I’m Dr. Taylor. Before I get into this, a few things about me, since before I read these types of articles I like to know who the heck I’m taking advice from. Especially in the age of a bunch of “online know it all’s” that found the information somewhere on the internet before they regurgitated it to me. This is the part where I’m probing I wont give you the ick like them.
Our substack stats are kind of unique. We’re generally in the Top 20 in Business on Substack. We hit Top 20 in the first 30 days and generally ride out our time there (unless we have a launch in which case our focus is elsewhere). In our first 10 to 20 days on this platform, before we had a single paid subscriber, we made our first $70,000 and that was one of the coolest moments of knowing SUBSTACK was the platform of our time. I have a lot of respect for the paid subscriber model, I think it’s genuinely great, and I also recognize it has its place. Sometimes when you are in a cash crunch, waiting for 100 people to subscribe to your $10/mo subscription model may or may not take care of your immediate need. I also believe you don’t have to wait to change your financial future or speak to the people ready to pay you now. You can take your destiny into your own hands and start making money now, this month, without waiting for a subscriber count to slowly climb toward something sustainable.
I’m not someone who learned “digital marketing” in a basement last year. I’ve been doing this for a decade and a half. I teach 1,500 to 3,000 people a month, for free, how to monetize online, without asking a single one of them for a dime. It’s a genuine passion. The success of my work has been featured in Forbes and Business Insider.
So if you want to make $10,000 to $20,000 a month in the next 30 days, using only Substack and what’s already in your head ... .Then your fastest path is a thing called “Digital Products”. You build them with your zone of genius..your category of one stuff then, here’s exactly how.
Before I show you how you must understand how this is different from generic “Substack Coach” speak. I’m a creative marketer. I’ve always been creative, usually in the form of a writer. I’m someone with my own point of view long before any of it made me a penny. Here’s the difference between me and a lot of people on this platform: I’m a monetized creative. I’m not waiting for someone to discover my brilliance through a slowly growing subscriber count, hoping something magical happens one day. It generally doesn’t, not without doing something radically different.I teach people who have 30 subscribers the same way I teach people who have 30,000 monetize on this platform. The number of subscribers has only a tiny correlation to the amount of money they make every month. Everything I teach works for all of them.
Before I came to Substack, the model I speak of was run on other platforms. We ran it on Instagram. We ran it on Facebook. We ran it on LinkedIn. We ran it on YouTube. Different platforms. Different audiences. The same 5 steps to make money while you sleep on all of them. Every. Single. Time:
Build your digital product for a specific niche audience, not “parents,” not “entrepreneurs,” but rather a specific type of person with a specific problem.
The product solves for one specific pain point. Not all their pain points. ONE.
Give them a framework to get to the result that feels achievable. This can’t feel long and arduous. It will usually land between 7 and 30 days.
The format must be delivered in a similar format. Here is our winning combo: 3 videos, 5 to 20 minutes each depending on the topic, plus 3 to 4 PDFs, frameworks, or checklists.
Provide your reader with their next logical step after completing the digital product. It should address what they should do next if they want more help thereafter.
That’s the whole framework. I’ve rebuilt it on 5 different platforms because it was never about the platform. It’s about nailing in the audience, the promise, and the next step.
The Substack Digital Product Experiment
When I built our Substack digital product it looked like this: $47 product, 3 videos ( 10 minutes-, 15 minutes), and 3 templates that were a framework to the teaching. It solved one problem, for one specific person. For example, “how to use Instagram without showing your face, without chasing virality, and book 5 qualified calls per week”.
We placed an invitation to join the digital product in four articles. Transparently we did not have an email sequence. There is a case for and against that. The model is simple. If someone reads the article and they like it they buy the digital product. If they don’t then we don’t see a stipe notification. That’s simple.
We ran the exact same structure for our latest digital product. This past Sunday, on a Substack Live we had 106 people tune into a 40 min session. The hat was active, but the engagement in terms of like was “blah”- 23 likes. The room was fine, but the smallest I;ve done in years as we I just decided to hit the live button. That is what makes this next part so fun.
Here’s what that tiny room did. 37 people bought a $97 base offer. Of those 37 people, 38%, about 14 people, bought the $27 upsell. Within 48 hours of that live ending, that room alone had generated $3,967.
I didn’t talk to a single one of those people on the phone. I didn’t beg anyone to buy. I didn’t DM them and try to become their friend first. They just bought it.
