Is it actually possible to make money online — or is it too late, too crowded, and only for people with huge followings?

In this mini-training episode (voted on by you over on Instagram — 70% wanted to know how to turn content into customers), I’m pulling back the curtain on the exact strategy behind my entire business: your Paid Before Perfect offer.

Since 2020, 100% of my business has come from content. And in this episode, I’m sharing the same training I just walked my clients through — the one that already helped one of them make her first offer she never would’ve made otherwise.

We get into a statistic that’ll change how you see the “saturated” market forever, why brand deals and affiliate links aren’t the foundation you think they are, and the simple math that proves why one call beats a hundred low-ticket sales.

This one leans into the business side — stick with me, because if you’ve ever wanted to make money from your content, this is the transparency you’ve been looking for.

In this episode:

• The stat that proves it’s not too late (97% / 3% / less than 1%)
• Why people buy from people — and why that someone gets to be you
• What a Paid Before Perfect offer actually is (and why it needs no sales page or funnel)
• The honest truth about brand deals and affiliate links (do the math with me)
• Why every post is virtual real estate — and what deserves that space
• The low-ticket trap: the $2,000 math that changes everything
• How I made $65K in a month after a course that burned me out and made less
• Letting your audience tell you what they want (like Jessi Jean’s Gap Challenge)

Ready for the how? We covered why Paid Before Perfect works — but identifying your exact offer and learning to sell it is what we do together inside Courage Driven Latina. I have two spots open right now, and if you grab one, you’ll get a bonus one-on-one call with me. Claim yours at couragedrivenlatina.com.

DM me on Instagram @theerikacruz with your questions — I read every one.

TRANSCRIPT:

Is it possible to make money online or is it just a scam? If you’ve been listening to this podcast, then you have heard my journey around finances, around different lessons, and you know that I definitely have made money. But if you are just starting out, you may believe that it’s either too late for you, or the only way to make money is through things like brand deals. And is it actually even possible for you? So

In today’s podcast episode, I want to answer this question for you. I am going to do a mini training. So what I did is I went to my stories and I asked what you all wanted my next free training to be. And 70% of you wanted to know how to turn your content into customers. How in the world do you make money from creating content online? Which is pretty much what my entire business model is.

From the moment that I started my business at the end of 2020, content has been the number one, actually like a hundred percent, of where my business has come from. Even if it was referral, quote unquote referral, it came because they found me on social media or because I was top of mind because of social media.

Just a couple of days ago, I took my clients through a training that they absolutely loved. So I was like, okay, I have to share this with the podcast because I don’t like gatekeeping. So I’m going to share as much as I can. But there are some limits, right? Because my clients have paid to be in my program and they have paid to learn from me. So I have to make sure I also give them what they came for.

I did this training for my clients about how to make money online before you feel ready. And it has done so well with my clients. They are making offers. One of them already had success with it. And if it wasn’t for this training, I don’t think she would have made an attempt at selling her offer. So I’m going to answer all of the questions that you might have around different ways of making money, how to price what you’re selling, how to decide what you’re selling.

And if you want more, if you want to learn exactly how to decide what your offer is and how to sell your offer, then I invite you to join us inside of my program for the full training. But for now, let’s get into it. So you may be thinking that it is too late. You might be asking yourself, isn’t the market already saturated? Perhaps in your feed, you are seeing people create content, you are seeing people sell courses, you are seeing people do all the things.

But I actually got an amazing statistic from a company called GenFlow. They were doing a webinar, and I know it can feel like everybody and their mom is online right now and creating content, and that it really feels like it’s too crowded for you to stand out. But these statistics that I learned from that webinar are mind-blowing, and it’s going to show you by the way, a webinar is nothing more than an online training.

And at the end of that training, they offer that you join their program. But sometimes I I love to learn. So I will go to a bunch of different trainings and things like that to ensure that I am up to speed with what’s going on. And this statistic was worth me joining that training for. So let me show you why it is not too late and why it’s not true. 97% of people simply watch on social media. 97% of people are just scrolling, they are consuming, they are not creating.

3% of people on social media actually create. That is a very small number. So if you think that it is too late for you, the data shows that that is actually not true. And of those 3% of people that are creating, only 1% of those creators are actually selling online. So even when it feels oversaturated, it is not because the room is nearly empty and nobody is you, right? There is enough room for all of us.

And they don’t have your lived experience, your life experience, your perspective. So it is definitely not too late. Remember, people buy from people. And more than ever, we have people learning to do things themselves. Like if we think back to our grandmother’s generation, they probably knew how to make a handful of dishes really well. But now people are learning skills.

So easily because of the online space, because of our access to information. And people love learning from other people. They would rather learn from somebody who has a personal brand and has a lived experience rather than buying from a faceless account. Let’s say that you wanted to learn how to groom your dog at home, okay? And because it’s very expensive to groom your dogs, and you want to learn, okay, how do I bathe them properly?

