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How to get your first $1,000/month

April 25, 2026·9 min read·issue #018

If you haven't made your $1,000/month yet, and you have been in the online space for a while, congratulations - you are among the 90% of others online going through the same struggle, and the struggle is real.

Last week, a follower of mine asked me a question that I wish I had asked when I started my personal brand. The question she asked was, "How can I make my first $1,000/m?" Then she said, "I tried selling a PDF digital product, and I have only had one buyer in 5 months, which is my friend."

Let's call her 'Lia' for the sake of privacy.

I was curious, so I asked Lia, "How many followers do you have now?" She said, "1400 followers."

Immediately I heard that response, I knew what was wrong and what Lia needed to do to make her first $1,000/m, without losing her sanity. Lia was doing the right thing at the wrong time, and that is what a lot of creators are doing, thinking that what they need is one product that will make them $100k/m with 2,000 followers.

I made the same mistake. I could still remember sometime last year when I just started building my personal brand, I thought it would be easy, that all I needed was some followers and a digital product. The dream was to get to $1,000 in the first month of launching any product. That wasn't the case at all. I created 3 digital products, and none of them made a dime.

I was frustrated. I had told myself that when you start on LinkedIn within the first few months, you will get to $10,000/m, so what went wrong? Was I not posting enough? Not promoting my product enough? All these questions keep going through my head.

The problem wasn't that I didn't know how to fight. I'm skilled, but the problem was that I brought a knife to a gun fight — never, ever, ever. I didn't realize this until it was 6 months later, when I decided to change my strategy.

No one said it would be easy. Yes, it will be hard. If earning comes easy we will all be on a yacht.

By the end of this letter, you will know what to do to make your first $1,000/m MRR.

The Wrong Tool at the Wrong Time

There are a lot of ways to make money online, but if you are not using the right tool or place, you might not earn anything. Early last year, when I started posting on LinkedIn, I was sold a dream that within 6 months I would get to $10,000/m. Did it come through? It's a big No. What really happened was that I spent time building a product for audiences I had not built, and the ones I had did not trust me enough to pay for my PDF.

Yes, I brought a pocket knife to a gun fight, and I ended up earning less than $1,000 in 6 months.

Then I earned $15,000 the next 6 months from my personal brand.

It was a great achievement for me, because I have multiple ways I make money, but this is the fastest one for me.

If you have less than 10k followers on your social media, your core product shouldn't be digital, instead, you should offer a service. That was what I did. I already had email marketing and newsletter setup skills, so I sold that to clients.

Don't fall into the trap being preached online, here and there, about how they are making money selling an ebook with no audience. Deep down, we all know that it is a shortcut that leads to a waste of time, and being broke along the way.

What I told Lia was to offer high-value services. Here is why:

For a digital PDF at $15, you need 67 purchases to get $1,000/m.
For a service at $500, you need 2 paid clients to get $1,000/m.

The second one is faster and easier. All you need is two clients a month. You might have started thinking about how to get these clients. No worries, we'll talk about it next.

Two Ways to Get Clients

There are two ways to go about this. The first is going into people's DMs to tell them you can help, reduce their workload on a particular thing, or help them make more money. The other way is to post about what you do in a very non-annoying way.

Last year, in June, I decided to change my strategy to reach out to prospects on LinkedIn and other platforms. I was sending 20 new DMs daily, but after 4 weeks, I couldn't keep up. It was another job on top of posting, but I stuck to it for as long as I could.

From those 20 DMs daily I did for 4 weeks, I got 2 clients, one was an email system setup, and the other was to manage a LinkedIn page. Both paid me $3,200 in total for 3 months. That was how I got my first $1,000/m from my personal brand.

You can do the same by reaching out to 20+ people every day. Make sure everyone you reach out to really needs your service. I was reaching out to creators about how to have an audience to sell to, and creators who have a newsletter. I know I can make it better and make them more money.

Wait, yes, I used the word 'was', I stopped doing the DMs.

You guessed right, I'm not the DM-daily kind of person. I'm okay with just posting, but now I post to turn readers into clients and customers. When I was doing the DM thing, two people reached out to me, saying they would like to work with me through my posts. That was when I saw the beauty in that, so I used it. I started posting more, and I got more reach.

