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02 million dollar funnel overview

Mon Apr 20 2026 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) ·course-notes ·status: stub

Module 2: Million Dollar Funnel Overview

Welcome

Hey there!

Welcome to Module 2 of Low-Ticket Product Marketing & Monetization, a mini-course inside of Low-Ticket Launchpad.

Before we start giving you recommendations on the different types of software tools you should use (and why) to launch & sell your Low-Ticket Digital Product, I want to first give you a high-level overview of our Million-Dollar Funnel.

This is how we sell millions of dollars of low-ticket digital products each year.

In a nutshell, it goes like this:

Walking through each of these steps will help you “visualize” how all these different pieces work together.

Then, we can talk about each individual component of our tech stack.

Let’s dive in!

Million-Dollar Funnel Overview

Building a million-dollar funnel is NOT as complicated as people think.

The challenge isn’t in setting it up.

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The challenge is, once it’s set up, being consistent long enough to see it start to work—and then making tiny tweaks and little adjustments over time, slowly but surely increasing all your core metrics:

Again, all very easy skills to learn.

Most people just give up too early.

So, let’s walk through each step of our million-dollar funnel.

Step 1: Drive Traffic

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Now, quick crash course on “traffic.”

There’s really only 3 forms of traffic:

The truth is, you can drive traffic in all sorts of ways—but for the purposes of this training, I am going to talk exclusively about Warm Traffic in the form of Organic Content.

Why?

But there are all sorts of different ways you can drive traffic using Organic Content, too!

Again, the truth is… anywhere you can successfully drive traffic is great.

But here are my recommendations.

If you prefer creating text-based content, you should be creating content on:

(And if you want to get fancy with it, I’d consider republishing content on Medium. But X & LinkedIn are the best text-based platforms right now by a wide margin. Medium is a fraction of the size and has considerably less distribution.)

And if you prefer creating video-based content, you should be creating content on:

“But Cole?! What about {{ Insert literally any other platform or opportunity }}.”

I’m sure there’s some version of this question rumbling around in your head right now.

And the answer is always the same:

This is what marketing is all about.

You form a hypothesis… you go spend time, energy, and effort testing it… and if it works, you experience some sort of “win,” and if it doesn’t work, then you try again.

It’s that simple.

BUT, I want to emphasize that I (and “we” as a team) have tried and experimented with a LOT of different things.

And so, as far as platforms go, these are the recs:

Now, what’s the PURPOSE of all this traffic?

It’s very simple.

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Creating content on social media with no CTA (”Call To Action”) to your email list (or some sort of email opt-in) is one of the biggest mistakes digital writers/creators make.

Is there value in “building an audience?” Sure.

But all the money, and how your digital product sells, happens via email.

So if you want a digital product that generates hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in revenue, then you HAVE to use Organic Content as a vehicle for getting people onto your email list.

This is the entire game.

“But Cole?! If I CTA over and over again to my email list, won’t I annoy my followers? Won’t people get mad at me? Won’t my entire life burn down King’s Landing at the end of Game of Thrones???????”

Sigh.

No.

This is 100% a faulty belief—and is just another clever way you’ve found to get in your own way.

Go look at what ANY big creator does. They link to their email list and/or email opt-in over and over again.

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So, to recap… this is our super-advanced top-of-funnel system:

It’s so simple!

And you just do this over and over again, for weeks and months and years.

Step 2: Opt-In

The whole goal is to drive free readers on social platforms over to your email list.

Why?

Because email is an “owned” platform—you own your email list—and you have significantly more control over how you interact with those people (whereas you have almost no control over who sees your posts on social platforms, and are victim to the algorithm).

Now there are 2 types of email opt-ins I would encourage you to use…

Beginner Option: Traffic to Newsletter

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If you are brand new to the world of digital writing & creating digital products, then there’s no need to get fancy with it.

All you need to do is send readers to your newsletter—which can be easily hosted on a newsletter landing page.

Since “newsletters” are an entirely different rabbit hole, I won’t be covering them in-depth here. However, if you would like a detailed walkthrough of how to set this up, I’d encourage you to check out our Category Newsletter Creator product—which is entirely focused on newsletters & email marketing.

Advanced Option: Traffic to Educational Email Course

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When we were first starting out, we just sent traffic to our newsletter landing page.

(And for what it’s worth: this worked fine, and is how we generated our first $1,000,000 selling Ship 30 for 30 + various digital products.)

But over time, we realized that if we could increase the conversion rate % of our email opt-in landing page, we would get significantly more people:

So, we eventually created a more valuable email opt-in—in the form of an Educational Email Course—prompting people to type in their email in exchange for more “immediate” free value.

