$100,000 Per Month One-Person Business (how I did this)

Hi there, this is Shatee and today I want to show you how I built a $100,000 a month one person business in 3.5 years. My hope with making this video is that more people understand and are able to figure out whether or not this could be a viable path for them. This is information I did not have access to five years ago. I had no idea that it was possible to actually make a living online, let alone make a really good living. So my hope is that through this video you'll also be able to understand how I was able to do this and how you can do the same. Now the first step that you need to take is to come up with your idea and when we talk about coming up with your idea, you want to think about what is the industry or the category that I am going to focus on and then think of what are the types of things you can sell in that industry. So for me personally, I knew that I wanted to build a freedom-based business where I was not stuck on the clock and I wasn't trading my time for money, which I know sounds like such a cliche because it's been beaten to death on the internet, but this is really something that I was clear on from day one. I knew that I was not going to have a service-based business model where I could only scale with a large team and I would have to trade my hours for money. This is why I decided to come up with the idea of creating and selling digital products. Now digital products simply put art products that can be consumed, created, and delivered online. This means that I do not have to incur shipping costs. I do not need a warehouse and I do not need to get raw material over and over again in order to make a sale. So once I have created this product, I can sell it over and over again. So once I had this idea and I knew that I wanted it to be a product-based business model, at this stage I picked a niche that I knew was going to be profitable, which was digital marketing. Now even though this is a very, very competitive niche, I knew that I had something to share and I wanted to create products specifically in this niche. So I started out with products which were in the social media marketing niche and then blogging and then also digital marketing in general. I created and launched products anywhere from $5 to $200, which was my comfort spot and I knew that this was something I could sell without any complicated funnels or any complicated systems that we often see online and can be very, very overwhelming for a beginner. The second step, once I had clarity on what types of products I was going to create was to build my audience. Now there are so many different ways of going about building an online business and you can absolutely go to the paid ads route where you just blow up a lot of money on ads on testing, which we see a lot of other people do in, for example, affiliate marketing or drop shipping, where they put a lot of money into ads and then they continuously test products and see what works. For me, that wasn't an option because when I was starting out, I had a really, really small budget. So for me, I wanted to build my own audience organically and for free, which obviously was a very, very time consuming process. So when it comes to building your audience, I always recommend doing this before you launch your products because you need to have clarity on what it is that your audience even wants from you. And this is something you can only know once you start to build your audience online. Now how do you go about building your audience online? We are so privileged that we live in a time that we can build our audience through social media and it is free for everyone to build. The entry barrier to have such a business has never been lower. Does that mean that it is easy or it's going to be quick? No, nothing good in life comes easy or quick. You do need to figure out your steps and your journey, which is going to be unique for everyone in order to build a business to a point where it's really profitable and making you happy. So in this case, when I launched my YouTube channel, which was about three and a half years ago, I did this in Jan of 2020 with the sole aim that I am going to learn what it takes to build my audience. I'm going to learn how to create videos and to be honest, I had never ever made like a video like this before where I sit down and talk to the camera. So obviously if you scroll all the way back to my YouTube channel and you see the first few videos, I don't have the best eye contact, I am just rambling off. Sometimes I talk too fast, sometimes I just don't make sense, but that is just normal in figuring out how you can be of value to your audience. And the reason why this stage I feel is so so important is because not only are you learning, you know, what your audience needs and your understanding your segment or your industry, but you're also getting better at building a connection and building your community online. And that is something which is priceless. So being able to sit down and talk to in front of a camera is obviously a skill that needs to be worked at. And now we will are able to do this on platforms like Instagram or TikTok where you can just use your phone wherever you are in the world and start filming a video and reach out to your audience. So there really is no excuse for us not to be leveraging these free platforms to grow our audiences and to grow our community. The reason why we need to build an audience, especially if we don't have the budget to pay for ads in the beginning, is so that you're able to sell something to your audience which is actually interested in your product and also get a lot of feedback in order to improve your products and create even better products in your business. So when it comes to which platforms I was using, I started with using YouTube primarily to create video content and then once I got comfortable with YouTube, I also launched into other platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which is predominantly where I create content right now. But as you can see, I have content going in all different directions. I also am very, very active on Pinterest, which happens to be one of my favorite platforms as well. But the community aspect of Pinterest is somewhat missing because not a lot of people are able to DM you or send a comment to you. So it's really hard to build a community there, but you can still get a lot of eyeballs on your business on Pinterest and drive that traffic back to your store or your shop if you know how to do it well. If you're interested in doing that, I have tons of video on my YouTube channel, so you can just head to the playlist and you can watch the Pinterest tips playlist to get an idea of how to build your audience and traffic from Pinterest. Now when I talk about building your audience, one thing that I really, really want to emphasize on is being consistent. I think a lot of us sort of give a short to social media, we show online for one month and we have all the speed and we will show up once every day and talk on stories, share Instagram reels and all of that and then we disappear for three months. The problem with doing that is that if you can't be reliable and consistent in front of your audience, why would they want to purchase from you? Now this could work in other industries where an