7 Lessons I learned After Making $12,985 From My Small Writing Business

The good. The bad. The lies. The lessons.

In the past 3 months, I had 6 launches.

That's an average of one launch every 2 weeks.

The goal behind it?

Get good at sales emails.

Just 5 months ago, I didn’t even know what a sales email even was.

So I'm far from being an expert at email marketing or copywriting. After all, I'm a graduate student who's building a writing business on the side.

But I'm happy to say that I've gotten much better at sales emails (at least that's what my readers and expert copywriters are telling me).

However, before I tell you the lessons, here's a breakdown of the $12,985

• The Modern Creator Cohort (launch 1) = $3,750

• The Modern Creator Cohort (launch 2) = $3,000

• 1-on-1 coaching = $2,500

• Workshops = $2,749

• Ghostwriting = $750

• Productize Your Knowledge (affiliate) = $236

So without further ado… here are the 7 lessons I learned:

1) Email is King

My email list is 1/10th the size of my audience on social media.

(2,000+ readers compared to my 22,000+ followers on social media)

But 90% of my revenue came from my email list.

See? size doesn't always matter…

Now, you might be wondering why am I selling on email and not social media, or sales call, or DMs?

3 reasons why:

1. On social media, only about 1% of your audience actually gets to see your content. But with emails, almost 40% of people get to see your content.

2. I have an extremely low social battery. So getting on sales calls with people just leaves me exhausted afterwards — just last week, I had 3 back to back calls with clients, and I was tired for the rest of the day.

3. I also don't like wasting hours of my time pestering and begging people in the DMs hoping for someone to decide to work with me.

This is why I built my entire writing business around NOT doing them.

Which is why I love emails so much. You get to write about topics you love, you invite your readers to invest, and if you did a good job, you make a sale.

You save time, you have higher leverage (1 email can lead to 10+ sales).

The most valuable asset you have in your business is your email list.

2) The Low-Ticket Lie

All most all of the big creators sell preach about low ticket products.

"Create a $150 course and sell it. It's passive income"

Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of courses and low-ticket $100 workshops. They're a great way to build trust and relationships with your readers.

You get to show them that you know what you're doing and you're someone worth investing in.

But 71% of my revenue came from selling my higher-ticket offers — group coaching or 1-on-1 coaching.

The only way I can see you can make low-ticket offers work is if you have a lot of traffic coming in (i.e. you have millions of followers, a huge email list, or are running paid ads).

3) Aspirational Hourly Rate

Earlier this year, I read a concept from Naval Ravikant and it blew my mind:

Aspirational Personal Hourly Rate.

In short, you decide how much your hour is worth.

At the beginning of this year, I was making around $40/hour from my writing business.

So when I decided to set my hourly rate, I set it at $200/hour.

Why?

I don't know. All I knew is that it made me feel scared and if somehow I could pull it off, then I must be doing something right.

I increased my private coaching prices from $750/month → $1,250/month.

I also created "lower-leverage" offers — group coaching — $750 for 5 calls.

This allows you to serve more people at scale while working less.

But after setting my $200/hour aspirational hourly rate… I forgot about it. But my subconscious mind was always working on achieving that goal — after just 2 months, I reached it — now, I am ~$325/hour.

Writing this makes me realize that I should increase my hourly rate to $425/hour…

So you'd like to work with me closely to help you build an audience and gain more readers towards your business and writing…

Now is the time to take advantage of it.

I'm increasing my prices on July 17th from $1,250/month to $1,675/month.

Build your audience today.

4) You Need To Learn This Skill — Marketing

Most people see marketing and sales as evil.

Perhaps they've had a bad experience before or that's just the idea they have from all the shows and movies they've watched.

I've certainly had the same perception of them.

But recently, I realized how wrong I was.

Marketing and sales are spiritual.

If you're a good person, you need to learn how to market and sell.

Otherwise, how will you help other people if you can't convince them to buy your products?

Now, I don't want to get into too much depth here because I'm already working on another newsletter called "Sales & Money is Spiritual."

But the reason why you need to learn marketing as a fundamental skill for your life is because it is the skill that puts you in the best possible place to help others.

It's how you make others aware of their problems and the solutions that exist.

And if you want to turn your passion into profits, you must learn how to hunt for yourself — build, promote, and sell your own products — not relying on your boss to do the selling for you and pay you pennies in return.

All the successful writers, creators, and entrepreneurs that are making $50k-$100k/month I've met this year, all of them, by no exception, have nailed their marketing.

Marketing and nailing my launches is what helped me go from getting paid $40/hour to $300+/hour

Marketing is what separates starving artists from thriving artists.

5) Business Growth = Personal Growth

In my last workshop, the software I was using to sell, Stan, stopped working just 3 hours before the deadline.

I didn't know this at the time. So I went on with my normal schedule, delivered the workshop, people loved it, and I went to sleep.

But I woke up the next day to 5 emails from people telling me how they couldn't join because the website stopped working.

That's $500 lost…

If this was 12 months ago, I would've been upset about it for the next 2-3 months.

But this time?

I laughed it off.

My reaction was: "This would make for a really good story."

I was so surprised by my reaction that I even told my mentor about it. I saw it as a win. I was glad that I lost on that $500. Because it made me realize that I don't even blink or care about a $500 sale anymore.

It showed me how much personal growth you can have from running a writing business.

Who cares about losing $500 when your business can make you $500k?

6) Passion Projects

A launch requires a lot of effort.

Doing one every 2 weeks is exhausting. After my 5th launch I was starting to burn out.

Yes, writing sales emails are fun, I was laughing at my own jokes when I was writing them, but it's the creative energy it demands that's exhausting.

And if you don't have the right systems in place, you could easily run yourself into burnout.

But one good thing I had was having passion projects. Projects where I get to write and explore my ideas without having to worry if it'll lead to a sale or not. Writing these weekly newsletters are my passion projects.

When you get to do something for the sake of enjoying it (not because you want to get a sale or leads for your business), it energizes, it fills you with excitement and motivation to keep going.

So a habit I had during my launches was to write down the ideas that excite me or caught my attention.

Now, whenever you're struggling to find an idea you write about, you can just open your folder of ideas and see it filled to the brim.

It makes the writing process much easier.

7) Things Will Always Go Wrong

Like I said, at my last workshop, some people couldn't join because my software stopped working 3 hours before the deadline.

But in almost every launch something went wrong.

I'd send the wrong emails. I forgot to put the correct links. Emails are going out at the wrong times. Sending too few emails. Typos… A LOT OF TYPOS…

But that's all part of the learning curve.

With every launch, you learn something new and you improve.

The process of running a launch became faster, more enjoyable, made me more money, and most importantly, people liked reading them.

I even started getting emails from people saying: "How can I write emails like you?"

Which made me think, if I should run a small group coaching where I help you write emails like me.

Emails that build your relationships, revenue, and reputation with your readers.

Because I know what it feels like to have great ideas but not have anyone reading them or feel like what you're writing has no impact.

So do me a favor…

If you'd be interested in joining a 4-week exclusive group coaching where you get to discover how to write engaging sales emails (that don't feel sleazy)…

Reply to me with your biggest problem and what you're hoping to achieve with your emails (i.e. make more money, build an audience, start writing in your voice, etc).

The more detailed your answers are, the better I can serve you.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

- Hussain

P.S.

Gentle reminder:

I'll be increasing my 1-on-1 mentorship on July 17th from $1,250/month to $1,675/month.

If you'd like to build an audience, your emails, and turn your passion into profit.

Now is the time to join.

Start building a loyal audience today.