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If you’ve been around the online business/blogging world for any amount of time, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of rumblings about how important it is to create and launch your own digital product.
If you’re new to this space and have no idea what I am talking about, even better. Let me explain what I’m talking about because launching a digital product is so important to running a successful online business.
That’s right, you can launch your own digital product in just 30 days. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. But I promise you, if you do it right, it will be worth it!
Why Launching a Digital Product will Transform Your Online Business
There are many ways to monetize your online business. In the blogging world, some of the most common ways include:
- Ads
- Sponsored articles/social media posts
- Affiliate marketing
- Services (such as a graphic designer offering social media image services on retainer)
- Coaching/consulting
Do you know the downfall of these options? They either require you to drive a ton of traffic to your website or trade time for dollars.
The truth of the matter is, neither is very ideal. Driving large amounts of traffic to your website takes a lot of work and it definitely doesn’t happen overnight. Trading time for dollars can be lucrative but it’s also impossible to scale. You only have so many hours in a day. Eventually, your ability to grow your income will be capped.
This is where the brilliance of creating your own digital product comes into play. You can create and launch a product that solves a specific pain point for your ideal customer that can be sold over and over again with little intervention from you once it’s created.
Do you know what that’s called? Scaling your income. If you want to be successful in your online business, you need to create an income stream that does not require constant touch from you. Some people use the phrase passive income to describe what I’m talking about. I personally don’t like using that term because there is honestly no way to make money that is truly passive. While the majority of work to create a digital product is done upfront, you still need to address customer issues and continually promote your product to be successful.
Let’s break down an example of how scaling your income through digital products makes more sense than chasing pageviews or offering services.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Successful in online business = create an income stream that is scalable!” quote=”Successful in online business = create an income stream that is scalable!”]
Simplified sponsored post example:
There’s a brand that wants to work with you that requires monthly pageviews of 100,000. Perfect! You just surpassed this important milestone last month and you love the brand. Win-win.
Income: $500
Requirements: (1) 1,000+ word blog post with custom pictures that you take of yourself using the product, 2 Instagram posts, 2 Facebook page posts, 2 mentions on Twitter.
Time it takes you to complete: 5 hours
Money made per hour: $100
Opportunity to make more money from the content you created: $0
1:1 consulting example:
Income: $1,500
Requirements: Initial exploratory call, time spent creating the contract and setting up your client workflow, initial onboarding call, time to do the work in the contract, and call to present work to the client
Time it takes you to complete: 8 hours
Money made per hour: $187.50
Opportunity to make more money with the client: Capped at how many working hours you have to dedicate to client work
Launching your first digital product example:
Income: $15,000 in the first month (please keep in mind not everyone is going to have a $15,000 product launch, I’m using this simply to illustrate the point of scaling your income)
Requirements: Identifying your customer’s pain points, creating the product, designing a sales page, and launching the product to your audience
Time it takes you to complete: 60 hours
Money made per hour: $250
Opportunity to make more money from your product after the initial launch: Unlimited!!!!
Ding, Ding, Ding! We have a winner. There is only one option that can produce an unlimited income stream for your online business and that is creating and owning the rights to your own product. Think about this, after the initial work is put in, the amount of money you can make per hour to maintain sales on your digital product is also unlimited!
Are you convinced yet? Great, I knew you were. Let’s dive in…
[clickToTweet tweet=”Your income potential from digital products is UNLIMITED!” quote=”Your income potential from digital products is UNLIMITED!”]
5 Tips for Successfully Launching Your First Digital Product
#1 Choose a niche product that addresses a specific pain point for your customer
If you learn nothing else from me about launching your own product, learn this…
The easiest way to sell a product is to be extremely specific with the problem it solves for your customer.
How do you do that? You get to know your customers, duh! ;p
Okay! Okay! I know that sounds a lot easier said than done. Trust me, I know it is because I’ve made the mistake of creating overly broad products myself. Along the way, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to identify your customer’s pain points.
The easiest and most efficient way is to ASK! I know, I can hear you groaning right now saying, “but WHO do I ask?!”
I’ve got ya….
- Work with 1:1 clients to discover their pain points
- Network in Facebook groups
If you’re serious about running an online business, I strongly advise you to work with 1:1 clients for a few months so you get a good understanding of their daily struggles. I took on 1:1 social media clients before I created my course, Pin Practical. I also ran a group coaching program while I was creating my signature course, Busy Moms Building.