online audience is not that important, but when it comes to selling digital products, your medium is a digital space, right? And hopefully you're building a brand for yourself, so you want to be showing up as a brand that is consistent in their presence, that is consistent in their marketing and you can't do this if you don't show up to create content every single day. So if you're overwhelmed by all of the platforms out there, which I was to, what I recommend is to pick one platform, learn how that platform works, get really, really good at creating content on that platform and then move on to the next. This is exactly what I did. I started with YouTube, that was my focus for one year and I felt like I knew what I was doing and then I kept adding a single platform every single year and today we have a community of over 150,000 people through YouTube, social media, like Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, as well as our email list, which is another great asset to build. So the next step, once we know which audience we are going to target as well as which platform we are going to show up on, is going to be creating your product. Now again, we live in a time where it has never, ever been easier to create and sell digital products online. One of my favorite tools that I use that you're probably already familiar with is Canva. Now Canva is a graphic design tool that is free for you to get started with and you can create things like social media templates, marketing presentations, e-books, workbooks, guides, all of which are digital products. You can create them for free on Canva. Now this is a tool that people 20 years back did not have access to and this is also why it has never been easier for you to just go on Canva, hit a template that you know want to create, edit that template, add the information or the content that you want to create and go forward with it. When it comes to creating your product, there are usually two types of products that you can create and sell as digital products. One is going to be an information-based product so it could be something like an e-book, a guide, a workshop, or an online course. All of these things are what I do in my business predominantly but I also create the second type of digital product which is going to be a tool. So this could be for example a template that you create for interior designers to pitch to their clients, right? This could be like a pitch template or a portfolio template that you create for fellow bloggers or fellow influencers. That is not an information-based product that is more of a tool that helps people achieve a certain outcome. So when you are in the creating your product phase, you also want to think about what format do I want to show up in and what is something that I could easily do. So always pick a product category whether it is an information product or a template based product based on your skill set and what you feel is going to be easiest for you to create. I think that you should create something that you can do in a week or two jobs because the longer that you drag your feet out, the more likely that you're never going to launch that product and you're never going to take off with your business. So create something that you can do quickly that you have some sort of information or knowledge about and go ahead and you know follow the next steps that I'm going to share because that is going to do you a world of good instead of just dragging your feet and figuring out what it is that you should create. Because what's important here is that you create something that adds value and actually offers a solution instead of the type of format that you create that in. Okay so next step once you have created your product is to set up the tech and the automation. So where is your product going to be hosted? How is it going to get delivered to your customer? How are they going to receive that file? All of these things are what you're going to figure out at this stage. And like I said because we have such amazing tools and platforms that are available you can absolutely use any of the tools that I'm going to recommend to get started. Now one of my favorite tools to get started is SAP if you you know only want to build your brand on social media and that is your main audience is going to be Stan which is sort of a link in bio tool combined with a shop so you can create it as a link in bio which shows up as a stan store and you can also add products and services including things like coaching calls and audits etc in just one place it's very very easy to set up and get started with and it has the same functionality as what you know you would expect from a link in bio tool but on the back end is also a store which can deliver your products to your customers as soon as they make a purchase if you don't have the bandwidth to pay that fees then I recommend a platform called Gumroad which is free to get started with and only charges a transaction fee each time you sell however Gumroad doesn't really work like a link in bio but you can use Canva to create a free website link in bio and then add your Gumroad links to sell on social media as well other places that you can sell your digital products include things like Shopify which is great if you plan to sell more than one product so if you're going to have a multi-product store and you want all of the automations customizations possible and you want to have the most powerful e-commerce platform then Shopify is the best bet to do that now if you're someone who is in the information digital product space like me and you want to be selling workshops courses or even e-books and guides you can also use a platform called Teachable which I have been using on my back end and that I absolutely love because it is so user friendly a lot of my students and customers are already aware of how the platform works so I don't have to go in and you know troubleshoot a lot so if you're comfortable and you are someone who's going to create a lot of information-based products you can look at Teachable as well however one thing to keep in mind is that as you grow Teachable can get you know pricey so keep in mind that you evaluate all of the different price options of you know all these different recommendations and see what suits your needs and your budget the most once you have set up your product and you have set up a sales page which is going to be a page where people can read what your product is about they can see images of your product and they can put in their credit card information or their PayPal information and buy that you know information then the next step really is to launch your product launching your product simply means that it is available for sale and now people can go to your store page wherever that is hosted and they can put in their purchase information and buy that product from your store now one thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to running an online business specifically a product-based business it is all a numbers game what do I mean by that that means that the more eyeballs slash visitors you have on your product page the more sales you're going to make the industry standard rate for conversions in e-commerce specifically digital e-commerce tends to be between 1 to 3% and if you're just starting out it's more likely that