162: From Domain Name Purchase to $100K in Revenue and 16K Email Subscribers

Hi there.

Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my Digital Product Accelerator one on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you be bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan that tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable freedom giving business you dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business. Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of Digital Product Entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners craft robust growth strategies that combine the magical world of digital products and selling them via automated funnels and savvy e commerce practices. Join me as I unravel the secrets to boosting the digital product revenue and designing long term business growth. From exclusive interviews with industry leaders to in depth analysis of successful digital product models, this podcast is your guide to thriving in the digital product marketplace. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Hey there Destiny Here. And in this podcast episode I want to walk you through how I purchased a domain name on a whim and turned it into a thriving digital product business in less than two years with over 16,000 email subscribers and over 100,000 in revenue. So I want to take this opportunity and walk you through the the strategies that worked for me. And I'm also going to talk about.

Some that didn't work.

So you know the exact steps I took to grow this brand. Now, for those of you who don't know me, or maybe you're new to turning in to this podcast, My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I'm a college marketing professor turned online entrepreneur. And you know I'm the host of the Creators MBA Podcast because you're listening to it now. And my superpower is helping business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desk constantly live launching or worrying about social media. Now, I have three different digital product brands that I own and manage and one of them is our hello Content shop and that is my Shopify store where we have low cost digital products that online business owners can use in their marketing, they can use them in their online courses, in their memberships. I have my personal brand, which is destinycop.com where I offer one on one coaching services to digital product business owners like you. And then I have my hobby school brand. And that's the brand that I'm going to be talking about today in a little bit more detail. Now today I'm going to be talking about my story in the journey that I have gone through in building this hobby school brand. But before I get into all of that, I have a question for you. Now when you hear the term passive income or the promise of making money while you sleep, I want you to think about what does that mean to you. And I think that many people, they take these phrases at face value or they buy into the hype, but without fully understanding what it requires to build these type of businesses. I know that I did, right, I didn't understand how much would be involved into taking one of these digital product brands and growing them. So what happens is people dive into creating these digital products like online courses. They think it's going to be easy, right? They're going to create it once and they're going to sell it over and over and over again. Because that's what they were told, right? That's what I was told. That's what I thought was going to happen. But when you really dig into it and you kind of pull back the layers, you find out that there's a very different reality out there. And I have noticed that people really fall into one of two categories. And the first category is they might struggle to gain traction. They selling their digital products and there's, they sit back and they wonder, you know, what am I missing? While others seem to thrive doing this, right? They seem to be making a lot of money doing this or they fall into this category where they are constantly doing live launches to keep that revenue flowing. So their days are packed with zoom calls. They might be managing memberships, they might be managing group coaching programs with online courses, or they might be dealing with the demands of huge Facebook group and it really becomes that endless cycle of marketing, posting on social media, worrying about the algorithm and turns in what they thought was going to be a passion project and something that they love into a demanding 60 or more hour work week, even, maybe even working weekends. So in both of these situations, their dream of that flexible, fulfilling business goes away and they start thinking in My mind, right. They start thinking, you know what? That nine to five traditional job is starting to look better every single day. Well, in this episode, I want to tell you about a different story, and I want to show you that it's possible to build a flexible, successful digital product business without any of these headaches that I just described. And I can tell you that I am nothing special. In fact, I'm probably older than most of you who are listening to this. I definitely have active kids at home. I have one in middle school, one in high school, and they both play travel baseball all year round. So we are super, super busy as a family. So I want to go in and tell you about my journey in growing this brand called Hobby School. And I will tell you that I literally purchased this domain name on a whim. So what happened was. And I'll tell you exactly where I was sitting and exactly where I was. We were on vacation in water school in the watercolor, Florida. This was in April of 2021. So we were actually on spring break in April of 2021. And my family, they were still sleeping. I had gotten my coffee. I was sitting at the breakfast table with the rental that we had, and I was just, you know, going around kind of searching on websites. And at that point in time, this is way back before ChatGPT or any of that was out there. I was on a domain name generator website or a business name generator website called namelix. So name Licks L I x dot com. I think it might even still be out there. And I was just playing around with it, and I was like, you know what? I'm interested in hobbies, and I'm wondering if there's any cool names out there related to that that I could do something