certain amounts of money. Changing your relationship with money will change the way you approach this exchange.
- Focus on what lights you up. Don’t follow trends. Don’t do what everyone else is doing—because by the time you catch up, it’ll already be obsolete.
