One of the coolest things is being able to compile your knowledge in a PDF, video, or course and sell it for a profit, and I’ve been able to do this time and time again.

I learned about this business model in the most unexpected way too.

Way back in 2009, I was part of one of those businesses where you invite all your friends, family, associates, coworkers, and even that guy asking for change down the street to come to your home if they’re open to different ways of making money.

I couldn’t stand doing it and I didn’t really know that many people beyond the 50 or so who declined my invite, so I turned to the internet.

I quickly came across a bunch of people teaching you how to sell this type of business online, despite most of the companies didn’t want you promoting their name online.

Their method to get interested people while staying compliant with company policy?

Selling related digital products on the front end then selling the business on the back end via phone call.

Fast forward to today, it’s a pretty standard sales funnel process but back then not many people were doing it.

How I Decided On A Niche

My career (if you can call it that) in the “home meeting business model” was short lived and I quickly converted to only selling products online.

I sold quite a few products as an affiliate but never really got around to selling my own stuff.

However, that era taught me a ton of valuable skills, such as:

• Article writing
• Email marketing
• Creating videos
• Basic copywriting
• Basic sales funnels

I use all of those skills to this day, and I’ve only become better at them, but I want to focus in on the 2020-2021 time period.

One of my claims to “fame” was how I was able to sell the vast majority of affiliate offers and products through email marketing from 2010-2016 and even built an email list of over 2,400 subscribers.

So my bright idea was to start helping other businesses and creators with email marketing and my platform of choice was Twitter.

How I Easily Created My First Digital Product

When I started posting about email marketing, I had about 1,000 followers I built up from posting about my daily life and a fair bit about fitness too.

It was a hard switch to email marketing, and my initial abysmal engagement showed no one cared about my new content.

However, I kept plugging along anyway.

Months later, I started to notice some positive growth, more likes, more followers, and more people joining my newsletter which I had originally planned on sending weekly.

Shortly after, I committed to a daily newsletter helping people make more sales with email.

And not too long after that, I created my first digital product which was 25 email examples you can use to model for your own business, called Level Up Your Email Marketing which doubled as an email marketing course because the whole campaign was teaching people the lessons I learned about email over the years.

That only sold a total of 24 copies, but I went on to create more digital products that did even better.

How I Found Success Selling Digital Products

During this time, I kept posting on Twitter anywhere between 3 and 100 times per day, including comments I left on other posts and replies to my own comments.

The momentum really started building and I was getting multiple signups to my daily newsletter every day.

Eventually I created a guide now known as How To Write Emails That Sell which broke down my non-boring copywriting process to generate sales from email.

It took several revisions of the sales page, but eventually that started selling consistently and better than the last guide, which made sense because it was an actual guide not just copy and paste from my previous campaigns, although it did include different niche email examples as well.

And since I was getting consistent results from posting on Twitter, building an email list, and selling products, I decided to create a guide on how I did that called the Twitter List Building Formula, which also sold pretty well.

What I went over here was exactly my formula:

• Post educational, entertaining, and even personal content on my X account
• Join conversations and actually be a human (this was before the AI comment spam that is littering X today)
• Have my newsletter link in bio, and reply with a link below tweets that got more likes than normal
• Send emails using the email formula I was teaching other people to use and sell the guide teaching the formula

Super meta, but hey if it works then why not use the platform (email) to sell the platform I’m teaching.

Why I Quit Teaching Email Marketing

It still befuddles me to this day, but I stopped because I thought the business was failing.

It really wasn’t.

I sold 113 ebooks, several courses, a membership, and affiliate offers from my tiny list of 400 subscribers and a Twitter audience of 2,800 followers at it’s peak.

I was even getting clients who wanted me to write their emails simply by doing the exact thing I was teaching.

Definitely one of those things where I gave up too soon due to impatience, and while I don’t necessarily regret it…

Sometimes I wonder how far I could have taken it if I kept it up and running all these years later.

In any case, that era definitely strengthened my online selling skills and I can take that to anything I plan on building in the future.

That’s all for now.

Any questions? Let me know.

Talk soon,
-Gabe