How to Make $6k on a Digital Product Flash Sale

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It’s the dream of anyone working a 9 to 5 that they hate to get out of there ASAP! But that takes money – money most of us have 0 idea how to get.

In 2022, I ran 3 flash sales. My first made over $5k in 2 weeks, my 2nd made over $6k in 3 days! My 3rd made me my first $25k/mo!

So I’m kind of obsessed with flash sales now and have continued to run them when I launch products or have discounts. I’m going to teach you my exact recipe for success – first shared as an email to my list in November 2022 after my 2nd sale, but updated with my newer strategies for 2024.

To clarify, I’ve maintained date references from the original email. So “last year” refers to November 2021.

Let’s get you ready to flash into riches!

How My Flash Sale Went

HOLY COW!

I never expected the Jasper flash sale to perform like that but you have blown my socks clean out of the house!!

This time last year, I was ready to throw in the towel.

I was living in downtown Ottawa with a teenage puppy, making less than $500 a month on my blog (closer to $100 most months), and ready to pack it in and go back to law school (ew!).

This weekend, I made more in a WEEKEND than I did in my first 4 years as a blogger.

WHAT??!

If you weren’t keeping up, on Friday I launched a 3 day flash sale of my Jasper.ai Course for Bloggers.

People have been asking me to do this course since January and I finally got over my imposter syndrome enough and find the time to record it.

Essentially the breakdown was: $47 course for 3 days of promotion, then the price would rise (it’s now $147).

The result: I sold $6,199.80 USD (about $8,515 CAD) worth of courses in 3 days.

This was 95% Jasper, and then some upsells for my guest posting kit and SEO spreadsheets.

How the heck did I do it??

Great question!

I want to break it down for you so you can do the same – cause really it wasn’t anything top secret.

Recipe for Success:

Step 1) Listen to your audience.

Last year, I started using Jasper.ai.

I talked about it kind of constantly in my blogging groups and accidentally started influencing people to join it. I just genuinely was obsessed with this platform.

I noticed people were struggling with it and they’d often ask me for tips and tricks.

That’s legit all it took for me to be like “hey, I should build a course around this.”

Step 2) Actually record the course

This sounds simple but it’s oddly hard to start building courses when you haven’t done it before.

I have, and even then I had hardcore imposter syndrome.

I’d sit at my laptop with Jasper having just written 10 affiliate articles that week that were already bringing money.

But I would think “no, I don’t know enough. I’m not enough of an expert”.

If y’all are in the course (or read any of the comments I got on Facebook – which I’ll share below) you’ll know that was incredibly incorrect and my anxious brain was in the driver’s seat.

Step 3) Test it

I don’t love beta testing.

It’s where you get people to try out the course before you sell it.

Sometimes you offer it for free and other times you offer it at a lower price.

When I’ve done free beta testing for other people, I don’t feel invested in doing the course tbh.

Also, I’ve got the thinnest skin and I know that opening myself up to people who would never actually pay for a course from me to critique me would end up with me booking 10 therapy sessions for the next day.

And how the heck can I afford all that therapy if I’m not accepting payment???

Instead, I like to beta test with 1-2 individuals at a time. These are usually blogging friends who have specifically asked for help somewhere along the way.

Or I post in FB groups and answer questions, and use the reactions to my answers to guage how they feel about my expertise.

(Side note: I fricken love FB groups. I know they’re old school or whatever, but they’re how I grew my SEO business to 5 figures a month without more than a homepage! I highly recommend commenting helpfully in any and every FB group there is related to your niche or blogging!!)

Step 4) Have a support system

I’ve made the BEST blogging friends over the years.

And without them, I’d be sitting in a cubicle at some downtown law firm feeling absolutely miserable.

Non-blogging friends are fine, but they don’t get it.

You need someone who does. Who can encourage you along the way, give feedback on sales pages, and tell you to get your shit together when you’re randomly panicking over nonsense.

Two of my friends talked me off a cliff when I was like “my free Jasper commands ebook needs to be only 1 page!! I’ve ruined it!!”

They were like … Nina what is happening? It’s great. Publish it now.

So I did!

Step 5) Make a sales page

Now we’re getting into the actual launch.

Once you have a product of any sort and any price, you NEED a sales page.

Mine had two iterations: 1) a waitlist page and 2) a sales page.

I only did the waitlist because I knew I’d be speaking at Travel Blog Summit Denver and promoting the course.

BUT I had an anxiety attack the week before I left (when I’d planned to launch the course the first time) so I needed a stop-gap.

Since I got 50 waitlist-ees from the event, I’m super glad I did it.

Your sales page doesn’t need to be perfect!!

That’s something a lot of us struggle with (it’s what kept me from writing affiliate posts for YEARS).

I used a super simple outline from Liz Wilcox (you’ll see her name a couple times in this email!!).

Her Sales Page Training includes a 2 hour video walkthrough of the outline where you write it with a recording of her.

It helped SO MUCH!!

Step 6) Keep it simple!

This kind of applies above to sales pages and recording the course.

YOU DO NOT NEED FANCY STUFF TO LAUNCH!

When I launched the SEO Roadmap back in June, I got terrible advice from a coach to buy a mic, a webcam, the latest software for every recording platform, to use Elementor (ew!), and to set prices I wasn’t comfortable with.

Literally none of that was true.

Same goes with the sales page!

I made mine with Kadence blocks for this round, didn’t include anything fancy on it with animations or tons of pictures, and it converted like CRAZY.

Step 7) Flash sale 101

Everything I know about Flash Sales comes thanks to Liz Wilcox’s Email Marketing Membership.

You may remember me promoting it back in the summer when she hosted a flash sale to sell annual passes to the membership.

She made over $30k in a few days with that flash sale!!

