Grow With Soul: Ep.40 Creating and Selling Digital Products With Kayte Ferris
I wanted to talk about creating and selling digital products. I know that digital products are are on a lot of peoples radar at the moment as they are touted as easy/passive ways to make money while you sleep or do another job. So for those of you who are playing round with the idea of a digital product then this episode is for you.I have been running e-courses for over a year now and in the last month I launched two other digital products The Purpose Kit and my Online Workshops, so I am going to share the leanings of all those different experiences.
Here's what we talk about in this episode:
What is a digital product?
Are digital products for you?
Is the market saturated with e-courses?
What will make your e-course or digital product more successful
How will it make a difference to your customers life?
Getting clear on your why and on the feelings of your customers
How do you find out what your customers specific problems are
What is the best format to deliver your digital product
How to create an e-book or digital product
Getting feedback
What software and platforms to use
Thinking about pricing
Pre-launch tips
Open & Close Carts and building momentum
Evergreen content
What if they don't sell?
After toady's episode I am taking a little break from Grow With Soul but I will be back before autumn with new episodes. If you would like to be part of Grow With soul or take part in a coaching episode, please take drop me an email and also check out the link below to the Blog that tells you how to pitch to be on the Podcast.
Links and resources we discuss:
Pin for later:
Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 40 of Grow with Soul. Today it’s just me, and I want to talk to you about creating and selling digital products. I know digital products are on a lot of people’s radars at the moment, and especially because they’re often touted as easy/passive ways to make money while you sleep or do another job. For those of you who are playing around with the idea of digital products, this episode is for you. I’ve been running e-courses for over a year now, and in the last month have launched two other digital products. The Purpose Kit, and my online workshop. So, in this episode I’m going to share the learnings of all those different experiences.
SO FIRST OF ALL, WHAT EVEN REALLY IS A DIGITAL PRODUCT?
Most commonly digital products are eCourses and eBooks, but really they’re just anything that’s delivered digitally to the customer; so a video or an audio series, design templates, printables, anything that you can imagine that you can deliver digitally is a digital product. You can have them on sale consistently all year round, you can have launch periods where you open and close the carts; most commonly you’ll see that with eCourses. Generally they don’t include any 1-2-1 contact between you and your customer, or although you can get hybrid eCourses or programmes that have that feature in there as well. That’s often why digital products are really so popular for people who want that as a secondary or tertiary income stream or for those who have limited time or limited energy to work on their businesses.
Of course, there’s no such thing as money for nothing, and claims that digital products are totally passive streams of income are pretty misleading. Aside from the actual creation of the thing (that isn’t passive, let’s just say) you have to take a pretty proactive role in promoting the product. Just putting it live isn’t going to be enough to sell it, just like putting a physical product on a shelf isn’t enough to get people in through the shop door. You need to always be reminding your audience that your product exists, and tapping into new streams of customers to bring in through the doors to buy that product.
There’s no reason why introducing a digital product shouldn’t work for any business; it can be an interesting sideline for a physical product business, and provide a more accessible income stream for service based business – that’s exactly what I did. While I know that working with me 1-2-1 for a period of time is not always accessible for people financially, having some much smaller price points that people can buy into is really useful.
A digital product is full of the possibility for you to explore what you do in a really creative and really valuable way. However, you do have to be honest with yourself and decide whether a digital product is suited to you as a human and as a business owner. For example, if what I said about needing to proactively market and talk about that digital product feels horrendous, then that might be a sign either to use an open and close cart model, or that just maybe digital products aren’t for you. If your skillset is more in doing the thing than in teaching the thing, then maybe templates are a better option than an eCourse. So really play to your strengths when you’re thinking about introducing a new digital product; think about how you can best provide that product to your person.
When I posted on Instagram that I was going to be recording this episode, one of the questions that I got was ‘is the market for eCourses saturated now?’ And this is something that I’ve heard a couple of times and I do think it’s a really interesting question to unpack. My stock answer to that has always been that no one ever says ‘we’ve got too many books, nobody write any more books, nobody publish any more books, there’s enough books’. So, in theory, why should eCourses be any different to that? But I do think that’s a little bit simplistic because of course, more people have likely been burned, particularly in the last couple of years, by lacklustre eCourses, than they have with underwhelming books. Particularly as if you buy an underwhelming book, you’ve lost £8, whereas if you buy a lacklustre ecourse you might be out several hundred pounds.
I think the problem is that over a short space of time, the market was really flooded with eCourses from people who thought they should do an eCourse, or wanted just to have an eCourse and wanted that easy way to make money, rather than having all these courses flood the market with really passionate engaging teachers at their helm. It became, and it has definitely become of the past couple of years, a thing to do. And yes, when it’s just that you’re doing it because it’s a thing to do, the customers aren’t getting value and they’re going to be a bit more sceptical. But people are still selling courses, and the courses that are selling are the ones that are truly valuable and are creating results for the people who take them, and also whose creators are infectiously excited and believe wholeheartedly in their content and their product.
