I Made $10k from Selling a Course on Gumroad — Here’s How

I had some SEO success with a former employer, and I decided to dish on my strategy and techniques.

I launched in late December 2021, and recently hit $10k in sales.

This isn’t as much as others, but it’s also not the worst thing ever. I would know because I’ve tried to launch a few Notion templates and other small books but nothing has worked as well as this for me.

Here are my takeaways:

1. Prime your audience

This worked for me because I posted regularly on LinkedIn on SEO and content marketing topics. People had followed my journey and they were fairly devoted.

2. Solve a very specific problem

My playbook wasn’t called an “Intermediate’s Guide to SEO” even though that’s essentially what it is. It isn’t for advanced people and it’s definitely not for beginners. The niche was always going to be fairly small, but that was the goal. The problem I helped solve was growing your traffic in one quarter. This playbook is a very actionable way to make that happen.

3. Show the proof

Proof points and results let potential buyers know that your system works. On the landing page for the content playbook, I included this image:

It shows the spike in traffic I was able to achieve in a relative short amount of time.

What I would do differently:

1. I built this playbook in Notion which works fairly well as an MVP, but can lead to a lot of sharing. I don’t mind as much and don’t have well-founded evidence for this. But it could happen, of course.
2. Start a newsletter earlier. I used this buyer base to create a newsletter, but I wish I had one earlier for this particular topic. A lot of my communication about release dates and discount codes were done via LinkedIn and Twitter. I think some communication was lost.
3. I didn’t feel the need to do an elaborate sales page, but I could see a more persuasive sales page helping out with the revenue. If I had a product that appealed to a broader base, I would spend more time on this.

If you’re interested in the content playbook, here’s the landing page. You can use the discount code SCALE to purchase it (already applied).

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