There is a fallacy in the World of Creators that you shouldn’t monetize too early.
Instead, you’re supposed to create a ton of value and earn an immeasurable amount of trust before trying to make money.
This makes no sense at all for one very good reason.
Some people are demanding help right now!
You can’t measure how much value you’ve provided someone. You can’t measure the level of trust they have in you.
Are you supposed to wait until you do 100 YouTube videos or write 1,000 tweets?
Imagine if the pipes burst in your home.
Water is getting everywhere. It’s an absolute mess.
There is a new plumber in town that you call.
He just set up shop last week so instead of coming over with tools he comes over with a pamphlet.
It’s an amazing guide on how to treat your pipes so they don’t burst. He tells you that he’ll come back in a week with some more valuable information.
This hasn’t stopped the water from flooding your home.
When it comes to your audience not everyone is at the same part of the journey.
Some need help with a solution right now and others need to know where to get started.
By waiting until you hit Trust Level 73 (this isn’t actually a thing) you miss out on those that need help today.
Marty the Marketer knows this so what does he do?
We’ll get to that in a second. First, I want to tell you a story about myself.
My first 5-figure month happened by accident.
I used to own a health site with my wife.
In the beginning, I had grand plans for it. I was going to be the new Richard Simmons.
If you don’t know who that is, don’t sweat it.
My ego believed that things would take off right away.
They didn’t.
We didn’t get 100 pageviews until 3 months after the site launched. However, by month 6 we were doing over 100,000 pageviews a month.
It was awesome.
But there was a big problem. We weren’t making any money!
We could’ve easily slapped some ads up on the site, but they didn’t fit my vision of what I wanted.
The site was meant to be a destination for people looking to improve their lives. Ads would only try to convince them to leave.
So I set out to create an info product around Keto. It took me about a month to create but when it was done I knew this was going to be the thing.
The thing that allowed my wife to no longer worry about the bills being paid. Where I could stop feeling like I made a big mistake.
I launched the offer and waited.
And waited some more.
6 hours later, nobody had bought it.
Over 1,000 people had been on the site and only a couple of people looked at the sales page.
Hm, maybe I needed to add more links to the sales page. Oh yeah, and make the banner at the top of the page bigger!
So that’s what I did and still got the same results.
I wasn’t sure what was going on, but eventually, a couple of sales happened.
I figured it was going to start the avalanche but that never happened.
Every day it was a trickle of sales. Don’t get me wrong, some money is better than no money, but you expect more when you’re doing over 100,000 pageviews a month and climbing.
We continued to write blog posts and grow the site’s traffic. I continued to work on the sales page thinking something had to be off with it.
I tried every copywriting formula in the book.
Nothing budged.
It seemed like if I wanted to get 10 more sales a day I needed to increase the traffic by 20,000 pageviews.
Take a second to think about that.
Does it make sense that I would need 15,000 people to come to my site to just get 10 of them to buy something?
That’s a 0.067% conversion rate. You can’t scale a business on those kinds of numbers.
One day, my wife and I went out to lunch (that’s the freedom part of being a Creator that we all chase). As we were talking my phone started to blow up. Since I was with my wife I didn’t look at the phone, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious as to what was going on.
Lucky for me she had to go to the restroom.
As soon as she left the table I got my phone out and saw 7 notifications for payments.
Was this a joke? We hadn’t sold 7 in a whole day and now it happened in a span of minutes?
This didn’t make sense.
Was it the fact I changed one of the words on the sales page?
The genius copywriter strikes again!
When my wife returned she saw me on the phone and gave me that look that she always gives so I hurriedly explained the situation.
Her face lit up and she began to ask me a million questions to which I had no answers.
We paid the bill and rushed home. I ran to the computer and hopped on the analytics to see what was happening.
Traffic to the site was increasing but it wasn’t enough to double our daily revenue so what was happening?
I looked to see what pages were being most visited and I was surprised to see a new blog post at the top.
Okay, so a lot of people were going to a new blog post but that didn’t explain why they were buying our Keto product. The blog post was about how my wife was able to find foods that our kids enjoyed with Keto.
Nothing crazy, but within the blog post there was a link. Not to the product page, but to a free guide on Keto.
The guide was another blog post so people could read it right away. It was the page with the second most volume that day.
From there people were going to our product page and buying.
It was a funnel!
But why was it working?
The answer didn’t come until I reached out to Emily.