Creating and monetising a playbook

I’m sick of reading articles about people making £30,000 on Payhip in three months without posting on social media. Not because I doubt the numbers (though I do), but because they skip the only part that matters: where did the traffic come from?

These stories follow the same template. Someone creates a digital product, uploads it to Payhip, connects their payment processor, and money appears. The traffic source is either vague (“I optimised my listings”) or suspiciously absent. If you don’t have an email list, an audience, or a following, these articles are useless. They’re selling you the dream of passive income without explaining the active work of customer acquisition.

So I’m running an experiment. I’m going to create a basic marketing playbook, put it on Payhip, and document what happens when you start from zero. No existing audience to sell to. No email list to monetise. No social media following to leverage. Just paid ads, SEO, and the reality of building traffic from scratch.

This is Part 1. I’ve built the thing. Part 2 will cover what happened in the first 30 days. Part 3 will document what I did to make it profitable.

Part 1: Building the product (40 minutes)

I wanted to take the path of least resistance. If creating digital products is genuinely easy, it should be fast.

Step 1: Writing the content

I used Claude to write a marketing playbook. I gave it a brief: create a guide for small businesses on digital marketing fundamentals. It didn’t cover anything other than defining your audience, selecting channels, and measuring outcomes.  You could start with this playbook and get something off the ground but its very surface level.

Time taken: 10 minutes

Step 2: Design

I used a Canva template. Picked something clean, dropped in the content, adjusted the colours. The playbook is 15 pages. It looks professional enough that someone might pay £5 for it, but basic enough that I’m not claiming it’s the definitive guide to anything.

Time taken: 20 minutes

Step 3: Upload to Payhip

Created an account, uploaded the PDF, wrote a product description, set the price at £5. Payhip takes a 5% transaction fee. PayPal takes about 3.4% plus 20p per transaction. So on a £5 sale, I’d make roughly £4.35.

The 30-day test

I’m going to leave this sitting here for 30 days. No promotion. No traffic. No SEO. Nothing. Just to prove the point: if you build it, they don’t come. After 30 days, I’ll start driving traffic properly. Paid ads and SEO, because that’s what I know. I’ll do it in layers, starting small, tracking what works, and scaling only if it’s profitable.

The first goal is modest: cover my WordPress and domain costs, which run about £10 a month. That’s three sales. Then I’ll set a bigger target and see if this thing can scale beyond covering its own overheads.

I’ll document the process. What channels I used. What I spent. What converted. What didn’t? The real numbers, not the suspiciously round figures you see in “I made £30K” articles.

This won’t happen quickly. Building traffic from scratch takes time. But at least you’ll see what it takes, rather than reading another article that skips from “I created a product” to “I made thousands” without explaining the work in between.

[Part 2 will be added here once the 30-day “do nothing” test is complete]

Part 3: Making it profitable

[This section will cover what I did after the initial 30-day test, including scaling decisions and whether this experiment was worth the effort]

Why I’m doing this

I’m not doing this to get rich selling a £5 playbook. I’m doing it because I’m tired of people talking about digital products as if the hard part is creating them. The hard part is customer acquisition. It always has been.

I’ve scaled three startups into mature sales pipelines from digital marketing. I’ve watched every platform evolve, every algorithm change, every gold rush come and go. The game has changed, but the fundamentals haven’t. You need traffic. You need conversion. You need unit economics that work.

This is a live case study. If it works, I’ll show you how. If it doesn’t, I’ll show you why. Either way, you’ll see the reality of building something from scratch without an audience to sell to.

I’ll update this piece as the experiment progresses. If you want to follow along, the product is live at https://payhip.com/b/rtCO0. I’m not asking you to buy it. I’m asking you to watch what happens when someone tries to sell it properly.