Transcription
As I was on my journey making $11 million selling digital products, I very much stayed in my own lane, which naturally led to me doing things very differently than how most people do an attempt to sell digital products. And it's only now, looking up and like $11 million later, I realized that it's because I did things differently that I've made such a disproportionate amount of money selling digital products.
Um, what I want to do in this video is walk you through the six unusual things. So, I have notes here. There's six unusual things that I did when selling digital products that most people don't do. And that's what made all the difference. And I just did it almost like accidentally. I didn't mean to do it. Um, but it just like, by doing that, it's the thing that actually made such a big difference selling digital products.
Um, I share proof of income claims everywhere. So, you can go to my website, read my tax returns from last year. I also, in many of my videos here on this channel, will just like share my dashboard. Um, so I also am putting links in the description. So, um, $11 million selling digital products, big income claim. I totally get that. I get the skepticism. So, I try to work with you guys to show you proof because it is going to reset your belief in what's possible. And that's a good thing. That's the goal.
So, okay, what did I do differently here? First thing that I did, number one, let me make my font a little smaller here. First thing that I did is I sold one product over and over again. Now, you're going to see me look down a lot. I'm reading my notes. I've got two big pages of notes for you here. Here's what I want you to know about selling one product. It's called the rule of the five ones. I have other videos on my channel that really dive into it, but I want to give it to you right now because this is what allowed me to run a seven-figure business selling digital products. You're selling one product, solving one hyperspecific problem. We'll talk more about that later. Problem. So, one product solving one problem. Oh my gosh, can I spell? Make $11 million, but I can't spell. One problem, um, to one target audience on one platform like Instagram, YouTube, or whatever for one year. When I first heard about this rule of the five ones, it was November of 2019. And by May of 2020, so less than a year later, I was running a seven-figure business. The rule of the five ones works. I have a video that dives even deeper into it. It works. Most people, and this is what I want to read pretty much verbatim because I like the way I wrote it down in my notes. Most people constantly try launching new products all the time, especially when the first one doesn't work, right? So, oh, my product flopped. My product launch flopped. Better launch a new product. I didn't do that. I kept getting better and better at marketing. Better and better at sales. Better and better at generating traffic, getting people to my checkout page. So, I sold the same exact product over and over again. And because I wasn't constantly changing my offer, I had tons of time to improve the things that actually make money. The first unusual thing I did is I sold one product. Just going to erase this over here. You guys, I highly recommend you go look at that other video of mine that talks about that, um, because I think it's going to really help you.
Second thing that I did is I charged way less. Charged way less than my competitors. Um, I've kind of always been in the like lower end of the market. So, my digital products are way better and way cheaper. That is so different than what most people tell you. They tell you to charge your worth, which is completely unhelpful advice and takes absolutely no account of supply and demand and basic business and economic principles. My digital products are way better, so they get way better results, and I charge significantly less than most people in my industry do. I would rather you charge $5 and get a hundred people to pay you for a total of $500, right? Like $5 each and 100 customers doing that instead of sweating and working really hard for one $50 sale. Plus, and this has been my experience as someone that sells literally thousands of products every single month. This is my experience. Those 100 customers buy from you over and over and over again. So, I would rather have a hundred customers paying me $5 because I'm going to remarket to them over and over and over and over again with cross sales and upsells and order bumps and all that other jazz and make a lot more profit ultimately long term from those 100 customers than getting, um, working hard for 10 people to pay me f like 10 people to each or yeah 10 people to each pay me $50 for a total of like $50 sales. Gosh, I could not have said that more confusing. Basically, I would rather get a 100 people to pay me $5 than 10 people to pay me 50 because I will make more money fundamentally having 100 customers. And that is what people miss. That is what people do not understand. The other thing that's different that people do not understand is that when no one's taking care of that demographic, the lower-end demographic, right? Because people always are trying to go to the mid to high range, no one serves the very that very bottom. But it's super easy to do super well in that space because no one's going after that market. So, if you can figure out how to do it profitably, which I can. Last year alone, I made $4 million selling digital products. I took home 50% of it. So, I made $4 million and took home and paid myself $2 million. So, it's a very profitable, um, demographic to take care of if you know how to do. Sorry, hit the break. If you know how to do it, which is what I this is which is where I come in because I do know how to do it. So, that's the second thing is I charge way less. That worked out really really well for me.
Third thing is I became obsessed. You guys have no idea. You think I'm normal. You think I am like, "Oh, I I look like an ice girl." No, I am a freaking nerd. I am obsessed. I ran experiments. I asked a million questions. I read hundreds of books. I tracked so much data. I wanted to understand what makes people buy. I wanted to know what makes them click yes. What makes them add something to the cart? What makes them, you know, click? What makes them impulse buy? What makes them buy six products all at once instead of just one product? So, I understand completely everything that I need to know about my industry. I am a master at selling digital products. I know there's so many different things I know. Whether it's optimal price points, whether it's running ads to them profitably, whether it's collecting emails to then remarket to them, whether it's taking a $24 order and turning it into a $400 order. I became obsessed to insane levels. And I'm sharing that because most people, it's different. Most people are not as obsessed about this as I am. Fortunately, I genuinely enjoy it because I don't think if you enjoyed this, you could get as obsessed as I am because I'm obsessed. Obsessed and I I love it. I genuinely love it. And so that helped. But the mastery is what created the $11 million. You can't just watch a few I got started by watching a few YouTube videos. I certainly continue to watch YouTube videos to learn, but you have to be willing to dive deep and invest time and resources into mastery levels. If you want that, again, if you want like a couple hundred bucks a month, couple thousand bucks a month, that's fine. But if you want life-changing amounts of money, there has to be some level of obsession. There has to be some level of mastery. Um, because it's just not going to happen if you don't do that.
