Most creator advice says pick your lane. Either you’re a launch person or you’re an evergreen person.
Launch people build everything toward one or two massive campaigns per year.
They create weeks of pre-launch content, run live webinars, open cart for five days and pray the numbers work.
Then they spend the next three months recovering and building toward the next launch.
It’s exhausting, but at least the revenue comes in concentrated bursts you can plan around.
Evergreen people run ads to automated funnels. Their course is always available. Their webinar replays on a loop.
The math works as long as they keep feeding the funnel with paid traffic. Stop the ads, revenue stops.
It’s predictable, but the margins disappear into acquisition costs.
Gemma Bonham-Carter generates over $1.2 million CAD annually doing something different.
She’s running both models simultaneously, coordinated through a calendar that creates revenue smoothing neither approach can achieve alone.
And she’s doing it primarily through email to a warm list, which has the power to change the entire economic equation for creators.
From Fixer-Upper Blog to Full-Time Creator
Back in 2010, Gemma was running a home decor blog called The Sweetest Digs while working full-time in Public Health.
At the time she wrote about her fear of “sweat dripping in July heat” at her day job – that visceral dread of being trapped in work that demanded everything but delivered no freedom.
Her first blog started out as a creative outlet documenting the renovation of a fixer-upper home, sharing DIY projects and decoration ideas.
The transparency of her home transformation journey resonated. People connected with the practical, stylish approach. The audience grew.
The blog took off. Major Canadian publications featured her work. Blogging conferences invited her to speak.
But the real education came from figuring out how to make money from the attention—ad revenue, affiliate commissions, brand partnerships.
Each revenue stream taught her something about what her audience valued and how they made buying decisions.
And through it all, she was building an email list.
Not random visitors, but people who wanted to hear from her regularly about home projects and design ideas.
That list became the most valuable asset she’d build, though she didn’t fully understand that yet.
In 2013, everything shifted. After her first child, she needed flexibility her Public Health job couldn’t provide.
By this point, The Sweetest Digs was generating revenue. She had proven she could build an audience and monetize content. She went full-time.
By 2016, she launched her first course – teaching blog monetization.
She was going meta, teaching other bloggers how to do what she’d learned from building The Sweetest Digs.
The course generated modest revenue, around $2,000. But she had already built multiple income streams. She wasn’t desperate for it to work.
Then she discovered something: she was good at creating and selling courses. Not just good at blogging. Good at the act of course creation itself.
That realization changed everything.
How a Renovation Blog Became a Course Creation Empire
The pivot happened gradually. If she could teach bloggers how to monetize, and she was discovering she had a talent for course creation, why not teach the course creation process itself?
Course Creator School emerged from this insight.
She took the playbook she’d developed growing The Sweetest Digs – how to build an audience, how to monetize content, how to create digital products – and packaged it for other business owners who wanted to do the same thing.
The email list she’d built through the home decor blog became the foundation. These people knew her work. They’d seen her build something successful. When she offered to teach them how to do it, they listened.
From Discovery to $1.2M Architecture
She started experimenting with how to structure the revenue model, and what emerged was a hybrid approach that eliminated the false choice most creators accept.
Her $997 Course Creator School runs as an evergreen funnel—automated webinar, email sequences, always available.
It creates baseline revenue every single month. While other creators are in the valley between launches, watching their bank account dwindle, she has money coming in from this steady foundation.
She added The Passive Project at $5,000. This premium offer gets one major launch push in March, then ongoing promotion throughout the year via email.
The Passive Project now drives around 40% of her annual revenue—roughly $486,000 from one product that gets strategic attention year-round rather than being locked into a single launch window.
Course Creator School contributes around 16% through its evergreen baseline plus periodic promotional boosts—flash sales, summer micro-campaigns, coordinated pushes that remind people the offer exists.
Between these two anchors, she fills the calendar with strategic promotional windows.
Deal Week in November. Black Friday campaigns running September through October.
Smaller offers like her AI Team at $1,500 get beta launches during these concentrated periods.
Everything coordinates so her list isn’t getting hammered with daily sales pitches, but they’re also not going months without being asked to buy something.
The entire system runs through email in the same strategy she learned building The Sweetest Digs.
Why She Runs Two Models Instead of Picking One
The power in Gemma’s model comes from how it eliminates the false trade-offs most creators accept as inevitable.
Pure launch models create feast and famine.
You make $50,000 in one week, then spend three months rebuilding your list’s willingness to buy from you again.
The emotional rollercoaster is tough – alternating between high-pressure intensity and anxiety watching your runway shrink. You’re either sprinting or recovering.
Pure evergreen models solve the cash flow problem but create platform dependency.
You need ads running constantly to feed the funnel with cold traffic. When Facebook increases ad costs by 30%, your margins shrink overnight.
When privacy changes hit your targeting, your conversion rates drop and you’re scrambling to fix the economics.
Gemma’s hybrid eliminates both problems because the warm email list changes the underlying math.
The evergreen offer creates a revenue floor. Even during quiet months, money comes in from Course Creator School. She’s never starting from zero. If a campaign underperforms or she needs time off, the baseline protects her.
The campaigns create strategic spikes without requiring her to bet everything on one launch.
Each promotional window is significant, but none of them has to work perfectly because the system distributes risk across multiple revenue events throughout the year.
The email list eliminates this acquisition tax.
She’s not paying to reach these people every day. They’re already there. When she opens an offer, she’s reminding her audience it exists, not convincing strangers to trust her enough to buy.
This is what she was seeking when she left that Public Health job. Not just revenue. Freedom from desperation. Control over her time. A business that doesn’t collapse if she takes a month off.
What You Can Build on a Warm Email List
The insight here isn’t that Gemma has some secret advantage. It’s that she refused to accept the either-or framing most creators treat as inevitable.
You don’t need to choose between launch exhaustion and ad dependency. You can layer multiple strategies if you build the foundation correctly – and that foundation is a warm, engaged email list.
Most creators think their monetization problem is “not enough audience” or “not the right offer.”
They’re optimizing the wrong variables. The real question is whether your conversion architecture creates consistent revenue without constant pressure or constant spending.
If you only run launches, you’re vulnerable to feast and famine.
Test adding one offer that runs quietly between your big campaigns. Something evergreen that people can buy any time.
It won’t generate launch-level revenue, but it creates a baseline so you’re not watching your bank account drain during rebuild periods.
If you only run evergreen, you’re also leaving money on the table and probably dependent on ads.
Test adding one strategic campaign per quarter – five to seven days of coordinated emails creating a revenue spike. See if your warm list responds to concentrated promotion.
Most creators discover their list is more ready to buy than they assumed; they just weren’t being asked clearly enough or often enough.
The key is coordination. Evergreen creates the floor so you’re never at zero.
Campaigns create the ceiling so you’re not leaving growth on the table.
Email connects everything without requiring you to pay for attention every single day. The warm relationship does the heavy lifting that cold traffic can never accomplish at the same economics.
If you have an email list – even a small one – you already have the core asset.
The question is whether you’re architecting the calendar to create consistent monthly revenue, or whether you’re hoping one model will magically solve everything if you just execute it harder.
Gemma’s $1.2 million doesn’t come from having a massive audience or some revolutionary offer.
It comes from refusing to choose between models and instead building a system where each approach covers what the others can’t provide alone.
That’s the shift. Not picking better tactics. Building better architecture.