While I intended to launch the Jasper course normally, I got carried away with my creation and added a bunch of extra valuable modules to it on product creation, email list growth, writing affiliate posts and MORE!

I realized I couldn’t price it at $47 as I’d intended for all I’d put into it. BUT I wanted to reward the people who had waited a month (or almost a year in some cases) for the course.

So I decided to use her model.

She outlines her flash sale technique AND provides email templates (that’s how I wrote the emails I sent to y’all from Friday to Sunday) to help you get it done.

Those emails saved me SO much time. I would have written crazy long emails otherwise because 1) I’m long winded as a person and 2) I always feel like I need to include EVERYTHING about the course in every single email.

If you’re considering launching a product or bettering your email marketing, I HIGHLY recommend Liz’s $9 a month email membership.

Step 8) Reduce, Reuse Recycle

Share the same message across all your platforms!

Yes, you will have people on FB see the same thing as your email.

Or your Instagram stories will sound similar to your email.

THAT’S OK!

It saves you a ton of time, and everyone has a favourite platform so they’re not likely to focus on the others.

Your diehard fans won’t care that it’s the same message everywhere.

Step 9) Keep Promoting

This one comes from the amazing Aisha Preece.

She taught me how to sell a live masterclass (and thanks to her methods it sold out!)

One thing that I had really been struggling with was seeing sales. And she told me to keep promoting it.

I didn’t want to bother anyone. She told me to get on my stories and put it out there – cause unlike my phone-addicted butt, other people aren’t always checking in daily.

And people learn/buy differently.

Between her teachings and Tarzan Kay’s colour coded copy tips, I realized I do need to show up daily.

Anyone who is bothered isn’t my ideal customer, so good riddance if they unsubscribe or unfollow!

Aisha also taught me the trick of adding in a question box on my Instagram stories so people can openly share their worries and I can address them.

Finally, Aisha taught me the power of voice notes.

If you have DMed me on Insta, there’s a 75% chance you got a voice note response.

This is 1) more personal and 2) saves me time when I’m trying to reply while walking Theo.

(I also have crushed nerves in my arms so it’s hard for me to type on a phone. This tip actually really helps with my pain management – which Aisha had no idea about when she suggested it.)

Step 10) Get affiliates

I actually skipped this step this time.

Not on purpose – I’m just kind of crap at planning ahead (I literally moved to New Zealand when I found a $200 flight and just bailed on law school).

So I emailed my existing affiliates the night before which definitely wasn’t enough time for them to prepare.

Liz really credited her $30k flash sale to her affiliates so I’m sure this would have helped even more.

Next time I’ll work harder on this.

Step 11) Create raving fans

How??

Provide 10x the quality you promise.

A lot of people who bought the course did so because they know me. I only had a few newbies from Twitter, but the rest of my buyers were already community members.

They’ve seen my info-rich emails. They’ve attended my free webinars. They went to my masterclass. They read. my FB posts and watch my lives. They watch my stories and send me DMs.

And I treat every single one of them like a best friend who I want to succeed.

So they know I’m 1) really good at what I do, 2) not going to offer some thin content just because it’s $47, and 3) they know I’m not some scammer.

(Yes, this is harder to do if you have 0 list and no followers. But this list was started in December and we’ve already grown to over 500 people!)

I recommend answering those Facebook group questions to start converting those fans ASAP. If they like your info, they will seek you out.

I’ve done this for my moving abroad blog, too, and regularly get people emailing me afterwards because they found me in an FB group and then went to my site to learn more and loved it.

Step 12) Tech will fail

This SUCKS but it’s so true.

I think it’s a rite of passage for anyone who makes a course (or even a blog really) to have the shit hit the fan at some point in a totally uncontrollable way.

My first ever webinar, my laptop died 1/2 way through despite being plugged in (turns out Theo had chewed the cord).

And you know what?

No one died!

So I ran to get my charger, and started back up again.

With this flash sale, I thought I was SO smart turning the waitlist page into the sales page so I didn’t need a new URL.

BUT that meant it previewed as the waitlist and anyone who didn’t clear their browser still saw the waitlist.

Then Loom decided to block 1/2 the people who signed up with Europe IPs from watching the embedded videos -.- (still working this one out btw!)

Yeah, it sucked. BUT no one died, I was able to direct people to the main Loom site to watch them, and I managed to get the sales page working finally.

Maintain the Course

From there, it’s really just being along for the ride!

I really didn’t have to do much. I spent a week creating the course around my law firm work (after a year of using Jasper like daily to build up my expertise).

I sent 4 emails, wrote 3 FB posts (basically just copied and pasted), posted 2x to Twitter, and posts 2x on my Insta stories each day + did a Q&A on Insta.

I had a few FB comments to reply to and a couple DMs, but it was probably in total 4-5 days of active work that earned me over $6000.

That’s more than $1k a day!!

And honestly, it’s not like I did anything super special or secret.

You can 100% do this too!

Your Turn!

In fact, I HIGHLY recommend doing it ASAP.

Lizzy Goddard is my mentor for all things course creation.

I recommend her Mighty Offers course to help you craft your first offer. It’s great for niche site owners looking to make ebooks, mini courses, or have custom offerings that your audience will immediately say yes to.

Pick 3-5 days and plot out your sale, if you already have a product.

If not, start working on growing that list of die hard fans, and ensuring your product solves their pain points. Don’t just make something for fun. Make something that helps.

Then prove how well it works.

And the sales will come pouring in!

Most bloggers don’t think to include products, or include products that make 0 sense for their audience’s pain points just because they saw someone else selling it.

Or it’s something super thin that no one should charge for.

Make it so valuable people tell you it should cost more!

You can analyze my launch strategies more by joining my list. I send email newsletter launches. Or you can find my old launch emails in my free SEO Facebook group. Just search by my name to find them.