$40,000 In One Weekend

bybryonbrewer

10.5K followers

8 years ago

People have asked me for an update to my $0 to $10,000 post (for those who've not read it, it's here: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/domw/blog/0-to-10k...)

I didn't want to just do a "One year later" type update, so I waited for something good to come along instead.

This is that post!

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Black Friday

Last year I didn't do a single Black Friday promotion. I was burned out with all the other affiliate offers I was getting and decided I wanted to set myself a part. I didn't want my business to look like just another affiliate pimping all the BF offers out there.

Probably a mistake though, I could have cashed in.

Fast forward to this year, and I didn't want to do a Black Friday offer again. Why? Well, partly through personal choice, partly through wanting to look "superior" to Black Friday, and partly because I didn't really know what to do for it.

For those of you who don't know, I sell my own products, services really, and so while many people here cleaned up as affiliates during Black Friday, I was on the other end, as the company doing the promotion, much like WA does.

However, over the course of November, several things changed my mind, and I decided to do a promotion:

1. Sales had been slow for the first 2-3 weeks. I realized that people were getting ready for BF, even if I wasn't. Some of them might even have been hoping I'd do a promo (I did get a few emails about this from customers and affiliates alike).
2. I have been planning to launch an additional service to supplement my existing one, and I thought this would be a perfect time to test the demand for it.
3. This would also force me to actually get that extra service completed rather than just putting it off every month.
4. I've read a few books on launches recently and figured I'd put my new knowledge to good use.

I put together a simple offer:

Buy a done-for-you affiliate site from us over the weekend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and get lifetime access to my new service for free.

It was a pretty good offer and would save people hundreds of dollars, but I still had a bit of fear. I hadn't tested the demand for the additional service, so if people weren't interested in it, the whole promotion would bomb.

When you own your own products, you have more irrational fears about messing up by discounting them, doing a promo that fails, or finding out that people don't like them anymore.

When you put that irrational fear together with the fact that November had been slow (like 40% revenue compared to previous months), I was going into Black Friday a bit worried.

Would people be interested in my offer? Would they care that I was bringing out a new service? Would I be able to generate interest over the noise of all the other companies doing Black Friday promos?

Would I be able to write good enough sales copy with only three days to prepare? Etc etc. The list goes on.

Only one way to find out though right?

Implementing The Offer

So the first thing I did was write a blog post outlining the offer, what people would get out of it, and the rules for qualifying. I did this about three days before Black Friday.

In a way, it was kind of weird putting together a promotion for a service we hadn't even rolled out yet. This whole thing was kind of like "Buy a site from us and get access to something we've not created yet".

Pre-selling is actually very simple if you manage expectations. I said several times over the course of the promotion that the new service was coming out at the end of the year, so everybody would know they were buying for something not out yet (Hey they were getting a site as well though).

I then sent an email out to my list (about 4,000 subscribers) letting them know about the post and the offer.

I wanted to gauge the response, and also wanted people to start getting ready to buy. I actually still had a huge fear that nobody would buy, but I had done enough of this type of email to know that it works well, so I had to go through the motions and try to push doubt to the back of my mind.

At this point, you're probably wondering how someone "successful" can still have doubts. It's simple really. If you're doing anything worth doing, you're going to have a fear of failure. What you get better at is coping with that fear.

Building Up Hype

I sent one more email about 5 hours before midnight EST on Thanksgiving. I wasn't sure if people would be reading emails during TG or not, but I got some pretty good metrics:

The purpose of this email was to tell people what time we were launching the promo, what time we were "opening the cart" as such. It was also just an easy excuse to remind people about it.

Again, I was also using these emails to gauge interest. So far, about a dozen or so people replied to my emails asking about the offer, but most of them were existing customers asking if they would qualify, or if they'd need to buy again to get the offer. That was a good sign, but not necessarily indicative of the overall sentiment.

Pressing The Next Send Button

When the time finally came to send the "We are live" email, once again I was pretty nervous. I felt like this was going to make or break my month, and now that I have something like $25,000 in monthly expenses (yes. really) there's more pressure to make sure you get a good result.

At this point, we'd already made enough money in November to cover expenses, so there was no fear that my people wouldn't get paid, I just didn't want to have no money left over for myself!

I needn't have worried, because I had put together a good offer, and people love it.

After I sent the email, I waited about 40 minutes before checking the results. I didn't want to be going crazy waiting for the first sales to come in, so I left it long enough (I hoped) to see a few results.

The Results

After 40 minutes, I wanted to see that maybe 5 people had bought a site. This would be a good sign for the weekend.

We actually made 14 sales in that first 40 minutes (About $9k in revenue) and over the course of Black Friday weekend, we made a total of 55 sales, bringing us just under $40,000 in revenue. As you can see below, $20,000 of that was on the 25th alone.

It wasn't all profit of course, delivering the service we sold has its own costs, but let's just say I was able to enjoy shopping that weekend a little more.

So How Does This Concern You?

Obviously I'm sharing this story because I'm incredibly proud of the results, and I know how inspirational that previous post I made was, so I wanted to give people a follow-up.

More importantly, I also wanted to point out what kind of things are possible once you have some authority built. Let's recollect what I did:

• I came up with an offer in a short period of time
• I wrote a quick post about the offer
• I shared it with my email list
• I launched the offer, and over the weekend sent a few reminder emails.

That's all I did to get this $40,000 revenue, but of course, the hard work was done months and years previously, so let this be a testament to why you should keep building your authority and keep growing your asset.

You might think you are doing a lot of work for nothing right now, but in a few years, you'll be doing a little work for a lot, and that's when you get to feel very grateful that you found Wealthy Affiliate and you stuck with it.