24:28Maria Wendt · Tutorial
How To Make $100 A Day With A $7 Product
A four-step breakdown of turning a $7 digital product into a $100-a-day income floor with upsells and daily Instagram Reels.
March 13th 2025The argument in one line.
A business with a good offer still won't make money without traffic, and building that traffic is a deliberate split between organic Reels-to-DM funnels and small, reinvested ad budgets pointed straight at a checkout page.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You sell, or want to sell, a digital product, course, or coaching offer and already have the offer built but aren't getting consistent sales.
- You're comfortable posting short-form video and want a repeatable system for turning views into checkout page traffic.
- You're considering running paid ads for the first time and want a low-budget way to start testing.
SKIP IF…
- You haven't validated that people want what you're building yet — this video assumes the product already exists.
- You're looking for a step-by-step ad-manager tutorial — the ad segment stays conceptual, not click-by-click.
The full version, fast.
Most struggling business owners have already solved their offer — they're just not getting anyone to see it. The real bottleneck is traffic: roughly 1,000 checkout page views per $2,000 in monthly revenue. The creator splits her own traffic 50/50 between organic Reels (with comment-triggered DM automation and a link in bio) and paid ads sent directly to a checkout page rather than a webinar or freebie funnel, starting as small as $5 a day and reinvesting profit as it grows. She also outlines three traits a product needs to go viral in the first place: a hyper-specific problem, an unbelievable-sounding promise it can actually deliver, and built-in intrigue.
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00:00 – 01:31
01 · Cold open
Personal revenue history ($62 → $350 → $8,000) sets up the traffic thesis.
01:31 – 03:05
02 · Two things you need to get money
Product/offer and traffic are the only two levers; most people have already solved the first.
03:05 – 04:40
03 · Three things your product needs
Hyper-specific problem, promise the unbelievable, creates massive intrigue.
04:40 – 08:08
04 · How much traffic you actually need
Traffic-to-revenue math using checkout page views, illustrated with real August analytics.
08:08 – 11:13
05 · Getting traffic organically
Reels with comment CTAs, ManyChat DM automation, and link in bio.
11:13 – 14:39
06 · Getting traffic with ads
Ads sent straight to a checkout page; the $5-a-day elevator ad strategy.
14:39 – 16:50
07 · Recap and resources
Restates the two-traffic-sources framework and points to two linked resources.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A product or offer only becomes profitable once traffic exists — most struggling businesses have already solved the offer, not the traffic problem.
- Checkout page views scale roughly linearly with revenue: about 1,000 views per $2,000 in monthly sales, before accounting for price point and conversion rate.
- A viral digital product needs three traits at once: a hyper-specific problem, an unbelievable-sounding promise the product can actually deliver, and built-in intrigue.
- Splitting traffic sources evenly protects against platform risk — one creator generates roughly half her revenue from organic content and half from paid ads.
- Comment-to-DM automation, a Reels call to action paired with an auto-reply tool, turns a viral video's comment section into a lead-capture funnel without manual follow-up.
- Running ads directly to a checkout page outperforms funneling cold traffic through webinars, freebies, or long email sequences.
- A $5-a-day ad budget can be reinvested step by step, turning $5 into $15 into $45, instead of requiring a large up-front ad spend to start testing.
- Small ad accounts and small budgets aren't at a structural disadvantage on Facebook — the platform rewards return on ad spend, not account size.
- Conversion rates drop as audience size grows: pitching to 100 warm people converts far better per-view than pitching to 30,000 people a day.
Traffic, not the offer, is usually the real bottleneck
WHAT TO LEARN
Most people who aren't making money have already built a good-enough offer — they've just never pointed enough eyeballs at it, and that's a traffic problem, not a product problem.
02Two things you need to get money
- Making money boils down to two variables only: a product or offer people want, and traffic pointed at it.
- Most people who struggle to sell already have a decent offer — the gap is almost always on the traffic side, not the product side.
03Three things your product needs
- A product needs to solve a hyper-specific problem, not a general one, to stand out enough to spread.
- The promise has to sound almost unbelievable while still being something the product can actually deliver — overpromising without delivering backfires.
- Beyond solving a problem, the product needs built-in intrigue that makes people curious enough to stop scrolling.
04How much traffic you actually need
- Checkout page views are a better tracking metric than 'people,' since one visitor can view a checkout page multiple times before buying.