So while yes, the book analogy is maybe a little bit more simplistic, there’s always plenty of space for great products. There’s not just one version of a smartphone, they could have released the iPhone and then Samsung and the other companies were like ‘well there’s no point us doing it’ but there’s always new technology coming out there, and that just makes it better for consumers. As long as you’ve got a really great product, there’s always going to be space for it.
So what will make your eCourse or digital product successful isn’t the format or the platform you use, but we will touch on that in this episode, but really it’s just basing it on a really, really great idea.
LET’S START THERE. LET’S START WITH THE IDEA, AND LET’S START WITH THE PLANNING.
In order for people to buy your product, it has to be valuable to them in some way. If it doesn’t give them value, they’re not going to give you value (i.e. financial value) back. Value means lots of different things and it doesn’t have to be just fixing a problem for people. It can be self exploration, learning a new hobby, taking time for themselves with some escapism. What helps you to sell it and for buyers to justify it to themselves is if you can tangibly show the difference it’s going to make in their life.
So the way to do that is to start with a really specific problem that you want to solve or more helpfully an end point you want to help people reach. So thinking about your customer, where they are right now in relation to the topic you want to write your course or eBook about and how you want them to feel when they finish it, and what’s the difference there. And so the content of your course will be made up of traversing that gap between where they are now and where you want them to get to. As long as you are really clear on where that endpoint is, that helps you to sell it, to stay really focused and be really specific.
And specific is key here, if you make it too sprawling, it might as well be a coaching offering rather than a course if you’re trying to cover every single possibility for people. And you won’t be able to cover it meaningfully in a course environment, which means people will end up kind of disappointed because you didn’t fulfil those promises you’d never have been able to keep in the first place.
But also even before that, customers might not feel very clear on what they’re buying if it’s quite wishy washy and sprawling. So get really clear on what that feeling is. And we’ve talked loads about this on the podcast, about starting with ‘why’, and how decisions are made in the emotional part of the brain. If we connect with how they feel now and how they could feel on the other side of this course, that can help them to make the decision to know whether this digital product is right for them.
For example, with my Campfire course, which is technically a blogging for business course but it’s much more of a content marketing course, that’s what i had to nail into; that I could have gone really big and really general about marketing and content (there’s so much you can say about it) but actually the specific problem I wanted to solve was for people who knew they wanted to do it but it felt like too much of a subject to broach, they needed it broken down into little steps that they could do to create great stuff they were proud of consistently.
They didn’t need to know loads and loads of theory, they didn’t need to take it to the next level, they didn’t need to professionalise it or monetise it, they just needed to start doing it. So that’s the kind of set up with that; where they were at the beginning was confused and frustrated, with themselves and not knowing which way to turn and by the end I wanted them to have a plan that they could work through and feel confident that they knew they could carry on blogging forever and ever if they wanted to with the tools that they’ve learned on that course.
So how do you find out what that even is? How do you find out what is the specific problem you want to solve, or how people are feeling and how you can help them? There are two ways to do this:
ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS AND YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
It’s really important that you do a fair bit of research when you’re creating a digital product, because you can spend weeks and months creating something and people are like ‘that’s not really exactly what I need, I need something a little more like this’. So if you can be helping your customers be part of the creation process, you know you’re going to be creating something that they really want.
If you’ve got a shortlist of things that you’re inspired to help people with, if you’ve kind of assumed a few problems or you’ve heard a few things on the grapevine, or perhaps the ‘gram, then start to do some research. Do some stories polls. If you’ve got a Facebook group or an email list, ask a few people if you can email them some questions or offer some kind of discovery calls just so you can get that kind of information from the horse’s mouth, and get really specific. You’ll start to pick up on things that are slightly different to what you might think.
GENERALLY PICK UP ON THE ZEITGEIST ON WHAT’S AROUND
For my online workshop which I did live and you can also purchase the replay, it was something I was picking up through my client calls and also through what people were saying on Instagram and on podcasts; that things were starting to not work and that authenticity and vulnerability ‘were on the rise’ and people didn’t feel confident about that. They were starting to lose their way with knowing how they can show up and feeling forced to go one way or the other. And that was something I was picking up over and over again in lots of different places so I twigged that this is a definite problem for people, a really specific problem, and this is something that I’m experiencing too as a business owner. So how can I start to draw this out and help people get from this place of confusion where they are now and give them some tools to get to a place where they feel more centred in what they’re doing and they can market from the inside out rather than the other way round?