And then once they completed this 5-Day Educational Email Course, we would move them onto our weekly evergreen newsletter.

We now have opt-ins like this built for all of our different business segments:

If you don’t want to build an EEC (Educational Email Course), you can also increase the email opt-in rate by offering:

But again…

For beginners, I recommend just driving traffic to a weekly newsletter landing page.

You can always upgrade to a stand-alone opt-in later if you want.

Step 3: Weekly Email Nurture

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Once you get someone on your email list, the real game begins.

One of the biggest misunderstandings in the world of “digital products” is that people think you sell products via social platforms.

And that’s not true.

For example, we did an internal audit in 2024 looking at how many emails we had to send (on average) to get someone to buy Ship 30 for 30 and/or one of our digital products.

And it’s way more emails than you think.

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Whenever I am chatting with other digital writers/creators and/or auditing their funnels, ALMOST ALWAYS their biggest issue is they just aren’t sending enough emails.

And all of these are wrong.

We now have a saying internally that goes like this:

The more emails you send, the more money you make.

And all of the data tells us this is true.

So, what should your “email” cadence be?

If you’re a beginner, just focus on sending 1 free-value email per week.

The challenge here is NOT “writing the perfect email.”

The challenge is always in building the discipline to stay consistent.

(For context: We have sent 1 free-value email to our Start Writing Online email list every single week for 4 years in a row. We’ve never missed a week. That might sound like a lot of work, but that email list is how we’ve generated millions of dollars in revenue. So, work aside, this is what’s required.)

If you’re more advanced and/or a seasoned marketer, you can add in a 2nd email per week.

For example, here’s an email we sent to “Clickers” on our Premium Ghostwriting Academy email list—people who had clicked on our application and/or call-booking page, but didn’t end up booking a call.

We want to remind them, again, that they should!

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This email for “Clickers” is very simple, and only has 3 parts:

And yes, we send some version of this email to all “Clickers” 1x per week.

So our email cadence looks like this:

And we do this every week, over and over and over again.

BUT… what’s the point of sending all these emails?

To drive clicks to your product landing page!!!

Step 4: Collect Payment

Your “landing page” is the page where your Low-Ticket Digital Product is hosted.

For example, here’s the landing page to our $350 Full-Stack Writer digital product.

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I’m going to cover all the in-depth nuances of building a high-converting landing pages in another module.

But here, the big idea you need to understand is that your landing page is what “sells” people on your Low-Ticket Digital Product.

And at the bottom, you collect payment for access to the digital product.

Once you have this product landing page live, and your product for sale, now you have a complete “funnel” allowing you to start capturing metrics & measuring funnel performance.

You can get REALLY nitty-gritty here, but high-level these are the Big 5 metrics that matter most:

Because with these 5 metrics, you can start to measure success AND see which “piece” is the bottleneck to continued growth.

Step 5: Unlock Digital Product

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The last step, of course, is once someone purchases your Low-Ticket Digital Product… you have to give them access!

We’re going to walk you through all the nuances of setting up your post-purchase flow in our next module (Tech Stack).

In the meantime, let’s break it down from a high-level.

First off, here’s a quick flowchart so it’s easier for you to visually see all the moving pieces:

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(Highly recommend double-clicking on the image so you can take a closer look!)

As you can see in the flowchart, there’s 5 different “pieces” involved here:

  1. Your checkout form (which is located at the bottom of your landing page)

  2. Your Post-Purchase Thank You Page

  3. Your Post-Purchase Welcome Email

  4. Your automated Skool Email Invite

  5. Your Skool Group (which is where the content of your Low-Ticket Product is hosted)

Now, let’s break down how this post-purchase flow works (from the perspective of the customer):

We’ve carefully designed this flow to make it as easy and frictionless as possible for people to get access to the product after they buy it.

But don’t worry—as I we said, we’ll show you how to set up all the different systems we use to automate all of this in the next module.

Module 2 Exercise

That’s it for Module 2 of Low-Ticket Product Marketing & Monetization, a mini-course inside of Low-Ticket Launchpad.

Now, if you want to see how our Million-Dollar Funnels work in-action, I’d encourage you to go through them yourself! (This is called “funnel hacking,” where you type in your email and observe what happens through the lens of a marketer.)

These are the opt-ins we’ve created for our different business verticals:

And if you want to funnel-hack some other big creators, I’d encourage you to subscribe to their newsletters and pay attention to their Welcome Email(s), their weekly newsletters, and any product promotion emails they send you—because this will show/teach you how different people execute this playbook!

Have fun funnel-hacking!

Key takeaways

TODO - For Ray