- eBiz Insider
- Posts
- How a musician made $50K passive income from 1 ebook 🤘
How a musician made $50K passive income from 1 ebook 🤘
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Musician Makes $50K Passive Income From an Ebook
Learn to Stand the F*ck Out
Failing Forward: $10,144 in 100 Days
€2.4 Million Selling Online Dental Courses
Underpricing By $14,700
PDF App: Zero to $16K/Month in 3 Months
This Joke Site Earned $25k in One Month
Did someone forward this to you? → subscribe here
Musician Makes $50K Passive Income From an Ebook
Emmett Cooke tells his story in a recent video…
Back in 2008, I worked in a call center taking AOL tech support calls from the elderly who needed help with their dial up internet connection, which as you imagine was about as fun as sticking cornflakes in your ears. But luckily we all lost our jobs and so I began following my real passion which was writing music
He started composing stock music 🎶 and licensing it to various projects. After a few years, Emmett had established himself as a bit of an expert in the industry.
He was active on forums and social media, answering questions and writing blog posts about the topic. As a result, he started getting emails from other composers seeking his advice.
It got Emmett thinking: could he package up his knowledge into an ebook product? 🤔
He knew he first needed to validate the idea before investing significant time into it.
So he did just that…
I made a mockup of the e-book, bought a domain and used a free service called LaunchRock to build a quick and easy email signup form where I could direct users to so they could enter their email address and get notified when I had a product ready.
Within a week, Emmett had 300 email signups from people interested in the ebook. This validated there was demand 👍
Then it was time to create the content. Emmett turned the common questions he received into chapters and outlines. He continually asked his email list and social media followers for more feedback on what to include.
After a month of writing, the ebook was complete: The Business of Music Licensing 🚀
By the time he launched in 2013, Emmett had over 2,100 subscribers waiting for the product.
The results?
The ebook brought in over $10,000 in sales its first month, $46k over the first 4 years, and more than $50k overall 🤑
(The book was priced at $9.99 initially but later increased to $24.99.)
Emmett's total costs to produce and market the product = $839.
So his profit was probably more than $50k as well 😎
The main things Emmett did to market the ebook…
1. Email: In the first month, my email marketing plan was to email everyone [multiple times]… almost 50% of the list purchased using this method within the 1st month.
2. Facebook ads: At the time, Facebook trialed a feature that allowed you to show an advert to your friends and their friends, so I used that really successfully… Unfortunately this was a temporary feature that Facebook killed faster than a sneeze in a library.
3. Continued posting on my social media to my pretty small following
4. I reached out to as many blogs and reviewers as I could find asking them to write about the release and offering them review copies.
That was it.
If Emmett could do it over again…
I should have set up a blog on the website, taken content from the eBook and re-write it into more digestible content which could be used as a traffic source from Google, resulting in more sales from organic traffic.
My key takeaway here is the value of building an audience before creating a product.
As Emmett's story shows, it's fairly easy to validate an idea and pull off a successful launch once you have a tribe of people who see you as an expert 👀
Reminds me of that tweet by Jack Butcher…
Build distribution, then build whatever you want.
Learn to Stand the F*ck Out
Today's email is brought to you by Stand The F*ck Out 🙊
That's a free newsletter by Louis Grenier, "the moody French guy behind Everyone Hates Marketers."
Louis has worked with the likes of Hotjar and Dropbox, and his subscribers tell him things like this…
You do an absolutely phenomenal job. You remind me of Seth Godin in your ability to cut through the fluff and get to the meat of what it means to be an impactful marketer.
Failing Forward: $10,144 in 100 Days
Marat Miftakhov is a software engineer from Serbia 🇷🇸 who recently challenged himself to earn $100,000 in 100 days.
Marat had no prior experience in sales or entrepreneurship, but he decided to push himself outside his comfort zone 😱
During the 100 days he tried…
Creating a mobile app
Creating some digital products
Offering mentoring services for new programmers
Making YouTube videos
Freelancing
In total, after 100 days, Marat ended up earning $10,144… far short of his ambitious $100K goal 😔
He writes…
I failed. I've made 10X less than I aimed to make…
…I'm happy that I've made 10K and I believe if my goal was $10K I would make only $1K or so.
Also…
I learned something new about myself. I'm happy to know that I can work hard and be disciplined. It gives me confidence that I can achieve anything I want, that I won't quit.
So it seems there might be something to that saying…
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
But here's the most interesting part to me 👇
$8000 of Marat's earnings – ie. the vast majority – came from…
a freelance project where I work as a backend developer, just like my main job. I understand it’s not very entrepreneurial because it’s just a job
Next best was the $2115 he earned from mentoring other programmers.
Which means he earned only $29 from all his other efforts combined 🤯
Through this experience, Marat realized…
at this stage it seems like [freelance programming is] the best option to make some money, because I already have the skill
True, freelancing may not be "very entrepreneurial," but who cares?
Money is money 💰
If freelancing is the best way to earn a living online – and it usually is, especially for people just starting out – then embrace it.