- As a rough benchmark: about 1,000 checkout page views generates $2,000/month, 10,000 views generates $20,000/month, and 50,000 views generates $100,000/month — ratios that shift with price point and conversion rate.
- Conversion rates get worse at higher volume — a small, warm audience converts at a much higher rate than a large, cold one.
05Getting traffic organically
- A Reels-based funnel works by posting short-form video with a comment-triggered call to action, then using automation to DM the link the moment someone comments the keyword.
- A link in bio pointed straight at a checkout page captures traffic passively from anyone who visits the profile after watching content.
- Two Reels a day, consistently posted, can generate roughly six figures a year in revenue from organic traffic alone once the audience and comment funnel are in place.
06Getting traffic with ads
- Ads sent directly to a checkout page outperform ads sent to webinars, freebies, or long email sequences, because the checkout page is the actual step that makes money.
- Ad budgets don't need to start large — a $5-a-day approach that reinvests profit, turning $5 into $15 then $45, is enough to start testing.
- Facebook's ad delivery rewards accounts with a high return on ad spend, not accounts with the biggest budgets, so a small budget isn't a structural disadvantage.
Terms worth knowing.
- CTA
- Call to action — the specific instruction inside a piece of content, such as 'comment TEACH ME,' that tells the viewer what to do next.
- Checkout page views
- The number of times a payment or order page loads, used as the traffic-volume metric instead of raw visitor counts, since one person can view a checkout page multiple times before buying.
- ManyChat
- An automation tool that DMs a link automatically when someone comments a trigger word on a post, used to move Instagram comments into a checkout funnel.
- ROAS
- Return on ad spend — the ratio of revenue generated to money spent on an ad, used to judge ad performance independent of total budget size.
- Elevator ad strategy
- A staged ad-spend approach that reinvests profit from a small daily ad budget, for example turning $5 into $15 and then $45, rather than committing a large budget upfront.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
00:40
“If you have this, you will make money. It's a guarantee. If you don't have this, I guarantee you won't make money.”
05:20
“We made $420,973.77, and we had 200,315 people view our checkout pages.”
13:05
“We call it our elevator ads, our elevator ad strategy — take $5 and turn it into $15, then reinvest that $15 into $45.”
16:30
“Facebook rewards the people with small budgets... the data speaks to the people who make the biggest return on ad spend, not the people who have big budgets.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphoranalogystory
00:00This is the number one thing I wish someone had taught me when I first started twelve years ago. It took me so long to figure this out, and that's why I had such abysmal money numbers at the first couple of years.
00:11I made $62 in my first year because I didn't have this. I only made $350 my second year because I didn't have this.
00:18I only made $8,000 in my third year because I didn't have this. And it wasn't until I got this thing that I'm gonna teach you right now, it wasn't until I figured this out that I started making serious money, and it's one of those things that if someone doesn't teach you like I'm about to right now, it will take you forever.
00:35So I'm just gonna, like, and show you how to have this because I promise you, if you have this, you will make money. It's a guarantee. If you have this, you'll make money.
00:45If you don't have this, I guarantee you won't make money. And the answer to that is traffic. You need traffic to your checkout pages or you won't make money.
00:54You need traffic to your offer pages or you won't make money. You need traffic to whatever it is you are selling or you won't make money. If you don't have traffic, we'll define traffic in a second, but if you don't have traffic, you will not have a consistent predictable business.
01:10Traffic is eyeballs. Traffic is people being offered your offer. Traffic is people making like, being presented with what it is you're selling and having to make a decision, yes or no, do I want this?
01:22If you don't have traffic, if you don't have people looking at your offer, you won't make money. Now, ultimately, it boils down to two things.
01:33Okay? So if this is you and you're trying to get money, you will get money, and it just boils down into two things.
01:45A product people want or an offer, product or offer people want, and traffic. Most people, in my experience, actual don't wanna erase that.
01:59I wanna highlight this. Most people actually nail this. They do a really good job with their product or offer.
02:04This is my experience. They suck at this and they think that this is the problem.
02:11They think the product or offer is the problem and so they spent all their time making a better offer, fiddling with the price point, um, changing the messaging again. You actually are effing up in this department.
