← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
966: Can I Really Replace My 1:1 Income with Courses or Digital Products?
00:40:13
Can you really replace your one-on-one income with courses or digital products? Many creators have been contending with this question for a while and they might have been sold a false vision.
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Abigail Pumphrey
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.
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Unknown
The life you have, but the life you want.
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Abigail Pumphrey
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.
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Unknown
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Do you know your numbers?
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Abigail Pumphrey
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Abigail Pumphrey
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Unknown
A lot of people go in overly ambitious and excited about making this switch and then feel very deflated a couple of months into this when they're not hitting their goals. And I think if you go in with the information that you need, you're going to feel a lot more empowered to work towards something than if you are just so confident that you can do it and then you don't make it happen on the timeline that you anticipate. And a big part of that is really understanding what it actually Takes from a numbers perspective to replace the income that you're interested in replacing. Can you really replace your one on one income with courses or digital products? I think it's an age old question and if you're talking to the wrong people, they're just going to sell you on a vision. I'm here today to talk about the truth about if this is a reality that's possible for creators now and into the future, what's going on today and what you should be mindful of as you grow and and what is changing in this market that you need to know to stay relevant. My personal transition from one on one services to digital products and courses wasn't exactly pretty. I had a vision for what I thought my business would look like and I started out as an agency. I thought I was going to serve local clients and design badass websites and I absolutely did that and charged a pretty penny for. But my whole life changed when I was in a five car collision that dramatically changed the course of my life. Now in those moments, in the months to follow after that accident, it became very clear that the business I had built, the one that was really reliant on me ultimately was not sustainable. If I wanted to continue to grow, it was too much focused on me being at the helm, answering every email, doing all the work. And I wanted something that provided a bit more freedom. And this whole online world was at the very, very, very beginning stages. Were there a couple of people doing this full time? Sure, but we're talking about maybe a dozen. Like this was not an industry with hundreds if not thousands of creat. It was teeny, teeny tiny. More people wanted to learn and more people were jumping in. But it was still super early. I had fully planned on doing this gradually, on slowly taking on less and less one on one clients and moving over to making my digital products and courses my more primary source of income. But it was a lot more cold turkey than I anticipated and that's definitely not the way I would suggest you doing it if it's something you're really passionate about making a part of your reality. The reason it ultimately worked out okay in that very cold turkey scenario was that I had a very supportive partner who was willing to see that lull, who was willing to just let that happen. Not that it was his choice. Like obviously I have autonomy here and can do what's right for me and my business, but we had the financial means to support that, essentially lose what income was coming in on a gamble that this could work and it Absolutely did, but not necessarily all at once. Like there were months where I didn't make anything. There were months where I had a fantastic launch and would do very well. And then months. I was just confused about what to do next. So I don't want to sit here and sell you this idea that it was just magically okay. It took time and it took effort, but it was worth it in my opinion. I also think it's important that you understand that one on one services were 100% of my income previously. Digital products and courses are not 100% of my income now. I make income from a variety of kind of ways and I like having the diversification. Ultimately. My educational products, those digital products and courses right now make somewhere between 40 and 50% of my actual business. The rest is filled with brand partnerships and sponsorships for the podcast, as well as some minor one on one work. I work with a handful of clients every year and it's usually on more of like a consulting or coaching basis. And then I also have affiliate income which has been consistent and definitely a large part of what I've done for a very long time. And then I make money outside of this business by taking the income I do earn and obviously living on it, but taking a portion of that and investing it back into various stock market kind of options to help me grow my money outside of what's happening internally. That said, I do run a business that is completely asynchronous. So while things are still reliant on me to some degree, like I still have deliverables for brand partners, I still have ads to record for sponsors, I still have coaching to provide for clients, ultimately none of that is really on anyone else's timeline but mine. I'm very much the seat that's driving the ship forward. But that set aside, I know you are interested in having more income from things that you do not have to be actively monitoring something that could potentially sell as many times as you want without necessarily scaling more work to make that happen. I think the number one thing you have to understand is that this is still work. It's still a business. It still requires attention, it still requires time, it still requires effort. It's just different. It's different effort. When your primary job is service based work, you, yes, take discovery calls and do pitch meetings and have sales and some administration. But a large portion of your job ends up being the actual fulfillment of that work. And usually that is why you started your business in the first place. As a person with a background in design, I Started my business to design and prior to making this change, design was a massive part of what I did on a day to day basis. When you're selling at a lower price point or you're selling more one to many, which tends to be true for both, your job shifts, you move away from doing less of that like creative output. Not that it's not creative, it's still incredibly creative, but