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- [00:00]
Kevin Schmidlin
Have you ever wondered how to turn your podcast from an expensive side project into a profit making machine? You are not the only one. Many podcasters grapple with the challenge of monetizing their show, and they often hit a wall when it comes to generating sustainable income. They either are reliant on fickle brand deals and sponsorships, or they resort to selling their time with one on one coaching. Imagine if instead you could leverage your podcast not only as a platform for sharing your expertise, but as a springboard for selling digital products that transform your listener base into a loyal customer base. You're listening to Grow the Show, the podcast that grows your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidlin. I am your guide to expanding your podcast's reach, authority and profitability. Today, we're diving into the world of digital products and how you can use them to monetize your podcast effectively. Joining us on the show is Steph Taylor, a digital product strategist who turned the tide on traditional business models by harnessing the power of online courses, ebooks, and more leveraged products. Steph's story is a testament to the untapped potential lying within every podcast audience. In this episode, you're going to learn three things. Number one, you're going to learn the benefits of integrating digital products into your podcasting business model. Number two, you're going to learn strategies for seamlessly aligning your content with your digital products in a way that resonates. And number three, Steph's going to share some real life examples of podcasts that have successfully monetized via digital products, proving that it's possible for you too. Plus, we're going to dive into the steps that you can take today to start this lucrative journey. And Steph's also going to shed light on some common pitfalls to avoid and the best practices to follow. So if you're ready to explore how digital products can not only complement your podcasting pattern, but contribute to your financial goals, then stick around to this episode of Grow the Show.
- [02:05]
Steph Taylor
Steph Taylor, welcome to Grow the Show. So excited to have you here. Could you please start and kick us off by taking us back to a time before you had digital products? Can you tell me what your business and life looked like and why? What about it drove you towards digital products?
- [02:25]
Oh, yes. Well, firstly, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to talk about digital products with you because honestly, they have changed my life. I think back to not my first business. My first business was a physical product Business, we won't go there. But my second business, after I closed down the first business, I started working as a marketing consultant and I started realizing, oh, if I'm going to scale, I have to hire more people, I have to build this out into an agency. So that's what I started doing. And I ended up at this point where I see so many people who are selling one on one services, so many agency owners, so many coaches, consultants, at the ceiling where you feel like you're not really earning enough for the amount of time that you're working, but you don't have any more time to work more, to earn more and people are already telling you, oh, you're too expensive so you can't put your prices up. So I was in this kind of ceiling where I was stuck and I didn't really know what am I going to do, how am I going to get out of this? And the turning point was I was actually in Paris. I was there, I was in Europe for a couple of months and I was standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and I open up my phone, check my emails and there's a client emergency sitting in my inbox. I'm sure you know the kind. And I'm looking at it, I'm like, oh, I need to reply to this right now. Meanwhile, all these beautiful couples sitting having picnics in front of the Eiffel Tower. My own partner at the time was standing next to me like, what are you doing? We're on holiday, don't reply to this email. And that was this point where I realized, like I started this business because it gave me freedom. But the kind of freedom that it gave me was just location freedom. All it meant was that I could take my laptop with me to different places around the world and work from different cafes around the world. But I couldn't ever really step away from the emails, the calls, all of the things that kept the lights on in my business. So then fast forward to when I started adding digital products to the business and started being able to let go of those clients. Suddenly that created this new level of freedom where not only could I work from anywhere and the hours that I wanted to work, but I also could have this mental freedom where I wasn't always worrying about what emergencies landing in my inbo, what's gone wrong with this client's sales page or their ads campaign because none of those things were going on.
- [04:54]
Oh, incredible. So yeah, let's dive into the how you got to that place and so you're at A place where you're like, okay, this is too much. I don't want to do this anymore. First of all, how do you even get out of that? Because you can't just be like, you know what, everyone, I'm done. Like, you can't quit.
- [05:10]
Kevin Schmidlin
Right.
- [05:10]
Steph Taylor
Because you've got contracts to fulfill. So how did you, in that moment then start to work your way towards freedom?
- [05:17]
Yeah. So it wasn't this one instant moment of like, all of my clients are fired. I think everyone imagines this moment where they're just going to stop working with their clients. That it's like this hard line in the sand of like, one day you're working with clients and the next day you're not. It was this gradual process of I'm going to let go of this one client. And a lot of them were on just month to month contracts. A lot of them weren't on longer term contracts. So that made it a lot easier. So I let go of the first client that gave me back a couple of hours a week. And that couple of hours. Then I spent that really intentionally starting to build out. At the time, I thought the solution was going to be a membership and a whole library of different courses. In my mind, I was like, oh, I need to have a course about Facebook ads, a course about Instagram, a course about Pinterest, all of the different marketing things. It needs to be this whole library so they can come in and pick and choose. And I've since completely changed my perspective on how to actually design those out. And maybe we can talk about that today as well. But I started building out this library of different courses. And as each of the things that I created started becoming a little bit more profitable, I'd let go of the next client and then I'd put a bit more time in and let go of the next one. And eventually I found myself at this point where, hey, like, all my income is coming from digital products. Great.
