If I were to tell you that fixing this one thing could be the difference between
a $3,000 month and a $10,000 month. Would you try it? Well,
this small business did.
And that big jump that you see on the graph is the result a five-figure
month. The first time I had a $10,000 month, I was working remotely in Bali.
I was working from the treetops of Ubud and I was about to become a six-figure
business. For the first time. Things looked pretty dreamy, but they weren't.
Because at that same time I was on the brink of burnout.
Things looked great from the outside, but inside my business,
I was struggling to find ways to make more money.
And I didn't have a clear plan or path on how to get there.
I tried a ton of things to reach my first $10,000 month.
I was almost desperate to hit that marker because I thought it was a huge marker
of success. Like all of a sudden, I would be a legit business owner.
So on my quest to reach my first $10,000 month, I tried a lot.
And most of the things I tried failed in this video,
I'm gonna walk you through what actually worked for me,
and I'm gonna prove to you that these results are repeatable.
They have worked for my students as well.
And if you are on your way to your first $10,000 month,
they can work for you too.
So before my first $10,000 month for a little context, here's what I was doing.
I had been offering services to clients for a couple of years and that had
transformed into an agency.
But the whole reason I did this was to start a lifestyle business.
All I wanted to do was travel and work online. And that's exactly what I did,
but my income plateaued because I was one person I couldn't take on more
clients. So without a clear plan in place,
I had to try a lot of different things to figure out what was gonna help me
scale, AKA, adding more money to the business without taking more of my time,
any guesses as to what that might be. Here's what I did. First.
I created a personal brand. At that time.
I knew that I had taken my agency brand as far as I could or even wanted to.
It had served me well,
but I thought there was more potential in me showing up as a person and coming
out of hiding from behind my agency brand.
So at that time I also realized that there were business coaches that could help
me do this people who had been there and done this already.
Eventually I hired a business coach and that was the start of the Elise Darma
brand. From that point on,
I focused on putting myself as a person out there and growing things like my
email list. That's something I've never focused on, but the question is,
did creating a personal brand result in my first 10K month? Nope.
After launching my personal brand,
the next thing I did was grow my online following.
And because of my experience as an Instagram marketer,
I decided to turn the skills on myself and put myself out there and treat
myself as the brand for the very first time.
So I took all of my travel photos and stories and I started sharing it.
And I started collecting a following of people who were interested in my
lifestyle as a digital nomad. So you're probably wondering,
did growing a following online result in my first $10,000 month?
Nope.
It wasn't that after creating my personal brand and getting fresh followers,
the next thing I did was create a digital course. Yes,
I jumped into the online course space because I saw so many people talking about
big, big numbers. And I was curious, I wanted in, so with the help of my coach,
I put together the bones of an online course. I also asked my following.
I also asked my audience, what are you most interested in from me?
And the answer was a hundred percent Instagram growth.
They wanted to know how to grow on Instagram. So to launch this online course,
I put together the concept of it.
I put together a sales page and I hosted a free five-day challenge.
This was the first time I had done any of this,
but I hosted this free five-day challenge.
And every day I showed up and taught my audience who was part of the challenge.
One more thing about Instagram growth. Now,
growing on Instagram for business at this time was a very new concept.
So I was focusing on basic things like your profile and what kind of content to
post, but people loved it. And on day four of the challenge,
I was streaming live on Facebook. And even with a shaky voice,
I shared the idea of my online course with the people who were watching,
I call it Instagram Boss. And because it was brand new,
I offered it at the lowest price.
It was ever going to be $197 bucks. Over the course of the weekend,
people joined the course and I was like mind-blown because
the course didn't even exist yet.
I was just selling the idea of it and people were willing to become founding
members. It was wild,
by the time I closed cart on my first online course,
we had 46 students join and become founding members of Instagram boss. Now,
if you do the math 46 people, times 197,
isn't $10,000 spoiler alert.
So the month that I launched my first online course,
it got me real close to a $10,000 month.
But this wasn't the month that it happened for me.
With my digital course in hand.
I bet you're guessing that the next month after I created it is when I hit my
first 10 K month? No, that's not what happened.
