← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
918: Grow Your Impact and Revenue by Adding Digital Products to Your Offer Lineup
00:42:55
If you’re sitting here wondering if this is something you should be doing, the answer is probably yes. It allows you to take control and to grow in ways you never thought were possible.
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Abigail Pumphrey
This industry is in a rapid growth trajectory. People are looking for more alternatives to education than they ever have before. 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 this is my first time recording with a brand new office setup and I am both nervous and excited. For the last four years I have been primarily officing out of what I've been lovingly calling my clothice. It is a closet off of my primary bedroom and I've had my desktop computer in here. I've recorded a ton of course programs in here, I've recorded hundreds of podcasts in here and I have just been craving more sunshine and more space and the plan was always to move my primary office to the front of the house where I have these beautiful leaded glass windows. But there's no door. There's no door, there's no soundproofing because we have hardwood floors and we don't have rugs because I have dogs and I just don't want to maintain that and there's way too much echo in there. So I decided over break that I was going to move some things around and I moved my desktop to the front office and I now have my laptop set up in the same place I have been, but it's just a little bit of a different recording experience for me. So I am excited because I feel like I just am going into this new year with different energy because I am spending so much time in a different environment. It has felt like a refresh and something that I have really enjoyed. But in today's episode I want to dig into how you can utilize digital products to actually grow your impact and revenue. When I started down this whole digital product road. I really didn't understand what it could mean for my ability to work with more people, impact more people, make a bigger difference in the lives of my clients. I loved, loved, loved, loved running my design agency. I enjoyed building websites. I loved the intimacy of the client projects. They really got to know these people, they became my friends. And many of those relationships continued on for the last decade. But so much of my income was dependent on needs of my clients and their timeline and their schedule and their budget. And it really just felt like I had traded bosses. Like instead of having one person I reported to that handed me more projects than I could handle. Now all of a sudden I had a ton of bosses and they were all my clients and I was doing exactly what they needed me to do. Now I totally know that a lot of this situation could have been fixed by just adjusting my boundaries, becoming a better leader in my company, maturing in that role. I get that. But when I made this transition, it wasn't something that felt like it was my choice. It wasn't something that I had intended to do. I had absolutely imagined a world in which I would always work with local clients, where I would run a design agency that would become as significant and impactful as the ones that inspired me to go into this career in the first place. I wanted big Fortune 500 clients with flashy ad campaigns and large budgets. But I knew it meant starting small and starting hyperlocal, and I was okay with that. I didn't expect to get sick. I didn't expect for my whole world to turn upside down. And I didn't even know that this would ultimately be a solution for me. I made a good living running an agency. I built that into a multi six figure business. I was bringing home a good paycheck. It was incredible. But with this business, I have been able to bring in multiple millions of dollars in revenue. It has completely changed my life. It has changed my living situation, it's changed my financial future. And I think part of it was that I was so young that I definitely went into this with a lot of audacity and gumption and self confidence that I've honestly struggled with in more recent years because I feel like I'm more aware of my weaknesses than I was then. So I'm super glad I started it so long ago. But if you're sitting here wondering, like, is this something I should be doing? The answer is probably yes. Like, if it's on your heart to do this, if it's on your heart to impact more people. If you feel like you're just constantly trading hours for dollars and everyone else is dictating what your life and your business looks like, this allows you to take control. This allows you to grow in ways that were not previously possible. Can you scale an agency? Absolutely. But that requires more manpower. You have to hire more people to take on more projects. In the digital product world and chorus world, you can run a really lean team. And I've seen many people run their business into the million dollar plus mark on their own. You don't necessarily need a ton of assistance on the back end. Now I personally am of the belief that having a small team makes for a more ethical company. I can be more supportive of my clients. I can handle customer service much more promptly, more professionally, with less of that, like, personal feelings attached to it. But that's a story for another day. 60% of entrepreneurs struggle to scale without burning out. And I think so much of that has to do with the fact that it does require you to become a whole different person. I in recent years felt this need to like, get back in the game so