02:22You have no traffic and that's why you have no sales, that's why you have no money. And so really quickly, on the off chance you don't have an offer people want, I wanna really quickly tell you the three things every product has to have so that we can move on to what I wanna spend the majority of this video on, which is getting more traffic.
02:43Because again, like I promised, if you get traffic, you will get sales. I promise. So I'm sorry if the audio is bad.
02:50I just realized it wasn't directly under me. So what makes a product popular?
02:55I've launched many successful products, and more importantly, I've taught students in all different kinds of industries how to create a viral product. And creating a viral product has three things. Let's quickly make our font smaller.
03:08It's got three things. One, a hyper specific problem.
03:13So it solves something specific problem.
03:21So your product has to solve not just a general problem, but a hyper specific problem. I think there's another s in there. Okay, guys.
03:31The good news is you can make money online even if you can't spell, apparently. Specific.
03:37There we go. Second thing that your product needs is to promise the unbelievable. Meaning, like, this would be unbelievable except the thing that I'm selling will actually solve it.
03:48So promise the and that doesn't mean promise something that you can't deliver on because that's a recipe for disaster. It's not promise the unachievable. It's just, like, so good they don't believe it.
03:58Don't promise something you can't actually deliver. That's obviously that's obvious. And then third, creates massive intrigue.
04:07So if you have a product that solves a hyper specific problem, promises the unbelievable, and creates massive intrigue, your product will go viral.
04:16Your product will sell. You have something people want. Now that we've put that to bed, we can do what I really wanna do, is spend the majority of the time talking about traffic because, again, traffic solves all our issues.
04:2880% of people get this one right. They know how to do this. Almost no one does this, and this is why almost no one makes money online.
04:37They have not solved the traffic problem. So how do you get traffic to a product?
04:42How do you do this? Well, I wanna first so you feel like I I'm someone you can trust on this.
04:49I wanna add an image to this and talk about it. Let's see. Gonna add oh, hang on.
04:58Let me just let me just quickly take a screenshot, and then I wanna add an image, because this is our traffic, and I wanna quickly add this so you can actually see, a, one, know what I'm talking about, b, I actually have I come with numbers and facts.
05:15So let's look at this. This is my analytics from August. We made $420,000, and we had 200,000 people view our checkout pages.
05:26This is over cold campaigns. Um, and by the way, that number is slightly incorrect. It's not 200,000 people, it's we had 200,000 checkout page views.
05:37So if someone views a checkout page eight times, they that each counts as a view, just to throw that out there. So that should not say 200,000 people, it should just say 200,000 checkout page views.
05:48This is people who have never seen us before. This is people who look at a checkout page 10 times before they actually make a decision. Broad strokes, if we have $400,000 we had 200,000 page views.
06:01Now, before I go into breaking this down for you, you need to understand that when you're running a business at my level, your conversion rates will always be worse, meaning conversion rates lower at volume.
06:15So if I'm pitching to a 100 people and I know all 100 people does really well and they're very warm, I'm going to have a much higher conversion rate percentage, meaning I need many less checkout page views than someone who's pitching to 30,000 people a day the way I do. So rough math though, rough math, based on my numbers from August, if you want to play it safe and be very conservative, which I recommend you do, if you want $2,000 a month, you roughly need a thousand checkout page views.
06:45If you want $20,000 a month, you need 10,000 checkout page views. If you want a $100,000 a month, you need 50 checkout page views.
06:53This is super general math. Numbers are going to vary a lot based on your price point, your conversion rate, etcetera. But when I was starting my business, I found it so helpful to be given specific targets like this that just got me in the range.
07:06So maybe you don't need exactly a thousand checkout page views. Maybe you only need 800. Maybe you only need 500.
07:12The point is that it gets you in the general range, so if you have 50 checkout page views, people look only 50 people looked at your checkout page, you know why you're not making $2,000 a month.
07:23You need more traffic, and that's what I want to hit home for you. So that's a range.
07:30Now I'm gonna pull my iPad baby back up here, and we're gonna get this this bad boy back up, and we're gonna talk about how do we get traffic.
07:39Okay? So how do we actually get traffic?
07:45The two ways I'll just share the two ways we get traffic. Okay? So we get again, we generate 200,000 page views a month.
07:53That's nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of traffic. And the way that we do that just gonna highlight this.
08:02The way that we do that is with two different things. We get traffic organically, and we get traffic with ads.