you're far more focused on marketing. So rather than teaching the people or helping the people, you are marketing your business that helps the people. So your day to day responsibility changes from fulfilling client deliverables to attracting new buyers. And not everybody wants to do that. So I think you need to know that going into this equation, if you love marketing though, this can be an incredible opportunity. That said, I really do want to like put a little asterisk here because I think that's also part of the problem. A lot of the people that you see doing well in this industry are great marketers, but they're not necessarily great educators. And I would love, love, love to see more people who are genuinely interested in creating impact, who want to make change, who want to help their clients be successful. I want to see more of those kinds of people out doing the work. And that might mean for some of them that they have to learn how to market. That might not be something that comes naturally to them or something that they're kind of born used to, but it can be something that you get good at. It takes practice. Just like anything else. Making this income switch, it's a numbers game. It's completely a numbers game. When you're selling one $5,000 offer to one person versus selling a $50 offer. Now you all of a sudden have to sell that to a hundred people to make the same amount of money. And it definitely is easier to sell one person one thing, regardless of price point, than it is to sell a hundred people anything. I think it's really helpful to understand where you're trying to land. A lot of people go in overly ambitious and excited about making this switch and then feel very deflated a couple of months into this when they're not hitting their goals. And I think if you go in with the information that you need, you're going to feel a lot more empowered to work towards something than if you are just so confident that you can do it and then you don't make it happen on the timeline that you anticipate. And a big part of that is really understanding what it actually takes from a numbers perspective to replace the income that you're interested in replacing. If you sell a product for X, how many do you have to sell to hit the amount of income necessary to cover your expenses to pay for your life? To make all of this make sense? Now, if you have an existing audience that is just ripe and ready and wants something from you, and you have yet to sell them something, then this may be like a total no brainer. But if you're starting with an audience that is teensy tiny and you have to grow that rapidly to make all of the numbers make sense, it can feel like a lot more pressure. And so I might be more willing to make a leap if the audience is already there. If it's not, I totally would recommend making this a slow shift where you are gradually taking on less one on one projects and filling the gap with your other income goals with the idea that you could surpass what you're doing and slowly let go of the rest. But that's not to say that you need a large audience to make this possible. There's absolutely people making a million dollars with a few hundred subscribers. And I know that sounds wild, but it's about who is there and what you're selling them. It's not necessarily about the number of people until we get into the logistics of obviously hitting those financial goals. Now what do I mean by that? I think we assume that if we have to sell a hundred of something at X price point, that that means we have to sell to a hundred different people. But that's not necessarily true. You could have two products that are both priced at a similar price point and you could have 50 people buy both of those products. Now all of a sudden you need half as many people to hit the same number of sales. So I think you kind of sit in one of three camps and I definitely think one is the most sustainable. But nonetheless, there are three kind of distinct options here. You could go in with a plan to not grow at all, as in not add in new people into your orbit. You could just be talking to the people that are already there. Now the only way that is possible is either that you solve a problem that stays a problem and someone would need continuous support around. You could create a reoccurring revenue model that helps those specific people and helps them in an ongoing capacity. And that could work. You could also come up with new offers that allow the same group of people to to move from one thing to the next. That requires a lot of active listening to really understand the needs of these people and figure out new ways you can serve them and it can get quite exhausting. So if you can do the first, if you can figure out an ongoing issue, that is a much more sustainable way to go about this. But you could in theory, continue to come up with new solutions and new offers and continue speaking to the same people. Now, obviously there's some attrition here and you are going to see people slip away, their lives change, circumstances change. Like you're not. You're never going to be in a situation where you're always talking to the exact same people. That's just not possible. But we could talk about a very niche group here and it could still work. I think most people will fall into the second camp where they could, you know, continue to solve an ongoing problem for a group of people and slowly grow that audience. Or they could have a small collection of offers that can, you can help someone steadily increase your revenue over time without necessarily having to come up with new things all the time. And what I mean by that is imagine a string of connected offers that feel like very obvious next steps for people. Now, not everyone who buys the first thing is going to go on to buy all three or four things, but some people will. And if you have enough of that kind of set up and set in place and you don't have to grow your audience as fast to make those income goals a reality for this group, I think it's important that you don't jump into this creating all of those offers all at the same time. I do think you adding them and stacking them over a period of time is both going to make this more sustainable, but it's also going to be less confusing to the people like coming in and give you time to really assess what they need, not what you think they need, and maybe even a step beyond that. Not just what you think they need, but the thing they want that you can deliver what they need. Which is a little bit odd sometimes because you can end up in a scenario where you're like, why are you so focused on this very specific thing that it's not going to give you the results you want? And so that can get to be quite frustrating. But if you can find the right balance of giving them the sexy thing they're attracted to alongside something that you know the depths of and can actually make a real difference in, it can be a really incredible combination.