that I could better understand the needs of my clients. Now we're backing up a handful of years at this point, but it wasn't until the last 18 months or so that I was teaching other people how to build out digital products and transition from services into this world. Prior to that, I was working almost exclusively with service providers, people who were running one on one businesses. And I had been out of that world for so long, I wanted to get back in touch with it. And so I reopened my agency after not doing it for seven or eight years. And I got into the weeds again and I felt what it was like to handle that. And I was in a completely different position. When I had done this a decade ago, it was just me. It was just me, just my clients. I was handling every aspect of the company. At this end of the spectrum, I had a team. At one point, we had up to 10 full time team members, almost half of which were touching every single private client project. On top of attempting to run this whole business at the same time, which is doable but stressful. What I had realized by scaling my team was that I no longer got to be as creative. I had to give a lot of that space over to my employees. And I had to focus on management and leadership and bringing the right people to the table and making sure all of the pieces were working together, both ethically and financially. And my role in the company completely shifted. I went from being what I would kind of consider the content creator to head of finance and hr. Like I was the CFO of the company and I missed having access to my clients in a way that was really hands on, but also super creative. Running a digital product based and course based business is an absolute game changer. It allows me to serve multiple customers simultaneously without increasing my workload much at all. Like I could add hundreds of clients before it starts impacting my team, potentially even thousands of clients. It, it definitely depends on the type of product we're talking about and the level of customer service needed and the level of support promised. All of those things are factors, yes, but it isn't a one for one ratio where I know if I'm building five high end websites, I mean I'm probably going to need two or three teams to be working on all five projects. And I don't even know realistically if we could handle five high end projects at the same time. With the size of team that I did have on the average month, which this is probably actually low, I haven't looked at this number in a very long time. We are serving over a thousand clients. A thousand. And realistically at the same size and scale we're at right now, we could serve two to three high end clients for one on one services. That multiple is insane. I went from having four to five client calls and you know, discovery calls and proposal calls a day to having five to seven meetings a month inside of this business. And honestly I could probably have less and do even more of this via asynchronous communication. But I love talking to my team and I actually enjoy meetings. I never didn't enjoy them, but four to five a day was beyond my personal capacity. Now it's definitely true that when you're working with more clients and you're sharing your knowledge in this way that not everyone is going to have the same impact that you would if you were working so closely one on one with them. But when you can manage 500 times the amount of clients in the same given period, I promise you that you are going to have a greater impact and serve more people in more tangible ways than you previously thought possible. When I started my career, this industry was in its infancy. I consider myself as part of kind of the second wave of online businesses that are educating online, selling digital products and online courses and templates and serving people in their own niche or industry. But this industry is in a rapid growth trajectory. People are looking for more alternatives to education than they ever have before and especially following things like Covid, people are wanting to do more of these things virtually and online so that they can decide when and where they are investing their time and attention. The digital product industry for online businesses is projected to grow into a $325 billion industry by the end of next year. Like let that sink in, let that sink in. You don't even need 1% of that to have a successful and fulfilling life and career. You don't have to be a big kahuna in this industry. You don't have to be a household name in this industry to support your family and to touch more lives than you currently are. There's essentially two kinds of groups of offers when we start talking about the digital product space and ultimately for this to be your full time income, you're going to need both kinds. You're going to need both kinds. But initially if we're looking at transitioning, you only need one. And you don't have to go all in, all the way, all at once. I think for most people that's unrealistic. I suggest that you continue running the business you have today and you layer this on as an opportunity to get paid to grow your audience, get paid to grow your list, get paid to bring in more qualified leads, and when you're ready, you can add this second tier. And so what do I mean by that? I think the best starting point is by developing entry point digital products. These are like starter level for people. They're typically at a lower price point. They're no brainer offers. They solve small problems that are top of mind for your ideal clients. They're quick to build, they're easy to market, and