The Ultimate Passive Income Business Gameplan

Okay, let's get right into it. I'm going to give you guys the ultimate passive income game plan.

In case you don't know me, my name is Maria Went. I've got hundreds of thousands of followers kind of all over the internet. I make millions of dollars selling digital products, very automated, and that's kind of what I want to show you today. Is just if you want to sell a digital product, here's a very foolproof game plan. And I know what I'm talking about, not just because I've done it for myself. I think it's one thing to teach yourself how to sell digital products, but I've actually helped get some really incredible results for my students. I printed off a couple of them just cuz it's fun. Um, so the first one is from Crystal, and Crystal says, "Huge win! We hit $273,000 in November." She says, "Thank you to Maria," and then also that's my sister for always answering my questions. So she almost had a $300,000 month in November. And then Joy—I blurred out her baby's face—but Joyce says, "Um, I just hit 320,000 with digital products in 10 months." So she did not quite—Crystal did a 300K month, which is amazing. Um, Joy did—it's still incredible—$300,000 um, in 10 months, and she says, "Thank you so much for being the number one person that's inspired me and that I've learned from. I'm so excited. I want to start scaling even more and getting more automations," which again is exactly what she can do.

Um, these are some of the big wins. There's tons and tons and tons and tons of ones where I help people make their first digital product sale, or I help people make enough product sales so that they can quit a job they hate. I like sharing the really big ones because they're exciting, and it really stretches people's minds to what is possible, to the potential that we all have. Um, but just realize that even if it's not a $300,000 month for some people, a $3,000 month that allows them to then be home with their babies, or allows them to quit a job they hate, or allows them to travel the world—that's just as amazing. And that's really what I'm about, is just showing you guys what I did and what I show my students so that you can do it too. It's not that hard. I'm not smart or clever; I just am really good at figuring things out and taking really complicated concept, you know, concepts or really complicated text stuff and making it really simple and easy to understand and follow. And that's what I'm going to do with this game plan. My goal is that by the end of the time you watch this video, you're going to know exactly what to do, and you're going to feel like, "Okay, I know what I need to do. I'm super clear. I just have to do the work." A lot of times, in my experience, you're not afraid of the work; you just want someone to tell you what to do. You're like, "Look, I'll work hard to build this. I know it's not magic. I know it's not a get-rich-quick thing. I know I'm gonna have to work, but someone just tell me what to do because I'm watching all this stuff on Instagram, and I'm watching all these videos, and it's just like not coming together." So I'm going to give you what you need here. Okay, first thing is really important. I didn't learn this for years and years and years and years, but I wish I had, so I'm going to give this to you right away. This is the first—and I'm—we're going to kind of write on my iPad here—but this is the first and most important thing you need to learn. There's one rule that you have to follow, and it's called the rule—rule of the five ones. So, rule of the five ones—what are they? Essentially, you're going to solve one problem, um, to one niche or like target market, ideal client and avatar, selling one product—we'll talk more about that—um, on one social media platform, one platform for one year.

