πŸ’Έ My Best Month Ever - AGAIN!

✊ Updates from The Indie Creator | Issue #49

So August ended up being my first 4 figure month in terms of product revenue.

July was the best month before this, August was slightly better than July.

Super grateful πŸ™

A major portion of my August revenue was the Indie Masterminds Program.

It's revenue increased significantly this month.

  • June - $430

  • July - $400

  • August - $750

Overall - $1580

In August I raised prices but still got more sales.

I tried 5 experiments to increase the sales of Indie Masterminds this month, 4 of them worked alright, 1 failed miserably πŸ™ˆ

  1. Landing Page and Domain

  2. Live Chat on the website

  3. Multiple Pricing Tiers

  4. Structured Email Marketing Campaign

  5. Twitter Ads πŸ˜…

Let's go deeper into them -

Experiments

Landing Page and Domain

This time I build a proper landing page and got the perfect domain for Indie Masterminds.

Before this I was using Gumroad's product page. It was functional but I wasn't able to fully capture the value of the program on a Gumroad page.

Stuff like highlighting social proof, removing friction, dealing with objections - all of these are hard to do on a simple text only Gumroad page.

But these aspects are so important when it comes to improving conversion rates of your landing pages. (I go deeper into these ideas in the landing page playbook)

There's still room for improvement, but I think a proper landing page on my own domain has worked way better than the Gumroad page.

One caveat - I don't think I needed the landing page from day 1, I think back then it would have been an overkill. Especially when I didn't have any social proof, had no paying users and no validation that the product is actually useful. Once I had that over 2 months, I could refine the landing page and make it more effective.

So don't buy a domain and build a landing page before your project has legs.

Live chat on the website

I also installed a live chat icon on the website. I used a service called Crisp chat for it. I think this is a great way to address the concerns of the people who might be on the fence.

One person actually got on a chat with me and asked a few questions, I was able to resolve their queries and they eventually ended up joining the program.

So that's a win πŸ˜€

Although someone did use the chat feature to give me the middle finger, but I still think it was worth it overallπŸ˜…

Multiple Pricing Tiers

Before this month I only had 1 offer at 1 price point. Even if someone wanted to pay me more there was no way for them to do it.

Customers who want to get more value from you will be happy to pay you more. But for that you have to give them the option to pay more.

So I added 2 pricing tiers on top of the existing one. And guess what - 25% of the customers picked the higher price points.

I'm going to raise prices again next month for each tier and might add another tier there. Let's see how that goes 🀞

Structured Email Marketing Campaign

I sent out 4 emails over 14 days to everyone who was there in my Gumroad email list. These are people who had bought a free/paid product from me before.

Every email focused on 1 benefit of the program and how it can help people. This is a great way to attract the right kind of people. Twitter is great for promotion, but I think a lot of purchase decisions there are impulse driven.

While on email, the decisions are more thought out and the user knows what they are coming in for.

So next month I'm going to double down on email marketing and have a more sophisticated campaign. (Maybe via ConvertKit instead of Gumroad)

If you want to experience first hand how the emails look and how they work from the inside then make sure you get one of my free products like this, this or this.

Or you can get one of my paid products from my Gumroad page as well, I don't mind πŸ˜†

Twitter Ads

This didn't work at all πŸ™ˆ

I saw Daniel Vassallo get good results from his ads so I thought I can experiment as well. But didn't get any conversions from ads.

I did get a decent click through rate - 2 cents per click.

Which is damn cheap, but it probably means my targeting was way off and I was not getting the right audience at all.

Or maybe my landing page isn't optimized for cold traffic.

I should probably try to capture the emails of the cold audience and then promote them the program via email. Let's see.

FWIW, here are the ad results -

Good thing I didn't spend more than $100 on ads.

Will try them again in the future with a different strategy. For now, I'm done with ads...

That's it for today.

Hope these strategies give you some ideas and insights for your own products. Do hit reply and let me know.

Cheers ✌️

✍️ Pro Tip of the week

You like reading books? Or want to build a reading habit?

Attach a specific purpose to every book you pickup.

Fiction - For entertainment and relaxation.

Non-fiction - To learn a specific topic.

Biographies - To get inspired.

This will also help you give up the books that don't add value to you easily, and stick to the ones that you're actually enjoying.

πŸ‘‹ Bottomline

Time to go, these were my best performing tweets from last week -

I asked people - what is the 1 life skill they think everyone in the world should have?

Got some amazing answers -

Launched a new product last night, get it for free πŸ‘‡

Crossed $1000 in sales in August 🀩

Thank you for reading πŸ™

That's my time this week. See you next week πŸ‘‹

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Cheer,

Ayush