08:11And what's crazy I thought it was really crazy, is right now, that split is, like, literally fifty fifty.
08:20So right now, 50% of our revenue comes from organic stuff, me putting content on Instagram basically, and then 50% of the traffic comes from ads.
08:29This is going up because our ads traffic used to be like 40% and now it's 50%. So it's 50% from ads, 50% organic, but I can promise you as we continue to scale our ads, ads is gonna continue to raise and organic will continue to lower just because, um, the momentum for our ads is scaling faster than the momentum for my organic because that's just the nature of ads, and we have a lot of money to throw ads every month, which we'll talk about because you don't have to have a lot of money.
08:59It's just it is helpful. Okay. So let's do organic first.
09:04How do I get traffic organically? There's two main ways that I get traffic with organic. The first is with my Reels, and there's like a CTA on my Reels.
09:14A CTA stands for call to action. And then the second way is just my link in bio or my lib. So I make two Reels every single day, and all those Reels pitch people to check out something in the comments.
09:28Right? So comment the word, comment a keyword. And the other way that I get organic traffic, and we're going to look at both of these in a second, is with my link in bio.
09:36I literally just link to my checkout page in my bio, and I get a ton of traffic from that because I make I get a ton of traffic to my account because I make a lot of content. So let me just let's just actually look at some examples here.
09:48Okay. So here's an example of a Reel, and this is like pinned to the top, so it's a bigger Reel, but here's an example of what this looks like.
09:58They comment the word teach me, and then I send them automatically, my software does, sends them a link to my checkout page.
10:08This one did really well. It obviously had lots, like thousands of likes, thousands of comments. This one did really, really well.
10:14This one went viral. You can see these happen on a smaller scale. Let's just look at this one that I published yesterday morning.
10:22I say comment guide if you want my free guide. They comment guide. I say comment link, they comment link.
10:32This is how I make a ton of money every single month. Like, if, let's see, if I make 50% from organic, I probably make a $100,000 a month doing this.
10:43Just this, just making two reels a day, probably, again, rough numbers off the top of my head, but probably at least a $100,000 every month just from doing this, if not more. If it's it's not less than a $100,000 just from making two reels a day.
10:57That is nothing to sneeze at. So that's the first way that I get traffic to my checkout pages is with my ManyChat automation. So ManyChat will DM them a link to my checkout page, and then a certain percentage of people will buy.
11:08That's the first way. Second way, super obvious, it's just a link in bio that goes to a checkout page.
11:15Yeah. This just goes to a checkout page. Easy peasy.
11:19That again, like, you view my insights, I don't if I can see right here how many people I get. Yeah.
11:25So I got so just in the last twenty eight days, I get almost a thousand people a day checking out that checkout page.
11:34Actually, if you look at it, it's 23. This is over the last thirty days, and there's 23,000 people who click that link.
11:43Right? So I get almost a thousand page views a day just from that, and I get that many profile visits.
11:51So, again, this stuff is nothing to sneeze at, but you work your way up to that.
11:57They just changed the way they do the insights, so I'm still kind of confused looking at everything in the insights. So if we go back, let's turn back to my head here and turn the iPad back on because want talk about the ads as well.
12:09Um, organic is nothing to sneeze at, I'll tell you what, and if you are not wanting to start with something more complicated, organic's pretty easy. I talk about how to make money making reels all the time here on YouTube.
12:21I have so many tutorials on this, like this is super doable, but here's the thing, here's the honest thing, some people don't want to make content for many different reasons, and that's totally valid, and so in that case, you're going to be very interested to know how we get 50% of our revenue from ads because ads is a perfectly perfectly legitimate it's a perfectly incredible way to get, um, traffic to your checkout pages.
12:46So we I'll show you my share well, really quickly, I'll just kind of talk about what we do. We have this strategy that we call our $5 a day strategy, where we'll basically take $5 and we'll turn it into $15, and then we'll reinvest that $15 and turn that $15 into $45, and we call it our elevator ads, our elevator ad strategy.
13:09And it basically has been a really incredible way for people who are maybe like you and you don't have a big budget for ads. It's what we do and we have made we've scaled that little $5 a day strategy up to spending a $100,000 a month on ads.
13:24And so what we've learned is that when you run very simple basic ads to a checkout page, it's immediately profitable.
