6 Things That Got Me to Consistent 10K Sales Months for Digital Products
Reaching the milestone of your first 10k sales month can seem difficult at best. Consistently reaching 10k months can feel almost impossible. The good news is that once you hit that first big milestone, the next one takes a quarter of the time. It’s a weird, exponential, hockey stick-shaped growth pattern but that’s how it works, almost every single time.
I’m sharing 6 things that helped me get to consistent 10k sales months in my business in the hopes that it can help you get there as well. Some of these are tactical, some are higher level and some are just common sense.
So what are the 6 things I did on the regular to help my trajectory go from 2k sales in a month to 10k in sales month in and month out?
#1. Mindset
When I first heard about mindset work, I thought it was all a bunch of phooey. Mindset work was some kind of useless thing that “other people needed” because I thought all that mattered was “taking action”. Come to find out, actively working on my mindset was the biggest factor in making 10k sales months (and more!) my new normal.
Mindset work was the missing piece that exploded my business to 10k in sales every month and beyond!
Mindset blocks come in all shapes and sizes and although it isn’t always about money, it had a lot to do with how I was holding myself back from reaching the next level. Amanda Frances is my go-to girl for all things mindset and by working through her Money Mindset Mastery Course, I was able to overcome a lot of my self-sabotaging behaviors and beliefs that were holding me back.
You can score a free Money Mindset bundle from Amanda Frances right here. I highly recommend digging into her free content while she still has it available.
I had a ton of guilt around charging money for my digital products.
There were issues around people thinking I was too big for my britches. I was afraid I would lose touch with who I am and where I came from. I know it doesn’t make sense logically (mindset blocks rarely do). I watched other entrepreneurs go from being scrappy to reaching these amazing income milestones – 10k in sales, 20k in sales, 100k in sales in a month – only to see them completely lose touch with who they were. They were almost unrecognizable.
For some reason, I was tying myself to them, even though those people are nothing like me. I was afraid of becoming “that person”. And that fear was holding me back from the 10k sales months I was aiming for. I had to work on being ok with success and being seen as an industry leader. I needed to realize that I’m the type of person who doesn’t forget what it’s like in the beginning.
Another mindset trap I had to escape was the employee mindset.
Maybe it’s because I started out as a copywriter, getting paid to write words that sell. Being a service provider means that you’re doing all the work. It was my job to get people to mash buttons and to enter their credit card details. As a natural talker, it takes me twice as long to write good copy as it does for someone who is a natural writer. I would spend hours poring over research, writing hooks and calls to actions, capturing moments – only to charge 2k for a sales page.
Then I found I could teach other people to write these sales pages for themselves. That was a turning point in my business but also a mindset block to overcome. A one-hour webinar could sell a $200 course on how to DIY a sales page and then I could scale it up as much as I wanted. It’s a totally different mind space. Instead of doing all the work myself, I was able to leverage what I knew, help other people, and make more money.
And it was easier. Which brings me to my next mindset hurdle.
I had to learn to be okay with it being easy.
Coaching comes easy for me. I love to talk & that’s how I communicate best. When I’m coaching, I get to talk with my favorite people, show them tricks of the trade, hold them accountable, celebrate their wins… and it’s easy and fun for me to do it.
There was almost a guilt there about how much easier it was for me. I didn’t have to force myself to work harder than I needed to like I did when I was writing copy. The sales came in naturally without me having to shove my new programs down people’s throats. It was easy. It was fun. And that felt scary as hell.
Just like you can’t do one sit-up and have 6-pack abs forever, mindset work is something you’ve got to work on all the time. I’m constantly working on myself. Just like anyone else, I have good days and bad days and even on the bad days, I make sure to focus on moving the needle just a bit instead of giving up and throwing in the towel for the day. Without mindset work, $10k sales would have never happened in my business, at least not consistently.
#2. Higher Prices Means More Profits
The second secret to my consistent 10k+ sales a month income is charging higher prices and having multiple tiers of offers to sell to my audience.
I know that there are some people who are going to make a ridiculous amount of money with a $7 or $27 product but there’s one thing they have to make that happen. A giant audience.
When you don’t have an email list of 100,000 people, making 10k in sales a month on a $27 product is going to be hard.
The reason I teach people in Love Your List to start out with a lower ticket item is that most people are nervous when it comes to sales. Starting with a lower ticket offer helps them dip their toes in the water before diving into the deep end of high-ticket offers.
If I were to teach people to start off with a $200 course or a $100 live workshop, it would be too much of a mindset hurdle. That’s why we start with something small. We go into the course knowing that we are working on mindset first. Until you get comfortable saying “I love to accept money. I am worth accepting money for my offers”, at a lower ticket price, the high ticket sales aren’t going to come. I know this because I faced the same challenge.