- [06:41]
Yeah. Yeah. I can't wait to hear what that actually looks like and how you make sales regularly, you know, and reliantly. Like, what does that type of funnel look like? How is it different? But you just made a comment about you thought you'd build a membership. Let's dive into that right here and now. So you thought you'd build something out, but then you found out what. That, that's. That wasn't what you wanted, that wasn't the right thing.
- [07:00]
Kevin Schmidlin
Let's.
- [07:01]
Steph Taylor
What was that?
- [07:02]
Yeah. So at the time, my podcast was focused purely around marketing. It was marketing Tips for small business owners. That was, it was so broad, such a broad nich. And then because of that podcast, everyone who was listening to it, they were there for marketing advice. And I thought, I need to give them a course on each of the different areas of marketing that they are struggling with. And I thought, oh, I also need to create a membership so that the podcast listeners who want to learn how to market their businesses better, they can come into that membership as well. And the library just ended up being so broad. And the problem was that people were coming to the podcast to learn about general marketing strategy. But then when they wanted to learn about Facebook ads, instead of buying my Facebook ads course, they would go to the person who specialized in Facebook ads and learn from them. And with the membership, man, the membership was great for a little while, but it was essentially each month I was delivering a masterclass on a certain aspect of marketing their business. And what I didn't realize was every single month and forever I'm going to be creating and delivering a brand new masterclass. And I kept adding cheat sheets, implementation guides, all of the extra things, bonus podcast episodes, because I thought, oh, if I can just jam pack this membership so full of value, they're going to want to be in there. And people kept canceling. I was struggling to sell it and I couldn't figure out what was going on. And I realized it's because firstly, people don't want to learn how to market their business, they want to make more sales. They don't care about learning marketing, they care about getting clients. And the second reason why was because there was just so much content in there. They were getting, they were joining, they were getting overwhelmed, I was getting overwhelmed creating it, they were getting overwhelmed consuming it. And then they would leave because they thought, oh, I'm not getting my money's worth right now. I'll join in six months time when I have more time to implement all of this.
- [08:55]
Oh man, that sounds brutal. But also like it makes sense, right? Like when you're overwhelmed by that much content, like, of course, what a fascinating. And I jump into this here now because I know that there's grow the show listeners who are feeling that I know there's grow the show listeners who right now are like, I'm going to build out a membership and have all these different quarters and things like that. So you had this issue, you were burnt out, your clients were getting burnt out. And so where did you go from there?
- [09:22]
Yeah, so. And actually I'm going to take a step back because I know you're saying a lot of your clients might have this issue. A lot of your listeners might have this issue. This is probably the number one mistake I see people making with memberships is they come at it from this perspective of like, oh, I want recurring income in my business, so I'm going to go and create a membership, rather than actually asking the question, does this need to be a membership? Should this be a membership or should it be a course instead? So where did I go from there? I ended up closing down that membership, which was really hard at the time because that was maybe about half of my monthly income at this point. I had let go of my clients. I was selling some of the courses in my library, but not a huge number of them. But I just knew that this membership had to go to create that space for something else. So I closed it down. I closed it down and had a couple of really rough months before I ended up having some of the biggest months in my business ever.
- [10:19]
Wow. So, yeah, I mean, we gotta keep the train rolling. So just to leave on a cliffhanger. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for coming on the show. No. So, yeah, what happens next? You have a couple of rough months. So first of all, before the inflection point is about to happen, but in those really rough months, what were you doing?
