In this post, I'm going to reveal why you don't need a big audience to sell digital products. What you do need instead to grow a list of your ideal customers. Plus, I'll share how to actually sell your digital products to this list of ideal customers and make sure you take action on these things instead of just passively consuming the information.
Prefer to watch the video version?
Is building an audience possible for you?
First, you need to know if this is even possible for you. So let's look at some examples of people who don't have huge social media followings but still bring in decent incomes by selling digital products:
- Lizzy Goddard has used this method for years. She was at multiple 6 figures in 2021 when she spoke in an interview on the get paid podcast. As a member of her community I know that she has increased her revenue significantly since. Her Instagram following is currently at 7,681 but she does’t post to Instagram that regularly.
- Leanne from Passive Income Superstars has also used this method. She made $8290.50 with this method from just one event over the course of a couple of weeks. Bringing lots of new email leads into her business at the same time. Leanne has Just under 2000 followers on Instagram at the time of researching for this post.
- Over a 3 month period using this method, my own email list increased by 5,300%.
How to build an audience
So, you don't need to focus on growing a massive audience. Instead, you need to get in front of the right people. People who would be interested in your offers. You can do this by collaborating with other business owners who already have that target audience.
Collaborations
The type of collaboration that was used in all of the examples above is called a "bundle." It involves a group of business owners contributing digital products that are usually sold in their business. These products are all contributed to a bundled offer. Consumers access the bundle by providing their email address or paying a small fee (usually a bargain compared to the total value of the bundle). You grow you email list, because to access your product, they give you their email address, helping you grow your list.
So, why would these people let you get in front of their audience?
A bundle is a win, win, win. A win for you, a win for all the other people taking part and a win for the consumer.
A bundle involves a group of business owners coming together. Each business owner contributes one digital product that is usually sold in their business. The digital product is provided for free to the consumers who either provide their email address or pay for access to the bundle. If the bundle is paid, the price is usually a great bargain (for example $47 for $5000 worth of digital products).
When they access your product, they provide their email address so it helps you to grow your email list.
What are the benefits?
The collaborator and host both benefit by growing their email list and the consumer benefits by getting a bargain.
Can you make money from taking part in a bundle?
Affiliate Commission
If the bundle is a paid bundle, you can usually become an affiliate for that bundle. Which means you earn a commission for any people who sign up to the bundle through your specific link. Sometimes you can also earn commission if they go on to buy other items from the host.
Tripwire Sales
You can also usually set up a tripwire on the back end of your contribution. This basically means that once someone give you their name and email address so they can access your product, you can set up your website so that they are redirected to a thank you page that provides a low cost offer that is related to the thing they just accessed that they can purchase in that moment.
Cross promotion within your digital products
You could mention and link to some of your other digital products and offers in your digital product contribution. This means that those who are engaged and use your product can easily purchase other products from you.
How to sell digital products in the longer term
You need to create yourself a long term sales strategy. So having studied sales strategy from many people, essentially sales strategy seems to me to fall into three parts. Those part are:
- To Regularly bring in new leads.
- To Nurture Leads to build trust and understanding.
- To Regularly make offers so your community have the chance to buy.
Tactics
The things we do to implement that strategy are our tactics. And tactics can vary greatly. As an example to illustrate what I mean I'll share my current tactics for each stage:
- To regularly bring in leads, I use bundles for quick lead generation but I also create YouTube videos. Those YouTube videos will help me to bring in leads in the longer term but they also currently help me with the next step which is...
- To Nurture leads to build trust and understanding. I can share my YouTube videos with the people who join my email list through bundles. I can use my videos to nurture those people and start building that trust. I also use email marketing for this by sending a weekly newsletter where I can link to those videos when it makes sense to.
- My current tactics to make offers regularly are to mention my offers in my weekly newsletter based on my sales focus for that week. I also have tripwire offers set up and cross mention my offers.
Implementation
I get very easily distracted so I need a system to make sure I remember to keep this up. The tool I use to stay on top of things is Notion. I created an entire system to ensure that I am organised and keep up with each part of this strategy consistently.
With this system I can do lots of things, here are just a few of them:
- Input bundle opportunities when I see them and keep on top of the deadlines.
- Review which opportunities I want to apply to and what is required of me in terms of promotion
- Link to any promotional assets that are supplied by the bundle host.
- I can keep all of my offers organised so I can plan out what digital product I want to contribute and what would make a good tripwire.
- Easily access all my sales and marketing assets that relate to that product.
- Plan what I want my sales focus to be each week so I can link up to my email marketing planner and plan the emails I need to send.
The beauty of Notion is you can link these planners together so that everything you do is working towards that top level strategy.
I have taken, my sales campaign planner, my product planner, my collaboration planner and my email marketing planner and I have linked them all up in a Notion template bundle so that you can start using this method right away too if you want to.
If you have any questions about any of the things mentioned in the post, ask them in the comments and the same goes if you would like me to make a video on any specific tactics I have mentioned.
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