This is the part people skip past– the math. The math is important because if you can reverse engineer this to fit your situation you can make money too!
A fa digital product funnel like this usually has 4 parts. A base offer, somewhere between $47 and $97. An order bump at checkout, $27 to $47. A backend upsell, usually around $97. And a downsell, around $47, for anyone who says no to the upsell but still wants something.
Blend those together across real buyer behavior, some people take the bump, some take the upsell, some take neither, and your average order value usually lands somewhere around $75 to $85 per buyer. This is still from the base of your little $47 digital product.
Now play, let’s run the numbers. The basic numbers, not the best case scenario. If an article converts even a conservative 5 sales a day, that’s roughly $400 a day. Over 30 days, that’s north of $12,000, without a single dollar spent on ads, without a subscriber count in the tens of thousands, without anything beyond what you already know how to do.
Want a FREE substack audit to see how you can turn your Substack into cash? Click Here.
Most people assume creating a profitable digital product takes weeks–it does NOT! The idea of that just makes me sleepy.
The true breakdown is that it will take you 3 to 4 hours to map out the intellectual property, the blueprint, the framework behind the product. It will take another, 3 to 4 hours, to record the videos, build the templates, design it, and load it into a portal. That’s 6 hours, one time, done.
That means all you need is to devote 6 hours, one time, and you can produce a product that earns money every single day, even while you sleep, for as long as you write on Substack.
The BIGGEST Mistake Most People Make ( I did it too)
When I first started building digital products I made a mistake. I’ve come to realize almost every smart, generous, brilliant person makes this mistake initially as well. I’m good at what I do. You are good at what you do. People like us know so much and it becomes a big hindrance because we want to tell people everything. The whole picture. The end game. Every angle I’d ever learned. Everything I know about a topic personally and professionally.
It backfired, every time. People got overwhelmed. They didn’t finish the damn digital product even though it was short. It was often, in my opinion, the best material in the world on said topic, but it didn’t matter. If someone doesn’t finish your product they blame you. It will look like you didn’t deliver, no matter how good it was.
What people actually want isn’t everything you know. They want their one problem solved. Their Michael Jordan moment, the one shot that matters, made. Give them that and over deliver on the one specific thing. When you do this, two things will inevitably happen without you realizing it. 1.They come back for more. 2. A real number of them decide they’d rather not figure out the rest alone and ask for your help (paid).
The Case for Why Everyone on Substack Should Be Doing This
There is a case and it goes beyond the money. Building a digital product forces you to find your people on the Substack Platform. I’m not talking about your audience in general. I’m talking about the handful who are wildly, unreasonably excited about the exact thing you write about.
Those people don’t just become your best customers. They become your best subscribers. They become the community behind your publication. I have also found, in some cases, they genuinely come from my real life friends. You find out who they are by watching who buys, not just who reads. That’s worth building.
I used to think everyone on every platform needed to buy all my things. Why not? It was good stuff. As I grew in my journey I realized that they don’t. The people scrolling past your post do not desire the exact goal you solve for.
Not everybody needs “How to Potty Train Your Two Year Old in Two Weeks or Less, Without Pulling Your Hair Out.” Not everybody needs “How to Become the Best Mixologist at Your Summer Job Using These 4 Hacks.” Not everybody needs “How to Use AI to Save Your Relationship and Become the Therapist You Thought You Needed.” Not everybody needs “How to Turn Your Watercolor Paintings Into $100,000 Before the End of the Year.”
But the beautiful thing is……. someone does. The someone who does will go all in, completely, because it’s exactly what they have been looking for.
I taught between 1,500 and 3,000 people about Substack last month, for free. Every one of them started in the exact same place.
If you consider yourself a thought leader, a creative person, someone with experience: professional or lived, who has one specific thing you know how to break down into a framework, and you actually want to get paid for it.
Since you’re on Substack right now, no matter if you have 5 subscribers or 50,000, and you want passive income coming in daily, not just a slowly growing paid subscriber count you’re hoping adds up eventually. THIS IS FOR YOU!
My Substack training is nearly full right now, we’re about to move to a waitlist. In the meantime, I’m opening a small number of free audits, and there’s genuinely not a lot of these. They’re hands-on, they’re done by me directly, not a team member, so I can only take on a handful at a time.
If you’re actively writing on Substack and want to monetize outside of just paid subscriptions, apply below and grab a spot before they’re gone.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.