you will be on the lower end so your product is probably going to convert at 1% if you have done all of the other steps well and what this really means is that if you have 100 people clicking on your sales page link one out of those 100 people is going to buy your product so at this stage your focus really is in figuring out how can you drive the eyeballs and the traffic which is just visitors that you need to make more sales because when you're launching and you're launching to a size of 10 you obviously are not going to make as many sales compared to when you're launching with you know an audience size of 1000 and this is why I talked you know in step two to create your audience to nurture your audience to create consistent content because when you do that you build a lot of trust and equity with your brand on social media and that is how you're able to have a great launch when you actually decide to sell a product because you have spent the time in giving a lot of value and information to your audience and building that community who now trusts you and is willing to pay for your products now one thing to keep in mind is that if you are brand new to this space and you have just learned about this model from this video or from some other video on the internet and you're launching your first product just make sure to remind yourself that it is something that is going to take a while to master and finish my first launch I only made two sales and that is when I had been blogging for three years prior and did have some sort of industry knowledge before I launched my product but even with that knowledge I could only make two sales because my audience size was really low and I hadn't spent a lot of time in building and nurturing my audience and this is why I think that launching is so important to do as soon as possible so that you can get concrete data on what's working and what's not working if you made sales but you didn't make a lot of sales that is great news because now what you can work on is you can work on drawing your traffic, drawing your audience and you can also work on improving your product and improving your conversion rate so that more people buy your products when they do show up on your sales page the one thing that I feel has really led to my success has been the speed in which I create and put products for sale because I do not hold myself back thinking that I am going to do this perfect beautiful digital product and then I'm going to make sales, no I make sales to an MVP which is also known as a minimum viable product that I feel is going to solve the problem that I am stepping up to solve and as in when I get feedback on the product I can always upgrade and improve that product with time right so you want to keep in mind that it is more important to get that data and understand whether or not your product is selling instead of dragging your feed out and taking ears to make sure that you have a perfect product to sell because even if the product is perfect and it is something that your audience doesn't want that's just going to be wasted time so make sure you get to this step of launching your product as soon as possible so that you get data and you can then work on the next step which is going to be to optimize and scale so once you have data from your launch and now you know how your product is doing let's say that you had a 1% conversion rate you know that your product is something that people want so at this stage your job really is to optimize and scale this is where you're going to add new traffic sources and you're going to see whether or not you could for example invest in paid advertising this is where you could see if you could invest in a coach who would help you scale or a consulting firm that would help you scale your offers you could also look at growing your team at this point so that you can maximize your effort so for me my team looks like a customer support manager as well as a social media manager and both these people work with me part-time and have their own businesses so nobody in my team really is a full-time member including me because at this point I work about one to two hours a day and that's usually on strategy and really thinking about the vision and where I want the business to go because all of my products have already been created they have a whole back end that is set up and that's already running like a well oil machine so I don't need to do too much in terms of product creation or operations however my day-to-day activity is usually look like figuring out where a traffic is coming from how can we improve the traffic source how can we make sure that more for audiences converting how can we make sure that the visuals the images that our products have are really really good so these are things you're going to be working on once you have launched your product and you're looking to optimize and scale of course if you launch your product and you make zero sales you need to go back to step one and start all over again because that means at one of the steps you didn't do something right so when my first launch I had two sales which wasn't a complete failure but it was really really clear to me that why that happened was because I did not do step two which was grow my audience and I think that was the biggest reason why I wasn't able to have a great launch and once I had that feedback I knew that I had to go back and work on step two for as long as it took for me to build that trust with my audience so the great thing when you already have reached you know step one till launch is that you know how this process works so really what you have to do is to figure out with step you may be missed or with step you could improve and work on and then launch that next product or launch that improved product and do this over and over again until you get to you know five gay months until you get to ten gay months until you get to a hundred gay months one thing I want to finish this video with is that keep in mind that this journey took me three point five years even though it may seem like too much or too little for you this is something that every business needs to go through you likely will not make a hundred gay months in the first month you get started or maybe even in the first year that you get started and you need to compare this journey to you know getting a business degree or getting a graduate degree if it takes you three or four years to get your bachelor diploma why do you think that you're going to graduate from your business and have seven figures in income in one year that is unrealistic so make sure to give yourself two to four years minimum to see where your business can go even if you're not selling digital products and you have a completely different business because that is the minimum amount of time you need to actually learn the skills and have the experience that it takes to build a successful profitable business especially if you've never done this before and this is your first time building a business so i hope this video was really helpful for you if you want to learn more about how to create and sell digital products with my guidance and support you can check out my program digital product academy i'm going to drop the link to it in the description box below thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one