I’m writing this one straight from my heart, because it’s something I’m truly, truly passionate about.
Let me get right into this. Would you rather start every single month at zero and work your way back up to $5k, $10k, $30k, over and over, forever? Or would you rather start every month with $5k, $10k, $30k already secured, and everything else you earn that month simply builds on top of that base?
For me, it’s the latter. Obviously.
For three and a half years now, I’ve been sharing affiliate offers, courses, digital products, all of it. Starting every single month from zero. Granted, it’s been mostly reliable. But there’s been one piece I’ve missed from network marketing, from when I first came into this online space. And that was the repeat income I’d built there.
That, in my opinion, is the biggest flaw when it comes to digital products and most affiliate marketing offers. The lack of residual income. And that ugly flaw showed itself so blatantly when I lost my 262k Instagram account and my 26k Facebook account, on my kids’ last day of school this year.
My income was only ever as good as the leads I was consistently bringing in. There are so many ways to make money online, and digital products are an incredible one, same with affiliate marketing. But your conversion is only as good as the leads you’re bringing in. Your leads stop, your conversion stops. It really is that simple, and that unforgiving.
Social media is a great free platform. But it’s not yours. To be so confident in its ability to generate you income forever, without ever owning a piece of it, is a poor business decision. I know that now in a way I didn’t fully know it before.
Back in 2021, when I was thinking about my great escape from network marketing, I actually tried this once already. I was going to start a blog, I even had a name for it, The Ashley Actual. I got a Wix account, a Bluehost account, all sorts of things I’m still not sure I said right at the time. It was so confusing. I had no idea how bloggers were even getting paid, I just knew I could write about so much. I thought it was my next big move, until I realized how long it was going to take to build an established blog as a beginner who had no idea what she was doing. I didn’t have the time, so I cancelled everything I’d started. I think about that a lot now. If I’d known what Substack was back then, maybe things would’ve been different. Or maybe I had zero marketing experience at the time and it wouldn’t have gone anywhere regardless. I’ll never fully know.
Let’s bring it back to now. It’s the first day of summer. My accounts are gone. I have three kids home, five and under, for the entire summer, and I have to pivot. Substack gets presented to me days later, completely by accident. Substack is like social media and a blog had a baby, and I am obsessed.
Here’s what I actually want to hand you in this article, not just the story, the real math on what a digital product actually pays versus what a Substack actually pays, what I’d build if I lost everything again tomorrow, and the exact prompts to start building your own version, whether you’re starting from zero or already have a business behind you.
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