with. So I came up and it gave me this name, Hobby School and school without AN H. So hobby s c o o l.com and it was a dot com. And I thought, you know, that's perfect. That's exactly what I'm looking for. I think I can do something with this. So I purchased it. Then I went ahead and purchased it. So I had the domain name. I didn't do anything with it in the beginning because I kind of sat on it. I was like, I'm not sure what business model I want to do for this. I had some things in my mind that I was thinking about. I was thinking about my audience. I'm like, you know, a lot of them have courses or memberships. Maybe I could do some type of marketplace or something like that. Where, you know, I have their courses in this marketplace and I help sell them. So I was kind of playing around. I'm like, maybe I could do something like that. But then I decided, you know what? I'm going to try launching this brand with a paid bundle. So I put together the website, I went on the Wayback machine so I could tell you exactly what I had on this website. And one of the, in the hero section of this website, I had the best digital resources bundled into one learning box so you can master your next big thing. So that was my thought process at that point in time. We're going to do paid bundles. We were going to sell them. That was going to be a revenue stream. We're also going to use that to grow our list. So when people, you know, purchase the paid bundle, that will, you know, like I said, we'll grow our, our audience in our email list. And it did fine. We had some really great contributors for this paid bundle, but it really wasn't given me the type of revenue growth and the audience growth that I was looking for at that point in time. We ended up doing two paid bundles and kind of tested it out because, you know, in marketing and if you've been around me for a while, you know, in marketing, I always say, try something, see if it works for you. I'm not against paid bundles. It just wasn't given me the kind of results that I want at that point in time. And then I thought, you know what? I'm going to look at doing a virtual summit for hobby school. Because I had ran virtual summits in my personal brand, the destinycop.com brand. I had run several of them by that time. So I knew how to run an awesome virtual summit. I said, you know what, I think this would be a good business model for hobby school. And that's when we ran our first online virtual summit. We called it the Hobby School Summit Home Guarding and Cooking Edition. And we did that in July of 2022 and it was a huge hit. And we've actually ran that summit two other times since then. We're actually going to be running it again next week. We've changed the name of it. It's called the Harvest A Table Summit. But it has been, you know, one of our, our big hit summits that we've been doing for this brand. And it really gave me the kind of results or gave us the kind of results that we were looking for. So not only were we able to monetize and get, you know, bring in revenue from The VIP past sales. I don't even think at that point in time we had any order bumps. Maybe we did. I don't remember exactly. But, you know, now we have order bumps and we have upsells that are in that funnel. So we can, you know, maximize the revenue coming in. But at that point in time, it gave, you know, we had the revenue coming in from the VIP past sales and any, you know, anything else that was in that funnel. But it also gave us the audience growth. So we started growing our list. So in the rest of 2022 and in 2023, we continue to test what our audience was interested in. Now, some of our events were big hits, others not so much. So we did one that was in, like, the parenting type niche. It was around in August when people were going back to school. So we did like a back to school event. We had some homeschooling stuff in there, and it, you know, it did fine, but it just wasn't one of our big hits. An example of one of our big hits was our art of expression summit, where we, you know, brought in experts that were teaching about art journaling or calligraphy or bullet journaling or maybe even like painting and stuff like that. So that was one of our big, big hits. And we've done some others like that. We had an art of handmade summits where people came in and, you know, taught people how to do handmade items. That was another one of our, our big hits there. So we continue to test and refine that. And then in January of 2024, so less than two years than when we ra first bundle, we have over 16,000 email subscribers, and we've had over a hundred thousand in revenue. I think it's been about 110 in revenue. So that has been our journey there. So I want to talk a little bit about the lessons that I have learned over the past two years in, you know, basically taking a domain name that I purchased on a whim and turn it into this digital product, product, brand. And the first thing I would say is that there is power in collaborations. This would not have been possible without our partners, mainly our speakers. They have been absolutely fantastic in promoting our events, and of course, we've rewarded them. Right. They're getting a lot of leads by speaking at our events, and we also pay them 50% affiliate commission. The other thing I would say is listen to your audience and be willing to pivot fast. We look at all of our data. So paying attention to that data, knowing what's working, what's not working, listening to your audience. We look at our data after every single event. We look and see, you know, what did the registration page convert at, what did the VIP pass convert at? What did the order bump convert at? How about the upsells? You know, how did our speakers promote? How did our affiliates promote? How much money did they make? You know, we get feedback from the attendees, so we do surveys there. We get feedback and do surveys with the speakers to see if it was worthwhile for them to participate in the event. We do a lot of promotion of our speakers in these events to make sure that, you know, participating in that event is worthwhile to them. So pay attention to all of that data. The other thing I've learned is that email list growth is so very important, but also consistency in your marketing. So making sure that you're staying on top of mine with your, you know, your email subscribers once they're on your list. And