Most creators will never make a full-time living from it.
You can be the best in the world at something, but if nobody knows who you are, what you do, or what value you bring, nobody will know about it, and you’ll end up being a starving artist.
Most creators are starving artists.
A starving artist is someone who is great at what they do but never learned marketing, sales, and persuasion to turn their knowledge, interests, and skills into a living.
They use their inability to make money as virtue signaling.
“Look at me. Look at how pure my work is! Look at what true art looks like!”
You’ll see them complain on social media that their work comes from the heart.
But who said that making money from your work means it’s any less valuable?
Let’s get one thing clear:
There’s nothing noble about being a starving artist.
It doesn’t make your work more authentic.
If anything, it makes your work less authentic because you are now creating from a place of scarcity. And your refusal to learn how to turn it into a profit leaks into your work. You become more resentful of those who are making it their full-time job, doing what they love for work, and this all changes your personality, the way you act, create, think, and behave.
I used to wear the starving artist as a badge of honor. In 2024, I didn’t want to “taint” my work by selling under my brand. But what ended up happening was that I still needed money to survive. So I became a ghostwriter, writing tweets for $250 a pop. But only this time I wasn’t selling my work, but I was selling other people’s work.
It was only when I was on vacation that I realized the problem I created for myself. I was in the best hotels, in the nicest area, with the best shops, but I spent all of my vacation in my hotel researching, learning, and writing about childhood trauma for a client. I didn’t have any interest in writing about childhood trauma.
This made me hate writing.
So the only way for me to make a living doing something I love, brings me meaning and fulfillment, was to sell my own products because I genuinely believe in them and they are aligned with what I’m trying to build.
If you’re not selling your own products, you’re selling someone else’s.
The only authentic way to do work you love for a living is to sell the work you actually believe in.
“Marketing is about changing people for the better, creating work you can be proud of. And it’s about being a driver of the market, not simply being market-driven.”
- Seth Godin
This letter is about how to market your work and to make a meaningful living doing so.
If you think that marketing and selling is evil and that it’s only for greedy corporations that want to secretly destroy the world for the sake of profit, do yourself a favor and stop reading.
But if you’re one of the few who want to make content creation their full-time job. To make a living doing something you love, to have complete control over your time, income, and freedom, keep reading.
This is for you.
In this letter, I’ll show you 3 strategies to help you sell more of your products from beginner to advanced.
Let’s begin.
You’re already a marketer. You just don’t know it yet
“Marketing your work is a complain on the way to better.”
- Seth Godin
Marketing isn’t evil.
It’s not a tool that evil corporations use to exploit humanity.
Marketing has a bad stigma because we were all burned by cheap marketing gimmicks.
Real marketing is about change. It’s about helping others, giving them the opportunity to solve their problems.
Marketing is how you attract supporters to your work. Marketing is how you communicate the value you bring to the world.
Marketing is how you make change happen.
It’s how you show people there’s a better way to do things. That there’s a different path to take, to live a better life. Your way of doing things is called marketing, and you can do it.
Marketing gives people the opportunity to change their lives and improve their lives.
You use marketing in your daily life.
- When you recommend a book to your friend, you’re marketing.
- When you’re planning a night out and suggest a restaurant, you’re marketing.
- When you’re organizing a trip with family, you’re marketing.
- When you ask your boss for a raise, you’re marketing.
- When you ask strangers to donate to charity, you’re marketing.
- When you write about an idea, you need to use marketing to make other people interested in it, see the value it brings, and adopt it in their lives.
To you, that doesn’t feel like marketing. But that’s only because you’re doing it because you genuinely believe in what you’re saying.
II - 3 methods to become dangerously good at selling (without being salesy)
“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve their problem.”
- Seth Godin
Before I show you how to sell more digital products. I need to make a few assumptions.
- You are already creating value-based content and you have an audience (it doesn’t need to be a massive audience, but you have one).
- You already have a product to sell. Without a product to sell, you can’t make money. Money is a byproduct of value exchange. You help people solve their problems and in return, they pay you money.
- You don’t want to build a freelance business. You want to sell your own products, own your time, and
- You don’t want to do sales calls or cold outreach. You want to make content that drives traffic to your product and sell all organically.
If you don’t already have an audience, or you’re not creating content, I created a free course to help you get started.
Once you have that nailed down, come back to this letter.
With that said, here are 3 ways to sell more of your products:
1) Open, Close, Refine, Launch (Beginner)
Humans are too scared to lose out on opportunities.
It’s the reason why Adam ate the apple from the forbidden tree, or why people buy a new TV during Black Friday (even though they bought one last year), or why you go out even when you know you won’t enjoy it.
Humans want to experience everything. We can’t help it. This is why productivity porn is also becoming a thing. You want to be more productive so you can do everything at once.
