From a failed Kickstarter to over $41,000 per month in revenue in less than one year — The Smartist™ Way

In this FacebookLive, we pulled back the curtain and shared how we went from a failed Kickstarter to over forty-thousand per month in less than a year.

It’s been a wild ride to say the least. And the most amazing thing to me is that we accomplished this while still also doing client work, other projects and dealing with some big life stuff.

So how did we do it? It’s simple, really. (but not easy)

1. We focused on the essentials and parked our other ideas and “should do’s” to be revisited later
2. First we leveraged Kim’s existing audience to drive pre-sales to fund our first print run
3. Next (in May 2019) we experimented with paid traffic (Facebook and Instagram ads) at $10 a day until we had an ad that was converting well
4. We tried scaling that up on our own and concluded we should hire someone with more experience at this to help manage this
5. We hired a paid traffic agency to help us scale (end of Oct 2019).
6. In November we did $6185 gross revenue
7. Then we scaled incrementally from $100/day to over $1000/day in ad spend and grossed $41,681.41 for December!  UNBELIEVABLE. We are on track to do over $60k for January.

What’s next?

• We are continuing to scale our paid traffic and beginning to focus on other traffic/sales channels:
  • launching an affiliate program
  • launching a podcast
• building/launching additional products:
  • Content Promotion course
  • Content Creators Planner for Trello
• many more ideas… but one thing at a time!

By applying The Smartist Way framework to our own project, we have been able to make massive progress by focusing on those essential things that move our needle forward towards meeting our goals.

We are content marketers, and content marketing is a long game. We are excited to produce content that helps our readers with their businesses and at the same time, recognized that our conversion rate was good but we needed more traffic. By focusing on paid traffic we were able to fast-track our sales and thus our revenue… which means we can begin paying ourselves (we didn’t pay ourselves for most of 2019 while getting things off the ground and growing). Now that we can draw some income from the project, we can devote more time to creating and promoting content — precisely what the planner helps you do!

By creating and promoting our content we can increase organic traffic to the site which will grow and compound on itself. By creating an affiliate program, we can develop an additional traffic and sales channel. By adding more related products, we can increase average order value and customer lifetime value by offering them more things to buy from us that will help them grow their own businesses.

Learn more about The Content Creators Planner: