This Is the Best Money-Making Opportunity Online Right Now
Even if you know of it, I’m going to give you kickass examples from people you can copy.
Most of you are sleeping on this income stream.
I know I’ve been. Yet people with small social media followings and no business skills are killing it. Some have made a full-time income. Plenty are just making a side hustle income.
Let’s break it down so you can give it a go.
The huge problem with making money online
Ready?
What do you make money from and where? There are so many places. The strategies are cryptic. Or you need to do an online course because of the nuances involved.
Even if you work all this out, you often need to build a website and collect payments. Yesterday, on a call with my friend, I realized there’s one platform that’s silently built a new creator economy. It’s more inclusive and doesn’t require genius skills.
You may know it: Gumroad.
But what I’m about to say isn’t what you think.
The bizarre reason why it works
One thing I suck at is getting people to resell my (already) wildly successful digital products that have made more than 6-figures.
I hate asking. I hate being too salesy.
My friend kills it on Gumroad. He’ll do 7-figures this year on there.
Something slapped me across the face. What matters with any online opportunity is the platform psychology.
Once you understand the psychology of internet users in a given place, you can make unfair amounts of money.
But most people ignore platform psychology.
- They take tweets and post them on LinkedIn.
- They copy and paste their blog posts to every social media platform they can.
- Or they don’t even do that — they simply paste links to their selfish ‘asks’ of people, so they can make money from their products.
What makes Gumroad amazing is the platform psychology is to sell each other’s products and earn part of the upside.
Affiliate marketing is built into Gumroad — but not in a creepy pyramid scheme, Amway-kind-of-way. The feature isn’t enough though.
I learned that many people have been taken advantage of with affiliate marketing. They’ve helped a creator make money, yet never got paid the promised amount for doing so.
Gumroad has loads of trust. People know if they onsell a product on Gumroad they will 100% get paid — in real-time!
Gumroad reinvented affiliate marketing. They made it honest again.
Let’s make it stupidly simple
Gumroad is the replacement for a website.
It’s a place to sell courses, books, how-to guides, templates, coaching, audits, spreadsheets, curated lists, memberships, etc.
Once you create your product or service, you post it on the site and earn money. The big question is always marketing.
To make money on Gumroad you’ll need to drive some of your own traffic to the pages that sell your stuff.
Gumroad also has discoverability, meaning that users can search the site for a solution to their problem and stumble across what you offer. But this works better later in your Gumroad journey.
You might be wondering how to create traffic to make sales on Gumroad.
Most Gumroad sales happen through Twitter.
Twitter and Gumroad are joined at the hip. That’s why you see so many people who want to make money online going back to Twitter and starting from scratch.
They’ve heard about Gumroad and seek to quietly build their tiny online empire. The way to sell on Twitter is simple. Listen carefully…
- Write tweets and schedule them with a tool like Tweet Hunter or HypeFury. Your audience will grow slowly.
- Write Tweet Threads and make the last tweet in the series a link to the related Gumroad product.
That’s all you have to do.
You don’t need millions of followers to make it work either. Twitter users love to buy stuff from Gumroad. If your product is good then a few hundred followers can make you a nice little side hustle income.
You can direct traffic from other social media apps or sites too.
But Twitter is the easiest because Gumroad is built into the user psychology. And psychology affects how we buy stuff online. Pay attention.
Humble legends you can copy (Steal!!!)
You don’t want fluff.
You don’t want your tires to be pumped up only to have them let down. So let’s cut the crap and give you some tiny Gumroad legends you can copy who are unknown in most circles.
1. The 4-hour woman
Arunima created three products and put them on Gumroad. She spent 4 hours creating each. Her #1 tip is to start creating Gumroad products when you have around 700 Twitter followers.
2. The 20 year old making $12K a month
Easlo is cool. He makes templates for the popular note-taking app Notion.
After a year of selling them on Gumroad he’s doing $12K a month. That’s more than those tech nerds working 7 days a week and kissing their bosses’ ass every 5 minutes in-between writing code.
His #1 tip is to ask a community of people what problem drives them nuts.
He became a fly on the wall in the Notion community. Minimalist templates were highly desirable, but uncommon. On his first launch he sold $1000 of templates.
Ask questions in public, build solutions to sell on Gumroad in public.
3. The cheeky devil from India I love
Sahil Patel tweets a lot. I never know if the guy is serious LOL.
The guy is the best example of not having experience and still selling a product. He chose a freaking hard niche: venture capital.
The kid is 20 so he doesn’t run a venture capital firm or know much.
He learned through Twitter that many people want to get into it via a viral tweet thread he wrote. So, he turned the free content into a more extensive list and sold it on Gumroad.
He spent his time consuming all the best VC content and asking people in the field what resources are the best. Then he sold the list for $10 or a pay what you want price and made hundreds of sales.
No need to be an expert. People pay to save time looking for the best content.
4. The weirdo who turned free into cash
Harsh Makadia isn’t an internet superstar. His Gumroad launches typically make $600. What’s strange is his products are $0.
All he does is give people the option to pay what they want. Stupidly simple.
5. The spreadsheet nerd
Kamphey is another relatable Gumroad badass.
He’s made a modest $1,048 in three months selling Google spreadsheets full of business ideas. His second product teaches people how to sell their own spreadsheets on Gumroad.
The thing to know with Gumroad is everyone has a meta product. That is, when their first product is successful they make another product teaching people how they did it. LOL.
The stuff you do every day has enormous value on Gumroad.
What do you nerd out on? Sell that.
6. The $250K Amazon Developer
Daniel Vassalo has crushed it on Gumroad. He’s done more than $250K in sales of his courses and books.
In an ask me anything, he revealed that 95% of the sales came from his 15K Twitter following at the time. The other 5% came from running ads on Reddit.
It all started with building an audience. Then an Amazon book for developers. Then a course.
The #1 insight I got from Daniel is that all the content for his paid products came from free tweets he published. People paid for it to be presented in a different format and to all be in one place.
I always make fresh content for my paid products — but it’s worth remembering, you don’t have to.
Final Thought
Gumroad is the for the big time and small time creators.
You don’t need to be a genius, or build a perfect product, or learn new skills. Right now, many everyday people are sleeping on Gumroad.
Don’t.
Sales on Gumroad will always be higher than a website or other places because their reinvented affiliate marketing model is built into their platform.
Customers helping other customers find products while they earn money online — is what’s great about the internet.
Take a wild walk down Gumroad and make your first $1000.
It’ll change how you think. Don’t be a sleeper.
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