So if you are starting to hear things over and over again from friends or maybe in your local area if that’s the kind of business that you have, how is that a problem that you can solve? I mean, not everything that you pick up on is going to be a problem that you can solve, but if you can feel like you can, then that’s somewhere that you can start. Combining the two of asking and researching your customers and picking up on the zeitgeist, combining those two, and you’re on to a winner of an idea.
The final piece of the puzzle is that when you know that problem you want to be solving, you know the endpoint that you want people to get to with your course or your product, what’s the best format for you to deliver that? How can you deliver that result for people the best? This is kind of two-fold. It’s what are you best at, like I said earlier, how can you play to your strengths with it? If you’re more of a doer than a teacher, perhaps this isn’t an eCourse, perhaps this is more of a book or a really practical set of steps or email templates that you can give to people.
Or is this topic actually a little bit smaller, so like my workshop – that could have been an eCourse but it really didn’t need to be. It needed to be a two hour workshop talking through things, discussing with people where things were going wrong because I didn’t want to just broadcast that content, because the problem was in the specificities for people. So if I could actually speak to them over the chat function and dig out what was going wrong, that was the best way for me to help them.
So think outside the box a little bit, don’t just think ‘this is my eCourse I’m going to jam this content into an eCourse format’. What is the best way that you could deliver this result to these people to solve this problem?
Once you know the format you’re going to use and you know the problem that you’re solving and the people you’re solving it for, really there’s nothing left but to start making the thing.
And really this comes down to how you work best. In the episode with Susannah Conway, she said that she likes to start up here courses, then she kind of creates them as people are working through them, so she’s a week or two ahead of her students, so she can be moulding the course in a way that best fits what’s coming up with them with their questions. And that might be a way that you really want to work it and that’s how your content is best delivered.
However, for me, that is very stressful and I hate feeling like I’m chasing my tail in that way and that’s also because I also have other things going on. So when I’m creating a course, I’m also doing client calls and doing emails and this podcast so it just builds up on me a bit too much, so I like to give myself some space and time to work on the project and get it pretty much there before it goes on sale.
For example, with the Purpose Kit, I actually booked a little Airbnb for a couple of days, and I went away and got it all down. What helps is it’s an eBook and that always helps, but similarly when I was creating Campfire for the first time, I would spend a couple of days a week, a couple of hours on those days, just typing away.
What I found worked really well for me was to get everything that I could out of my head first. I’d have my outline that I was going to do, and I knew roughly what was in each section, but then I’d just type away, almost stream of consciousness, and when I got to a place where I didn’t know what to say next, I’d move on and try to keep in that flow state, just to get me out of my head. And then I’d go back in and go through it, make it make more sense a lot of the time but also start to add in examples and choose things that were going to illustrate those points better, add in work from other people; so if I’d read a book and thought ‘that’s a really good quote to illustrate my point’ I’d stick that in. I’d put everything that I thought down, and I’d just kind of put glitter over the top to really bring it to life a little bit more.
Again, it’s really knowing how you work best. Perhaps if you need to be more methodical and get each section properly done, do it that way. But also it’s a really good idea again to continue to get feedback at this point, like I said with getting your idea in the first place, to ask your audience, checking in with those people because you don’t want to be going down this road, creating this product and you’ve kind of leaned away from what they really wanted. When I was in my Airbnb creating my Purpose Kit, I was on Instagram, sharing what I was doing, asking more questions, getting feedback back so I could really make sure I was creating with my audience front and centre in my mind, because if it didn’t work for them, they were never going to buy it.
Once you’ve got your content, there is a slightly important way in thinking about how you’re going to deliver it and the software and the platforms to do with that.
With online courses there are obviously a selection, you’ve probably used them as a customer. I’ve used Teachable; the reason I went with Teachable for my course is because I knew a lot of other courses were hosted on there, and it would be a pretty native platform for people. It can be a barrier to purchase if what you’re hosting your course on is something people don’t already have an account with and they don’t want another account with another platform. Or they’ve never heard of it and they’re worried that they don’t trust it. So that’s a consideration to make, especially if you’re selling to an audience that aren’t au fait with the idea of eCourses, then making sure that you’ve got a platform that makes it easy for them to buy and isn’t going to be a stopper for them to buy, that’s really helpful.
I know a lot of people are also moving more towards delivering course content by email which really works because you don’t have to pay any extra money other than what you’re already doing for your email hosting to be delivering that content. If you do want to use email for your course, or you want to just have a downloadable eBook, I use the WordPress plugin Easy Digital Downloads, which is free and you can put your buy button on and if you got to the Purpose Kit site, that’s what’s used there so you can see what that journey is.
Another platform that I’m kind of heavily researching is one called Podia, which you can have all your eCourses and memberships and digital downloads all in one place. So if you want to really make your business model 100% digital products, then Podia might be the sort of platform that actually works out to be the most efficient for you. But ultimately it’s not the format that’s the most important thing. So this is the thing that I’d spend the absolute least amount of time deciding, just find something that works and that makes sense to you that you can use and spend the rest of time creating the best course or product that you possibly can.