With marketing, you can leverage this trait to help your audience to solve their problems.
Because to get people to buy your products that help them solve their problems, you need pressure.
2 ways to add pressure:
- Urgency — a reason for people to move now. Discounts, limited-time offers, etc.
- Scarcity — limited quantity. Limited stock, only a few spots, etc.
The idea behind this method is pretty simple.
You open your product for a few days (5-7), people can buy during that time, then you close it for 2-3 months.
Once the doors are closed, your goal is to work closely with your customers to improve your product, implement their feedback, iterate on your product, then open it again. You can either launch it at the same price again, or increase it.
And once the second launch is over, you have a decision to make:
Either turn your product into an evergreen product (people can always buy it), or close it again and repeat the same process.
Where you can use this method:
- Digital Products - you can’t make digital products scarce (they’re digital), but you can add urgency by not making it available all the time.
- Workshops - you can run people through your process in the workshop, and post-workshop, you can collect feedback.
- Cohorts - cohorts have clear start and end dates. Once the cohort starts, it doesn’t make sense for someone to join in the middle.
- Communities - you can stop accepting new members to focus on the members you already have, refine the material that’s inside, overdeliver to those who are already inside, collect social proof, and launch it again either at the same price or a higher price.
I use this method 90% of the time and the reason is simple:
It’s my first time building that product.
When it’s your first time selling your product, it’s best to let your product go through a few rounds of iteration. Refine your process so your results are more consistent.
This also allows you to collect more testimonials which help improve your product and conversions.
2) Tripwire Method (Intermediate)
Not everyone will buy from your launch.
Some people are more skeptical. And it’s fair. Social media is a sketchy place. Skepticism is at an all-time high, and trust is at an all-time low.
Giving people unconditional value in the form of content, lead magnets, or free training helps build the trust between you and your audience.
It shows that you’re the man for the job and you mean serious business.
It also has a nice benefit because you get to collect people’s email addresses (which helps build your email list).
A tripwire offer needs 3 things:
- A free resource - this is the thing that will “hook” your audience in. It can be a lead magnet or a free masterclass.
- An email sequence - this can be a 10, 20, or 30-day email sequence.
- An evergreen product - pretty self-explanatory. To make this work, you need people to buy a product. If that product isn’t always available, then your tripwire won’t work.
With Eden, you can create and host your products (a course with AI, a masterclass, or a free community).
You can add them to an automation that immediately starts as soon as they join.
The magic isn’t in the value of the lead magnet or masterclass itself.
It’s in the 5-10 emails after they get your lead magnet. You have more opportunity to sell your products that you wouldn’t have had if you they didn’t get your lead magnet.
You don’t need to “sell” in all of the emails. You can have 5-10 days of emails that are purely value-based, and in the last 3 days, you go into the sale.
And if you want to go the extra step, you can add urgency to your pitch by starting an automated exclusive offer for anyone who gets your lead magnet.
For example, with my lead magnet, anyone who gets it automatically gets an exclusive offer for 11 days.
After 11 days, the exclusive offer disappears.
This way, you’re not relying on cheap marketing tactics to make a sale. You’re being honest with your marketing
Once you have everything in place, you need to be constantly promoting your lead magnet.
Promote your lead magnet everywhere.
- In your stories
- Under your posts
- In your newsletters
Promote. Promote. Promote. Promote. Promote.
You need to be constantly driving traffic to your lead magnet because this is the only way it works. People won’t magically find it. You need to constantly be putting it in front of as many eyes as you possibly can.
What this means to you:
- Core offer: $300
- Traffic: 2,000 emails/month
- Churn: 500 email drop-off
- New readers: 1,500
- Conversion rate: 5%
- Revenue generated: $22,500
You made $22,500/month by simply promoting a free product and that’s it.
Disclaimer:
If you’re just starting out, or don’t have a proven core offer, you don’t need to have a tripwire offer or a lead magnet.
I’ve been running my business for close to 3 years and I have never had a lead magnet that’s always running.
I mostly just use the first method and I made 6 figures this year using that method alone
3) 4-Week Launch (Advanced)
Think of a launch like an elastic band.
The longer and harder you pull, the bigger the snap.
A 4-week launch plan gives you more marketing firepower to play with.
What you can do during the 4-week launch:
- Launch a giveaway - giveaways get you a huge influx of leads (from my experience, I got 100-200 leads each time).
- Manual outreach - you can reach out to previous customers, leads, and interested people in your audience and have conversations and close them on a call or in the DMs.
- Gradual price increase - start the launch with a 40% discount, and each week, the prices increase by 10% until you reach full price.
If you’re doing the gradual price increase, you don’t need to be sending daily emails for 4 weeks, because you’re going to have something called Offer Fatigue.
Offer fatigue means your audience got sick of your offer and your offer isn’t converting as much as it used to.