- [10:36]
So the roughest month was, I think it was about October 2019, October or November 2019. And I had just finished creating this beautiful course on Instagram marketing. It was eight weeks long. I thought it was so full of value. I had taught everything I knew about Instagram in this course. And I had put the last of the money that I had in my bank account. Like, I know this is such a cliche. Like, I went and invested my last bit of money. I really did. I put that last bit of money into Facebook ads to get people to register for the webinar where I was going to launch this course off the back of. And I went to go live on the webinar, hit the button and spinning circle, going live, going live. And it just never went live. So, tech glitch to end all tech glitches. Because I'm in Australia, the US support team for this platform, the webinar platform, they were offline. There was literally nothing we could do. I was looking at my inbox and I'm getting these emails from people being like, I put my kids to bed early so I could come to this. And I'm thinking, oh, no, what am I going to do? I was working in a co working space at that Time. This was maybe 11am I went home, I poured myself a massive glass of wine, I climbed into bed and I texted my best friend. And I was like, do you ever think about getting a job? And she calls me and she's like, this is what you're going to do. You're going to email all of the people who registered for the webinar. You're going to tell them that there was a tech glitch. You're going to tell them it's happening this time tomorrow instead. And she walked me through the whole process. I ended up launching that course. It didn't do as well as I'd hoped it would, but it gave me enough of a cash injection to keep the lights on for a little bit longer. And meanwhile, I'd been having a lot of people asking like, hey, Steph, you've got a podcast. Can you show me how to do that? A lot of friends were like, hey, will you like, can we just catch up and you show me how to do a podcast? I was like, maybe there's something in this. So I ended up launching a group program. I thought, let me just put it out there to my list. Let's see if I can get eight people signed up and I will show them week by week on Zoom over a couple of weeks to set up their podcasts. Two people signed up and I thought that's probably not enough to go ahead with this. So I then sent out a survey to everybody who hadn't signed up but who had expressed some kind of interest. And the big resounding response was, oh, well, I want to do this in a self paced format. I don't have eight weeks to commit. I want to do it in four weeks, I want to do it in six months. It's the start of the summer holidays here, so my kids are going to be at home. So I realized, okay, they want this thing, but they just don't want it in this format. So then I launched it again. I said, well, okay, here now, it's a self paced program that you can go through. And 20 people bought it. So I went and I created it in the space of seven days after I'd sold it, delivered it to them, they loved it. Then I thought, let me try launch this again properly with a webinar this time. And I did that. Another 20 people bought it. Then I started running Facebook ads to this new webinar and it started converting. I ran it again, I ran it again, I ran it again. And then eventually I realized, wow, this webinar is converting. So. Well, let me pre record this webinar and see what happens if I run Facebook ads to the prerecorded webinar. So in the space of about five months from that really low point where I wanted to close my business and go and get a job, I was literally searching on LinkedIn through to, I think it was about Feb. 2020 was $10,000 month. March 2020 was like a $60,000 month, and then April 2020 was a $350,000 month. And that was that inflection point.
- [14:12]
How about shout out to that friend who got you out of bed and said, no, no, no, she's my best.
- [14:17]
Friend to this day.
- [14:18]
Incredible. Not now, not now. That's crazy. So what I also will commend is when you're in a time like that where you're like, pivoting from offer to offer to offer to offer, like, it's every single time you have to pivot, I imagine it's even more difficult to do that because you're like, should I keep pivoting? Like, is this. My gosh, can you talk about just how you were able to just keep.
- [14:41]
Kevin Schmidlin
Trying and keep going and not go.
- [14:43]
Steph Taylor
Back and get the job?
- [14:44]
Oh, man, there were a lot of job searches done throughout that year. I think for me, it's been. I've learned to think about the pivoting almost as like a let's experiment and test. Because I see so many people sitting there trying to get the perfect idea, trying to wait for the perfect time. And what I've realized is a lot of the time, the things that I've put out there that have done really well, maybe after doing them for three months or six months, I've realized, oh, actually, I don't enjoy doing that. When I was working with retainer clients, before I started working with retainer clients, I thought, oh, this is the one thing I'm going to love doing this. I love working with clients. It's going to be great. Let's work with them on a retainer basis. And then only through working with them did I realize, actually, no, I like having the freedom where I can take a month off in my business. So a lot of the time, we actually don't know what we're going to enjoy until we do it. We don't know what's going to work until we do it. And it's been so useful for me to get into this mindset of experimentation. It's why my podcast is called Imperfect Imperfect Action. I honestly believe that if you can take that imperfect action, not be overly attached to it succeeding, because, you know, half the time, maybe more than half the time, it's not going to succeed. Obviously you want it to, but if it doesn't, it's not the end of the world. We can learn something from it. We can pivot, we can try again. And the more you do that, the more that resilience builds, the easier it becomes to keep doing it.
- [16:09]
Yeah. So let's talk about how your life changed after 350k in April. And I imagine the momentum kept going. And so coming from a place where, you know, you initially were. You had no freedom from your business, then you spent time pivoting, trying to, you know, going month to month trying to make things work. What was your life like once the digital product actually, in a completely leveraged way, was actually bringing you income?