I went into full creation mode after I sold my course and I spent the next six
weeks delivering the course content.
And after those six weeks I was hooped,
I was tired and I didn't really know how to continue to sell this project.
So it sat on my digital course shelf and I was hoping people would buy it. I,
I was hoping they would come across the sales page and be like, this is perfect.
I need this. But they didn't. And course,
sales trickled in really slowly over the next six months. Yes.
It took me six months to figure out how to sell this course and
hit my first $10,000 month in cash. So what did I do?
Well, this brings me back to Bali. I was working remotely and it was November.
And in November I realized that a big holiday was around the corner.
And this big holiday meant that people would be doing this (tchoo tchoo).
It was Black Friday, Black Friday was around the corner.
And I realized I had an asset. I had my digital course that I could sell.
So I got strategic.
I put together a promotion that got my products out there in front of my
audience without off my prior customers. Now,
at this point I had two courses and in order to offer the best price
possible,
what I did was removed the support portion from both of the courses.
So both of my courses came with Facebook groups that allowed access to me so
that I could support my students along the way in order to offer a snazzy Black
Friday deal.
What I did was take away the Facebook groups and that allowed me to minimize the
price of these courses. They were never as low as when I started them.
The founding members still got the best price,
but I was able to put together a pretty sweet deal so that someone could enroll
in Instagram boss, get all the teachings for about 250 bucks.
The reason why this worked really well for me and why my audience loved it is
because in the six months of when I had started these courses,
my audience had continued to grow.
So this promotion was a reason to get my products and offers out there in front
of them in a fun celebratory way. Yes,
inboxes were super busy and full at that time around Black Friday as they always
are. But I found a way to have fun with it.
I told stories about my experience in Bali when the volcano was erupting
and I likened that to this amazing sale.
So as much as you can have fun with your promotion and make it really clear for
your reader, what the value is for them,
you're going to see sales back to your business by running something like a fun
flash sale or promotion.
I have to say that this November sale was a year into my quest of reaching
my first $10,000 month. This took me a year to figure out,
but in that month,
by running that promotion and making my courses look really jazzy,
new and fresh and repackaging the offers,
my business generated $13,428 and
92 cents USD to be exact as a Canadian solopreneur,
that was a sweet month.
Now the cool thing is you can take what I've shared in this video and implement
it for yourself in your own business. And it probably won't take you a year.
In fact, I shared this exact same process with a student of mine, Adrienne,
who runs a barre studio. And here's what Adrienne did. First.
She moved her entire brand online for many years she had run barre classes
in a brick and mortar studio, but when that all changed for her,
she moved the entire business online and she chose one platform for her online
growth Instagram. That brings me to the second step of what Adrienne did next.
And that was grow her following on Instagram.
She gave her profile a beautiful makeover,
and she showed up as a barre instructor.
Someone you'd want to either take a class from or learn barre from,
and she did this consistently for months and slowly but steadily her following
on Instagram group third,
she offered online barre classes and she sold them to her Instagram followers.
Often. Now, Adrienne is someone I'd call a master relationship cultivator.
She didn't just create content on Instagram and then let Instagram's algorithm
do its thing she connected with as many of her followers as she could.
There were a lot of DMS, a lot of conversations.
And as those conversations progressed,
it became so natural for Adrienne to invite that person on the other
side of the profile to one of her classes. And more times than not, they said,
yes,
the next step Adrienne took was to launch her own course for barre instructors
so that she could teach other people how to become barre instructors.
But the thing that tipped her over the edge,
the thing that brought her first 10K month was creating a Black
Friday promotion for her course.
She put together a very alluring promotion for her course,
and because of all the relationships she had cultivated over the months that
weekend of her Black Friday promotion resulted in over
$45,000 in sales that weekend also marked when Adrienne
became a six figure business for the first time,
because her business had made at least a hundred thousand dollars in revenue up
until that point for the entire year,
now that you know what I've done and what Adrienne did to reach our first 10K
months, go ahead and watch this next video right here,
where I walk you through a very key step in this entire process,
which is launching your own digital product online,
click this video to keep the learning going.
And you'll be on your way to your first 10K month in no time flat.