What I learned from both experiences was invaluable to creating products that would sell!
[clickToTweet tweet=”Work with 1:1 clients to get to know your target customer better” quote=”Work with 1:1 clients to get to know your target customer better”]
#2 Buy your product domain
This might not seem like a big deal, but trust me, there are a ton of copycats out there. The last thing you want to do is get your product idea ripped off before you’re even finished with it!
As soon as you settle on a name for your product, head on over to Namecheap and register the domain.
Ultimate Beginners Guide to Blogging: How to Blog for Money
#3 Attract potential customers before you’re ready to launch
A lot of new online business owners shy away from launching a product because they don’t already have an email list of potential customers to market their product to. Even worse, they worry that the only way to actually make sales is to invest a ton of money into paid ads.
I’m here to tell you that you can build an email list of raving fans before you even finish your product!
Over the past year, I’ve experimented with different ways to attract my ideal potential customer and I’ve found two ways that work the best. And, guess what? Both are free!
I bring people to my website through Pinterest and I target them with a specific opt-in (or freebie) offer that is directly related to the product I’m going to be selling.
#1 Provide a tangible product for free that is so valuable your customer would have been willing to pay for it.
A good example of this is my Free Printable Budget Binder. I set this up before I created my very first product, the Easy Family Budget Spreadsheet. When someone signed up to get the budget binder, I sent them into a nurture email sequence that talked about the benefits of having a family budget. Now they get the upsell to the spreadsheet immediately on the thank you page and in the email sequence.
When I launched the spreadsheet, I already had over 2,000 people on my email list that had opted to receive the budget binder!
#2 A limited time opt-in offer
One of the best tactics I’ve used to create urgency is by offering something valuable for a limited amount of time. Once the time runs out, they’ll have to pay for the item I’m offering as part of the digital product I’m creating.
This worked really well for my new Pinterest course, Pin Practical. I offered one of my favorite videos from the course for free and created urgency by putting a countdown timer on the opt-in page. Once the course launched, the video would no longer be available. This worked super well for collecting email addresses in a short amount of time.
I used LeadPages to set up my landing page. Here’s what it looked like:
#4 Create a tripwire product
Many studies have been done that evaluate buyer behavior. The two most important statistics I’ve read are…
- A potential buyer needs to see your offer SEVEN times before they’ll buy from you
- A customer who spends a small amount of money with you is more likely to invest in your higher-priced products in the future
A tripwire product is when you offer a related product to the main product you will be selling but at a much lower cost. A tripwire product is usually between $7-$27. The idea is that you build trust and loyalty with your customers by offering the lower priced product first in the hopes that they convert into customers of your higher-priced options.
An example of this is my Busy Moms Building Business Tracking Spreadsheet. I offer this as a tripwire product for my signature course, Busy Moms Building: 12 Steps to Running Your Own Online Business for Busy Moms.
You can also use a tripwire product for strategic affiliate offers. For higher-priced affiliate product that you promote, you can use a lower-priced product that you create as a tripwire to upsell your customers to the affiliate offer.
#5 Invest in the right tools
In order to pull off a successful launch, you need to use the right tools to create an amazing customer experience.
Here is a list of tools I use to launch a variety of digital products:
CovertKit: email service provider, send marketing communications to your customers. Learn how to use ConvertKit for free using my Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing
SendOwl: product delivery service
LeadPages: create beautiful landing pages and collect email addresses
Thinkific: host your online courses
PayPal: payment processor
Stripe: payment processor
Canva: design beautiful graphics even with no graphic design experience
DepositPhotos: stock photography
Google Docs: where I wrote & edited my book and numerous other word documents
Google Drive: where I organized all my files (and my entire life!) Read more: 5 Top Time Management Tips for Moms
Fiverr: find cheap digital services such as graphic design services
Creative Market: find stock photography, fonts, beautiful social media templates, and much more
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Fantastic post! So many great tips! I need to determine what kind of product my customers are looking for. I will be revisiting this post to get me started. Thank you.
Wow, I wish I had this post on hand when I first started on Teachable! Thank you!
I love your advice, always practical and actionable. My first digital product is being included in the Genius Bloggers Toolkit this October and I’m excited and terrified at the same time. I,still need to set up sequences and continue nurturing potential customers in my list as the launch gets nearer. I,have other concerns like how/if to collect sales tax and other business set up items before I offer my product for sale on my site. But the toolkit is my first step in that direction!