Launching a business and going from a point where you're getting no results, to reaching your first income goal is a major milestone for new business owners. Whether the goal is $10 or $5000, it's an amazing feeling when your business starts earning consistent income. 

If you're stuck between understanding how to go from zero to hero, this article will help you outline the steps needed to make your first $1000. 

We chose $1000 because it's a nice even number that's realistic for a new business. Reaching this income goal gets most business owners excited and motivated to keep going and take additional steps to earn even more. 

This is the amount of money that can make a difference in most people's lives. It can be saved, spent on necessities or reinvested into the business, and it can go a long way to improving anyone's finances. 

If you're lost when it comes to figuring out the steps needed to reach your income goals, realize that with a little preparation, you can be a lot closer than you think to getting answers that will help you reach and exceed your hopes and dreams.

This amount of monthly income is a welcome addition for many people who never thought they could earn online. 

What Makes This Exercise So Exciting?

It's exciting because if you can map out a process to make $1000 per month, you can use the same process to make $10,000 per month. When you look at your numbers and plug them into this 6 step process, you'll find that it’s relatively easy to earn $1000 in passive income using simple systems that run in the background.

The chart below shows how to reach your income goals based on the number of items you’re able to sell.

Before you start, decide on an income goal by answering the question, how much do you want to make? 

Everything you do in this process will be based on this number.  In this example, we have decided on $1000, but this number could be any number you would like. 

1. Choose a Product to Offer

Choose a product to offer and start thinking about an audience of people that will be a good fit for your product. You can choose a product you make or a product made by someone else.

While this will work with virtually any product, you will have more flexibility when making an offer on a product you have control over. 

For example, with a product you make, you can control whether it goes on sale, whether you can offer bundles, buy one get one deals and other sales incentives to encourage people to make a purchase.

When promoting someone else's product, you wouldn't be able to make those types of offers available without getting permission from the person who made the product. 

We'll talk more about traffic sources later, but you can start to think about who you will sell your products to. If you're not sure how to determine your target audience, check out this article. 

2. Determine the Selling Price

Next, determine the selling price of the product or service you will offer. If you're using a print on demand or affiliate business model, (someone else's products) be sure to factor in your costs and consider how much you will be able to put in your pocket for each product sold.

If you're selling multiple products, you should perform the steps below for each product. You can use a spreadsheet to make the calculations easier. 

3. Determine the Number of Purchases Required

Next, figure out how many units (widgets) of your product you will need to sell to reach your income goal of $1000.

To earn $1000 per month from a product that sells for $100, you would need to make 10 sales per month (10 sales x $100 per sale = $1000 per month). 

I've also included the table below to show how much would have to be sold at two additional price points. You can also see that with a lower selling price, you would have to sell more units to reach your goal. 

Many Ways to Get to the Same Place

You'll also note, that there are multiple ways to reach the goal of $1000.00 per month. For example, the simple chart above shows three different ways to earn $1000. 

• 10 customers pay you $100 for a product or service
• 20 customers pay you $50 each for a product or service
• 40 customers pay you $25 for a product or service

Now that you have an income goal and you know how many units need to be sold to reach it, you will need a timeline.

How long should it take for you to earn $1000.00? Do you want to reach this goal after one day, a week or a month? Write down how long you're going to give yourself to make this goal. 

4. Determine Your Conversion Rate

The next step is to determine the conversion rate, which is the percentage of people who visit your sales page, who will actually purchase your product or service.

You can review historical data and analytics using tools like Google analytics or data you've obtained from running ads on social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram to obtain your typical conversion rate.

If you're just starting out, you may not have historical data. If that's the case no problem, you can use estimates!  While you would love to have a conversion rate of 80%, you will need to manage your expectations until you have real data that shows your actual conversion rates. 