- [16:30]
Yeah, I'd love to say that it was really easy, but. And everyone thinks growth is going to be so easy. They're like, yeah, as long as I can just make more money in my business, then all my problems will be solved. And I mean, I hate to say it, but, like, more money, more problems. Right? Like the things that are like a tiny, little, tiny little stone in your shoe. When you start to scale, that stone in your shoe becomes like a rock, and every little tiny thing starts to scale. So at that point, it was me, and I had a va, working maybe a couple of hours a week. And I pretty quickly realized, oh, we have a lot of customer support now because people aren't getting their login detail emails, people are forgetting their passwords, They've lost the link to go and log in. So I started to. That was the first thing that I managed to get off my plate because that was taking up way too much time. And then as we started to scale, I was realizing, oh, I have all of these people now, and I have nothing else to sell them. After the whole Instagram launch debacle, I realized that was the point where I realized I can't just be this generalist marketer anymore. And I retired all of my courses, the library of courses that I had created, I retired them and just went all in on this podcasting course for a little while, and I had nothing else to sell them. These were all people who had gone and they'd now launched a podcast, and they were like, cool, what's next? How can we work with you next? And I'm like, I'm so overwhelmed with this business that's grown so quickly. I don't have time to create anything else for you. I don't have the brain space. I'm like not inspired. So there was a little while there where all I was doing was sitting on the couch, freaking out, like, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? What's the next step? The next step sort of organically became, well, I'm going to teach other people how to launch their own digital products, how to run these live launches, like what I had done with the podcast launch plan and with all of my other courses previously. I'm going to show them how I use a webinar to sell. I'm going to show them how I strategically share content that moves somebody closer to buying. And then I launched that one. I think it was towards the end of 2020 for the first time. And that was I guess the next inflection point where I started to be able to help people on a bit more of a deeper level, not just in a self paced course.
- [18:43]
So yeah, what is that? Just tactically, that offer is more than a self paced course. Did you go back to offering any sort of like coaching or you know, on call support or anything like that?
- [18:52]
Oh, like every now and then I'll offer sort of coaching deals like, you know, come on, we can do like four weeks of coaching. When I feel like it's. But ongoing, it's not something that I do because I like to have the freedom. I've intentionally designed my business so that I have the freedom where, you know, like in, I think it was March 2021, I took a whole month off and went traveling around Australia in a van.
- [19:14]
Wow. Wow.
- [19:14]
Didn't touch my laptop for an entire month. Last year I took two weeks off to go hiking through the outback. Didn't have my laptop, my phone, I was out of phone service for pretty much the entire two weeks. So I very intentionally removed myself from most one on one elements. But working with my students in a deeper container was this new program was 12 weeks long. And for 12 weeks I'd show up and I would do my Q and A calls with them. I could coach them in those calls. But then when the 12 weeks was done, I could take a month off.
- [19:45]
Kevin Schmidlin
Let's transition.
- [19:46]
Steph Taylor
But congratulations, by the way. Thank you. There's a lot of folks who would have quit. There's a lot of folks who would have quit. And for some it would have been the right decision. And it's just so cool to hear that you were able to persevere and find light on the other side. That's inspiring. So let's talk about the tactics. Okay, so a podcaster is listening today and a lot of our listeners are one on one. Coaches are folks that are selling their time a lot and are probably really interested in hearing what it would be like to sell a digital product to their podcast audience. But I'm willing to bet that one of their concerns is going to be, do I have enough listeners yet? So what would you say to that?
- [20:22]
I would say that you don't need to have a lot of listeners. It doesn't need to be something that you sell at volume. I have worked with so many people who have launched digital products and that is audience is probably the biggest thing that is stopping people from even getting started. And that's because they see all of these people, they look around them and they see all of these people having $100,000 launches, million dollar launches. And in their mind they're like, oh, if my first Launch isn't that $100,000 launch, then it wasn't worth it. But the first launch is never going to be your best launch. The first launch is just the first launch. And then we launch it again and we launch it again and we launch it again. So that's the first thing I want to say. The second thing that I want to say is pricing plays a huge factor in this. If you are launching a $10 ebook and you want to make $10,000, you need to sell a thousand copies of that ebook. If you are selling a $1,000 course, you only need to sell 10 of those to make $10,000. It's a lot easier to provide an awesome experience for 10 people than it is to provide an awesome experience for a thousand people. And you'll probably find that with the thousand people, if you're hiring somebody to do customer support, you're probably just gonna break even on that $10,000 anyway. Cause there's gonna be a lot more customer support for those thousand people.
- [21:38]
Got it? Totally.
- [21:39]
So be mindful of the price point as well. Like you can deliver a really awesome more, I guess a higher touch experience for fewer people at a higher price point rather than having to create an ebook where it's so hands off.
- [21:55]
It sounds like there's a sweet spot where like, because if you're too, if the price is too low, you're going to have tons of work to do with customer support. If the price is super high, you're going to have tons of work to do with, you know, with like coaching and stuff like that. So it sounds like if you're truly optimizing for the most amount of freedom. There's like a middle ground. Is that accurate?
