← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
903: Stop Wasting Time on the WRONG Digital Products
00:32:36
Your digital product should be a tool that magnetizes strangers who are your ideal customers. And you want to actually get paid to bring in qualified leads for your offers.
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Abigail Pumphrey
The most effective digital products are actually all about curiosity. They scratch an itch for people. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host, Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee it's weird and a little bit wild to say that I have been making digital products for more than eight years now. But I have all this knowledge and I feel like I'm sitting on it and I need to get it out into the world so that I can help more people. I want to see you be successful with this and I know it can be such an incredible tool. So on today's show, we're going to be digging into the digital products I would not create if I were just getting started. And it's definitely not what you're going to think that I'm going to say. So you got to listen in. Every time I see someone talking about the digital products they wouldn't create, they start giving you this laundry list of different kinds of formats, like not an ebook or not a this or not a that. They'll even say things like don't do Canva templates because that is just so saturated that you're going to have a hard time getting traction and it's just not worth doing. That's just honestly bs. I've done more than a million in just Canva templates. So no, okay, it is not about the format. It has actually nothing to do with the format. There is a one very specific thing that almost every, every single person starting out is doing wrong. The problem is you're selling something that people don't want. But let me back up because it's not what you think it is. They may want the offer. They may want what it is that you're doing. They may have total buy in that it's going to work, that it is effective, that it is going to provide some sort of transformation. They may totally believe you, be totally bought into your world and even excited for you. But if there is any element of creating a self commitment, you are going to have some serious problems. Because now not only are you having to sell them on the potential transformation, but you have to sell them on their own abilities to DIY it themselves. And I hear what you're saying, you're like, but I thought the whole point of an early on entry point digital product was that they are supposed to diy. Yes, sort of. The most effective digital products are actually all about curiosity. They scratch an itch for people. It's something they've been interested in potentially exploring and you give them a window into a whole new world and they can see for themselves. Does this make sense for me? Will this work for me? They don't have to commit prior to purchase. Now we're still problem solving here. Okay. We still have to provide some sort of transformation. But this isn't like the magic potion number nine that we're going to give them some sort of dreamy end outcome. Although definitely some of the ones that have scratched the itch. People have said it was the best thing they ever bought on the Internet and thank you, I so appreciate that feedback, but that was not necessarily the reason I put it out into the world. You want to create something that goes along with the thought process of. I've been thinking about this area of my life, business relationship, health and I want to explore more and potentially get XYZ outcome. But if all I did was explore, that would be enough for me. Now. As someone who considers themselves a small business consultant and has coached tens of thousands of small businesses from across the globe, you'd think that my most popular digital products would have something to do with people making more money. And they don't. Now don't get this twisted. The things in my business that have earned me the most income long term, absolutely have allowed people to grow and scale their business, I. E. Earn more revenue. Cool. But I'm talking about volume. The digital products that have sold the most copies to as many people as possible had nothing to do with making more income. So if you're in the B2B space, I'm not sure I would deliver on any kind of promise that has to do with income. It makes people skeptical. Instead, if we're going to like scratch this itch, it's like you do all the research for them. You're like compiling all the information in one place to make it really easy for someone to absorb a ton really, really quickly. And sure, they could go Google it or they could go search it, or they could go watch 17 YouTube videos, but you are compiling. Now, this isn't to say that you are scraping other people's resources. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. It still is going to be best if it's your personal knowledge or experience or the things you have utilized or learned. I've seen people do the things where they're compiling other resources and you can. There's absolutely people who are compilers all the time and do incredibly well. For instance, instance, maybe you're in the travel space and a digital product is an itinerary. Well, okay, maybe you never took that trip yourself, but that doesn't mean you couldn't do a bunch of research about other people's trips and the path they took and look at a bunch of rating and reviews for hotels and like ultimately come up with an itinerary that could work for someone. Even if you've never traveled to that location 100%, you could totally do that. That being said, you will likely have a better time selling the things, at least initially if you've had some sort of personal transformation or had it work for you or you use the thing just because people love story and they love to interact with story. Not that you couldn't do that. So while yes, an entry point, digital product is technically on the DIY end of the spectrum. Like if we were going to look at it from low price to high price, typically we're talking about DIY then some