So right away, this might be different than what you heard. You might have heard you're going to sell tons of digital products; you're going to, um, you know, be posting on multiple platforms; um, you're going to solve multiple problems. No. I got to a million-dollar business, multi-million-dollar business. Um, I've made over a million dollars every year now since 2020. I have income proof all over the place. You can—I share literally everything. Um, if you are skeptical, cuz some people are, and I get that, um, it works when you focus. You probably maybe have heard this saying: simple scales, fancy fails. It's true. If you are trying to solve more than one problem, you're spreading yourself thin here. If you're trying to talk to more than one, uh, target market, you're spreading yourself thin here. If you're trying to sell—a lot of people are trying to sell like four or five products—it's nuts. You're spreading yourself super thin here. If you're trying to repurpose your reels on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok, you're spreading yourself really thin. And the other thing you're doing is you're starting then stopping and starting and stopping. You're not being consistent for a year. Look at all this spread energy here. Look at this—all of this energy is spread so thin and it's getting diluted. Contrast that to this: it's just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and they're all kind of working together. Frankly, it actually probably should look like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, because there really is—what it really is doing is all five of these things are going in and building one business really, really well. And I just did a coaching call on this, so you might not know this, but I have a tiny little coaching group. Um, I don't do a ton of coaching, but I have a group where I answer questions, so it's like a Facebook group, and I answer questions, but I do do one coaching call a month to that group just for fun. And, um, one of the things that I talked about last week on this call was the rule of the five ones, and the amount of people in there—I wasn't expecting it; I didn't ask for it—but the amount of people in there who said, "I followed the rule of the five ones, and that's how I hit seven figures," surprised me. Now it was like three people, so it wasn't like it was 100 people in my group saying that, but three different people confirming, plus my own anecdotal experience, plus what I know from other business mentors and friends, but it was a re—it was a recent confirmation that I wasn't expecting to get last week, with a couple students being like, "Yeah, I followed the rule of five ones, and that's how I hit, um, seven figures or over a million in my business." So I'm—I'm going to give it to you real—that's why I'm here. If you think you're smart enough to break this rule, you're not. One product, solve one problem for one niche, offering one product on one platform for one year. That's your first thing.