In my experience, this progression works well for most folks…
Start with freelancing or a remote job
As you gain experience, increase your rate 📈 and reduce your hours 📉
Enjoy your free time or invest it into building a higher level business
€2.4 Million Selling Online Dental Courses
🗂 From the archive, published March 2023…
That's osteocom.me, which is a bit like Masterclass for dentists 😬
This company was featured on Financial Times' newest annual ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing companies.
Apparently Osteocom was founded in 2009 in Italy and did €2.4 million (~$2.7 million USD) in revenue in 2021, up from €911K in revenue in 2018.
I heard about the FT list via Glen Allsopp, who highlighted 8 of those companies and wrote about Osteocom…
Online courses for people looking to learn from…the best dental professionals. 🦷
Not surprised this is a thing but had no idea it could be so successful. So many other niches this could work in.
Agreed.
Eventually every profession will have its own trusted e-learning platform like Osteocom.
Could you build something like this for a profession you're familiar with? 🤔
Also, regarding the FT list, Jakob Greenfield writes…
Underpricing By $14,700
☕️ Patrick McKenzie talks about meeting up with a business friend for coffee…
A couple of minutes into the coffee date, he locked me in a conference room with him and one of the cofounders of the company and said, “We just want ask you some questions about the stuff that you do, in terms of search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, that sort of thing.”
Patrick had experience and liked to be helpful. So he went ahead and dropped knowledge bombs for the next 3 hours 🔥
At the end of it all, his friend said…
I just want you to know that if today had not been a coffee date, you could have charged for this conversation and I would be pulling out my checkbook right now and write you a check for it.
Patrick was a young engineer when this happened, and figured his time was worth about $100 an hour 💵
He said as much, and got back an astonishing reply…
“No, I think I’ve got $15,000 worth of value out of this. I would write you a check for $15,000 right now.”
He asked his cofounder, “Do you think $15,000 is about right?” His cofounder said, “Well, I don’t know about $15,000.”
I’m like, “Oh, thank God. Sanity.”
His cofounder said, “For $15,000, I would need to see a printed report about it too. But $5000, yeah. We could pay that out of the petty cash.”
It blew my mind.
So…
Patrick wasn't even thinking to charge for those 3 hours
If he did charge, he figured his contribution was worth $300 max
One "client" figured Patrick's contribution was worth $15,000
Another figured it was worth at least $5,000
Patrick's takeaway 👇
If you are genuinely creating value for businesses, you are no longer in the “trade defined small units of time for defined small units of money” business model. This is what most employees do. This is how you have spent most of your life working. You have left that life behind.
PDF App: Zero to $16K/Month in 3 Months
PDF.ai is an app that lets you "chat with any PDF document" 🤖
Owner Damon Chen recently tweeted…
PDF.ai hits $200K ARR in 3 months. Let me explain to you how you can replicate the same "overnight success":
1. Invest $20k in a new product with zero revenue.
2. Spend $10k on a new domain for rebranding.
3. Launch a lifetime campaign to validate the market.
4. Transition pricing plan to subscription.
5. Use LTD revenue to hire a full-time influencer for daily videos.
6. Hire a dedicated full-time developer.
7. Keep exceeding customer expectations, every single day.
8. Create non-stop hype on social media.
You call it luck, I get it, so do I! But without steps 1-8, luck is nowhere.
The app was originally called Looseleaf, and it was generating $0 in revenue when Damon acquired it for $20k 🤯
We covered the story of Looseleaf here…
Apparently the app now has "300,000+ happy users" and generates $16K/month (ie. $200,000 ARR) 🤑
How did Damon make that happen in only 3 months?
I reckon a key move was hiring the "full-time influencer for daily videos"
Looks like this was one of their first Reels that went viral (2M+ views)...
Damon tweeted…
We post the same to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Instagram performs 10x better than TikTok
I see he's also adding PDF related tools on the site as a way to grow traffic from SEO 📈
Damon on his marketing strategy…
The strategies I use are nothing but social media, videos, SEO, sponsorships, and ads. I do nothing beyond these.
Some strategies may work for PDF.ai, some may not. But one common strategy that works for all is being consistent. Consistency is the strategy for everything.
Every day, I will be thinking about what content I can create for my products, just trying to keep them hot for as long as I can.
Past features on Damon in this newsletter 👇
This Joke Site Earned $25k in One Month
🗂 From the archive, published April 2020…
On Reddit:
I created a website that went viral during the coronavirus outbreak. I dont want to mention its name exactly, but it may be easy to figure out – it is a humour jokey website that helps inform people about one aspect of coronavirus.
It ended up getting featured in almost every major news site, every major tv website, and on radio, and on TV.
It has generated ~$25k in the month since launch.
I’m pretty sure the site is howmuchtoiletpaper.com 🧻 and it looks to be making money mainly from display ads.
Surely a short-lived success, but impressive nonetheless.
🔎 display ads | permalink
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Fancy learning marketing from a moody French guy? Then subscribe to Louis Grenier's free newsletter 👉 Stand The F*ck Out
What did you think of today's email? |