- [22:13]
And I think it depends on the person. Right. Some people, I have friends who, if their calendars were booked solid with coaching calls all day, they would be so happy. If my calendar was booked full with coaching calls all day, I would not be able to do anything else because I find it so energy draining. So, first of all, that sweet spot is going to really depend on you and your personality and how you work. But I also think that we need to look at it a little bit more holistically in terms of what are all of the different things that you sell in your business. Because it might be that that $10 ebook solves the problem for somebody that is then going to lead them into solving the next problem in the journey. And to solve that next problem in the journey, that's where they need to come into your higher ticket program. Or Maybe it's a 12 week course where you're showing up for Q and A calls for the group. So we need to look at what is that overall journey that we are taking somebody on. So, for example, the overall journey I take a business owner on is I'm helping them to build a business that is profitable when they're not at their laptop. And the very first step in that is designing out what their office suite is going to look like, what their business model is. Then the next step is growing their audience. Then the next step is learning how to sell through launching. And then the next step is the structure and the systems that will allow them to step away from all of that. And now I could teach all of those things in one gigantic offer, but it would be so overwhelming, they would never get to the finish line. So instead I have smaller offers and I have bigger ones. And the whole goal is I'm moving them step by step through that overall journey.
- [23:57]
So bringing it back to the podcaster who's listening and wants to start doing this, right? Take the first steps. It sounds like the way that you got there was by listening to what your audience wanted over what you kind of thought you should make.
- [24:14]
Kevin Schmidlin
And you're nodding.
- [24:15]
Steph Taylor
So I'm thinking that's probably on the right track.
- [24:16]
Kevin Schmidlin
So is that, is that the next step?
- [24:18]
Steph Taylor
Yeah. So it's funny because in my mind I thought, oh, they, of course they want to learn about Instagram. And this was 2018, 2019, around then when, you know, peak Instagram life, right? Everyone was like, I want to build my following so I can grow my business organically and not have to spend. Not have to spend a cent doing that. And I was like, cool, well, I've done this on Instagram. Let me teach other people how to do that. And what I didn't realize was that they didn't care about learning the strategy behind Instagram. They just wanted to. They wanted the shortcuts. So here I was, I was creating this course around strategy, and I wasn't giving them, I wasn't putting it out there in the words that they wanted. And meanwhile, I was kind of ignoring the people in the background who were like, can you show us how to do a podcast? Can you show me how to launch a podcast? So, yeah, a lot of it has been from actually getting out there and talking to my audience. I survey my email list twice a year just to find out, what are you struggling with? What are your goals? What are the obstacles standing between you and your goals right now? And from those responses, I get great ideas about what else I can sell to them. But it also helps me to write any messaging, any copy, because I can literally take the words that they've told me and reflect those back to them.
- [25:32]
Got it. Okay. So is that the move? Is it doing an audience survey?
- [25:36]
It could be surveys. I also think that if you are launching something for the first time, jump on zoom calls with people who are really similar to your ideal client. Because a survey, they can give you like a high level response, but we can never ask them why. So when somebody says, I'm struggling to grow my audience, if we're on a zoom call with them, we can say, well, like, how is that a problem? Like, why is that a problem for you? Why is it a priority for you to solve that problem right now? And we can get a lot more of an insight into what's actually going on in their minds and we can start to see whether it's something that they would value paying money for.
- [26:11]
Yeah. So how then do you take those responses? So, like, let's imagine a podcaster has done a survey, They've got responses. How can they then translate that into what should this product look, look like? And how much should I charge?
- [26:24]
Yeah, and that's how long is a piece of string is how much should I charge? Both of those things, it comes back to, okay, so we do need to keep in mind who your audience is. If they don't. If your existing audience doesn't have a huge amount of money, a huge amount of money to spend right now, we probably can't go super high ticket but also thinking longer term, who do you want to attract into this offer? Because generally the higher ticket something is going to be, the more committed somebody is going to be to getting those results. They're going to put the work in because it's hurt, like it's painful to invest that kind of money. They're going to be a little bit more committed. If I'm working with business owners, for example, generally somebody who's a bit more experienced in business is going to invest in something more expensive, whereas somebody who's a little bit newer is going to buy the $27 courses. That's such a big generalization and it's not always the case, but it is something to keep in mind with pricing. Then with the structure of it. It comes down to two things. It comes down to what do I want to do? Like, what is my vision for my business, what is my vision for freedom? What does my ideal day, week, month look like, and how can I make this fit in with that? But also what format does this need to be to get my ideal client the result that they want?
- [27:42]
Right. So it's a lot of just like trying to find the sweet spot of all these different things, like the, of what you want your day to look like. But also you actually have to deliver results. So it can't just be, you know, I want to be, you know, just kind of picnicking all day. Like, you got to make sure that the courses actually work, right?
- [27:57]
Oh, absolutely. And this is where it comes back to experimenting, pivoting. You know, I had to launch the podcast launch program as a group program to find out that people just wanted to do that in a self paced format.
- [28:09]
Got it. Okay. So I definitely can also hear podcasters listening who are worried that they're not yet enough of an expert to sell a sort of course or digital product. What would you say to them?