I was posting about my work less annoyingly and also posting about anything I am interested in. That way, my posts do not get too boring. Now I can stay focused on getting better at one thing: creating content.

Now it's easier for me to post content. I use writepat.com to write and convert my newsletters into content for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Substack. The content auto-publishes as scheduled. Last week, I made an update to the LinkedIn post converter, and the result was a post that gets 90%–100% in AI detection, which was like, wow, it was very hard for an AI-generated content to get that good.

Do not add a link to your post, the algorithm doesn't like that. For my LinkedIn, I only add links in the comments.

If You Don't Have a Personal Brand Yet

Here is where I started, as a freelancer on Upwork. This literally changed my life. A few years ago, I didn't have a personal brand, so all I did was send proposals on Upwork to get a client, and it worked. I got my first client for $20 for 5 hours of work.

It wasn't a great amount of money, but I was happy because someone who hadn't seen my work paid me for my skills.

So if you do not have a personal brand that is paying you yet, use any freelance platform, there are a lot of them out there, just pick one. Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, etc. Just pick one, work with it for a while to see how much you like it, and if you do, then keep going. I picked Upwork, and I rode on that for as long as I could. With a freelance platform, you do not have to look for clients - they come to you.

I have earned more than $60k in total from freelancing, so I think it's worth giving it a try. Until other earning parts I have built are sufficiently bringing in money, I will still stick to freelancing, or you can call it a one-person business.

I am tired of seeing people stop because they think the only ways to make money from their personal brand are by creating a course or a digital product, pushing themselves so hard that they burn out and think everything is a scam. The course you bought won't tell you that you need more than 50k followers for your digital product to sell. Someone tells you they made $20k/m from their 70k followers, and you want to do the same thing with your 5k followers. We all want to live the dream, but you need to wake up to do that.

What Earning Your First $1,000/m Actually Feels Like

I was getting out of bed, it was Feb 21, 2023. I went to the kitchen to make my coffee, coffee in hand. I head to my workstation, turn on my PC, and open my payment dashboard. I stood up immediately.

What I saw was my first $1,000/m earning. I don't know how to describe the feeling, but it was one of the best feelings I've had about money to date.

I have earned more monthly since then, but the feeling of earning your first thousand is different. Maybe I will get the same feeling when I get to $10k/m, but I am still holding on to the $1,000/m feeling because I haven't gotten anything close to that feeling about earnings since then.

You may not feel the same way, but for me, coming from nothing, where the people around me hardly earn half of that a month, it means a lot to me then and now. I came from nothing. I could still remember when the best money I earned was $1 a day. I could still remember when I had to eat once a day just to have something to eat the next day. So when I tell you I had this unmatched feeling when I earned that first $1,000/m, I meant it.

Now, I'm someone who could sleep for 8 hours without the worry that I will starve to death. Now, I'm someone who could pay for courses and tools/apps (I used to look for the free tools/apps initially).

Earning my first $1,000/m shows me that I can do more than I thought. I remember when earning $200 was the goal. Now the main goal is never to go broke again, and I know a lot of creators out there are broke. I'm not the hardest-working person, but I will do what it takes to never go broke again.

If you haven't earned your first $1,000/m online, here is what I would do if I were you. If you will take one thing out of this letter, it is volume: the more you do something, the better you become.

If you have a personal brand with less than 20k followers, here is what I will do. I pick a skill I am good at, niche down as much as I can, update my profile so visitors immediately know what I do and who I help, and include a CTA in my profile. Then I pick days I will post, batch my posts every weekend, engage with other creators, schedule my posts, and add a CTA in the post comments. 20% of my weekly posts will be based on promotion in ways that don't make it look like a promotion.

I can reach out to 20+ people every weekday. It might not seem like a lot daily, but that is 400 a month and 4,800 a year. With 400, you will get 2-4 clients.

If you do not have a personal brand, or for some reason you don't want one, pick a freelance platform, update your profile, and reach out to a prospect for work.

Reply to this email if you need help with this topic or other topics I have spoken about. Even if I can't reply to all replies, note that I read everything.

- Owol

P.S. If you don't have something to eat, you can't create a digital product and wait - your first goal should be surviving, and then you can scale from there. Start with your skill, find two clients, and earn that first thousand. Everything else comes after.

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