Second thing that we're going to want to talk about is the actual product. Okay, the actual digital product that you're selling. It can be an—like a real product, um, that's fine. Um, one of my favorite stories about physical products is the aquarium lamp. I've talked about this before on my social media, but this guy has an Instagram account, and the only thing he does is sell an aquarium lamp, and I came across one of his reels, and I bought an aquarium lamp. So you absolutely can do this for digital or physical. Most people watching this, my guess would be you're wanting to sell digital products, so let's talk about that. Okay, product is really, really, really important, and you kind of know that—like I'm guessing you already know that—and there's a couple of things that I want to give you that are going to help you with your product. Okay, so the first thing that your product is going to be most likely is it's either going to be a course, um, like a PDF or other kind of like digital file, or it's going to be audio. I would say most people are going to do a course, and then another—let's just say like 60% are going to do a course, 30% are going to do a PDF, 10% will be audio. Audio is tough. I talk about that. Um, two things I want to give you with this are—first let me just really quick pause this so I can focus—there's two things: one, you're going to need a hyper—this is what most people get wrong—hyper-specific title of your product. So the product title needs to be hyper-specific, and it needs to, um, tell you exactly what you're going to get when you buy. So when someone buys your course, exactly what are they going to get? I'll give you an example. Instead of doing something like, um, let's say you're a life coach and you are—or let's say you're a relationship coach and you help people have better marriages—the name of your course shouldn't be intimacy, or it shouldn't be passion, or it shouldn't be marriage; it shouldn't be, um, something fancy, right? Like we all have heard of those fancy course titles where it's like, "Unlock your marriage." It should be something very specific, like, "How to have a conflict-free marriage"—that would be much better—or "Reigniting the spark in your marriage," or like, um, something like that where it's very clear what you're going—you should be able to read the title. I'm not a marriage expert by any means, so I think that's why I'm struggling to come up with examples. I'll use my business. I would never make a product called "Unleash Your Potential." I would never make a product called "The Academy." I would never make a product called, um, "Abundance." I would never make a product called, um, "Next Level." I would never make a product called, um, like "The Collective." I would make a product called "Passive Income with Instagram," or, of course, I'm going to recommend that you get right now, which is "How to Create a Viral Digital Product." Guess what I teach you and show you how to do in my course called "How to Create a Viral Digital Product." I bet you have absolutely 100% clarity on what I teach you. I teach you how to create a viral digital product. And if you feel—this is the thing I wanted to like—L—I'm going to share my screen with you in a second and just kind of like show you what you get with the course. I really recommend it. If you feel a little less than confident in your ability to create—let me just turn this guy off as well for a second—um, if you do not feel confident in your ability to create a product that's going to sell really well, get this course. I'll link to it in the um, description down below. Obviously, it's optional, but what I teach you how to do is create a product that when people see it, they immediately want to buy it, which makes sales really easy. So I share things like the mindset you need to have to go viral, but also your viral digital product has to have this or it will flop; how to pick the right niche; um, how to, um, like five reasons digital products don't go viral; the price-to-value ratio; um, how to choose what kind of digital product to create. Some people automatically think they should do a course, or they automatically think they should do a PDF bundle, and they're wrong; they should be doing the opposite; um, what to do if you don't want to show your face; um, you know, what if you want to create a course on your phone? Like I really go over—and then if you do decide, "Oh, I'm going to do a course, or I'm going to do a bundle, or I'm going to do audio," I teach you how to make it. So we're going to make the viral PDF bundle together; we're going to make the course together; um, I give options on lighting—like this is really the complete—I'll just kind of like give you an example of one of the videos. Let's see. So like, "How to structure and outline the course" is a video that literally goes over, "Okay, here's a sample course: How to elevate your entire wardrobe for $100 or less." That's the name of the course, by the way. Guess what you get when you buy this course? Very clear instructions on how to elevate your wardrobe for $100 or less. So it's super clear, and I literally go over—I'm just going to kind of scrub it—but I literally go over, "Okay, what should each outline have? What should each section have?" Um, and I literally do an example where I say, "Okay, the first video is going to be this; the second video is going to be this; the third video is going to be this." This is the kind of stuff that is going to make such a difference because here's what I've learned—I've learned—and there's like a little flop/viral scale which is very cool—here's what I've learned, you guys: I've learned that if you create the right product, it makes marketing so much easier, and no amount of clever marketing can get around a bad product. So you can learn all the Instagram hacks in the world; you can learn all the traffic hacks in the world, but if your product isn't sellable, it's not going to move, and it's going to be the most frustrating thing in the world world because you're trying to market a product that's never going to sell. So highly recommend my course, "How to Create a Viral Digital Product." A lot of you guys already have it, so if you are watching and you do have it, amazing, go implement it. Make sure there's a little section on if you already have a digital product and you need to just make sure the digital product will like meet the criteria or meet the standard, go do that. So step two is the product. Um, step three is to leverage Instagram content. So we're going to talk about a lot about this. Okay, there's, um, there's a lot of different ways, and I'm going to kind of like walk you through what this looks like next. There's a lot of different ways you're going to get traffic to your digital product. There's ads; there's, um, emails; like there's so many different ways you're going to get traffic to your digital product over time, but if you remember, we had to pick one platform. The platform that I have seen—not just myself, but my students—see the most immediate results from. So if you're looking for, "I want results right away; I want results like within a week, within a month," that's going to be Instagram more than any other platform. And there's basically three—I'm going to walk you through the three different content, um, and then kind of talk about where each one fits into this picture, and then how it all works together. So there's obviously reels, carousels, and stories. They're all important. Um, reels bring in the foot traffic. So reels basically equal traffic. Um, carousels—essentially, they nurture and warm, um, but they do also sell. I make a lot of money for my—a lot of money for my carousels. And then finally, stories—believe it or not—stories reach a ton of people, um, but then they also sell like hotcakes. So all of these work together. You can't do one or the other, in my opinion, my experience. If you want the most money for your effort, it's best to do all three. If I had to give you—I'll just give you my advice on if you're like, "Okay, I got to figure where do—where do I get started, right? I'm a little overwhelmed. What do I pick first?" Start with reels because you really can't—it doesn't make any sense to do carousels, and it doesn't make really any sense to do stories if you're not bringing in the foot traffic. Surely that makes sense, right? If you don't have people coming in, you really shouldn't be on your stories pitching, and you really should—there's no one to nurture. So reels are the foot traffic. I have a ton of stuff here on—on YouTube about, um, reels, but I also will tell you this: it's so much easier than you think. I just did the math on—and it's so profitable—I just did the math literally this morning on how much—like what was the average amount of money I got paid per reel on Instagram over the last six months, and I checked the math three times, and I had Rose check it again because I didn't think it was right. I get paid literally almost $2,500 per reel. It's $2,433.19. I haven't memorized because I checked it so much. So at every reel I make, I get paid on average $2,500, and my reels take—they're so quick—the way I teach you to do reels, um, it's with a course called "Passive Income with Instagram." You probably have heard of it. I'll link it down in the description below. "Passive Income," by the way, basically walks you through how to do all of this. So all of this—like selling your digital product with Instagram traffic—that's what "Passive Income with Instagram" teaches you how to do is basically building all the automations, building all the tech stuff so that all you have to do when this is built is just make those reels, make those carousels, um, and there's lots of things that I teach you in that course to make it really easy to do that, like generating 365 reels very quickly, um, what to do if you don't want to show your face—that kind of stuff's in my "Passive Income with Instagram" course. I'm not going to show you what that looks like cuz I feel like a lot of you guys are really familiar with it, and I don't want to spend too much time, um, talking about all my courses. I really want to just teach you, um, and so my advice if you're just getting started, um, and you—you need something tangible to hang on to is a couple of different things. One, you're going to want to give yourself permission to ease into this, so, um, and we're going to kind of go over the rest of the gameplay in here, but I want to pause really quick with the Instagram content creation process. Give yourself permission to ease into this. Do not immediately go 0 to 100, meaning don't go zero to publishing a reel and a carousel and stories every single day. That's going to be a really big recipe for burnout. I just talked about this with the agency I'm working with. Um, they do studio stuff for me—great agency—they got really excited about about me and about us working together, and they had this plan to like immediately do a bunch of different stuff, like a bunch of extra, um, reels and and YouTube videos and all this stuff, and I—I explained to them, I was like, "You guys, that's not how I work. Um, I tend to add something new in right." So me doing studio reels with this company, that's a new thing, so let's keep doing that for three months and then reassess. One extra thing we're going to add in. So if I was giving that advice to you, I would say, "Do a reel—like three reels a week for three months—and then add in an extra thing." If you go 0 to 100, you burn out, and then you lose all the progress. It—I would rather you post four reels a month—like let's just say you do it on a Tuesday—I think you'd make more money doing four reels a month but you never miss that Tuesday than you would doing five reels a week for two weeks and then burning out. It's much better that you ease your way into it and build the muscle. The second thing that I'll tell you is that trust yourself to figure out—in my experience, you actually know what you need to do, and you know where you need to go to get like the information, but then you go and like also take in additional ideas. It's like you overwhelm yourself, and you get shiny object syndrome or like information overload. You might be doing that with this video right now where you have information overload. I would recommend that you pick one mentor—I don't mind if it's me or if it's someone else—pick one mentor, consume everything they create, and unfollow everyone else. And I'm not asking you to do something I haven't done myself. When I picked my mentor, I literally sat in my inbox and unsubscribed from everybody else. I went to my Instagram and unfollowed everyone else. Back when, um, we were on Facebook a lot more, like I went and like unfollowed everyone on Facebook. I left Facebook groups, and I said, "Okay, this is the mentor that I'm going to, um, choose. I'm going to go all in, and I'm going to—there might be other ways to run a successful business; there might be other ways to do it—but I'm going all in on this one mentor," and it was amazing. That's how I got my seven-figure business, in case you're wondering who it—it was—it's talking more—um, I unfollowed everybody but talking more, and I followed him, and he helped me run a seven-figure business. So it's—it's—you got to control your mental, um, input, your mental load, because you're going to get really overwhelmed.