When I first started working on my money mindset, I had a ton of smaller offers like Trello Magic and Email Marketing Fairy. At only $36, I would have to sell 22 copies of the Email Marketing Fairy to make the same amount of money I can make from one sale of Love Your List.
Truth be told, a lot of people who buy Email Marketing Fairy also end up enrolling in Love Your List.
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There’s definitely a strategy to having lower ticket items that lead to higher ticket products.
While the “value ladder” strategy that Russel Brunson teaches works, it was NOT what I was doing. I didn’t have anything over $100 to offer my people and that was keeping me stuck at $2-3k months. By having a higher-tier product that your people can purchase from you, you’re automatically going to increase your chances of hitting those consistent five-figure months in your own business.
The good news is that if you’re already making a couple of thousand dollars a month in your business and you have your Easy Yes Offer in place, you can always create a new Easy Yes Offer or a mid-tier or higher priced product to couple in with your Easy Yes Offers to multiply your income to 10k sales months and beyond!
What I do for people who buy the Email Marketing Fairy is give them a coupon code for the sales price of the Email Marketing Fairy if they decide they want to go ahead and upgrade to Love Your List. That way, it’s like they are getting their money back and I’m rewarding the action takers int he process.
#3. Focus on Bigger, Faster, and Flashier Audience Growth Opportunities
Just like raising your prices or having higher ticket products available, stepping up with audience growth game is a mindset thing. When I first started thinking about raising my visibility and putting myself out there in a bigger way, I immediately fell back to “who am I to be talking about this?” and started making things wayyyyy harder than they had to be.
At one point my list was teeny tiny and despite that, I was doing pretty good financially. Anyone I revealed my tiny list size to was amazed that I was creating that kind of income with a minuscule list. Somehow, that became a point of pride for me until I realized I was doing a disservice to the people who really need me. I was letting my pride get in the way of getting in front of more people.
How messed up is that logic? I was being selfish and I wasn’t helping a lot of people which is what I really wanted to do.
Sometimes our mindset issues sound absolutely ridiculous when you say them out loud or write them down. It makes no sense. That’s why mindset work is so important.
Overcoming those mindset blocks unlocked a HUGE amount of people I’ve been able to get my message out to.
Once I unpacked that nonsense, I started getting involved in online summits. I began hosting my own summit, the Back to Business Bundle Giveaway. I made sure to reach my audience through regular podcasts and blog posts. I realized that if I really was serious about helping more people, I had to get in front of more of them. It’s not rocket science. It was my mindset that was holding me back.
So if you’re not getting a ton of blog traffic and you’re wasting time creating 10 Pinterest pins and then spending all your brainpower trying to map them out and strategize so you don’t trigger a spam filter, try something different. Spend your time creating a few strategic pins and then spend the rest of that time actively networking with people. Reach out to people who are organizing a summit. Consider hosting your OWN summit. Host a give-away.
Do something bigger. Bigger than blog posts or pins or Instagram posts.
Do something that will actually multiply your efforts and get eyeballs on your offers.
I always notice a big influx in sales when I’m featured in someone else’s summit. Any time I’m on someone else’s podcast – boom… sales pour in.
There’s an interesting adage in podcasting that says “listeners don’t make good subscribers but they make good buyers”. I don’t know why but it’s true. Maybe because it’s more intimate. It’s a smaller medium. You’re literally right in their earholes. And they buy.
Would I make 10k in sales every month without my podcast? Maybe. But I know it’s a whole lot easier to consistently reach five figures a month with it.
If you have a podcast, you need to be on other people’s podcasts. If you don’t have a podcast, you need to be on other people’s podcasts. Collaborate with people in compatible niches. You know I love to collaborate and that’s where I’ve been focusing my time.
And speaking of time…
#4: Get Smart With Your Time
Even on days when you can’t seem to focus, you can direct what energy you have into being productive and moving your business closer to 10k sales months. It’s a marathon, not a sprint so every focused step you take gets you closer to the finish line.
Time-management issues can sometimes lead right back to mindset.
Shocker, I know. Sometimes, we find ourselves being “busy” and not being “productive”. We may nit-pick brand colors or font choices to death when what we really need to spend our time on is getting your offers out there and growing your list.
I’ve found myself spending an hour or more recording a 20-minute podcast episode. I kept deleting and starting over, getting off track, and interrupting myself. It just doesn’t make sense. That’s not a smart use of my time.
For me, it’s not really what I spend my time on, it’s how long it’s taking me to get things done. Giving myself clear deadlines and time windows has helped cut down on time wasted.
Set a timer for the amount of time you are going to spend on each task.
We have this uncanny ability to take something and either stretch it out long enough to fill the time or manage to fit it in before the deadline. Things will expand to the amount of time you give it. So if you allot 20 minutes to a project or 2 hours to a project (within reason of course), that’s how long it will take you.
