I want wealth more than fame. And I have made over $115M online without being well known.
Most people think they need millions of views before they can sell anything. They do not. My first videos got almost no views, and I was already making sales.
Here is exactly how I did it, step by step.
Subscriber count is fool’s gold
My first fitness program sold before I had a brand or an audience. I did not wait for followers. I went and found buyers.
First I messaged people who had liked, commented on or followed me. Then I joined fitness Facebook groups and started conversations. I also studied famous influencers’ follower lists and messaged those followers.
I made my first $10,000 month with under 1,000 followers. Followers help, but they are not required. Focus on buyers, not vanity metrics.
Go ultra specific
The riches are in the niches. My path went in three stages:
- Fitness. I helped people lose weight with a custom program. The positioning was simple: eat what you want without sabotaging your results.
- Trainers. Trainers started asking how I did it, so I moved to helping trainers make $10K a month. I made $1M in a year in fitness, then about $10M in the trainer market.
- Business consulting. Only then did I go broader.
Become king of your pond first, then expand. Pick one avatar and one painful problem.
Build trust with free content, ads, or both
I ran a lot of ads early and I still do. Ads are about 60% of my expenses. Organic content can offset those costs and build a brand, but running only ads builds very little brand. The best mix is to attract organic traffic and then retarget it with ads.
For organic, three things matter:
- Show proof. Testimonials, before and afters, transformations.
- Hit one pain point per piece. In fitness that was losing weight while eating normally.
- Teach the what and the why, then sell the how.
Content alone does not sell. Always tell people the next step. One client found me through a post asking people to comment a keyword to get a spot in a group about losing 20 lbs in 5 weeks. They did not book right away. A follow up post invited people to DM me, and that is when they reached out.
People rarely click a bio link and buy on their own. You usually have to reach out and show interest first. Then match the offer to how warm the traffic is:
- Cold: free guides or content to build trust.
- Warm: a free training or webinar.
- Hot: book a call or DM a keyword.
Sell the transformation, not the tactics
Nobody cares about 12 weeks of coaching or a custom meal plan. They want to lose the fat and feel attractive again. Trainers do not buy funnels. They buy freedom, income and a way out of their 9 to 5.
I build every offer on three pillars:
- The offer. Do not be a commodity. A trainer charging $50 to $100 an hour in person is a commodity. An online program at $3,000 to $4,000 can work when it delivers a lifestyle change.
- The conversion conversation system. Webinars can fail and burn $20K to $30K. My alternative is follow up through texts, emails, voicemails and retargeting ads. That raised conversions by over 70%.
- The process. How to choose who to work with, based on experience, specificity and attention. Would you rather have Bill Gates for 5 minutes or Bill Gates’s team for 4 hours? I would take the team.
People buy the destination, not the features.
Build your first high ticket offer with no tech
My first offer was a $3,200, four month fitness program. No funnel. No automations. No email or text sequences.
The process was outreach, then the prospect booked a call on Calendly (later Elite 360), then I sold on the phone. Delivery was an Excel spreadsheet with macros, calories and workouts, plus support on Zoom or FaceTime. It looked unprofessional. It worked.
- Focus on one major transformation.
- Price by outcome, not by time. My pitch was “pay once instead of paying monthly forever.”
- Record your coaching sessions and turn them into curriculum later.
Sell before you build. Avoid the Shark Tank model of borrowing heavily to build a product nobody has validated. For information products, sell first, then deliver within 24 to 72 hours. Spend three months building something you cannot sell and you will probably quit.
Track the numbers that make money
Do not track likes or followers. Track leads, daily messages, booked calls and sales. My tracking sheet covers spend, profile views, boosted post reach, follows, leads, inbound conversations, outbound replies, invites, calls booked, appointments, shows and sales.
Benchmarks I use:
- Cold outreach: about 100 DMs a day, 10% reply, 3 calls booked, 1 close. Miss these and you have a messaging, sales or offer problem.
- Boosted posts: about $1 to $2 per follower. 500 followers, 30% reply (150), 10% book (15), close 3 to 4.
Stop acting like a creator and think like a CEO. Experts solve problems. Creators chase attention. Speak to your ideal client’s pain, build trust with results, and aim to impact rather than impress.
Paid traffic is the growth engine
I have spent about $30M on paid ads. Organic works too, but most people I help have no organic traction, so they need ads aimed at strangers.
Start simple. Short form video ads that link to a booking page, or simple image ads. Use proof based creative like client results. Test constantly, beat the control, track your numbers and scale what works.
The takeaway
You do not need to go viral. You need a specific niche, a transformation people will pay for, real conversations with buyers and numbers you actually track. I am going back to organic now to build the brand, but the sales came first.
Want to know what’s really capping your sales right now? Take my free 90 Day Ceiling Plan. Answer 18 questions and get a written plan, built on your own numbers, that names the one thing holding you back and what to fix first.
