I Set a $150k Sales Goal This Black Friday. But Did I Hit It?

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Black Friday 2022 was my highest income month of the year, where I made my first $26.5k in 30 days (2.5x my best month prior!). So I had high hopes for Black Friday 2023 and set myself quite the high goal.

I decided to aim for $150k USD in sales this Black Friday.

I didn’t want it to include any other income from affiliates, ads, or sponsors. This was to be purely from digital products.

I was so confident that I would hit it, that I custom coded a plugin to live share my digital product income on my Black Friday sales page.

Pretty cocky right?

But you don’t care about my delusional confidence. You just want to know if I made $150k in 30 days.

And the answer is…

My Black Friday 2023 Income Report

Total Digital Product Sales = $43,081.30 USD

… womp womp!

I didn’t even get 1/3 of the way to my goal – however I did make over $50k when you combine all of my income sources, and if you combined all of my sites’ income.

(Note, this is already excluding affiliate payouts.)

What I Sold

In case you weren’t around for Black Friday, here’s what I sold:

Nov 1 – 10th: Profitable Part-Time Blogger (formerly SEO Roadmap) for $997

Nov 11 – 17th: 10 Custom Keywords for $200

Nov 18th to 24th: AI Bundle for $297 (all my AI courses)

Nov 25 to Dec 1st: Backlink Bundle for $147 (all of my guest posting/DA building courses)

What Went Right?

I’m not here complaining that I made $43k.

My monthly income across the board was over double what I made last year in November so I’m chuffed!

But I can’t say I’m not disappointed I didn’t hit $150k. That would have been a sweet accomplishment.

Still, I made a lot of money and a lot of sales so I want to talk about what went right for me to get to this point.

1. I Know My Audiences Pain Points

I listened to my audience all year to figure out what they were most struggling with.

I’ve been helping them on it in every email I send and post I publish to ensure they know I can help them. And I even asked them exactly what they wanted me to offer them for Black Friday.

2. I Warned My Audience

So many companies and bloggers didn’t warn their students/clients about their sales.

I guess they think a surprise sale will do better. But when I had my first $100k month, I teased that price increase for 6 weeks – even giving them a specific deadline for the last 3.

I think an informed buyer is much more beneficial and can make decisions they’ll be able to actually act on.

3. I Set Up Opt Ins / Outs

I emailed my audience over 15k words in November. Most of that was sales emails.

And I knew some people would hate me for it.

So I gave all of my audience the option to opt out of receiving my promos for my courses. And not many did! We had less than 3% of my audience decide they didn’t want to hear about my promos that month.

But the ones that opted out would almost certainly have left my list after the 3rd week of non stop promos – I know I would have when all that Black Friday onslaught was hitting.

I put my audience first and I don’t believe it lost me anything. Let’s be real, they don’t want to buy it if they don’t want to hear about it.

4. I Hyped Results

Most sales I saw were hyping the discount, but I hyped the value of what I teach.

Sure, I also talked about saving money.

But I wanted to show that what I teach matters and helps people. I never want to sell a course that isn’t beneficial to my students. That’s just stealing money then, and I’m not about that.

My emails shared tips they could test out along the way to see that what I teach actually helps them. It’s the Costco free sample policy: try before you buy.

5. I Have Client Reviews

I definitely think selling a course is easier when you have people hyping you.

Many of my email list and audience have taken at least 1 of my paid courses – since they start at $7, there’s a low barrier to entry. And most buy at least 5 courses from me within the first 18 months.

So they already know I’m good at what I do, and I create epic and actionable courses.

But for newbies, they need reassurance. Thankfully, I have an amazing client-base who share reviews and testimonials about working with me. I’m able to share those with new clients – because let’s be real, we’re more likely to believe someone who didn’t make the thing.

Other Things I Think Went Right:

My list is over 10x what it was last year (I think I was at 300 people then, I was at 5,000 for Black Friday after opt-outs)
I have better sales pages than last year
I showed up across socials every day and had more consistent promotions
I answered questions via email and socials (usually I only answer questions in my free FB group so everyone can learn together)
My 7 day refund policy for the Profitable Part-Time Blogger allowed people to try it without fear

What Went Wrong?

Now things obviously went wrong to prevent me from hitting my goal. And some of them are not circumstantial, they’re 100% my fault.

1. I Did Too Much

If you read my report from last year, you’ll notice I wish I had just focused on one offer for the sale.

… and what did I do this year??

I got greedy and decided offering 4 things over 4 weeks would make me more money.

2 things sold well, and 2 did not. So I really wasted a bunch of time on 2 of the things considering how long all that promo took.

And it took away my energy from promoting my other offerings.

I also, once again, spent way too much time trying to promote affiliates which did not convert very well for me. They made me a couple thousand dollars, but not nearly as much as I’d mentally banked on (I had set a $10k goal mentally for no real reason).

Considering affiliate sales plummeted in October, it basically just evened it out across the two months.

2. SEO is Dead

That was the most popular sentence in my inbox in November – from newsletters and as replies from potential students.

Everyone was terrified that post HCU, SEO doesn’t exist anymore (spoiler alert: it still does. It’s just different).

But that made it particularly hard to hype services directly related to SEO when everyone was feeling really disheartened by SEO.

Considering my sale in June made over $50k in a single day, I am pretty sure the lack of SEO hype was a big part of the downtick in sales – especially of the Profitable Part-Time Blogger.

3. Not in This Economy

The economy is in the toilet. Spending money on anything besides food – which has already like tripled in prices – is hard.

Risking that money on a strategy you’re afraid is vanishing because SEO is dead (again, it’s not) makes no sense.