13:36People make the mistake of running ads to webinars, they run ads to, like, freebies, they'll run ads to, um, like, long automate like, long automated email sequences, they'll run ads to challenges, They'll run ads to literally anything but the thing that will actually make them money, which is a checkout page.
13:54And so we run a ton of ads just straight to the checkout pages, and that gets us a ton of views. So I wanna show you, um, just like as an example.
14:03Again, I don't do much in the ads manager because that's really my sister Rose's, that's her thing, but let me show you. These are some of the ads we run, and they go straight to a checkout page.
14:18Very interesting. Like, so if we click that I'm, like, scared. I'm very scared to click anything.
14:23But if we click that ad, you can see here, it just goes straight to a checkout page where it pitches our courses and tells you what you get.
14:30It's not a link to buy or to, know, to get a freebie. It's not a link to do anything complicated. It's just straight to the checkout page.
14:39So to recap, let's just turn our iPad on really quick to recap this bad boy.
14:50Turn my circle off. To recap, you need traffic, and there's two ways you can get traffic.
14:59You can get traffic organically. You can get traffic with ads. Both are good.
15:05It's a matter of you learning what you wanna do. Do not believe the myth that you have to wait a long time to run ads. You run ads the minute you want to get traffic to your checkout pages from ads.
15:18In our ads course, we teach the $5 a day ad strategy. Do that. Don't feel like you have to invest $30,000 and lose a ton of money.
15:27Every single day our students are like, hey, I spent $5 and I sold my little course and I profited $17 today, and I'm reinvesting it back into the ads because I want to make a $100 later this week. And it just stacks. You stack it and it scales so quickly.
15:45So if you want, I have two resources that I'm gonna link to in the description. The first is how to really leverage reels to get traffic. I'll link to that in the description, and the second resource that I'm going to is how we run our ads, specifically the $5 a day strategy.
16:00So when you look in the description of this video, you're gonna see two links. The first one is gonna be to how we how I get a ton of traffic with reels, how I leverage reels to get traffic, and then the second one is going to be how we actually take the $5 a day strategy and scale it up, and how you can too. Because the thing is, this what is people don't realize about ads.
16:18Facebook rewards the people with small budgets. They think that Facebook is for the people with big budgets. That is not true.
16:23The data does not speak to that. The data speaks to the people who make the biggest return on ad spend or ROAS or the people who have small ad accounts with smaller budgets. So please don't leave money on the table.
16:35Please don't miss out on sales because you're too intimidated to run ads. Anyone can run ads, and we make it really simple and really easy, so check out that resource in the description. In the meantime, I will see you in the next video.
16:45This has been a fun one. I like talking about stuff like this.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Twelve years in, Maria Wendt still remembers exactly what she made in her first three years: $62, then $350, then $8,000. The thing that changed everything, she says, isn't a secret framework or a better offer — it's traffic, and most business owners have been solving the wrong problem the whole time.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:31list
Two Things You Need To Make Money
- Product or offer people want
- Traffic
Everything that determines whether a business makes money reduces to these two variables.
Steal fordiagnosing why a launch underperformed before touching the offer
03:05list
Three Things Every Viral Product Needs
- Hyper-specific problem
- Promise the unbelievable (that it can actually deliver)
- Creates massive intrigue
A checklist for whether a digital product/offer is positioned to spread.
Steal forauditing a product page or offer promise before blaming traffic
05:40concept
Checkout Page View Math
- $2,000/mo ≈ 1,000 checkout page views
- $20,000/mo ≈ 10,000 checkout page views
- $100,000/mo ≈ 50,000 checkout page views
A rough, conservative benchmark for how much traffic a revenue target requires.
Steal forsetting a traffic goal instead of a vague 'get more sales' goal
08:08model
Two Ways To Get Traffic
- Organic (Reels CTA + ManyChat DM automation + link in bio)
- Ads (straight-to-checkout, $5/day elevator strategy)
The only two traffic channels she uses, currently split about 50/50 of total revenue.
Steal forstructuring a traffic plan across owned content and paid spend
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
15:55link
“check out that resource in the description”
Restates the traffic thesis once more, then names two specific resources (a Reels-traffic course and the $5/day ads course) instead of a generic 'link below,' tying the CTA directly back to the video's core argument.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
