The $100K Method #2: $0-$100,000 In One Year (My Story)
Did you know this blog is part of a series? The next blog is here.
You can also listen to the series as a podcast here!
Are you ready to step back in time with me? We’re heading back to 2018, the year I took my business from $0 ➡ $100K in gross revenue — seriously, in just one year.
Now I’m showing entrepreneurs like you exactly how I did this so you can experience not only this kind of growth in your business, but connect with your clients while working from a place of rest.
Intrigued?
Let’s get into it!
The backstory heading into 2018 was that I had already started a few key assets:
2 years of blogging & social media posting
In May 2017, I started my YouTube channel that grew to 27K subscribers by the beginning of 2018
Grew email list to 2,000 subscribers
Pinterest was driving about 2,000 page views each month
This growth did not come easily!
I was spending countless hours juggling between content creation, customer service, product management, social media engagement, and oh yeah, my personal life…
This method was not sustainable, let alone scalable!
What did I do in 2018 that made all the difference?
I knew that if I wanted to grow my business to serve and support a wider audience, I needed to find a way to work less while earning more. I love a good challenge and started considering how to add more value to my audience while getting more rest myself.
#1 Evergreen Lead Generation
The first thing that I did was consider which lead generation source was driving the most lead value.
Lead value is simply how much revenue each lead generates, on average.
Lead value = monetary amount sold divided by the total leads
By creating a data tracking system — much like the one we provide for 100KMM students — I was able to compare and prioritize my marketing efforts.
This lead me to shift my focus to YouTube.
I started creating 2 videos each week to drive traffic to my programs while also making money directly from the ads on my videos — A win-win!
I purposefully created videos that would be relevant over time and continue to work for me years down the road. We call this evergreen content and it’s one of the core lead generation strategies we teach in $100K Mastermind.
Every new video started pointing toward the products that I was creating so that the audience watching these videos would also be interested in my upcoming course and community.
“YouTube feeds right into the business, without us having to walk people through it. Up until this month, [it has taken] hours of emails back and forth for a student to actually work with us. The automated funnel system was what we really needed.”
Amber Williams
#2 Products
The second focus in 2018 was creating and launching two products – though not at the same time.
I started by validating my ideas (link these words to previous blog) through one-off paid workshops.
This allowed me to test which ideas were most popular with my audience.
I didn’t want to create a course hoping that people would want it, I wanted to invest my time and energy into something I knew would be received well.
Once I knew which topics were desired by my audience, I created and launched my first successful course, Channel Launch, in May 2018. (To be clear, this wasn’t the first course I’d tried to create, but it was the first one that I was successfully able to sell!)
Soon after, in June 2018, I created and launched our membership for digital entrepreneurs, Startup Society.
Funny story about that….
I thought it would be a great idea to schedule the Startup Society launch right before my trip to VidCon – a YouTube conference.
The launch was a huge success with 300 members signing up!
The only problem was that the day before I left on my trip, I sent the (now infamous) email with the subject line, “Humour my curiosity…” where I asked those that didn’t sign up for Startup Society what had held them back.
While I was away at VidCon, I spent every extra moment answering the OVER 500 RESPONSES to that email. And, keep in mind… this was before I had a team. So I had to answer all those emails myself. 😅
Moral of the story: leave yourself a little extra time AFTER you launch a new product for customer support!
By July 2018, my free content online was driving sales to my products, and the popularity of my products helped to grow my YouTube channel to 100K subscribers!
I decided at this time to re-launch the Channel Launch course.
By the end of July, I was already on track to hit 6-figures by the end of the year!
For the remainder of the year, I would focus on serving the students inside of Channel Launch and Startup Society, especially with frequent new content within the community membership.
One more boost in revenue came in October 2018 when I participated as an affiliate for Teachable, which created another stream of passive income as well as prize money as a top affiliate — $1,250.
By the end of 2018:
2018 REVENUE
This was one of the craziest years of my life, and also one of the most successful — but things got even better the next year.
(In fact, in 2019, I nearly doubled my 2018 revenue, earning a total of $295,000.)
The most important shift I made between 2018 and 2019 was that I discovered how to take my course and community and make them work for me so that I didn’t need to spend countless hours maintaining them. I started earning more even while working less on these products and also while dropping coaching!
Here’s how I did it:
I took Channel Launch, the course I’d created and live launched in 2018, and built an automated, evergreen funnel for it — what we now call a $100K Funnel.
This funnel acted as a sales machine for my business — meaning that I could focus on lead generation, confident that a healthy percentage of the leads would be converted into sales and make me money.
I didn’t have to be running launches, creating new programs, doing sales calls, or really anything else.
I finally had the freedom to enjoy my business without getting burnt out or sacrificing time with my family.
My $100K Funnel allowed me to focus on building long-term, evergreen lead generation systems so that eventually I’d even be able to go on vacation without seeing a dip in my income.
I was also able to work on building my team, so that the day to day operations would be covered as well.
Now, you might wonder why that’s even necessary, if my income was stabilized, but, here’s the thing — even when you have a consistent stream of passive income, most people still want to keep GROWING their business because it’s what they’re passionate about.
They want to keep working to grow their income even further, talking about the topics they love, and creating content. And those things become so much more fun when you don’t have to do them to pay the bills.
And that’s really one of the things I love the most about having $100K Funnels in my business — they take the pressure off. They allow me to relax. They allow me to work from a place of rest.
Since then, I’ve created evergreen funnels for all of my major programs and it’s been such a blessing that I decided to create a program to teach the method — and that’s what led me to create 100K Mastermind in 2022.
The program walks students through 5 phases to build their $100K Funnels. The phases are:
course creation
funnel automation
evergreen lead generation systems
Each of these phases takes you step by step with detailed trainings and swipe copy to easily create this passive income funnel for your business.
Not only that, a personalized coach and mastermind community support you to reach your goals even faster than you would on your own.
If you are looking to make this your “100K year,” then I invite you to apply for 100KMM.
This story isn’t unique to me. Our students are achieving these same type of results every day, and you can too.
“When I went through the first modules [of 100K Mastermind], I was blown away by the fact how deep we go into market searching to figure out to whom do we want to sell to? What is our marketing message? And with that beta launch, I saw, well, that makes sense. In the end, it really pays off to do all this market research and to have this background knowledge, which I wouldn’t have had by my own.
Now that gives me a certain confidence when I promote my product, which I wouldn't have had otherwise.”
-Brigitte Heitland
Read more about how 100K Mastermind is showing entrepreneurs like you how to take their businesses to 6-figures.
About this $100K Method series
Throughout the rest of this blog series, we’ll look at how YOU can take action and successfully implement a money-making system like this for yourself, including how you can easily generate leads — even without a big audience AND without social media, how you can strategically structure your funnel to passively convert 5-10% of your leads, and how you can scale this system to consistent ten thousand dollar months.
If you’re ready to build a $100K Funnel on your own, then now is the time to start taking action. Head to https://gillianperkins.com/100K to find out how you can build a $100K Funnel to start making you money in the next 3 months or less!
I know you are capable of this and I know it will change your life.
YOUR NEXT STEP
In the next blog in the $100K Method series, I walk you through how to decide between prioritizing evergreen funnels vs. live launching.