So the fourth thing that I want to show you with this—basically, by the way, once you do this, you're very well on your way—um, the—the thing that I—I want you to have though that I think is really important is helping you understand what this is going to look like, very big picture, because this is a little bit in the weeds with the product and, um, you know, the reels and the carousels and whatnot, but I want to kind of like just give you a big bird's-eye view of what this is going to look like for you over the next few years. So what this is all going to look like, um, okay, so let's just do it like this. So essentially, it's going to look like this: let's just pretend this is you. You're going to start making—let's just say reels to keep it really simple—you're going to start making content, and that content is going to go to a sales page. I show you how to set that up, by the way, in that course, um, and then the sales page is obviously going to give you money. You're going to get sales. A good sales page will convert well. An average sales page converts at 2%; ours average is 6%, so three times the average. Some of our pages convert at 25%, meaning if four people come to our checkout page, we get one sale, or if 100 people go to our checkout page, we get 25 sales versus the average person would get two sales. So in my "Passive Income with Instagram" course, I give you a lot of very practical advice, and that matters, right? If I can send 100 people to a checkout page and get 25 sales versus two sales, I'm going to want to do what I'm doing for the better checkout page. That's what I teach you in the "Passive Income," um, thing as well. So however the metrics work for you—everyone's a little different—you're going to send traffic from your Instagram content—just highlight this—it's going to go to the sales page, and the sales page is going to give you money. This part over here you're going to build once, so this is a one-time thing, and basically the way I say it is: make the course once, make content weekly, make sales every day. So content is going to be made weekly. Again, I have tons of stuff here on YouTube for free. I also go over that in my, um, Instagram course, but you're going to make content daily eventually if you want to make more money. So I'm making like $400,000 a month; about 30% of that comes from Instagram, so whatever 30% of 400 is, um, is what I make from Instagram, or like another way to say it is I make $2,500 per reel. So if I publish two reels a day, which I do, I make around $5,000 a day just with my Instagram reels. That's a good trade for me because my reels take—about 30 to 40 minutes—if it's a good—good reel takes 30 to 40 minutes. So let's just say for an hour to an hour and a half a day—we'll just say—we'll just say one hour a day—I'm getting 5K. There's no acquisition costs; there's very little delivery costs; it's essentially profit on what I make on Instagram. It's a good trade. Now there's two ways you're going to scale this, so let's just talk scaling really quick. How are you going to scale this business up to—first you're going to scale it up to daily sales, right? That's going to be your first main goal.

