FF #021: How I Made My First $100,000 Online (And 3 Steps For You To Do It Too)

Aside from making your first $1 online…

There’s nothing more magical than your first $100,000.

I’m not talking revenue or an annualized project fee.

I’m talking about $100,000 sitting in your bank account coming strictly from your online bizness.

So today I wanna share…

How I Made My First $100,000 Online (And 3 Steps For You To Do It Too).

My hope is that everyone who follows me gets to experience this for themselves.

What I’m gonna lay out today is exactly what I did along with 3 steps you can follow to do it too regardless of your bizness model.

Let’s get into it.

My First $100,000 Story.

Back in 2016 I had a 9-5 as a project manager making around $75k/yr.

I hated every second of that job and knew it wasn’t gonna last long.

So I used some of every paycheck to fund my online biz.

I made a bit of money offering a SEO service to dentists.

But it wasn’t consistent and I stopped after a few months.

My next move was ecommerce. Specifically selling private labeled products on Amazon.

The first product I sold was a knockoff of a Yeti tumbler.

Here it is:

I sold 10,000 of these tumblers… but the problem was I had to put a fat wad of cash down upfront then wait 2-3 months for inventory.

I enjoyed ecommerce and selling physical products though.

So I looked into alternative, faster ways and found dropshipping.

Dropshipping was great because I could sell a product without needing inventory.

I just needed to find a product to sell, run some advertising to it, and the supplier would ship the order directly to my customer.

Beautiful.

My first dropshipping store was selling Steampunk products, a type of alternative fashion.

This was one of my best-selling products:

I would find Steampunk suppliers and products, list it on my store, launch a few FB ads, and my supplier would ship it out to customers.

In just over a month I went from $0 to $60k/mo+.

Within 3 months I was doing over $100k/mo and was able to leave my job.

I went full-time into this and launched a couple more related stores selling alternative fashion clothing.

At the highest point the stores were doing over $250k/mo before I sold them in 2018.

This made me my first $100k and much more.

It’s a lot harder to start a dropshipping biz now, but you can apply the steps I took here to any biz today.

So let’s break down what those steps are.

#1 - Pick a niche.

A niche is a group of people with shared characteristics who have a problem you can and want to solve.

I picked Steampunk lovers.

I knew nothing about Steampunk but based on research I knew their problem was difficulty finding Steampunk clothing and gear.

It was a “hungry niche” of people I knew I could help.

There’s a reason why this is step 1 too.

Choose your niche BEFORE you choose the product.

Most people do this backwards and wonder why their product doesn’t sell.

It’s because they made an assumption of what people want instead of picking a niche and selling what they've already said they want.

So start with the niche and problem you want to solve... and it’ll make the following steps much EZer.

#2 - Craft a delicious offer.

You’ve picked a niche.

You’ve chosen a problem you want to help them solve.

Now put a delicious offer together that solves that problem.

For my Steampunk people… their problem was difficulty finding Steampunk products.

At the time the only place you could find it were local niche fashion stores.

If no one in your area had it you were shid outta luck.

So my offer was to give them a central place to find everything they needed at reasonable prices.

Sunglasses, goggles, corsets, leggings, watches, jewelry… I had it all.

I remember going to Coachella years ago and seeing hundreds of people wearing the products from my store which was pretty cool.

The Steampunk community was HUNGRY for a store like this and my delicious offer was giving it to them.

Once you have your delicious offer it’s time to…

#3 - Get traffic to your offer.

Traffic, in simplest terms, means people seeing your stuff.

There are free traffic methods where you don’t pay money for it, but it takes longer.

Some examples are:

• SEO
• Email list
• Blog posts
• YouTube videos
• Text posts on social media
• Short-form videos on social media

And there are paid traffic methods which cost money, but work a lot faster.

Some examples are:

• Paying for ads on a website
• Paying for ads on social media (Snapchat, LinkedIn Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc)
• Paying for ads in search engines (Google, YouTube, Bing, etc)

For this particular biz I started with paying for FB ads.

But with how powerful social media is today...

You can start with free traffic then add paid traffic methods once you’re making money.

I started my consulting/education bizness in 2020.

I didn’t start running paid ads until 2022 because I wanted to validate first.

We have platforms like TikTok where creators and brands are getting millions of views for free.

Start with free then go to paid after you’ve validated your offer will sell.

The Math To Hit $100,000.

The $100,000 equation:

$100,000 / Average order value = # of sales you need.

For my Steampunk store my average order value was around $70.

This means I needed 1429 sales to hit $100,000.

If your offer price is $2000? You would need 50 sales to hit $100,000.

If your offer price is $10,000? You would need 10 sales to hit $100,000.

Make sense?

So simple it hurts.

This doesn’t take into account the additional times a customer might buy from you… which makes the numbers even more appealing.

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So that was my first $100,000 story.

And the 3 steps you can take to make your first (or next) $100,000 online too.

Apply these steps and lessons to any biz model and you'll be well on your way.

Alrighty...

That's it for today's Friday Fire action section.

Hope you found it useful.

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When you're ready, here are 6 ways I can help you...

1. Build and monetize audiences in my Audience Rainmaker community here.

2. Learn my multi-million dollar formula to write emails that sell here.

3. Get paid to write simple 5th grade emails that sell here.

4. Get 7 of my best campaigns and daily email training here.

5. Get my content creation and audience-building system here.

6. Join the waitlist for the next Leveraged Offer Launch workshop here.