sort of group thing. And then one on one is on the far other end of the spectrum and price would follow the same path. But even if it's diy, people still want things off their plate. They still want things off their plate. So how can you take the weight off? How can you provide a transformation that is like a breath of fresh air to them? Now we're going to dig way more into this inside digital product Jumpstart. So if you're interested in hearing more about how I'm helping people pick the right idea that is going to be the most effective and sell the most copies, like Definitely go to bossproject.com jumpstart you're going to get more details. It's a no brainer, I promise. But I do want to talk about some of my most popular digital products because I Want to give you insight into why they worked because I think you're going to learn a lot from that. Okay, so we're going to start with mini courses and then I'm going to talk about what I feel like some people think of as more traditional digital products. But I do want to be clear. A digital product can be a lot of different things. It can be a ton of different formats. It could be a guide, an ebook, a template, a mini course. The format doesn't so much matter. The goal is how can you deliver the transformation with the least friction, not only for yourself building the thing, but how could someone else take it from you, for example, and implement it the easiest? What is going to make that Fast, easy, whatever. Okay, so mini courses. My most popular mini course has been our product Trello for Business. This has sold 10,500 times plus. Okay. It has brought in over a quarter of a million dollars all on its own. And all of those were paid leads, many of which have gone on to buy $500 programs and $2,000 programs and $12,000 high end group coaching experiences and many of them even $20,000 websites. So, like the power of a low price mini course is way more than you even realize. But was trouble for business. I wasn't trying to transform every area of someone's business. Ultimately, if you're running a company, you have finance and operations and sales and marketing and I could keep going. You have all of these things that are constantly happening. All of those things also have their own set of problems. There is an element here of paying attention to trends. And when Trello for Business dropped, project management was all the small business world could talk about. What project management tool are you on? What are you utilizing? How is it helping you? Da da da da da. There was all this like conflict, not in a bad way, but like it was kind of the hub up. What are people using? What's effective? And so inside that product we broke down. How are we utilizing not only this tool, but how are we utilizing this tool in small business? And what's the practical application? So not how does the tool work, but how is it practically applied to this group of people, the kind of people we're trying to target. And we didn't just walk through how does it work? We gave them literal templates that they could copy and paste into their own project management software that would save them time, energy, etc. So they do not have to reinvent the wheel. You literally gave it to them. Now your business on autopilot was another digital product that we created. And this was not one we like forward face marketed a whole lot. We typically had it as an upsell. I definitely think it could have been forward facing if we wanted it to be. But again, what's the focus at the time? What is the kind of world you're in, the group of people you're talking to, what's the bus? And I'm not saying you should always go with the most trendy thing out there, but it does help. Okay, I'm not going to deny that holding on to some of these things is helpful. That being said, it should also be something that has staying power, like what is what people are talking about right now, but is still relevant three months from now, three years from now, et cetera. It needs to have staying power. Your business on Autopilot specifically spoke to tech stacks. And we all know in the small business world everyone's got a gajillion things going on. And depending on your niche, you may have industry specific tech. And that's very well true. But there's also just like a set of tools that almost every entrepreneur needs. They will likely need some sort of email service provider. They will likely need some sort of web hosting or web template. They will likely need some way to process payments. They will likely need something like Zapier that connects and integrates things. All of that. Okay, well if you're brand new to business, figuring out what's out there is a lot and there are more options than ever. And so what your business on Autopilot delivered on was showcased saying from our experience what software and tech was the most helpful for our clients and customers. Sure, here are some options, but what are the ones we're choosing? And we went through those and talked about why we made that choice and we charged $11 for it. And the thing was we could have given that away for free very well. But the people who invest in a digital product are way more likely, as in 70% more likely to invest in something else that you do. And so sure, we want to help people and we have plenty of free information. There's over 500 blog posts. You're listening to one of the 800 and something episode on this show. There's plenty of free content out there. So us putting this together was a great place to just make it easy and put it all in one spot. But the real kicker there was what we were recommending were all affiliate links. Everything in the entire program we were an affiliate for that software or service. So the goal is not to make money from the digital product. The goal was to make reoccurring revenue from our referral to those digital products. And we did. I keep seeing it happen. You're caught in a loop, waiting for that perfect moment, overthinking every decision and comparing your progress to the curated realities of others online. I've been there too, and I made a shift that changed