How do I maybe trim their face hairs, maybe their little feet hairs, so that maybe I don’t do it full time at home, but at least I don’t have to take them as much. And you’re in the market for a course to teach you to do this. Are you more likely going to buy from a page that doesn’t have any humans on it, that just has a bunch of graphics and says buy now? Or are you going to buy from the page that has videos of a human?

Bathing a dog, teaching you how maybe a specific breed of dog needs to be bathed in this other way, or maybe that you need to put cotton balls in their ear to ensure water doesn’t get in to re to ensure they don’t get an ear infection. I don’t know if that’s a real tip, but my my dog groomer did tell my mom that. So that was why I use that example. You are way more likely going to buy from the account that has a human and a personal brand. It actually shows behind the scenes.

So people buy from people. Because for the other account that just has graphics and just a few images or AI generated images, you’re probably thinking, I don’t know if I’m going to get scammed, right? So remember, people buy from people. And that someone gets to be you. I know you might be thinking, wait, no, I am not an expert yet. I don’t know exactly what I would sell.

But everybody’s an expert at something in their lives. And if we think about supporting the person that’s just two or three or four years behind us, imagine if you could go back in time and talk to yourself two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, you’d probably have so much valuable information to give your younger self.

So, what exactly do I recommend you do to make money? I my whole strategy and my signature approach to this is what I call your paid before perfect offer. And it’s exactly what it sounds like. It means making money before you have perfected the offer. It’s a 60 or 90-minute call, and you can

Even call it an intensive if you want. I have one of these. I have a personal branding intensive that has sold out many times. And what I did is I did this personal branding intensive, and that is what informed the changes that I made to my program CDL. Now CDL is a content program, but it was all because of this 90-minute one-on-one call I did that allowed me to understand if this was even what somebody wanted. It let me understand.

what people were struggling with, how I can help them, what my strengths were. And that’s exactly what we want to do with your paid before perfect offer. It does not require you to have a sales page. You don’t need a funnel. You don’t need any fancy tech and you don’t need to wait until something is fully polished. You can sell it directly in your content.

And you might be thinking, no, Erica, I would feel so salesy trying to sell something. Why can’t I just do brand deals or affiliate links? And the truth is, you can. You can do brand deals and affiliate links. And personally, I do brand deals every once in a while. I consider brand deals bonus money because brand deals are not guaranteed. You do not have control over timelines. You can’t control when a company

Is going to run a campaign, or if you are the creator chosen for the campaign. And I’ve even been in a situation where I got chosen for a campaign and then the campaign was canceled. And it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the executives of that company that decided they wanted to go in a different direction. You can’t build an income on something that you have no control over. Of course, you can do things to attract more brand deals. Of course, you can pit yourself for them.

I’ve personally had no luck pitching myself for brand deals. I find that when they come to me, I am in a better place to negotiate. I am in a better place to land that brand deal as well because they came to me. And I’d rather invest my time creating really good content that I could be discoverable, that allows me to be discoverable to brands. So now you might be thinking, okay, well what about affiliate links? I think it’s really important to do the math. I don’t want to discount affiliate links, but let’s say that you earn 10% on something that maybe cost $8. How much are you actually making? That’s 80 cents.

So now think about how many you would have to sell to make that commission worth it, to make your percent actually worth it. 80 cents on a sale. I mean, yeah, maybe you can buy yourself a coffee every month from what you sell, assuming you’re making a lot of sales. Now, the the time in which this works really well is there there is a situation and there is a circumstance in which affiliates work really well.

Let’s say that you are on TikTok and you have a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, five hundred thousand followers, and you create content on organization. So maybe you do things like Amazon links for little organizing cubbies and your videos keep going viral, and you’re like, by the way, the link to all the products is in my bio. In that place, in that circumstance, that makes sense, especially if you have a lot of volume of people who are watching your videos.

If it has something to do with the actual product, like let’s say you are again an organization person or maybe like I don’t know a fashion or a fashion influencer and you are getting commission on specific clothes and you have a large amount of people viewing your stuff, but very rarely are affiliate links going to be life-changing.

What I want you to know, and this is like really important information that I tell my clients all the time, every post is virtual real estate. And I want you to really ask yourself: every piece of content that you post is taking up virtual real estate on your page. So it’s really about.

Every post you make is a choice about what it is you are promoting and selling. So if you have an affiliate link and it’s only going to make you 80 cents every time you make a sale, is that really worth making a post about? You really do have to ask yourself what deserves space on your page? And in my opinion, the best thing that reserves that kind of, and in my opinion, the best thing to put.

On that virtual real estate is your paid before perfect offer.

Again, that is a one-on-one, either 60-minute or 90-minute call with you where you help them with something that you have helped yourself with. And you may be saying, Okay, no, Erika, but I’ve been seeing some of my favorite creators and they’re selling something for $17, or they’re selling a PDF, and I just really want to make passive income. And I totally get it. It feels a lot less scary to sell something that is reasonable, that’s not one-on-one time with you.