According to Shopify, the average eCommerce conversion rates are around 2.5% to 3% according to industry leaders, but that doesn't mean this is your business's sweet spot. Having a baseline of 2.5% is a good place to start, but keep working to optimize this with conversion rate tactics.

If your estimates are based on a lower percentage and you end up making more money, great, but you don't want to over estimate and be disappointed if especially when starting out, you're not able to convert as many visitors into customers and you make a lot less. 

To keep things simple for our example, let's assume that your shop is exceptional and the typical conversion rate for your shop is 5%. 

5. Determine the Number of Visitors Needed to Reach Your Goal

To receive 10 sales per month with a 5% conversion rate, you would need to have 200 visitors to your shop (10 sales ÷ 5% conversion rate = 200 visitors).

If you're a business owner who thinks that it takes thousands or millions of visitors to your shop to earn a decent amount of money, this exercise shows that it's possible to earn $1000 with a conversion rate of %5 and only 200 visitors! 

When we refer back to our chart, we find that we reached our goal of $1000 by having 10 customers pay us $100 each for our products. 

Consider that we're talking about 10 sales in 30 days, or an entire month. With a great product and an audience of people who are a great fit for the product this goal totally manageable and achievable. And that's the beauty of breaking down the math. 

6. Determine the Best Traffic Sources

The final step is to determine how you will get 200 (or the number of visitors you need based on your conversion rate) visitors to your sales page or shop. 

This could include paid advertising, social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, and other marketing strategies. 

Keep in mind, that if you use paid advertising you would want to factor in, the cost of running the ads which will be subtracted from your profit. 

At the same time, if you're not currently attracting people who are a good fit, people who are interested in or actively looking for your products, it may be worth it to run ads that will help you reach your ideal customers.

One of the pros of running ads is that most platforms will allow you to target a specific audience, which will get your products in front of the right people at the right time. People who are more likely to buy what you have to offer. 

The biggest cons to consider when running ads is that you really need to know your target audience. Otherwise you can lose a LOT of money and have nothing to show for it.

To learn about Facebook ads and how they work, check out Facebook Ads Made Simple by Andrea Vahl or Facebook Marketing For Beginners by Michael Ezeanaka. Both of these are practical guides for how to make Facebook ads work for you. I would recommend having a guide handy and having a basic knowledge and strategy before running paid ads. 

You can also use free social media platforms to promote your products. Social media enables you to promote your products on sales pages, lead capture pages, video and audio files, and any marketplaces where you list products.

Using a tool like Tailwind will automate your social media posting and allow you to track your progress. Automating your social media posts and being consistent are requirements if you want to run a successful marketing campaign. This may not get results as quickly as paid ads, but it's a great method to use each day to send more traffic to your offers. 

If you're not familiar with Tailwind, check it out to save time and become more efficient and consistent in reaching your target audience. 

Email marketing is another great way to promote your product to an audience of people who are familiar with your business. If someone is on your list, that means they are interested in what you have to offer. Don't overlook this source as a great place to sell products and services, as well as adding value to help your audience reach their goals. 

If you have a blog or website, be sure to keyword optimize your content (use SEO) so that it can be found by search engines. This is another passive tool that can drive lot's of traffic to your offers. 

By following these steps, you can reverse engineer a path that you can use to earn any monthly amount by plugging in your numbers to determine the selling price, conversion rate, and traffic sources needed to meet your desired income goals each month.

Which Path Should You Shoot For?

Now that you know the steps needed to reach your goals, which strategy should you start with? Do you take the quick way or a slow and steady approach? For example, it may take a lot less effort, (and get you to your goal faster) to get 10 people to pay $100.00 for an item that helps them solve a nagging issue or add value to their lives.

Do you have a product that helps relieve some issue that is making your target audience miserable? Or are you selling something that is considered more of an extra, nice to have or an impulse buy? 

The kind of product you have and the issues they help to address will be different and selling to each kind of audience is different. For example, your unique audience may not be as apt to buy an item costing $100, so a lower priced item may be needed to reach your goal.