- [28:25]
Yeah, so somebody else is buying from you not because they want to become an expert, but because they want to achieve a small transformation or they want to solve a small problem, a really specific, transformational, specific problem. And this is a huge mistake. I've made this mistake as well where I've thought that the more value, the more knowledge, the more content, the more expertise that I can jam pack into this course, the more valuable it's going to be. But the person who is buying that course, they can go and find the knowledge and the information, like it's all out there for free on the Internet. They don't want that. They want something that is going to show them Step by step, do this, then do this, then do this. And it's going to get them from point A to point B as quickly as possible. They're not buying all of the knowledge that you know. They are buying your expertise and your experience in what's going to get them there faster. So you don't have to know absolutely everything about your particular topic. You just need to know enough to be able to deliver that one transformation or solve that one problem as quickly as possible.
- [29:28]
So I would even take that a step further and say, like, especially as you do become somebody who is an expert, it sounds like you kind of have to work to not include everything that you know in the course. Is that what you found?
- [29:40]
Oh, absolutely. Like, I have some students who've come through my courses who are like, you know, they have PhDs, they have spent their entire life learning, and all of their. The writing that they do is all like, super academic and like, they're so smart and they really struggle with this because for them they're like, oh, but the student needs to know this for context, and they need to know this for. For context. And the way that I like to look at it is if you're putting things in there that are not getting them from A to B quicker, you're actually slowing them down and that's making it less valuable. The other place where those kinds of experts can get derailed is in their free content. Like the way that they are talking about the problem that they solve, the way that they are communicating their offer. They can come at it through this expert lens, assuming that their audience knows as much as they do. James Wedmore has this awesome analogy that I just love to share. He says, you're the expert in headaches. Your audience has a headache. They are walking around looking for a solution to their headache. And you know that their headache is caused by dehydration. But if you go to them and say, hey, here's a solution for your dehydration, they're going to say, no, thank you, I've just got a headache. So you almost have to put yourself back into the shoes of not knowing what you know. And this is where being a little bit earlier on, not being a huge expert in everything could actually be really helpful because you've maybe walked that same journey that your audience has walked and you can put yourself in their shoes.
- [31:06]
Yeah, that's. Oh, man, that resonates deeply. About three and a half years into my journey as a quote unquote podcast expert. And thinking back, like, it was kind of easier in the beginning because now I've just done nothing but study podcast growth. And you start to, as you get deeper into it, things like just kind of become more obvious because you've looked at it so much and you have to remember that the people that you're serving have never looked at this ever. They don't have the context that you have.
- [31:32]
Exactly. And like, a lot of the time when we know so much about something, we find it really hard to believe that somebody else would find that valuable. It's like the unconscious competence stage. I don't know if you're familiar with the stages of competence, but when you have been doing something for so long, you are able to do it without even really thinking about what's involved. Like driving a car. Like, I don't sit there and think, oh, now I need to put it into drive and now I need to press down the accelerator. It's just something that happens. But for somebody who doesn't know how to drive a car, that would. Me talking them through the steps would be so valuable to them.
- [32:07]
Life changing.
- [32:08]
But to me, I'm like, that's so obvious. Like, the steps are so obvious. And that's exactly the same when you're teaching something in any kind of digital product.
- [32:16]
Yeah, fantastic. What a perspective. So the next thing I want to ask about is, I guess the launch or you know, let's say this podcaster has done the survey, they have created a product and remember, they've got a podcast that's kind of there. They probably have an email list. They definitely have a podcast. So how do they make their first sales?
- [32:35]
I would be thinking of how you sell it as probably it's going to be a live launch the first time that you sell it. So when I say a live launch, most people are like, oh, the launch starts when I put it out there. That's not a launch. The launch starts in the 60 to 90 days before you even make that offer available for sale. And in that 60 to 90 days, I would be focusing on sharing content on your podcast. I would be sharing any kind of content that is going to move them closer to buying from you. So, for example, I love to use the example, I'm a dog trainer. Let's say I'm a dog trainer and I am training your dog to stop barking. Most people would on their podcast, they would say, well, I'm going to share episodes of how to get your dog to stop barking. I'm going to bring in guests who can talk about, you know, the tips and Tricks that they've used to get their dogs to stop barking. Meanwhile, that's not actually helping your audience because they have an old dog and they believe that their dog is too old to learn how to stop barking. So when they see the episodes on how to stop your dog barking, they're like, well, that's not going to work for me. They skip it. So instead, something that would be more useful for them would be an episode on why your dog is never too old to teach them to stop barking. So that kind of content is then moving them closer to buying from you. And then when you open doors, they're now at this point where they are actually ready to buy a course on how to stop their dog from barking.