Something that people always ask me about is pricing.
Pricing is so tricky, particularly with things like this where you don’t have huge amounts of overheads, or you don’t have material costs and things like that. It’s knowing what you want to make from this product and what this product is going to do for you. Actually, if it’s more important to you that you get volume coming through like it’s important for your course that there’s a thriving community because they need to be talking to each other to get the best out of that learning experience then maybe having the price lower to drive more volume might be the best way to price that course.
Alternatively if you actually need to hit a certain total income from that course, then actually making it a really boutique course where you only need to sell 10 places but they’re at a higher price, maybe that feels more manageable. Generally what I say to people when they’re creating a product is to start with the price point they want to sell it at and then create it to fit that price point. What we can all do, especially when we’ve got a topic we’re really excited about is that we can go real deep with it and then we end up with all those content which is really like a £400 or £500 course but the people we’re selling to are just starting out and maybe they’ve only got £100 to spend. So make sure that you’re thinking as part of your creation about how much you want to sell this for and how much that product is worth solving for your people.
Once you’ve got your product, you can either start selling it right away, before you’ve even made it, some people like to do a pre-sale, and they say ‘you can buy it now and it will be delivered in 2 months time’. That’s a really clever way of doing it because you’re really testing the market. When people do a survey, they say ‘I’d love to buy that’ and then they never get their card out of their purse. Whereas if you buy it on presale, and nobody buys it, that’s probably telling you that there’s something awry. But if you’ve got it all there, created and ready to go, then start selling it.
What I’ve found really useful is to pre-empt, or pre-launch, the sales period, so that’s different to a pre-sale in that people can’t buy it, but you start to mention it ahead of time so that people know that it’s coming and they can budget for it, they can start getting excited about it. I found this really useful for the purpose kit – it had really good first sales because I trailed it weeks and weeks ahead of time. So that was just mentioning things I was making for it, or an Instagram sticker, or saying something to my email list, starting to create blog or podcast content around the concept of purpose, so people were getting excited about it, and buy the time I launched it, they’d set up an email or Instagram alert and were ready to buy.
If you’re being reactive with your product and you want to get it out, like my workshop, sometimes you’ve got to just really push it. I put it on 3 weeks before I was going to run it, and that was just a case of making sure people understood what it was about, doing blog and podcast content but also just to talk about it on stories about what it was going to be, how it was going to help people, and letting people know it was there. We think we need to sneak a sales pitch underneath a lot of valuable content, whereas actually, people wise up to that and can spot a mile off when you’re doing it, so when everything else you do is purely valuable, there’s no sales pitch, and your Instagram posts make people laugh or make people feel something, and then once or twice a week you pop on an unabashedly say ‘Hi guys, I’ve got a new course coming out, it starts in two weeks and this is what it’s about and how you can buy it’, there’s no shadyness.
Again it’s thinking about how people feel. If you sign up for a webinar or listen to a podcast and then start you realise you’re being sold to, that’s not a good feeling, we feel squirmy, awkward and just gross, whereas if you’re scrolling through stories and see ‘hi guys, here’s a link to my workshop, it’s going to be great’, there’s no negative feelings there. It’s not trying to Trojan horse a sales pitch in so much as just making sure you’re showing up with really great content and then making sure they know there’s this thing available for them to buy.
What I would say, especially if you’re doing an open and close cart, is that people buy at the last minute. For context, I eventually sold 50 places for my workshop, which was at 7pm on a Monday. By 7pm on the Saturday before, I had sold 13 places. So I sold 37 places over the course of a weekend. People will leave it to the last minute, so your job isn’t to sell every time you mention it, it’s to build up so people know that it’s happening.
If you’re doing more of an evergreen type of product, you don’t get that type of scarcity, so you have to create it a bit. So you can do some campaigns, so maybe you push it a bit more in one month, or you might want to do a campaign where there’s an offer, so it could be a discount, or a value add, so for example when I hit 50 sales of the purpose kit, I’m going to do a Q&A for everybody who has bought it, so I’m about 17 away from that number. So something I’ll do over the summer is make sure people know if they buy it soon, they’ll get the Q&A.
Another question is ‘what if it doesn’t sell?’ This is a perennial question, but it’s the same in any business. What if nobody hires your services, what if nobody buys your pottery; there’s always that risk that it might not sell, so make sure you have other income streams that can act as a safety net for you. If it’s not selling, it’s a great indicator that it’s not quite right, so you either change the product or the price or the sales pitch. Ultimately, if it doesn’t sell, what you’re left with is a lot of work that’s actually already done. Remember, nobody else sees it, nobody else knows how it’s done – always remember that you’ve done the work, you have it in the bank, and you can use it elsewhere.