Someone paid a hundred dollars for my USD 4.99 Ebook on Gumroad
This is why I love making digital products
Lets be honest .. making digital products is H-A-R-D
It becomes especially depressing when you see everyone posting their wins non-stop on Medium or Youtube about how they earned 5 to10K this month via selling their product
“I earned 50K this month from my course”
“This video earned me 10K this month”
“This post earned me 2K in one day”
Argh !!!!
I wish all of these people the utmost success while struggling to hold down the bile of jealousy that come up
So it is with a little bit of pride that I post my win for last month
A brief history
The story on Medium for me that has resonated the most for people has been my journey with monetizing my cyber security knowledge
You can check it out below
I thought .. why not turn it into a small Ebook and give it away for free which I did below
That turned out to be quite popular with over 120 people downloading it in a month which was awesome
After a while I thought about adding more content and monetizing it to around USD 4.99
No one will buy it .. that voice buzzed in my year
But I gritted my teeth and updated the price on my Gumroad and shared it on my social network
To my surprise I got the below message within a few hours
I had to go and double check on Gumroad to make sure I was not mistaken but there it was
Sure enough the person reached out to me and thanked me for providing value via this Ebook
They were more than happy to pay me a hundred dollars which they saw a the actual value of this book
I cannot begin to tell you how much this meant and how much it boosted my confidence after it was down in the gutter
If you are a struggling content creator like me then I can honestly say based on this experience:
- Making content is HARD with lots of effort and no reward. And yet when it does click .. it is utterly beautiful
- Do not underestimate the impact your products are making to people .. I honestly thought no one was reading my Ebook until this person reached out
- Keep experimenting .. This never would have happened if I had not monetized my Ebook and taken a risk on what happened
I leave you with the best advice I ever got on digital products from “Atomic Habits” regarding the ice cube analogy
Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is a bit like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from 25 to 31 degree. You work was not wasted .. it is just being stored .. All the action happens at 32 degrees
Taimur Ijlal is a multi-award-winning, information security leader with over two decades of international experience in cyber-security and IT risk management in the fin-tech industry. Taimur can be connected on LinkedIn or on his YouTube channel “Cloud Security Guy” on which he regularly posts about Cloud Security, Artificial Intelligence, and general cyber-security career advice.
If you are interested in getting Cyber Security career coaching then reach out to him here.
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