Be realistic with your deadlines but don’t create so much wiggle room that you find yourself procrastinating.
Getting serious about where I spend my time has been a huge factor in creating 10k in sales every month. By making sure I’m focused on the right activities, I’m naturally going to increase my bottom line.
Guarding your time should always be a priority.
I’m still very hands-on in my business and just like any business, there’s a million different things going on – and going wrong – at any given time. Just recently, a huge SEO error reared its head on my website. My natural instinct is to dive in and fix it myself. By stepping back and prioritizing tasks, I’m able to see that it doesn’t make sense for me to fix the issue when I can have someone on my team do it. I don’t have to do everything myself. That way I can spend more time creating content, recording podcasts and coaching my students while someone else takes care of it.
And that brings us to…
#5. Getting Help
Hiring my team has been critical to growing my business to 10k in sales, month in and month out. I don’t have a huge team and I’m still super hands-on but getting help has not only taken some of the day-to-day tasks off my plate, it’s also made me step up because I’m not responsible for paying my people every month.
I’ve had the same effect when I’ve invested in coaching. By spending money on a coaching program, I always – without fail – my income has jumped. Without fail, not only do I increase my income to pay for my coaching program, it doubles or triples what I’ve invested.
The same increase in income happens when I invest in growing my team.
What sparked Trello Magic was realizing that I was using Trello as a surrogate virtual assistant.
I was leaning on my Trello boards like they were a person. That’s a big reason why I created a course around it. It really is that amazing, however, doing it all myself was really holding me back.
But then fears would pop up.
Mindset-wise, I was worried that I couldn’t pay someone to help me or they wouldn’t be good enough. I was afraid they wouldn’t do it “right”. I was letting perfectionism get in the way, which is another mindset trap. I was letting feels get in the way of making more profit.
Yea, I kissed a few frogs on the way to finding my team and there are always things that we could do better team-wise – both individually and as a whole – but in the big picture, getting help with some of the day-to-day tasks freed my time and my energy up to focus on the big money-making activities in my business.
And again, hiring my people put it into perspective for me. I need to pay these people so I need to do the right things to push the needle forward.
Last but not least to getting to 10k sales months and beyond …
#6. Loving Up My Audience
All the mindset hacks, email marketing strategies and Trello boards in the world won’t help if you don’t treat your audience right.
I love being there for you guys. I love making podcasts for my Inbox Besties. I love sending emails to my listies. Interacting with people on Instagram, getting direct messages and comments, it makes my business so much fun.
I spend time upgrading older content to keep it current. Sometimes with two or three versions to make sure it’s still relevant.
When you really care about your audience from the heart, it makes all the difference in the world.
Your email list is more than just a number. There are real people on the other end of that send button. And when you love them up, they can feel it.
When someone buys something from you, whether it’s a $7 e-book or a $2k course, make sure you have emails in place to make the buying process easier. Set up your post-sale emails with your download links. Let them know what to expect and how they can get the most out of what they spent their hard-earned money on.
Loving your audience is more than just sending messages or responding to comments. It’s also stepping up and taking an honest look at where you’re missing the mark.
We recently had someone who put in the wrong email when she signed up for something. We’ve all been there and it’s not a big deal at all to fix. What WAS a big deal was that it took her a few days and two emails before we got back to her. To me, that’s unacceptable. So I know I need to take a closer look at the systems we have in place, figure out where the breakdown was, and then fix it.
Take an honest look at your communications with your people. What can you do to improve it? What systems can you put in place to make sure they feel taken care of?
So to recap…
Mindset is always going to be the number one factor to your business growing to 10k sales months and beyond.
You obviously want to have offers that people want to buy and stellar copy – that’s a given. But it was getting my mindset right,
The things we did to get to 10k sales months aren’t hard to do for your own business. It’s not an impossible mountain to climb. If a nerdy chick who plays the ukelele can create a 6-figure business without selling out or turning into a brohim, you can too.
Getting my mindset right was by far the biggest turning point in my business growth. That naturally progressed to raising my prices, including mid-tier and higher-tier offers that people could buy from me. I was able to focus on bigger and faster opportunities to reach more people instead of spending so much time on busywork. It was being smarter with my time, getting help. It was loving my audience and genuinely caring about their experience and rooting for their success.
Obviously, you want to have offers that people want and you want to have stellar copy – those are a given. But once you have those in place, it’s time to stretch yourself, upgrade your goals, and elevate your income.
Super happy to see mindset as #1. It’s easy to dismiss because we often don’t realize the varied mental hurdles that quietly hold us back. As you said, it’s a constant work in progress.
Do you have any go-to books you use for working on your mindset? I find I have to tackle it from different angles, so some of my favorites include The Happiness Advantage, A Guide to the Good Life, and Quiet.