- [33:59]
Got it. That's fascinating. So you're not sharing content necessarily, that is just like content from the course. You're sharing content that gets them closer and closer to being in the position to need and want and be happy to purchase the course.
- [34:12]
Yeah, because they're not even ready for the content that's in the course yet. And I see this a lot. People are like, oh, I'm going to just take snippets out of my course, and if I can show them how much value is in it, then they'll want to buy. People aren't buying because it's valuable. They're buying because they have a problem. And they can see how your offer is going to solve their problem and how it's going to work for them. Even though nothing that they've tried so far has worked. This is going to be the one solution that works. That's why they buy.
- [34:37]
Yeah, fascinating. Do you have any specific advice for how to actually promote the launch on the podcast? In particular, is it different in any way from like an email list or an ad or something like that?
- [34:49]
What I would be doing is then I would be looking at, can we have some kind of launch trigger? That might be a webinar, it might be a challenge, it might be some other kind of live event where that is where you are opening doors. And I would be using then the podcast. I would be driving people to register for that webinar. If you have dynamic ads, it's great. Dynamic ads are so good for this because you can put the ad on all of your episodes saying, like, hey, next week I'm running this live webinar. Register here. And then once you've finished running the webinar, you can then start running ads saying, hey, doors are open for my offer. So I would be promoting that webinar maybe 7 to 10 days or the challenge 7 to 10 days beforehand and then once doors are open, it's not sharing content that's going to make somebody excited and try and build hype about the offer. I see this where people are like, oh, I need to get people excited. I need to build this FOMO that might sell shoes and iPhones, but it doesn't sell anything that's knowledge based. So then the kind of content that I would be shifting to is content that is addressing any objections somebody might have to buying the offer. So with one of my courses, LaunchMagic, where I'm teaching course launches, one of the big objections somebody has is, oh, my audience isn't big enough to launch yet. So I would do then an entire episode potentially talking about how your audience doesn't need to be big to launch. Or I might interview a previous student who had a small audience and had a successful launch. So I'd be sharing really different content to what we typically would think of as the kind of content that's going to get somebody to buy.
- [36:29]
Bit of a random question I hear all the time about Evergreen versus launch model. So can you just kind of compare and contrast those two and talk about like the pros and cons of each?
- [36:40]
Yeah, I have strong opinions on this because I have both in my business. And there's a big misconception that going straight to Evergreen is the easy way. It's easier than live launching. And if I just create this course, put it on my website, I'll be able to make an easy three to five sales a month and that'll just be a nice little passive income stream that doesn't work when you're putting it on Evergreen. You still need to have some kind of sales process. The sales process might be a really well written series of cut open emails, but the person who's getting that series is getting them like for a couple of days in a row. It might be a prerecorded webinar, which is what I use for a couple of my offers. It might be that they can book in a call with you at any point in time. But there still needs to be some element where they are getting those objections addressed and they are able to. It's going to get them off the fence. They're not going to just land on your website, find your online store and buy your course. That typically doesn't happen, especially once we start getting to courses over the hundred dollar mark. Then it's like, okay, great, can I just prerecord my webinar and put that up there and build a sequence around that. You can. But you're never going to know whether that webinar converts until you've put a lot of people through it. You're not getting reliable conversion rates until you've got a couple of hundred people who have come through it. And that can take a while. And then by the time you've had that many people come through it, you've wasted potentially weeks or months and now you've got to go and course correct, and then it's going to be another few weeks or months before you get any feedback on whether that converts. Whereas if you do the webinar live a couple of times, like I did with the podcast launch plan, I ran that live webinar seven or eight times before I pre recorded it, and it was only when I could see. Oh, each time I run this, it is reliably converting at this rate. Great. This webinar's as good as it's going to get. I'm going to record it and I'm going to set it up now and I'm going to leave that and I'm going to run ads to it. Oh, there's also the live element. With the live element, you're getting to address objections in real time. And when it's the first time that you're launching something, you can't really. Yes, you can guess they're probably going to have the objection of, well, I don't have much time right now, or this is a little bit out of my budget. Those are always going to come up as objections. But we don't know what specific objections they're going to have about your offer until you live launch it that first time and you see what questions come in. And when you're doing it live, you could answer those questions. You can help get somebody off the fence. When it's evergreen, they don't really have an avenue to ask those questions.
- [39:13]
So it's funny, this may be a super basic question. I've been on a thousand one on one sales calls, but I've never done a group sales call in my life. Do people just like in a group setting, like present their objections to you?
- [39:25]
So I've never done a group sales call, but what I would do is at the end of the webinar, so I'll teach a bit in the webinar, I'll deliver my sales pitch and then at the end there is Q and A and some people will ask questions about the general topic that I'm teaching But most people will ask questions about the offer that I've just presented them. Will this work? If I have only just started my business, will this work? If I don't have an email list, those kinds of questions come up and if one person's asking it, at least three other people are thinking it. So I get to answer those objections that way.
