A Complete Guide to Passive Selling

Last week I attended a getaway down in Mexico with six other entrepreneurs.

We were a great mix of Instagram influencers, hall-of-fame athletes, politicians, and creators. As we discussed our work, the diverse mix of people offered really interesting perspectives.

Of the seven attendees, two of the entrepreneurs had a very similar problem — they are in lower-margin coaching and/or product businesses, and are struggling to find higher-margin, more automated ways to increase their profit.

My ears perked up when I heard this problem, because that’s something I could help them solve. Especially because both of these entrepreneurs had digital products already built — one had an online course and one had multiple recipe books in his niche.

I decided to write them a guide on how I’d increase the sales of their products (and increase profit) and turn that guide into this newsletter for you.

I hope you enjoy it.

Maximizing Asset Revenue

When an entrepreneur creates a digital asset, they often focus on something we’ve all been told is important — the launch.

And while having a successful course or book launch is important, maintaining sales (post-launch) is what makes an asset so valuable. And many entrepreneurs don’t focus on a strategy for longevity with their assets. That’s a big mistake.

Longevity strategies don’t have to be complicated. You simply need a process and some data to get better over time.

Here’s how I coached them to increase the long-term value of the assets they’ve already built.

Start with short-term attention

To sell more assets, each of these entrepreneurs needs to continue generating short-term attention, which both are already good at.

One has a LinkedIn/X following of more than 1M, and the other has 1M+ followers on Instagram.

But the short term attention they’re generating doesn’t always lead to sales of their assets because they’re worried that their followers would get turned off if their social content was ‘selling’. I happen to agree, but there’s a better way to ‘sell’ without actually asking people to buy in your social content.

You just have to understand how to work the numbers. That means getting your products in front of enough people who might be interested without saying, ‘buy this thing’.

Convert attention to web traffic

Instead of straight up ‘selling’, my process is to get people to my website, where I can further educate them on the problem they’re trying to solve. And there are three ingredients for getting people from your ‘short-term attention content’ to your longer-form website content:

• The hook: The hook on your social content is generally what leads to 90% of your success in terms of impressions i.e. how many people see what you’re producing.
• The body: The body of your social content is where you show off a bit of your expertise. Can you be helpful enough to show the reader you’re a good candidate for solving their problem?
• The CTA (call-to-action): The CTA is how you get people from your short-form social content to your longer form website content.

Your goal as a short-form content creator should be to publish enough content so that you have meaningful metrics around all three of these things.

What are the hooks that drive the most impressions? What body copy generally drives the most positive sentiment? (measured in the comments) What CTA moves the most people from your short-form (social media) content over to your website?

All good entrepreneurs should be tracking these metrics all the time.

After three to six months of publishing content, you should have a good sense of your top five hooks, body styles, and calls-to-action. And by knowing this, you can start to create ‘combos’. The right hooks mixed with the right body content and CTA.

You can maximize impressions and, in turn, website visitors using successful combos.

Convert web traffic

Whenever you drive people to your website, it shouldn’t be to your homepage.

Consider sending people to relevant articles that expand on the problem/solution you talked about in your short-form content. Then, at the end of each article or issue, you can passively sell your assets. No hard selling required.

For example, if you’re writing about how to balance your fats, carbs, and protein to build a leaner body, you could simply end your article by saying:

If you’re looking to make this easy, I have a recipe book with 250+ perfectly portioned, simple meals. Get lean, shredded, and healthy with these 30-minute or less recipes in my recipe book here.

Simple. Helpful. Non-aggressive. Really just a ‘passive’ CTA.

Once each article has a passive CTA that leads to your asset, start rotating between 20 different articles/newsletter issues.

As you do this, you simply need to track the conversion rate from article reader to asset buyer. This will help you understand which article is currently set up to ‘sell’ the best for you.

And once you know that, you can start creating similar articles for different topics. These articles are like 24/7/365 salespeople that cost you nothing other than the time it takes to write them. They’ll work while you eat, sleep, and hang out with your family.

Takeaway

Once you have all your data points analyzed, you can start creating chain-linked content and articles that sell.

Best Hook → Best body copy → best CTA → Best ‘selling’ article. You’re maximizing every single piece of your entire micro-funnel.

If one of the entrepreneurs I’m coaching did this effectively, he might see results like this:

• 50,000 impressions
• 500 website visitors
• 20 purchases
• $30 per recipe book
• $600 in daily revenue
• $219,000 in yearly revenue

Not a bad result for doing the same thing they’re already doing.

And this doesn’t just work for big creators. This is something anyone can do who has some meaningful traction online.

Is that you? Do you have a digital asset you want to sell more of?

Consider joining 4,000+ other online entrepreneurs inside of my flagship course, The Creator MBA. 14 chapters and 111 lessons of instructional video content on finding a profitable idea, building out your unique value proposition, leveraging social media, stacking offers intelligently, and more.

Come see what the biggest internet entrepreneurs on social media are saying about The Creator MBA.

Or, if you're not ready yet, give this guide a try and let me know how it works for you.

See you next week.