I totally understand why people struggled with making expensive decisions this year. Since my main course was priced at almost $1k, and I decided to not offer the payment plan for the sale, it was harder for people to manage it financially.

Now why did I decide not to offer a payment plan? I got sooo many angry emails about this so I want to share my reasoning.

Payment plans suck.

Simple as that. They take 2x as much time and effort to manage. The main reason I hired my VA was for the hassle of rebilling issues people have when a payment method gets declined for some reason, someone decides they don’t want to pay anymore so they try to just cancel their “subscription” (if you aren’t aware, that’s not how payment plans work), or use a payment plan to try to steal my content for cheaper (the amount of cease and desist letters I had to send this year for people doing this was in the double digits! Wtf??)

It’s a lot of admin I didn’t want to deal with.

And honestly if people are struggling financially, I don’t want them spending even more on my course – cause payment plans always cost more than a flat out fee.

I have to charge more to safeguard against things like I just mentioned and to cover my VA costs managing these issues, so I felt not right charging people extra for not being able to pay all in one go.

I don’t want to add to economic issues in this climate, so I’d rather those people save their money or invest it in a high interest savings account until such time that they can afford the course.

4. I Didn’t Support My Affiliates

I had under 5 affiliate sales for the whole month – which is less than I usually have in a normal month.

I tried to support my affiliates by letting them know ahead of time of the sales, but was otherwise so focused on my own promotions that I let them fall by the wayside.

Other people, like Liz Wilcox, did tag team interviews with their affiliates, they offered swipe copy and graphics, or they set up support groups to encourage them.

I did none of that.

Now, I don’t make a ton on affiliate sales since I mostly teach travel bloggers who don’t have niche site audiences. It’s usually people recommending me to their other blogger friends, so it’s a less common occurrence.

And I probably should have done more outreach in October to try to fix this by connecting with niche site owners who may want to become an affiliate.

My current rule is that someone needs to have taken my courses to be an affiliate for them so they can accurately represent it. But I know most people don’t do that, so in the New Year I may need to consider trying out some partnerships.

5. Discount Codes < Bonuses

Discount codes were the way I thought I should go with Black Friday.

My other idea was an Everything Offer like Elizabeth Goddard did, where all her stuff was bundled together.

I didn’t love the idea of just a % discount across all my items since they’re so wildly different in prices.

Last year, I offered 25 custom keywords with a purchase of the Profitable Part-Time Blogger rather than a discount. That went over like gangbusters, but left me beyond burnt out in December when I needed to do a ton of keyword packages (and this was before I had my new onboarding system so there were a lot of communication issues with clients about deadlines, etc.).

I knew I didn’t want to do any 1:1 elements with the Profitable Part-Time Blogger this year – my team did my 1:1 offerings for me when I had them this year.

But it probably would have converted better with them. In fact, I got a couple very angry emails about how mad they were that I didn’t have a bundle offer of some sort.

While I went with what the crowd picked when I ran some polls, I also thought a discount would go over better. But maybe I was wrong.

6. I Didn’t Answer Some Questions

One of my policies is not to compare my courses to other courses.

I haven’t taken most other courses out of respect. I don’t want to copy them or step on any toes. Even the ones I took before I started my own SEO success journey, I have logged out of and ignored new updates.

I understand why people ask me – especially about how my course stacks up against it – since they don’t want to pay for something they already know.

I of course answered the questions, but I’m sure people wanted me to break things down more.

Of the students who asked me this question, only about 40% converted to sales.

7. Refund Policy Blues

I have a refund policy and I stand by it.

The Profitable Part-Time Blogger is the only refundable product and you get 2 weeks usually – 7 days for sales – to try it risk free or you can return it.

We had the most returns we’ve ever had in a month – which to be fair was about 5, so not bad at all. And the main reason cited by 4/5 (the 5th declined to give a reason) was about financial stress and how they needed to buy things for the holidays.

Most course owners with refund policies require clients to go through a certain % of a course, prove they did some amount of work, etc. before they’ll offer the refund. I don’t do that so I know this is a risk.

I obviously don’t love people buying something I poured my heart and soul into just to refund it because they knew they couldn’t afford it, but I equally understand that these things happen and I knew it was a risk going in.

But I also don’t think I’d have made a couple of the sales that stuck if they hadn’t been able to try the product before buying. So I think it ultimately is still worth it.

P.S. Please don’t buy it and just return it to abuse the system. I will stop offering refund policies and it’ll ruin it for everyone if it’s abused.

What Will I Do Next Year?

I’d love to say I’ll be smarter and just offer the Profitable Part-Time Blogger – or notice if the SEO climate isn’t great and focus on another offer like my AI courses.

But I think I may actually skip Black Friday all together.

It was exhausting and took up all of my October and November. I turned down a ton of gigs to do my set ups, and with my health being bad (I definitely think that played in a bit too, but it’s not a replicable thing for y’all so I left it out of the post above), it really cost me a lot of working hours.

My travel blog traffic plummeted as a result of a half assed test I did, an affiliate program that’s in my top 3 earners closed unexpectedly and I didn’t even notice till this week because of how busy I’ve been, and I completely abandoned my other sites. So I hindered income across the board doing this.

Considering my best month this year was in June – not a month I’ve ever seen hyped for its sales – I feel like tying all my eggs to Black Friday just isn’t worth it.

And I definitely think it’s not worth it for all the affiliate work I did to try to hunt down the best deals. In the end, what sold the best were my top 3 normal affiliates anyway who were easy to hype.

How did you find your November income versus other months this year, or other Novembers? Share your thoughts in my free Facebook Group, SEO for Travel Bloggers!