they have broad reach and appeal. Those more high impact offers that take a little bit more skill and a lot more time are going to be things like full fledged online courses, memberships and coaching programs. Now for the majority of people that are making a full time living from this, they have both kinds. They have entry point offers and they have high impact offers that are typically at a mid to higher price range. But building this kind of business takes time. The first digital product I launched was $29. I had no idea it was possible to reach as many people as it has. That one offer made $8,000 and $8,033 its first month. At $29 a pop, it has gone on all on its own. Just one has made $288,000. Just the one offer. It's had more than 10,000 people inside of that offer. It has touched so many lives. It has changed so many businesses and it has given me such a huge trajectory. I have since built hundreds of offers. Honestly, you never need to build as many offers as I built. It is completely unnecessary for the long term for you to be successful, you're going to need a handful. And you may potentially want to layer in diverse types of income. My income is definitely primarily from digital products and courses, but I also get paid affiliate income. I have brand partnership income that comes both from sponsorship and special events. And then I also get paid outside of my business via investments. And I have a very strong and very large investment portfolio where, you know, I'm investing more in the stock market and mutual funds and in specialty notes to really diverse diversify where my income comes from. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they decide they want to transition or they decide they want to layer this on, or they decide they, they just want this as an opportunity to be able to scale back the number of clients they're working with on a one on one basis so that they have some more flexibility in what they're week to week life looks like. But y'all come in really ambitious and I love that. I love how ambitious you are. I love how you want to share everything with your people. You want to give them all of your knowledge. You've been doing this a long time. You're an expert, you know what it takes, and so you want to turn around and you want to teach that. But the biggest mistake people are making is they try to turn all of that knowledge into one thing and that's not going to work. Will it sell? Probably. Will it sell as many times as it could? No. Will it devalue the knowledge that you do have? Yes, absolutely. Entry point. Digital products should solve problems. One problem. They're not kitchen sink products. You solve one problem completely and you do it well. When you're thinking about what to offer, I want you to think about what questions your clients ask the most and what problem can you solve quickly in a digital format. Now, if you want help on this specifically, I have a whole episode dedicated to helping you decide on what offer to choose. This is really about contemplating. Is this something you should layer in? And I'm guessing if you've listened this far into the episode, the answer is yes. Like, we don't need to hesitate here. You've already decided and you're scared. You've already said yes and you're waiting. I want to ask you why, like, why are you hesitating? Why are you hesitating on something that you have clearly said that you want to do. You have clearly decided and yet you keep waiting. Now, I want to give you the full fledged plan for how to get this out here. I want to help get you off the ground. I want to give you a quick start. I want to help you fast track this. I want to help you launch. And so I'm going to do that inside of my one day launch challenge. I have helped over 7 in 342 people last I checked build a digital product in this challenge and you can be the next. You can be one of them. So you're going to go to bossproject.com launch. This is about getting you off the fence. We are making it happen. You keep saying you want it. This is how you do it. It's free. Which is nuts by the way. I'm going to help you come up with a small actionable offer. I'm going to walk you through how to test the waters and build your own confidence and validate that offer in the market. We are going to market to both your existing audience and use this as a magnet to bring in people so that you can get paid for those leads. Have you been wanting to launch a digital product but you don't know where to start? Perhaps you're struggling to pick the right profitable idea. Is the idea there? But you just need to get the ball rolling again. I got you. I want to help you go from idea to launch in just one day. I partnered with Teachable to bring you the one day launch challenge. So far we've helped 6,786 people do just that Inside this challenge. We're helping you pick the right idea, getting all the tech set up. Heck, you could even collect your very first payment the same day. It's all loaded up for you and ready to dive in@bossproject.com launch. Don't wait until you're ready to sign up. We got pre challenge goodies ready and waiting for you. Including 100 profitable digital product ideas. Just head to bossproject.com launch and get started today. When you're hiring, it feels amazing to finally close out the job search. But what if you could get rid of the search and just match you can with indeed. With over 350 million global monthly visitors according to Indeed Data and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Ditch the busy work. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. 