How To Make Money with a Free Email Course - Dish It Out Social (2024)

Welcome to the third and final post in our Passive Pinterest blog series. In this post, I’m going to show you exactly how I make money every single day with my free email course and how you can too.

In last week’s post, I busted the myth that you needed to have a big email list in order to start making money online.

All you need is a simple sales funnel to turn a subscriber into a buyer. And one of the first things you need to create for your sales funnel is a freebie, also known as a lead magnet or opt-in.

This get’s people onto your list and into your email sequence.

In this blog series, I’ve talked a lot about how and why you need to craft an amazing freebie for your audience in order to get more people into your funnel.

But what I haven’t mentioned a lot of is one of the best freebies you can ever create.

A free email course on yourtopic.

A free email course makes for a super effective funnel setup that naturally leads a subscriber to become a buyer. Not only that, you can make money every day from yourFREE course.

Yup, you heard me right.

So now I’m sure your dying to know just how you can start making money from a totally free course.

I’m going to spill all the details for you in this post.

Some of you (that have been reading my blog for a while) know that I used to have a 10-day Pinterest e-course. Over 1,600 people took that free course and it’s actually the first freebie I ever created.

I created it because I wanted to quickly build my list, but what I didn’t realize is that I could be making money from this free mini-course.

I ran it as a free course for a few months before I realized that I could actually monetize it.

Once I started with this system I was blown away by the results…

Here is a look at my sales directly from my free e-course. Now, I know a sale for $7 isn’t gonna make me rich but you’ll notice that some of those days I got 2 or even 3 sales in a day.

When you add it all up it gives me a nice passive income stream that I’m earning all while building my list. It’s like I’m getting paid to build a list of people that are primed to buy from me.

It also gives me a list of buyers that are way more likely to buy something from me in the future.

And don’t forget that it’s all automated, so no additional work is needed from me in order to make money.

1 // My Secret Weapon

I talked a little bit about this in the first postof this series.

My secret weapon is my tripwire offer. This is a low-cost offer that a person is presented with when they first sign up for my free e-course.

So when someone signs up they are immediately taken to a tripwire thank you page like this. (see image below)

You’ll see that I’m offering everyone that signs up for the 10-day course access to all 10 lessons in an ebook for only $7 and for only 15 minutes.

It’s perfect. And every day people take me up on this offer.

Plus it’s easy… all I did was take the copy from my email lessons and plug it into an ebook. No need to write new content.

2 // Why this works

When people first sign up for a free email course they are excited to get started and learn all they can. But a lot of us are impatient and don’t want to wait. We want results right now!

Waiting for 10 days to get all of the lessons can seem like forever to some people. You are playing on people’s need for instant gratification.

Plus giving people the urgency of only 15 minutes along with a low price point is really a no-brainer for those people that hate to wait.

3 // How to set this up

You obviously need to have a free e-course that people can sign up for. You can create one and then add all the emails to an ebook format so you can offer it as an upsell for those people who already show an interest in it.

Now you’ll need to set up your tripwire page (like the one above). I use Leadpages for my landing page and the tripwire thank you page.

Leadpages has this great feature called a “countdown timer” that starts counting down the 15 minutes and then redirects to another URL when the time’s up.

Creating real urgency is a great way to get people to buy. And it’s real, there’s no way for someone to access this page (and the link) once the time is up.

Next, you’ll need to set up a payment processor to collect people’s credit card information and send your product via a digital download.

I use DPD to collect all my payments and send my ebook because it’s super affordable at only $10/month. They connect with PayPal and Stripe and even have a built-in affiliate system (which is really nice if you ever want to let people become affiliates of your digital products).

As an alternative, you can use something like SendOwl, Gumroad, or simply send them directly to a PayPal checkout form.

That’s it! I just gave you everything you need to easily create a passive income stream while building your list simultaneously.

That wraps up our Passive Pinterest series. Check out the other posts in this series, post #1 righthere and post #2 righthere.

As I mentioned above, you should definitely download my free Pinterest Sales Funnel Blueprint and learn exactly what emails to send and when to send them so you can start making passive income in your business!