absolutely everything. It simplified my approach and allowed me to start trusting my intuition again. Truly, everything changed. My business doubled, then doubled again. I rocked $300,000 launches, enrolled over 10,000 students in a single course, and finally started showing up in a way that felt effortless and aligned. Now I'm sharing those exact tools and strategies in my new three part workshop series, Mindset Reboot. Right now you can grab it for just $11. Hurry. Visit creative templateshop.commindset to find out more. Hiring with Indeed. Your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally according to Indeed Data and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire. When we've hired in the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences, so the more you use Indeed, the better it gets and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com strategy hour, just go to indeed.com strategy hour right now and support our show by seeing you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need Indeed. We've been top 50 affiliate for some of the biggest tech companies in the world multiple times because our goal is integration. Like we're not trying to be salesy about it. We're not like you need this, go do it now. It's here's the information, here's what worked for us. You can do your own research. Here's some competitors. This is the one we chose take it or leave it. And people like that straightforward approach. And because of that, a lot of people trust our input and and want to use the things that have made us successful. And so if you're thinking about your own business, think about who you're helping, what are the tools or the tech that they might need or want and it could even be other things that you're selling. You may want to like, upsell to something else in your offers or in your world inside your digital product. They should still be able to get value from your digital product. But you introducing them to the next step inside the thing is not a bad idea. It is an incredible idea and you should definitely do that now. I could literally sit here all day and do this. We have developed, I don't even know, 50, 100 courses. I literally do not even know. There's so many. It's ridiculous. But the thing we've done the most of is created templates, digital products that were primarily templates. We started creative templates shop.com in 2020 and@creative templates shop.com you can access hundreds, thousands of templates specifically designed for small business owners to solve very specific problems. Okay? Like a copywriting template for a sales page or social graphics or a launch planner. Like individual one thing, right? We're not trying to solve for the whole big ordeal. We're trying to give them one tangible takeaway. And that world has been a wild adventure. And I am definitely not going to tell you that day one, year one, whatever, that I would even recommend that you go start your own digital product shop or template shop and have 50 or 100 things. Like, I don't think volume is necessary. I think you can get there eventually if you love to continue to create and develop. But I don't think it is necessary. That being said, we do have the Co op, which offers ongoing access to all of the templates all at once. So it used to be just the templates. Like you used to just be able to get everything that was in the Creative Template Shop. You got access to all of them. Unlimited downloads. I changed it up in the fall and now you get access to all of that, plus all of our courses and education, including digital product jumpstart. So if you've been considering joining the Co op, now is the time because it's going to include this new thing anyway. But that's not my point here. My point here is why do these work? People could say canva templates aren't effective or this isn't effective. But the reason they work and have been downloaded so many times. Like I looked at our data from just the last 30 days, I've had over 1400 digital products that were primarily templates downloaded from the Creative Template Shop. 1400. So, like, this is troll for business times 10. Like, the volume is insane. Okay? The reason it's working is it's not overwhelming on an individualized basis, it is not overwhelming. I honestly think the membership itself is way more overwhelming to people than the one off templates. The reason people buy the membership is because they see the value of getting access to all of the things. But people are after solving individualized problems. And often if you can match those two relevant search terms or SEO, you can show up for solving those super specific individualized problems. Some of our most popular ones have been Canva templates. We've also done a ton of dubsado forms. And the reason dubsado forms ended up working is prior there was not a ton of options for customization and we worked directly with the software company and was like, we want to develop better templates for this software. What can we do that would make installing them easy? And they worked with us and we developed their like one click import technology. I don't know what you would call that, but that didn't exist until we asked. And some of our best tools, they work because of how they integrate with the other things they're connected to. And sometimes the simplest things that you think should exist don't exist yet. And I have advocated on our company's behalf to have tech companies improve their backend so our things would work. But you don't have to do that. Your goal here is simply to either solve a very specific tiny problem that doesn't require a whole bunch of their time, you are basically doing 90% of the lift for them, or you are fully focused on allowing them to explore that curiosity to see if they want to dive deeper into this subject or area of their life or business. And I promise you this switch and being less focused on format and more focused on what are my ideal clients thinking about doing, searching that is way more meaningful than is it a guide, a Google Doc, a template, you'll figure that out. The way you deliver it needs to match