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 at indeed.comstrategyhour just go to indee.comstrategy 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 for service providers, this is an opportunity to fill the gaps. Whether you want to do it so that you have a surplus of cash for slow periods or you want to spend more time on this effort in a certain part of the year so you don't have one on one clients. If you just want to layer on as an opportunity for scale without adding more team members, this is a great thing to do. It's also such a great opportunity to really better understand marketing because when it comes down to it, after we build this thing and we validate it and we're putting it out there, your primary job becomes marketing and sending traffic to this offer. The offer itself is doing the education and you can decide how you want to support it on the back end, but you will have already done the heavy lifting. You don't have to do it again and again and again for every client. You're not necessarily repeating yourself in that way. You get to spend your time freely giving your thoughts and insights away to the world. And in my opinion, this is a better plan to be a content creator. You can get paid to create, but you don't have to be reliant on brand deals or paid advertising to make that work. You're getting paid by sending people to your own products, your own services, your own offers. One of my biggest launches ever did over $300,000 in 10 days. That is life changing amounts of money. Life changing. And I do not take for granted what I have built because I'm able to bring in this level of income. My ability to give back to my community is stronger than it's ever been. One I have more time so I can go volunteer in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day and give back to my community in ways that I previously just did not have time for. But I also have the finances to back projects in my community that I care about. And I think a lot of the time when people see this opportunity, they hesitate because they worry, well, I don't need more money. Well, I'm comfortable. So I don't know. And mindset holds people back. Mindset holds people back because they're scared that if they do this thing, if they really invest in themselves and they make more, that they're going to turn into a different person. And I promise you, having more money only amplifies the person you were before. I am a natural born caregiver. I have been in this role since I was a child. Both of my parents were on disability. I spent much of my childhood, unfortunately taking care of them, making sure my sister was fed and that the house was clean and that homework was done. And then as an adult, I never really imagined that I would be back in that place. But we took on caregiving for Jared's grandmother and she lived with us full time until she passed. She was with us for three and a half years and then I thought I was definitely done by then. But then my dad, he had a stroke and I ended up in a position where I was caring for him and putting him in long term care. At just 64, I would not have had the time to invest, not just in my community, but to give so much of my time away to the people I love without this. The money is great, don't get me wrong. But it's what the money buys you in terms of time that is the biggest blessing. The riches are the minutes back. The riches are the people you get to spend that time with because money is a replenishing resource. There is always enough, There is always an abundance. There will always be more. But the time ticks away and you have a limited amount and everyone's gonna die, which, as sad as it sounds, your life is fleeting. And I want to see you using your gifts and talents. I have seen so many people overcomplicate this project process. They think they have to build out every offer, have their whole ecosystem planned out. They think they need to completely turn their entire business upside down. But we can start small. And just because it's small doesn't mean it can't have massive impact. Need I remind you I had a $29 product that has made nearly $300,000 on its own. I've had other products that have made that in just a few days, but that wouldn't have been possible if I didn't start with just one. Don't wait until everything is built. It really, really, really frustrated me. I saw this post the other day talking about how inappropriate it is to teach other people to build the plane while they're flying it in terms of building a business. And I thought, what a privileged thing to say. Very few of my clients have the ability to completely set down every single thing they're doing to work on development until they're ready. Most people still need the money rolling in. They still need the paycheck, they still need the client work. Most people do not have the luxury of spending all of their time and attention on building out the perfect thing before they put it out into the world. It's just not realistic for 99% of the population. Now, if you happen to be the kind of person that has all the time they need and your income is completely optional, then sure, maybe you go about this different. But for everyone else, I want to teach you how to do this while you're still maintaining the current life that you have. This is your opportunity to improve it. This is your opportunity to reach more people. This is an opportunity to scale your revenue without adding more team members. One step at a time, one small step. Now, the second mistake I see people making is they're skipping market validation. So many people will jump straight into development. They'll