[[{“value”:”In this week’s episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, Veronica Llorca-Smith and I discuss how she built a six-figure portfolio career by turning one area of expertise into connected income streams. Her business includes Substack, a paid community, coaching, courses, boot camps, public speaking, and four books. Rather than treating these as separate businesses, she uses the same ideas across formats.
That approach helps her create revenue without reinventing her business each time. Newsletter posts can become courses, workshops, coaching offers, or book material, while the community keeps her close to what people want. Her story shows how one topic can support a broader business.
Watch the Full Episode
Building One Business Around Multiple Income Streams
Veronica describes what she does as a “portfolio career.” Instead of thinking of herself as someone operating several separate companies, she sees one career made up of several pillars.
That distinction matters because the pieces support each other. A newsletter post can lead to a coaching client, become part of a course, support a workshop, or eventually contribute to a book.
Her business didn’t begin with all these pieces at once. She started with writing, saw what resonated, and gradually added new formats as opportunities arose. Today, the portfolio includes:
A free Substack publication and paid membership
One-to-one coaching
Digital courses
Small-group public speaking boot camps
Corporate speaking engagements and workshops
Four published books
A community that feeds interest into many of the other offers
That progression is one of the more useful parts of Veronica’s story. She didn’t create an elaborate business structure first and then hunt for customers to fill it. She built one piece, listened to what people wanted next, and expanded from there.
Growing the Community Before Monetizing More
Veronica launched The Lemon Tree Mindset on Substack in February 2023. She originally chose the platform because other writers recommended it, not because she had created a detailed monetization plan.
One feature made Substack especially useful for what she wanted to build: discovery inside the platform itself. Notes give creators a social layer where people who have never subscribed can encounter their posts, interact with them, and join the newsletter.
For Veronica, email became more important than chasing follower counts because it gave her a direct relationship with the people interested in her work. She now refers to those people as a community rather than an audience. The newsletter has grown considerably:
Around 14,000 total subscribers
Roughly 11,000 English subscribers
More than 3,000 Spanish subscribers
About 3% of subscribers are paid members
The paid community generates roughly $25,000 per year
That 3% conversion rate was lower than Veronica initially expected. She had heard estimates suggesting that 5% to 10% of free Substack subscribers could eventually become paid.
Instead of spending all her energy pushing 3% toward 5%, she started thinking about what else she could offer the much larger group that might never want a recurring paid subscription. That shift led to coaching, courses, workshops, and other ways for people to buy from her on their own terms.
Converting Free Attention Into Paid Offers
Veronica’s approach to paid content has evolved through trial and error. Her current philosophy separates information from implementation.
She’s comfortable sharing a large amount of information at no cost. Paid offers become more attractive when they provide personal feedback, structured exercises, frameworks, direct support, or opportunities to work alongside other people. Her paid community includes experiences that are difficult to reproduce through a standard article:
Dedicated chats where members can ask specific questions
Personalized feedback tied to an individual member’s situation
Peer connections that have led to guest posts and podcast collaborations
Monthly business roundtables centered on a specific topic
Opportunities for members to use the group as a sounding board
Veronica has changed these experiences as member behavior has changed. Traditional webinars and one-way masterclasses once worked well, then participation began declining toward the end of 2025 and into 2026.
After asking members what they wanted, she found that interaction was becoming more appealing than simply watching another presentation. That led her toward focused business roundtables where members could discuss problems with each other rather than only listening to her teach.
Reusing One Topic Across Multiple Products
One reason Veronica can support so many revenue streams is that she rarely treats a piece of content as something that has only one use. She often chooses one theme, develops it across several newsletter posts, and later packages the material into a different format.
Her recent work around portfolio careers is a good example. Instead of publishing unrelated articles from week to week, she created a serialized collection of eight posts around the topic. That series produced results before the course even existed:
The eight posts generated more than $1,200 in incremental paid-subscription revenue.
They gave Veronica direct feedback on which parts of the topic interested her community.
The finished material created the foundation for a portfolio career course.
They added videos and exercises so the course offered a different experience from the newsletter posts.
The hard thinking had already happened during the writing process. Creating the course became more about structuring, packaging, recording, and presenting material that already existed.
This is a major theme throughout Veronica’s business. Content doesn’t need to disappear after publication. A focused series can become an asset that feeds several parts of a creator business for months or years.
Selling Courses Around Existing Demand
Veronica entered digital courses relatively recently. She published her first one around May or June of 2025. Since then, she has created five original courses and translated two into Spanish, for a total of seven course products. Much of the written material came directly from work she had already published.
Her best-performing course has been The Substack Bestseller, which teaches people how to grow on Substack. The timing, her existing presence on the platform, and her status as a Substack bestseller all added credibility to the offer. Her experience has also shown her how heavily course revenue depends on launches:
Courses generate around $1,000 per month on average.
Veronica estimates roughly 80% of a course’s sales happen during the first month after launch.
Sales continue afterward, though at a much lower pace.
Courses can also add value when bundled with coaching or workshops.
Not every course has performed equally well. Her course about monetizing expertise through public speaking has sold fewer copies on its own because the topic appeals to a narrower group.
Veronica still considers it useful because it supports a larger public-speaking business. Around 50% to 60% of students in her speaking programs choose a package that includes the course. That makes course sales only one way to judge whether the product is worthwhile.
Running Small Workshops for Higher-Value Support
Veronica also runs public-speaking boot camps for people who already have expertise and want to turn it into paid corporate speaking, webinars, workshops, or keynotes.