The best approach is to do 2-3 emails per week (1 newsletter, 1 storytelling email + CTA at the end, and 1 reminder that prices increase tomorrow) leading up to full price.
That’s what I did at the beginning of the year and I made $7,000 from my cohort (it was my biggest launch at the time).
The most underrated part about this strategy is that you can create customers.
How?
By educating them through your newsletters about their problems, your vision, and your narrative.
Raise their awareness levels with your long-form newsletters and when you do so, your readers will grow to want your product.
In general, there are 5 awareness stages:
- Problem unaware - unaware of their problems and how it’s impacting their day-to-day life (focus on pain points).
- Problem aware - aware of their problems but don’t know how to solve them (focus on the impacts of the pain points and your unique point of view).
- Solution aware - aware of their problems and know that solutions exist, just not a streamlined solution (focus on actionable advice).
- Product aware - aware of their problems, know that there is a streamlined path, system, or solution that exists (focus on your unique mechanism).
- Most aware - they are ready for change, they just need a reason to act now (focus on objections and adding pressure like urgency and scarcity).
Your goal leading up to launch week is to educate your audience on their problems and show them that your product is the solution.
The 4-week plan (what to do in each week):
Week 1:
99% of your audience are beginners.
This week, your newsletters will be beginner-focused and more general when it comes to your topic.
You can use copywriting frameworks like PAS, PAS(O), or AIDA to structure your newsletter.
As you’re writing your newsletter, soft-promote your product. You can write it in the middle and/or at the end.
You can write something like this:
“Quick announcement:
If you want to [HEAVEN], my product, NAME, is currently on a 40% discount until Sunday, then prices increase.
You can get it here: LINK.”
When it comes to social media, go to your high-performing post of the day, and link that week’s newsletter under it.
On Sunday, send another email to your list reminding them that in 24 hours prices increase by 10%. It doesn’t need to be too long. The shorter and more straight to the point, the better.
Week 2:
Very similar to Week 1. Not much will change here.
Week 3:
You will turn the marketing engine on.
You will still do what you did in Weeks 1 and 2. But this week, you’ll launch a lead magnet.
The goal of this lead magnet is to give people the general framework of your product.
You will not actually give them a step-by-step plan on how to implement your product.
What you will do is talk about the overall framework from a big-picture POV.
Give them the what and why, but keep the how.
Once the lead magnet is done, do a “giveaway” post. Ask people to reply to your post and you’ll send it to them.
When you’re sending them the lead magnet, write a short message telling them about your product and if they want to learn more about it, they need to reply with a keyword.
You can use Eden to automate and customize your DMs so you don’t have to spend all day sending people your lead magnet.
This will help give you 100-200 new leads that you can speak to.
And if you’re decent at selling, you can close 5-10 people (this is a conservative estimate).
Week 4:
In this week, you will question reality.
From my experience, launch week is where the majority of the sales happen.
You see, a launch is like a train. In the beginning, you’re not sure if what you heard was a train or not. But as it gets closer, the train gets louder, and the people know for sure what’s coming.
During launch week, your goal is to be make as much noise as possible (on email and social media).
Start sending short, daily emails telling people to buy and that doors close on a certain date. On social media, write a daily post telling people to buy your product.
Your audience should feel the scarcity and that something big is happening this week.
“But Hussain, I don’t want to annoy my audience.”
Do you genuinely believe in the product you’re selling?
If so, then promoting it and getting as many people to buy it is an act of service. If you care about helping people and making the world a better place, you need to learn how to market, sell, and persuade people to buy your products.
On the last day, you will make so many sales, you wouldn’t believe it (I usually make 30-50 sales on the last day).
Rule of Thumb:
The more emails you send on the last day, the more sales you’ll make.
Personally, I like to do 3 reminder emails (24 hours left, 12 hours left, 3 hours left).
Once doors close, take the product down and focus on delivery.
That’s it.
That’s how you sell more digital products.
And if what I showed you today sounds like too much work, let me be real with you for a second.
What the f*ck are you doing here?
Seriously.
Are you actually serious about making this your full-time job?
Or do you just want to somehow magically have $100M in your bank account and never have to work again?
Do you actually want to make money selling a product you believe in, building a business you love, making a dent in the world, and gaining fulfillment from it?
Or do you just like to mentally masturbate and get off on the idea of making it big one day?
Did you expect this to be easy?
Because if it was, many people would have gone ahead and succeeded with their business but they didn’t because they didn’t have it in them to stick it out and weather the storm.
Please, take this seriously.
It’s not easy. But it is simple.
That’s all for today.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
Hussain
P.S.
The tool I was showing you is called Eden.
It’s the software I’ve been using for all of my writing, content creation, email marketing, hosting communities, digital products, and coaching.
If you’re serious about starting and building a one-person business, you need to get Eden.