- [39:58]
Okay, so after the initial launch, what happens after that? Let's say a podcaster has launched, they've got a handful of sales now what do they do?
- [40:06]
Yeah, so very first thing, regardless of whether the launch was a success or a flop, I would send out a non buyer survey. So sending out a couple of questions to the people who clicked through from your email list and viewed the sales page, send them a survey, ask them what made you decide not to buy. That's going to tell you so much more than the people who decided to buy. Then you can find out like, oh, these were maybe the objections that I didn't address properly, or these were some of the gaps in my messaging, or maybe I could have created some free content to help somebody overcome this problem. That's going to give you a lot of insight for the next time that you launch. Now a lot of people think it's the first launch, that's the one, and then you never launch again. I am a big fan of launching over and over and over again. So if you're going to put it on evergreen, you can do a bunch of launches really close together to test the webinar and test whether it's converting before you prerecorded and evergreen it. But if you're doing something like what I do with one of my programs where it's 12 weeks and I run it twice a year, I launch it twice a year. And each launch I can get better because I now have more insight for what I need to talk about. I know what converts, I know what doesn't convert and I have testimonials and social proof from previous rounds. So I structure my years by, okay, great, this year we're going to live launch this program in Feb and August. And then I know like this is where my content needs to be during the year to lead people into those.
- [41:35]
Live launches and just tying it all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. I imagine that's when you sort of bake in your two weeks in a van or something like that. So you're basically now able to say, okay, for these couple three months, I'm going to be launching, I'm going to be, you know, Taking. I'm going to be doing live calls or whatever, but then these other months, I can actually step away from the business and things are going to keep cranking.
- [41:57]
Right, Exactly. This is. So actually, we did our team 2024 planning call this week, and it's fun because. So one of my team members has kids, so we always put in school holidays first. So we know we can't really be launching during a school holiday because we need to have all hands on deck. And then we put in any other leave that we want to take. So in January, I'm like, cool, I'm going skiing for a month, guys. So let's not do any live launches while I'm in France at the mountains, because the time zone is going to be really weird. And then it's like, oh, well, July. I'm also planning to go away in a van for a month, so let's not have any launches there. Let's make it so that I can work just a couple of hours a day or be offline if I want to.
- [42:35]
Incredible. So bringing it all home, we found digital products are the way to both have an incredible business that brings you, you know, your financial goals, but also brings you the freedom that you crave. So before I let you go, Steph, I want to hear about your podcast. So can you tell me a little bit about the types of things that you share on Imperfect Action?
- [42:54]
Yes. So, Imperfect Action, the name came around because I was constantly having people ask me, like, how did you succeed? How did you grow your business so quickly? And like I shared with you earlier, I honestly think that the secret has been taking action. Let's see what works, let's see what doesn't work. What can we learn from it, and how can we iterate? So the episodes that I share are typically very actionable, very short. You know, these are some things that have worked for me. These are some things you can try with the idea that the listener is going to go and take the things that I've told them on the show and they can go and implement them, find out if that works for them, find out if they enjoy it, and learn from that. And also learn from my own mistakes and my own actions.
- [43:36]
Yeah. Well, I think listeners who grow the show are going to absolutely love that because it's very similar to our premise here. So, Steph, this was so actionable, so tactical. Thank you so, so much for sharing. Is there anything else you would ask the listeners to do if they want to learn more from you?
- [43:50]
Oh, please, just go and listen to the show. That is where I share all of my best content. And if you want to connect with me, the place to connect with me is over on Instagram. I'm there at Steph Taylor co.
- [44:01]
Perfect. Steph, thank you so, so much for coming on Grow the Show.
- [44:03]
Kevin Schmidlin
This was awesome. That is going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show.
- [44:07]
Steph Taylor
Now I have a quick favor to ask you.
- [44:09]
Kevin Schmidlin
If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five star rating and if you're feeling generous, a review in the app that you're using. To hear my voice right now, it just takes a couple seconds, but it really goes a long way in helping us to share even more valuable growth and monetization tactics here on the show because it helps us land bigger guests and it helps show the world that what we're doing here is actually valuable. So once again, if you've ever gotten any value from the show and you haven't already, please just take a moment, leave us a five star rating, maybe a brief review on what type of value you've gotten, and I will be eternally grateful. This episode was produced by me with post production by Podcast Boutique. And if you want your show to be post produced with quality, really freaking fast. And if you want to save yourself and your team tons of time working on your podcast, you should chat with Podcast Boutique. Just head to podcastboutique.com or click the link in the show notes and set up time with them. Because I spent no time editing this episode and neither should you. All right, that's going to do it for Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schmidlin. I'll see you next time.