build the thing, they'll make the thing, they'll spend hundreds of hours on the thing, and then they go to market it and it's crickets. That's not how I work. I want to ensure that your product is gonna sell, and we do that by going through a validation process where we actually pre sell your product before you've even built it, before you've spent a minute on actually making the final product. We'll do the initial development to understand what it is and how you're going to market it and get a sales page up and running. But we're not going to actually build the thing until you've sold it. And I teach all of that process inside of my challenge the one day launch. So you can find out more@bossproject.com launch don't worry about that. I'll take care of all that and walk you through it step by step. But when people skip this, I see a lot of people trying to, for lack of a better way to explain it, force feed their clients into eating something they don't want. They don't want to consume it. They're not interested. Like it might be a nice to have or like it sounds interesting, or they may have even told you they would buy it. But until they show you their credit card and actually swipe the thing virtually, that's not Proof of concept. And so I want to ensure that the thing you're ultimately selling is fixing a real problem. That's top of mind for someone who needs this to be solved. This is a need. Your higher end offers can serve more wants, but this needs to be a glaring problem for people and you're going to solve it simply. You're not going to solve all of their problems in one offer. You're going to solve one problem and then the third biggest mistake I see is people ignoring the marketing and distribution. They spend so much time on development and thinking about what their sales page is going to say or how they're going to set the product up, or how they're going to support it on the back end. And all of those things are important. I'm not saying you need to ignore them. But visibility is the biggest shift you're gonna see when you're running a one on one business. Most people can rely almost exclusively on referrals. Now, it's not to say that you're not doing social media, but very few of you are actually getting your clients from that effort. It is more like you're posting your portfolio and whether you're a designer or not, it doesn't matter. You are showcasing your expertise out loud so that when you do have a potential client, your social media is showing them that you're legit. It is validating your expertise, but it's not actually marketing. It's not growing the amount of people that are aware your business exists. So on the back end of building any sort of entry point digital product, I focus on visibility, I focus on organic marketing. And once that's working, then and only then do you put fuel on the fire by going down the road with something like paid advertising. Paid advertising is an amplifier for what you know already works. But visibility is necessary because you need higher volume to make the same amount of money. You need far more leads than you're used to in your current business. And that's not a problem, it's just a shift. And it's something you have to be tactical about. We're talking about email list building, we're talking about SEO optimization, we're talking about collaborations to get you in front of other people's audiences. There's so many opportunities here, but it is a piece of the puzzle. You're listening to this because this is something you want and many of you won't spend the time and attention on it until it's a need, until it becomes a necessity. I have seen so many of my clients Wait until they're chronically ill or someone they love is, or they have a baby on the way, which is incredible. But now they don't know how to take maternity leave when they're the ones doing their client deliverables. People will wait until there's pressure. And I want you to feel like this is an opportunity that you get to take advantage of, not something that feels like you have to fill this gap or you're going to be in trouble. That kind of place, creating from that space, while possible, don't get me wrong, I've definitely been there. But I promise you, coming from a space where it's not necessary, but it's just going to amplify what you're doing. It's going to allow you to impact more people, it's going to grow your revenue. That place, creating from that place is so much more fun, so much more creative, it's so much more fulfilling. And generally you see way more impact because you're showing up with passion and purpose. If you've ever felt stuck, like you were trading all of your time for money instead of having an opportunity for something that scales, digital products are your opportunity to keep growing without burning out. End of story. And if you're ready to start creating your first or your next digital product and you want help getting it out the door quickly and validating it in your market and continuing to market on an ongoing basis, then you need to go to bossproject.com launch and check out our challenge and I'm going to walk you through it step by step. If you have any questions or you want to share some love, I would love to hear from you. You can DM me anytime on Instagram. Abigail says you can find my profile by going to Boss Project and then Abigail says is linked there. Thanks so much guys. I'm excited to see what you create and I'm excited to see how it changes your future. 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 Boss Project. I'd love if you 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.