Is one sale every day? Because that stabilizes your income. One sale every day starts to stabilize your income. Your months—we want your months to stop looking like this, where there's like a lot of days where there's like a sale and it spikes. I'd much rather you—and you probably would be the same way—I want your sales to look like this: we're just very gradually trending upwards. To me, this represents stability, and that's really important if I'm making decisions like quitting a job or doing whatever.

So there's two ways you're going to stabilize your income and get it to that like daily sale, so it gets really, really steady. First way you're going to scale—first way you're going to scale—is organically. This one's really easy. Over time, you're going to go from posting, let's just say four reels a week—that's let's just say that's your starting one—to posting… this is my current organic schedule. Okay, I worked up to this over a period of like a year and a half, so please don't go and do this right away. But right now, I do two reels, one Carousel—spell that right—um, I would say one story on average, sometimes two if I—if it's good. That is my scaled Instagram content schedule every day.

So, as you can imagine, this starts to really stack. I don't know what that just did, um, but this starts to really stack because every—like if it's a week, right, you can imagine what I'm doing here. If it's a week, just duplicate this one more time. This is what it would look like over a period of a week. That's a lot of content, but I worked my way up to that. So eventually—just so you know, you're not going to do this right away—but that's your step one: is going to be scaling to something that looks like this. Okay, just scaling organically. This is pure profit. This is every reel I put out: profit.

Now, this is not Instagram related, but this is something else that I do that scales my products—unrelated to everything organically, unrelated to this number right here. This is just FYI. Basically, this is the second way you're going to scale: it's going to be through ads. And so that's another thing that we do. We spend like $100,000 a month on ads. Um, are we get a 3X return on invest? Well, no, we spend like—we spend yeah, like I would say like, yeah, like 70 to 80 to 90—again, it depends on the month—but like in the 70 to $100,000 range, and our return on ad spend is anywhere from 2X to 3X. Meaning if we spend $70,000 on ads, we'll make around $150,000 from that. Um, if we—essentially, we can turn $1 into $2.50 or up to $3. And so ads is going to be the big way you're going to scale.