also, community is a huge part of building a brand that your customers love. We have people in our hobby school summits who attend every single event that we have, and they purchase our VIP pass for every single event. And I never thought that would happen. I'm like, oh, you know, some people are going to be interested in this event, and then they're not going to be interested in this event or, well, we have people that. That are interested in all of that, and we have definitely built a community and we have a Facebook group for hobby school that is a very active Facebook group. And, you know, people feel part of that community. In terms of monetization and future plans for hobby school, we have a lot of things that we're working on. I really only feel that I have touch the tip of the iceberg, if you would, for monetization on this brand. So right now, like I said, we're monetizing the VIP passes and the funnels. We do offer summit sponsorships, so that's another way that we bring in money. We have email sponsorships. So we've had some of our past speakers come to us and say, you know, will you email your list and, you know, promote our workshop that we have coming up? So that's another way that we bring in money. The other thing that we did, and I probably should have mentioned this earlier, the other thing we did at the end of 2023 was we launched a Shopify store for hobby school. So as we have, you know, grown these summits and offered these summits, that's one of the things that we are selling on that store are our VIP Passes without the premium speaker bonuses. So just access to the workshops from the, you know, from the summit. So that's one thing we sell there and we just have digital products like our coloring books are one of our best sellers on this Shopify store. Who would have figured? The other thing that we're doing and will continue to do in the future are affiliate programs. So we know that our audience, they love events particular, they love events related to hobbies. So if we ever find an event that doesn't conflict or with one of the events that we are promoting, we definitely will look into doing that. So I would say in 2024, some of the things that I'm focusing on for hobby school, one of them is Pinterest and connecting that to our Shopify store, adding additional products to the store and really building up that organic traffic going into the Shopify store. So it's something we're going to be working on and adding additional products to that still. Continue to look at other affiliate programs that we can promote and really expanding and promoting our VIP spots for the summits and our email sponsorships. So we definitely have some things that we're working on and additional ways that we can monetize that brand. So I would say, if you're thinking destiny, what are your biggest, biggest tips? If you were going to be growing something like this from scratch and you really wanted to focus on growing your email list, which I think all digital product creators need to be focused on that constantly. It should be one of the main things that you have to focus on in terms of marketing in your business. And I would say focus on visibility. This might be speaking in events, so not necessarily hosting your own summit, but maybe speaking in events like what we have in hobby school. You can do this in live events or virtual events. Guest podcasting. I do a lot of guest podcasting and have done a lot over the years. Don't do as much now, but when I have the opportunity, I definitely do that and participating in bundles. So that's another thing that we're considering that we might test out in hobby school is participating in a bundles. Now, I prefer the free ones for list growth, but when you get a big email list like what we have in hobby school, it might be time for me to go back in and test out those paid bundles again that we actually started with at the beginning of this. But if you're really focused on list growth, I would look at participating in a free bundle. And if you do participate in a bundle or in a summit, do your part in promoting that event because you want to make sure that, you know, you are doing what you need to do to get the, get the word out there, because that will definitely help you. But also that host and the other speakers, you know, they've put a lot of work into this particular event and you want to make sure that you are promoting it. And then once people get on your list, make sure you're nurturing them and, you know, continually emailing them, nurture them and selling to them. Don't forget to sell to them because you, you know, that's what you're in business for. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. I really just wanted to take you on that journey that I or kind of walk you through that journ that I have been on for the past two years and what I did in hobby school to get to where I am today. If you have any questions whatsoever, feel free to DM me on Instagram, say that you listen to this episode or you can contact me on Voxer. I'm on Voxer 2 at Essinycop. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions that you have and just, just say hi. Now, one of the things I just want to mention, if you want to delve a little bit deeper into my strategies and what I have done to set up these flexible, successful digital product businesses, even without the need to be glued to your desk or constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms, I want you to sign up for my private podcast feed, which is, which I call my freedom formula. It's destinycop.com forward slash, freedom. Sign up for it. I really want to kind of expand on how we have set up these virtual summits. So these virtual summits that I talked about in hobby school, they're not live launching. I have everything set up so that it's prerecorded. Everything in terms of the emails and everything that we're doing. I don't have to worry about being at a webinar at 8, 8pm at night while I need to be at a baseball game with my kids. So I want to just go into a little bit more detail about how you can generate that consistent revenue from these digital product businesses without the need to be glued to your desk constantly live launching or worrying about social media. Again, reach out if you have any questions. I hope you enjoyed this episode and bye for now.

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