what's going to be the most helpful for them. For example, I love a good workbook. Love a good workbook. There's so many people that have gone out and designed beautiful workbooks, but they sit unused because they're a PDF. And that hurts my soul as a designer. Like a designer with that background. Like I know how much work and time and effort went into creating the thing, but it goes unused because there's a conflict with the person being able to integrate it into their world. Ten years ago, a workbook meant someone would print it out and work on it on their desk. And maybe that's true for some niches, like in the parent world. Maybe parents are still desperately wanting to print things off. Maybe they even want you to mail them something. I'm not sure. I'm not in the parenting world, so I can't speak for them, but definitely in the business world, I see less people printing things all the time. And so us converting our workbooks from beautiful Canva designed PDFs, we spent the time in Adobe Acrobat making the forms fillable so they could technically type on their computer. The ones that get used the most are Google Doc templates. They're still a workbook, but they can one click add it to their Google Drive. It is now searchable. They can add to it as they see fit. They can adjust it as they see fit. Do you see what I'm saying about these minor tweaks that make a massive difference in people utilizing it? The format is the delivery system. The transformation is where you need to focus. And if we're talking about getting more people to buy from you, attracting more of your ideal clients who are going to buy this small thing and go on to purchase other things in your company, we need to solve for curiosity. We do not need to get them to make a personal commitment because they may wait three months or six months or two years to say yes. Now it is not to say that other points in your offer, like maybe your very next thing, they do have to make a self commitment. Great. That's a different price point and a different purpose. Our goal is number one, visibility and number two, getting people who have purchasing power into your world. Like that's it. We want to attract them, show the value, but they can get the value without implementing anything. Earn their trust and the rest will come. Okay? I promise you there is a method to this madness. I have done it again and again and again and again and again. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Oh my God. I do have to back up because I do think it's important to speak to the trends thing again really quick. So I developed your digital VA to speak to people that want to utilize AI more in their business and they don't want to do all the research to figure out how to make this quick, easy, simple. So I literally gave them hundreds of scripts they can utilize to develop things in their marketing world or help with their team management or so many things. And it has gone smashingly well. Like in terms of volume, definitely on an upward spike because again, I am not forcing them to make a self commitment to use AI. I'm saying if you want to try it out, I'm going to make it real easy for you to try out and give you what's been working for me. Take it or leave it. Love it. People love it. It's been selling fantastic. You can definitely go check it out. Bossproject.comai okay, your digital va bossproject.comai why do I think it's working? It's relevant, it is current, it is speaking to the needs of my ideal client in the time and space that we're in. And I think a lot of people can stay stuck and things that were relevant to them when they started their journey. But you have to think about what's relevant to your people right now. And if you've been doing this a long time, the way you started may be not how you would recommend someone else starts. Maybe they have opportunities they can skip past, go and collect $200 and do all this other stuff because of what you already know. And forcing them to go back to a dated way of doing things isn't going to serve you long term and it's going to sell less volume. Okay, clearly I have so much to say about this, which is exactly why I have been developing digital product Jumpstart. Funny thing is, just for context, digital product Jumpstart is not quite this. Okay. Digital product Jumpstart is a little micro step above what I would normally suggest to someone at an entry point. But I'm eight years into my career and I've sold tens of thousands of digital products and so mine does have some element of self commitment and I'm fully aware of that. And I know that will mean I have to do more work to get someone excited because they have to be like, ooh, I'm interested and I want to try it. They don't have to try it, technically speaking, which is why I think it's kind of the middle of the road thing. They could just learn all the things that I'm teaching about and ultimately say, meh, I'm not sure I want to implement that strategy, which would be fine. And it's low price enough that they're not going to feel like they lost out if all they do is discover. But I will just put a caveat that it's not necessarily a starting point in my business. Your digital VA or all of our Canva templates over at creative templateshop.com, those are entry points. This is for someone who's likely been in my world a minute. Am I selling it direct to cold and being successful? A hundred percent. I've also done this a long time. So all that to say if you're like this is wild. I have not heard anyone talk about it like this. You're right. You haven't. I can't wait to rock your world. I cannot wait to help you bring in more ideal people who have already paid to be there, that are going to value, that are going to trust you and that are going to become loyal, lifelong customers. We can do it together. Bossproject.com jumpstart I want to be on this ride with you. Do it in community. Do it with me. Bossproject.com jumpstart Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me at Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from bossproject. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.