Um, and organic, you can do ads. Um, people think you have to have—there's a lot of myth around ads. There's a lot of myth that, um, like you have to have a ton of money to run ads; it's very complicated; only like internet marketer bros can—girls can't do ads—that's another one. But can I tell you, I wish I had done ads so much sooner. I always say now, if you've got $3—because we run ads for $3 a day, right?—that's where you can start. And I wish I had pulled up little um, testimonials of students who specifically were talking about their ads, because we have so many of them where they get daily sales, daily profit from the simple $5 a day, $3 a day campaigns that they run. It's not hard—hard to run ads. I just want you to know that we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, but again, it's an ultimate game plan. I want you to kind of know what's the ultimate version of this, um, and that includes ads, and it's way easier than you think, and please don't wait as long as I did.

So eventually, if you're running—right now I'm doing about $400,000 a month, all said and done—and my income flow—probably again, this is rough because I haven't looked at the recent numbers—but if I were to take a rough estimate—not a perfect estimate, but a rough estimate—it would probably look pretty evenly split. This is again my best guess, but it would be all my money, all my 400,000 comes from these three sources. Okay, again, average—you can't hold me to this—this is just average rough estimates, so you know… ads—let's just say that gives me—let's just say like 140K a month. Um, Instagram—let's just say I think that feels a little high, but that's fine—140K a month. And then, um, emails—we make it—we actually—I think it's probably a little closer, like maybe Instagram pays me around 100K a month. That feels even a little high itself; I have to remember. But like—and then basically I think it was something like uh, it was like almost 200K. My numbers aren't adding up here, but it's basically—it's napkin math, but you kind of get it. It's SL—Instagram is slightly like—so maybe it would look like this, with all of this being email and Instagram being a smaller chunk of the pie.

However, let's just say it's $100,000 on average from Instagram a month—nothing to sneeze at—but I'm sharing this because that's all of this, and it's the smallest piece of my income; it's the smallest piece of the pie. And so when you have the Ultimate Game Plan, yes, it's leveraging everything that Instagram has to offer because it's the fastest of all three of those to see results. The amount of time it takes you—although ads are—I will say ads you can get results from pretty quickly as well—but not as quickly as Instagram. And you have the um, associated cost of running ads. Instagram is the fastest and least expensive because it's free, followed by ads. You can get results very quickly; you just need to invest some money in ads and have a higher risk management because some days you lose money and some days you, you know, have massive profits. It's—it's wobbly, especially when you're newer and you don't know you're doing, but it's still very doable. Email is the hardest; it is a son of a—it just is—but lovely return on investment once you master it. So all of them are really good. That is the ultimate game plan.

I really quickly just want to show you—I know I said I wasn't—but I—I want to show you really quick, um, the inside of the passive income course, just in case you're interested—kind of what I would show you. Let me pull this up here. So this is basically what it looks like; it's broken into an eight-hour section, so you can sit through it in a day, and it walks you through my funnel. Um, it teaches you how to sell the digital product, so like the practical text stuff, right? It's not—not very hard; it's—we do—I make it easy for you. But connecting to platforms together, for example, like when someone checks out, how do they know to get your digital product? That's what this video shows you how to do. Um, if someone wants to do a payment plan, for example, how do they know what to do? That's what that shows you. Um, and then—then we get into like hacking Instagram traffic. So there's a lot of very practical stuff. Um, I share some low-effort reels that you can just copy. I share what you do if you don't want to show your face. Um, I share lots of hacks on getting more people to your checkout pages, um, just all kinds of stuff, like how to go from 100 views—a lot of people get stuck at 100 views—um, on their reels, but there's—there's very little like practical things you can do, um, to get like thousands of views on your reels. And my reels go viral all the time, and so I kind of show you what I do. Um, so that—that's basically what the course looks like. You—again, it's totally optional. There's lots of stuff I have literally for free here on this YouTube channel, so if it's not in the budget, please just start there. Um, but if you do want me to hold your hand and show you what to do, um, my students from this course—you can read the reviews online—I mean, they get really, really good results. So, um, there you have it: your ultimate game plan. Thank you guys so much, and I will see you in the next one.