Fourth thing is, okay, my products. This is a this is a big one. my products, um, looked and essentially like like were premium. They definitely looked premium and then they really were like even if they're just PDFs, even if they're just screen recordings, I always took the time to create quality mock-ups. I want the offer to feel very valuable. And the thing that people don't realize about digital products is that, um, the only way that you're going to see the products is with things like mockups. And so I put a lot of work into my products. I wrote down never say I'm only charging $5 so you can just launch a product. I make products that I could charge $5,000 for easily, but I sell it for $5. And $11 million later, I promise that you will not regret it. I used to sell, just so you know, like my background is in the high ticket coaching world. I used to sell $72,000 coaching packages over DMs. So, I wouldn't even take a sales call. I would just sell them over the DMs. So, I'm really good at selling just in general, um, high or low ticket, right? High ticket is like anything over $1,000. Low ticket is anything under $1,000. My secret, the thing that I have done differently is make products that I know I personally could sell for $5,000 or more and sell it for $5 because that's nuts, right? And so if that's nuts, then people get my and again, you see my testimonials all over the internet. People say, "Maria, you could be charging way more for these. I can't believe you only charge $24 for this course. I can't believe you let us have this. I can't I paid $10,000 for a coaching program and learn way less than I learn in your $200 course." That's on purpose. That's a really good business strategy for me. That's not an accident. I genuinely love helping people. I genuinely love that it gives access to my courses and my information, everything I've learned to more people. But that's a business strategy fundamentally. You create a product that is so good you could be charging 10 to 100 to a thousand times more for it and then you don't. And that is why I've made $11 million. And most people are stuck trying to hit, you know, even seven figures, even their first million dollars. It's because they're so obsessed with getting what they're worth and getting a what the product's worth, they are, you know, what is the word? Like you're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Something like that where you're like, you're trading your short-term sale for the long-term massive scalability of a business. So, my products, the way my products looked and felt and just were is really important in this, um, like what I did differently basically.
Okay, digital product 101. I kept perfecting small wins until they added up to 11 million. So, I'm just going to write small wins here. So, I didn't try to go viral overnight. I certainly didn't. I made $63 in my first year of business. So, we had a lot to learn. I didn't try to scale to six figures in a month. Although, I will say my first month that I launched, I was genuinely shocked that I didn't make $20,000 in my first month. Genuinely shocked. I couldn't believe it. I thought something was wrong because I just had really bad expectations from bad marketers. Um, I just focused on getting my first digital product sale. And then I try to get my first 10. And then I try to get my first 100. And every, this is key, guys. Every time something went slightly better or I had a slightly better conversion rate or I got slightly more money, which is something worked a little better, the nerd in me, the data girl in me analyzed the out of it. Why did that do better? What happened? What why is this working so much better? And then I would rinse and repeat that. And so I just kept stacking my small wins. I got to $1 million $1 at a time. So if you look at my like the breakdown of my actual sales, my average order value is right around $100, right? Meaning like the average amount of money someone gives me when they like they spend is around $100. I've just built that small win enough to turn that little $100 orders into a $10 million essentially $10 million business.
Okay, number six. This is a good one. This is important one. A lot of you guys need to hear this one. Okay, how do I turn this into like two words? Um, I'm going to turn it into three words. I only sold in-demand products. And I'm going to say it another way, the way I wrote it down because this is really important. I only built products people were already desperate to buy. So I didn't create random products that sounded fun to make. I built offers based on real demand, urgent pain points, urgent pain points, hyper-specific problems. Most of you guys are, again, I'm saying this with love, but most of you guys are launching products that sound interesting to you, that feel fun to make, that look cute, but then you wonder why you don't get sales. A lot of the products that I have made is not necessarily what I even would talk about, but they're products that you guys told me you needed. So, I'll give you an example. I recently launched a copywriting course on how to write like copy on your checkout page, how to write copy for your emails, how to write content in your captions, and it's all through the lens of making money. So, the name of the course is called like words into money. And I'm very good at writing copy. That is a strength of mine, but I'm not particularly interested in like teaching it. It's very hard to teach good copywriting well. It's a it's a hard one to do. And so, I wasn't super interested in making a course on that, but that's what you guys wanted. And so what I wrote down here is that most digital products flop because they solve problems no one is actually searching for. So really think about the digital products you've been trying to sell and really answer the question, are people urgently trying to solve this urgently? If the answer is no, that's a really big clue as to why you might not be getting the results you want. Now, if you want some digital product ideas that actually sell, watch this video next. It's going to show you exactly how to create digital products and give you a whole bunch of ideas on digital products that actually sell. I'll see you there.