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Abigail Pumphrey
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Abigail Pumphrey
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Unknown
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See mintmobile.com now the third group of people. I think this applies either to someone with a larger existing audience or someone who's focused on rapid audience growth. Meaning that a large portion of their time and energy is spent on velocity and less on the people, which that comes across as not helpful. But that's not necessarily true at all. I've seen plenty of people do this well, do it ethically, do it in alignment and actually make a real difference in people's lives. It's just a different kind of showing up. Now in this scenario, I've seen people rely on one flagship offer for a significant period of time before they diversify. And when they diversify, usually if they've created enough velocity and they are continuing to grow, it's only growing their income. It's not necessarily kind of desaturating the effectiveness of what they've already created. But let me give you a couple of examples to kind of help you better understand where you might fall. And it's not to say that this is a hard and fast rule for any of the industries I'm talking about. I just think they're good scenarios to indicate an area where you can continuously kind of be supportive of people with this kind of growth focused alignment on either, you know, none or very slow, kind of slow, medium or rapid. Right. So if you're focusing on selling to a limited audience and you're continuing to kind of foster a relationship with them, I think a good example of that is, I think her audience continues to grow. So do not, do not take this the wrong way, but I think if she wanted to, she absolutely could. She's an expert in Excel and she basically teaches everything there is to know about Excel, which it seems like, how could there be enough things to talk about? There's enough things to talk about. She could have kind of a limitless number of products that continues to help very specific nichey things around that topic. And she doesn't necessarily need to focus on the audience grow so much as like dominating that topic, really being the niche expert for that very, very specific thing. And she does it well. I'm kind of basing this on a person that actually exists. Right now I would consider myself kind of in the middle category. Not that I haven't had a significant growth like I have, but it's taken time. Like I've not necessarily blown up. I've never had what you would call like a viral moment. You know, has things been highly shareable or talked about for sure. But I've never had that moment in time that got me a hundred thousand followers. Like that just hasn't happened. This has been a very slow and steady thing. And as a result, I've helped people over a wide variety of subjects. So rather than being like drilled down focused on one niche topic, I tend to talk about quite a few different ways someone can start, build and grow their online business. I've talked about everything from pricing to email marketing, to launching to building your digital offers, to creating an offer ecosystem and everything in between. And, and that has allowed me to continue to grow an audience. But I have sold absolutely many, many things to the same person or group of people again and again. Most of my customers are customers multiple times or they are with me for a long period of time in a reoccurring offer. So for example, in my membership, 60% of my membership, people have Been with me more than a year, meaning that purchase has reoccurred more than 12 times. If you're kind of in this last model, you may only have one offer at something like 97 bucks total. And you're not selling it again to the same person. You're just getting new people in the door constantly. That's never been the level of pressure I wanted to put on myself, but I also think that might have been the direction I went if that was just the environment I was served up with. So that's a huge part of why I think most people kind of fit in that middle group. And a person that I think fits in this rapid growth kind of area is someone like Justin Welsh Welch. I'm not sure how to say his last name. He is a creator on LinkedIn and he started his career kind of in consulting. Actually. He was doing one on one work helping other SaaS, and on the side was just sharing thought leadership ideas on LinkedIn, which ultimately helped him grow LinkedIn. And then he eventually developed a course on how he grew on LinkedIn, which sounds kind of meta, but he had the audience to support it and has been incredibly successful. And he has gone on to do a lot of other things. But I know for a fact in this season of like early rapid growth, he had one offer, which was his LinkedIn course. And as that grew, he took on less consulting work to the point that he stopped taking consulting altogether. So is it possible? Yeah, like there's clearly evidence of all of the above. You just have to decide how you want to show up and what your level of effort looks like and how you want your ecosystem to kind of all work together. I think the reason people get so intimidated by this conversation when they're talking about letting go of something to make something else possible, is they feel like all of these decisions are forever. Like, if I let go of clients, I can't never get a client again, or if I stop doing this, that I can't restart. And that's just not true. Everything in business, for the most part, a large part, you can flip on and flip off. You can start over, you can try new things. Nothing is forever, which I think has a lot of beauty in it and can feel really relaxing is the wrong word. But take the pressure down, let you feel a little bit less like you have to make all the right decisions. You don't have to make the right decisions, you just have to make the next decision. And if it's the wrong one, then you undo that decision and make a Different one. And in this world of making income from one place versus another, you just figure it out. I don't want you to sit here and think, well, if I'm going to make this change, I have to do this perfectly or execute this or make sure this happens. Like it's not true. Do you ideally need X number of people in your audience to convert X number of people into XYZ product? Yes. Like the math is there for that. There's a lot of other creative ways to get to the same in game. It just doesn't tend to be a one for one. Like people are not usually all in on just this. I was really trying to think about a large variety of leaders that I know in this industry and the various sizes of business we're talking about everywhere