Something that feels more low-ticket. And I won’t get into how I think you should price your paid before perfect offer, but it should at least be $100. And I won’t get into any more details because again, that’s reserved for my clients. But what I’ll share with you here is that your instinct might be, yeah, I want to create a journal or I want to create this like $17 PDF or a $47 course. And

Even though it feels easier and less scary and more reasonable to sell something that’s low ticket or something that’s passive, let’s look at the numbers together. So let’s say that you want to make $2,000 and you sell something low ticket at $20. You would have to sell a hundred of those to reach $2,000 in sales. With your paid before perfect, let’s say you price it at $200, you would simply need to sell 10. If you priced it at $100, you would need to sell 20. Do you see how many less sales you would need to make in order to make the same amount of money? And you’re making way more impact because you are talking to people one on one.

Selling a hundred of literally anything requires a bigger audience. And if you are just starting out, you probably don’t have that just yet. Low ticket really works when you already have a brand, when you have big volumes, and when you’re already known for something. And the other thing about low ticket is that it requires upfront work. A course, templates, or a digital product require you to create something and you might not even know if this is what people want.

I spent many months building a course called Grow on TikTok that I thought was going to literally retire me. And it did not because people were not ready for this course. This was before TikTok was even popular. People were not really creating content on there. And it ended up making me about $10,000, which I know sounds like a lot of money, but it was $10,000 with.

Many, many hours of work. And it was almost harder to sell that low-ticket offer than it was to sell my paid before perfect offer. So back then, my paid before perfect offer was a program called Purpose Driven Latina, which has now evolved into courage-driven Latina. And I’ll never forget, I spent about five months working on creating the course, selling it, doing a pre-launch for it, launching it, totally burnt myself out.

And I made like less than $10,000. I think it was like 9,000 something. One month later, I decided I was simply going to have a more simple business. And I created again the paid before perfect offer. And in a month, I made $65,000. Insane. Insane. And I want to say it was completely insane. And I want to say I sold less of the paid before perfect offer offers.

I sold less of the paid before perfect offer and I still made more money than I did on the low ticket offer.

So look, I know we follow people that talk about making passive income and how one on one is not scalable. And it’s true, one on one is not scalable, but you cannot get to a one-to-many offer. So one to one is when you’re working with somebody privately. One to many means you there’s one person and then you have a group or a program. And when you are starting out, it is important to have understanding of what your client wants from you, how you can help them, how you enjoy working with them. And that is what’s going to craft your future offers. It is very difficult to start with a passive income offer. Unless you’ve mastered something yourself and you’re like, let me show other people how to do this, right?

Let’s say you mastered making all types of brownies and that’s what you’re really known for. Well, then maybe you can create something that’s low ticket, but again, you still need volume. You still need a lot of people in your space in order to make money from that. I understand this podcast episode is a lot more heavy on the business side. So stick with me here. I am trying to make this as accessible to you because the truth is, if you are creating content or if you want to create content,

It is because you know there’s an opportunity to make money. So I want to be as transparent as possible about the best way of making money online and how these like these goals you might have of a journal may not be the best thing, especially because a journal is a physical thing that requires production costs and you really want to do the math on these things. What is the profit you’re actually making? And something like a paid before perfect offer, you can literally start testing your idea now. You can make an impact, you can make money. And even though it’s not passive income, it is allowing you to get market research so that later on you can turn this into a passive income stream.

Another mistake people make is they think they need to just go build this amazing offer. And I actually believe in the opposite. We need to let your audience tell you what they want.

People will disappear for a few months, build in the dark, guess what people want, and then cross their fingers and hope. No, we aren’t doing that because you can use your content as market research and you can let your audience tell you what they really want before you even build anything. This is exactly what Jesse Jean did, who is the creator of the Gap Challenge.

She started creating content about yapping and it totally blew up. So, what did she do? She started creating more of that content. She started a wait list and was like, hey, by the way, if I start a course or a challenge around yapping, would you be interested? She collected people on the wait list. And once she figured out that it was something that had a lot of demand, then she went for it and did it and literally built it as she went with her audience. She it wasn’t like she decided right.

When she began her business, okay, this is exactly what I’m going to do. No, she had no idea. She let her audience tell her. Just like I let my audience tell me that they didn’t want girl on TikTok. What they actually wanted was this other program that is still alive today and has recently gotten its makeover as my content program. So in this podcast episode, we’ve covered why your paid before perfect offer is the fastest.

And easiest way of making money online. It also allows you to make a tremendous amount of impact. What we did not cover is how to identify what your paid before perfect offer is and how to actively sell it. If you want to know those two things, then I invite you to join us inside of my program Courage Driven Latina. I currently have two spots open. And if you want one of those to be yours, you will even get a bonus one-on-one call with me.

You can claim your spot by going to couragedrivenlatina.com. If you have any questions, you can DM me and I will see you all next week for next week’s episode.