The way you sell to your audience matters based on the type of product you're selling. It not only involves the product itself, it also involves your messaging, the images used, the tone of your message and the potential customer's budget.  

You will also need to consider whether you are working with a cold audience or an audience that knows, likes and trusts you. Is your audience happy or skeptical about working with you?

A lot also depends on how much your ideal customers are grappling with an issue and whether they feel that items you’re promoting will help them resolve that nagging pain point.

The more you understand your ideal customers, their challenges, pain points and motivation for buying, the better you will become at positioning yourself as an authority, and presenting your products in a way that attracts the right people to what you have to offer. 

Repeating the Winning Process with Additional Products and Upsells

Next, once you've had success with the original process that earned your first $1000, it's time to build on those results. Use the data from your original promotions to build on your wins and improve things that didn't work so well. Continuous improvement will be the thing that gets you to those higher conversion rates we talked about earlier. 

Use what you've learned to duplicate your process to continue earning $1000 per month.  Then try adding a related product or two, as either an upsell or a cross sell that can be offered to your customers.

Cross selling and upselling are methods you can use to grow your business using the same number of customers.  

Let's Take Another Look at Our Original Group of Customers

Let's look at the initial 200 people who visited your shop. We know that five percent (5%) of those visitors were interested in your product because they made a purchase. 

What would happen if you had offered those same visitors a related product when they added your original product to their cart? The related product could have been something in a similar price range that complimented what they were already buying.

One of these scenarios would have happened, they would (1) purchase both the related product and the original product, increasing their order value or (2) or they would reject the related product and continue to check out with their original choice.

They could have also abandoned their cart, and that's a conversation for another day. We won't address that here, but it's certainly a possibility. 

Back to our original scenario... I would venture to say that there would have been a certain percentage of customers who would have bought the additional item. 

Selling just one additional product to a certain percentage of those existing customers could have earned you even more than your original goal of $1000 using the same customers that were already shopping on your site. 

This example shows how one simple action, (adding one related product that is offered to existing customers) can increase the amount of money you are able to make, without having to go out and find additional customers.

What Does It Mean to Cross Sell or Upsell a Customer?

Cross-selling is the act of selling related products or services of equal or lesser value to an existing customer that is making a purchase for one item. For example, a customer might shop for a new subwoofer but check out with not only a new subwoofer but a new receiver and speakers. 

The customer may have had no intention of purchasing the additional items, but your shop was set up in a way that presented offers the customer couldn't resist.

Upselling is when a shop encourages customers to purchase an enhanced version of something they're already purchasing. An example would be a shop that sells backpacks might offer a customer who has a smaller backpack in their cart, to purchase a larger one instead because of multiple benefits.

Both of these methods are excellent ways to increase the amount you can make on each sale. So instead of making $1000, you might be able to double your earnings with the same number of customers. 

The next step in your growth strategy might be to add these methods to the existing process used to reach your initial goals.

Choose whether you want to make $1000 each day, week, or month and roll out promotions and strategies to meet your selected timeline.

Keep your original process in place, adding more products, upsells and cross sells to it, and watch your sales grow!

Time to Measure Your Results

Once you have a few months of sales data to review, it's time to measure your results. If you were successful in reaching your income goals, way to go! You have successfully built your first passive income system and run a successful promotion. 

If you were unsuccessful in reaching your goal, you will need to adjust and try again. While it may be disappointing, this is not the time to give up.

In most cases, setting these systems and running a campaign is not something that you can do once and expect to have shining results. You may have to adjust and test again several times before you see results.

The Benefits of Using Systems

The great thing about having a system is that it can be tested, tweaked, adjusted and repeated several times until it gives you the results you’re looking for. Don’t be discouraged. This is how the pros earn multiple six figures, with systems like this.

The best thing about all of this is that once you have a system that works, it can be repeated again and again, across multiple products and income sources.