from a couple hundred thousand to ten million. I couldn't think of a single one that is only receiving income in one capacity. All of them, all of them are receiving income in multiple capacities. Even if digital products and courses is making up the majority of their income now, does that mean sometimes they're selling to that same audience in a variety of different ways? Yeah. Some people have a one off digital product and a membership and a mastermind and those are all at very different price points and they're serving those people and, and it's working amazing. There's other people that are doing kind of low end digital products and courses and a membership and then brand deals and they're kind of filling the gap with outside companies money. Not necessarily continuing to sell to their audience, but they're selling their audience on other people's offers. And then there's also a group of people that are selling some of those one off things and then monetizing their actual views and traffic through things like YouTube where they're actually getting paid for views. So do I know anyone successfully thriving long term with one digital offer and nothing else? No. Like either. Either they had that one thing, but they were holding on to something else and letting it go over time, or they had other things behind the scenes that you just couldn't see. Or they had multiple offers and maybe not all of them are public or maybe they are public. I just think so often we get in our heads about what we think is happening in someone else's business and we just don't know. Now you might come here and be like, but I know so and so is making all of their income from digital products great. Amazing. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying it's improbable Most people have other circumstances and maybe that person is making their income all from one thing, but maybe it's not making a full time living. Maybe they're supplementing it with a 9 to 5 or they have a partner that is supporting them financially. You just don't know all of the circumstances. You very, very, very rarely do. And that's okay. We don't need to be in on someone's exact formula to be successful. It is very easy to think that the answer is outside of ourselves, that if we learn enough from enough people and continue to like, really understand how people have set up their business, that then we can be successful. And that's not true. You're smart. You wouldn't have gotten to where you are today if you weren't. You wouldn't be listening to a podcast like this if you didn't have the balls. You can do this. You get to decide how you want to show up. You get to decide how much you want to market. You get to decide how loud you want to be. You get to decide how controversial you want to be. You get to decide if you have one product or five. You get to decide if you open something or close something or shut it down or lower the price or raise the price or charge 10 times as much for something else in a different container. Like, you get to decide. And sure, you can follow other people's footsteps. You can copy, paste other formulas. I'm not saying you can't. But most people who are ultimately the most successful are not rinsing and repeating someone else's strategy. They might use that to get a leg up in one area, but they're following their intuition in a thousand other ways. They're doing things that are original, they're doing things that are exciting. They're bringing people into their energy. As much as it could be about your audience size or how many offers or the number of people to sell to, it's also about you. If your mindset is in the trash about all of this, none of this conversation is relevant. Like, if you don't think you can, then you won't. If you think it's going to require more than you can give, then it's going to require more than you can give. If you think it's going to be hard, it's going to be hard. It doesn't have to be those things. Now, I never said it wasn't going to be work. But you can enjoy it. You can have fun. You can do new things. You can be creative, you can make a real difference in people's lives. All of those things are true, but they're only true if you're convinced that you can do this. So it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter if I think your exact scenario will work out in the end, it doesn't matter. Do you. Do you know there's a market for it? Are you convinced it's going to work? Are you willing to figure it out? That's all that matters. Like, I could sit here all day and break down the formulas for you, and I have found time and time again that when I feel my best, I sell the most and when I feel my worst, I sell the least. And I think so much of it is not just energetically how you're feeling, but obviously when you don't feel yourself, you're not showing up in a way that's as effective. It's not just energetically what you bring to the table, it's literally your output. So if you want to do this, believe you can. If you feel like you need like a mindset reboot over this whole thing, you definitely should check that out. Inside the Co Op, I have three workshops that I think are very essential for a mindset reset. And I think more often than not, it's like the thing that people need to get out of their own way because usually that's the actual problem. It's not the strategy. It's not something teensy tiny. Like, it's not to say that you can't do the right things and it won't work. Like, there's obviously things that are going to feel right that are going to. You're going to be excited about that you're confident in, that won't perform. It's not me saying that, like, if you know it's going to work, that it's just going to automatically do so. It's just that if you know it's going to work and the first thing doesn't, you're the kind of person that will keep trying until it does. That's the difference.
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Abigail Pumphrey
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, Abigail says, and bossproject, so we can share it.
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Unknown
Okay.
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Abigail Pumphrey
Second favor, to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me.
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Unknown
If you'd leave a rating and review.
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Abigail Pumphrey
It not only helps more listeners find.
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Unknown
The show, but allows us to bring.
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Abigail Pumphrey
On quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening.
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Unknown
Until next time.