Rather than creating a large class, she keeps each group intentionally small. These programs provide more personal attention while giving her control over when she runs them. The format is concentrated:
Up to 10 participants
Three sessions held across three consecutive days
Roughly 90 minutes per session
Day one covers the speaker’s foundation and signature topic
Day two focuses on attracting opportunities and building visibility
Day three covers pricing, offers, agreements, cancellation fees, and speaker bureaus
Each workshop can produce roughly $3,000 to $4,000 in revenue. Veronica can schedule extra sessions during months when another income stream, such as corporate speaking, is quieter.
Her approach to filling them is also more selective than mass promotion. Rather than repeatedly sending the offer to her entire email list, she identifies people in her community who have already expressed interest in speaking and contacts a small number directly.
In one example, she might reach out personally to around 15 relevant people. The pitch becomes highly specific because she already has some context about what those people are trying to accomplish.
Using Public Speaking as the Primary Revenue Driver
For all the attention given to newsletters and digital products, public speaking remains Veronica’s largest source of income by a wide margin. Her background helps explain why. Before becoming a creator, she spent more than 15 years in corporate roles with companies including Apple and Estée Lauder, leading teams across Asia.
That experience gives her material she can take back into the corporate world through leadership, communication, productivity, and related presentations. Her speaking economics look considerably different from her lower-priced digital products:
Workshops are around $3,000.
Keynotes and larger presentations can reach around $5,000.
A busy month might include four or five sessions.
Those months can produce approximately $15,000 to $20,000 from speaking alone.
The challenge is predictability. Corporate clients decide when they need speakers, so Veronica cannot control the schedule as easily as she can with her own boot camps.
Her other revenue streams provide a useful counterweight. If speaking slows during a particular period, she can lean more heavily into a workshop, course launch, coaching, or another offer. Together, these streams have helped her build a six-figure business.
Publishing Books for Authority More Than Royalties
Books were part of Veronica’s business before the newsletter became successful. In fact, her first book helped expose a major problem in her early strategy.
She self-published The Lemon Tree Mindset in early 2023 and saw very few sales. That experience helped convince her that creating a book without first building a community made selling much harder.
She later self-published a second title and released another through an independent publisher. Eventually, she decided she wanted experience working with one of the world’s largest publishing companies.
Rather than pitching everywhere, she studied how major publishers are structured. Penguin Random House, for example, operates hundreds of imprints, so she focused on identifying the portion of the organization most closely connected to her geography and topic.
That research led to a deal with Penguin in Southeast Asia. She secured the agreement before writing the manuscript and spent roughly a year working on the project before its 2025 publication.
Financially, books remain her smallest pillar:
Veronica says a large publisher may offer royalties around 8%.
A publishing deal still leaves substantial marketing work with the author.
Book sales and royalties have been disappointing relative to her other income streams.
She has continued publishing because the benefits extend beyond direct sales.
Being able to describe herself as an author published by Penguin carries weight with corporate clients. Her books have also led to invitations to literary events in places including India, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
One book, The Anti-Procrastinator, later became both a Gumroad course and a corporate workshop. That means the original intellectual property now reaches far beyond copies sold at bookstores.
Connecting Every Offer Into One Ecosystem
The recurring pattern in Veronica’s business is that she creates around themes rather than isolated products. Once a topic earns attention, she asks how that same expertise could work in another format. A newsletter topic might become a course. A course can sit beside coaching, a workshop, or a group program.
A book can create credibility for speaking while supplying intellectual property for another product. A paid community can generate revenue while introducing Veronica to the people most likely to buy those other offers. The individual pieces frequently lead into each other:
Free content introduces Veronica’s ideas.
Email keeps her connected directly with her community.
Paid memberships create recurring revenue and deeper interaction.
One-to-one sessions reveal recurring problems worth solving.
Repeated questions can become course topics.
Courses support workshops and bundled packages.
Books create authority and new content assets.
Corporate speaking produces the largest individual transactions.
This structure helps explain how Veronica maintains so many activities. She’s not coming up with a separate business idea every time she creates something. She takes expertise she has already developed and asks where else it can create value.
Choosing Focus Without Trying to Do Everything at Once
Being present in more places doesn’t mean producing unrelated material for every platform. Veronica’s approach starts with concentration.
She recommends identifying one topic where you have useful expertise and then creating a focused series around it. Someone teaching podcasting, for example, could create eight or ten pieces that move from selecting a concept through publishing a show.
Once that series exists, several additional offers become possible without choosing a completely different topic:
Add a coaching call for people who want personal feedback.
Package the series into a structured video course.
Run a workshop for people who want direct interaction.
Use questions from those sessions to shape future content.
Turn proven material into longer-form intellectual property later.
This sequence keeps the focus on serving the same type of person in several ways. Each format gives customers a different level of access, convenience, structure, or personal support.
For creators who feel stretched by the idea of being everywhere, that distinction matters. The goal is not to create more unrelated work. The goal is to let your best work travel further.
Final Thoughts
Veronica Llorca-Smith’s business shows how one area of expertise can support several connected income streams. Her Substack community brings in about $25,000 annually, while workshops can generate $3,000 to $4,000 each and corporate speaking can reach $15,000 to $20,000 in busy months.
Courses add another revenue stream, with roughly 80% of sales arriving during the launch period. Her books earn less directly, but they have built credibility, created speaking opportunities, and provided material for courses and corporate workshops.
The key lesson is to get more value from work you have already created. A newsletter can become a course, a course can support a workshop, and a book can strengthen a speaking business. Together, those pieces can form a diversified six-figure business.
Links & Resources
Check out The Lemon Tree Mindset (Substack)
Connect with Veronica on LinkedIn
Get Veronica’s free Substack video tutorial
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