Unlock $10K Months: A Guide to Selling Digital Products
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Selling digital products is one of THE BEST ways to hit $10k months online.
Trust me, I've been in the online job game for almost 10 years, and digital products are by far my favorite!
I love them for the same reasons that most people do:
The minimal startup costs: you basically just need a laptop, some software, and a bit of time!
No massive overhead.
Delivery: when someone buys the product, it is automatically delivered. This means there is no risk of inventory problems
No need for a massive team.
You can literally make $10k months with just you and a laptop. 🖥️✨
picking the right digital product can be a challenge & begs the question: which product is actually worth your time and effort?
Let's dive into some proven digital product ideas, discuss how to market & sell them effectively, and then look at the specific order to do things in so that you can avoid some all-too-common mistakes and set-backs.
This is your COMPLETE GUIDE to successfuly growing your digital product business and hitting those $10k months!
What Digital Products Should You Sell? 🤔
Here are some proven options to get you started:
1. Website Templates
The idea: create a beautiful site design and instead of offering it to just one client, sell it repeatedly to anyone online who loves it.
How much can you make doing this? Well, Big Cat Creative has made an estimated $2M with their website templates over the years!
2. Online Courses
Jenna Kutcher primarily sells online courses and recently shared on insta that she made $9,249 in a day! 🤯
This just goes to show: the online education industry is booming, and a $10k month is definitely within the realm of possible.
3. Memberships
How does creating exercise videos, recording meditation audios, and writing recipes sound to you?
It sounded pretty good to Melissa Wood Tepperberg and that’s exactly what she put into her membership which is making an estimated $16.5M per year!
okay, If those 3 options felt a bit too intense to start with, here are a few beginner-friendly options.
They might not bring in $16.5m a year 😅 but they still do pretty well:
Pricing Your Products
Understanding the price points is KEY to hitting your income goals.
Here are some estimates for what each of the above products sells for in 2024:
Courses: $50 - $4,000 (most legit ones: $750 - $2,000)
Website templates: $100 - $1,500 (typically in $400 range)
Memberships: $5 - $500/month (typically $15/month)
Canva templates: $10 - $50
Fonts: $25 - $50
Stock photos: $20 - $50 (per package or membership)
Copy templates: $50 - $300
Calculators & spreadsheets: $10 - $100
Branding templates: $200- $1,000 (pricier when they are limited availability)
Party game printables: $5 - $20
Lightroom presets: $20 - $100
Notion templates: $20 - $70
Legal templates: $300 - $400
Okay so now that we know the numbers…how do you make a $10K month with these?
Let’s look at an example with a middle-price range product: a $400 website template.
If you want to sell a website template for $400 to make $10k a month, you will need to sell 25 templates each month.
Anddd this brings us to…
Conversion Rates 📈
A conversion rate is the percentage of people who see your product and make a purchase.
It is often formated as a percentage: for example, maybe 1.5% of people who see your product buy it. That means you would need 1,667 people to see your template in order to get those 25 sales that you need for a 10K month.
Now I know what you’re thinking….
How the heck am I going to get 1,667 people to see my product?! 🤨
The number one thing standing between you daydreaming of this business model and it actually working is….drum roll please….
an Audience on an email list 👥
The key to getting enough people to see your product is building an audience, particularly an email list.
Unlike 1:1 services, selling digital products requires a larger audience.
Think of it like being an influencer - you need to grow a following and then sell your own products to them.
The truth is: selling 25 templates a month to strangers on the internet is going to take a lot more than meeting 3 people at a networking event. But don’t let this get you down!
Building an audience can be a heck of a lot of fun. Just look at all the influencers out there! everyone wants to be one these days and what exactly is their business model?
Grow a following
sell other people’s products to their audience / have brands sponsor them to speak to their audience about the product.
The only difference between this and a digital product sellers is that you sell your OWN product to your audience instead of promoting another business’s products.
Soooo yes: you do need to go a little bit the influencer route in order to build this audience and get enough eyeballs on your product. And here’s why…
Lets look at the difference between the successful and the not so successful digital product shops:
SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL PRODUCT SHOPS 👇
Successful digital product shops have mastered being their own influencers. They are sending their own audience to their digital products.
UNSUCCESSFUL DIGITAL PRODUCT SHOPS 👇
Unsuccessful digital product shops are those that fail to generate this traffic. Even if you have the best product in the world ( and a fabulous conversion rate), it’s not going to be successful unless you find your audience and send them to your product.
4 Scalable Marketing Strategies for Your Digital Product Business
Now that we understand the importance of building and audience to generate traffic, lets take a closer look at the best options available for doing exactly that.
Here are the pros and cons of the most common marketing strategies.
Psst…Make sure to read till the end because there is one strategy on this list that is a GOLD MINE for your digital product business. Hint: both Jenna Kutcher and Big Cat Creative do it!
1. Social Media 📱
Pros
Relationship building:
People get to follow your life daily which creates strong relationships. Platforms like Instagram are places that people tend to show up daily on & in an unpolished way which builds a deep relationship.
Virality potential:
New features like reels, if picked up at the right timing, can be the key for going viral.
Cons
Algorithms:
You don’t have a direct connection to your audience because the algorithm is always in between.
Paid ads:
The platform will indeed help you to get around this algorithm issue but ONLY if you pay for it.
"Rented land" situation:
You don’t own the platform so someone else is making AND changing the rules as they please. So you basically just have to live with that.
Platform popularity changes:
If you build your popularity on a platform that then just suddenly loses steam (for example Facebook), that’s definitely not ideal.
Daily grind:
The mental health impacts of using social media daily are REAL. Enough said.
2. Ads 📢
Pros
Immediate results:
With ads, you can get very quick results and spread a message in a short period of time.
Spread a message quickly:
If you are having a sale for your business, you can guarantee that people hear about it on the day when it matters most.
Cons:
Significant costs:
Along with the price of ads, you will also have to hire an ads manager which is an additional cost. Plus don’t forget the time you spend managing the ad manager.
Lower conversion rates:
Ads actually don’t convert as well as the other marketing options on this list. So you might not be able to expect that 1,5% conversion rate that we spoke about earlier in the example calculation.
3. Podcast Guesting 🎙️
Pros
New audiences:
You are getting in front of brand new audiences with every podcast you visit.
Social interaction:
Okay so I don’t mean social media by this. I mean that this is a unique strategy in that you are interacting with another human when you chat with the host of the podcast.
Cons
Short-term relationships:
You don’t get to build a long-term relationship with the audience through just guesting on the podcast one time. This means you will need to have an additional strategy to help bring people from the podcast you guested on to your own channel or podcast.
4. Long-Form Content Creation (Blogging, YouTubing, Podcasting) 📝
I’m not gonna hide it - this is MY personal pick and in my opinion, the BEST strategy.
Pros
Builds SEO rank:
Your content is building your SEO rank. A reel will not show up in google results but a blog post WILL. So you get free organic traffic from google.
Scheduled content:
Right now, as you read this blog, I might be off on vacation or hanging out with my fam and you would never know!
I’ve literally taken 3 weeks’ vacations without my audience having a clue because all of my content is scheduled out weeks in advance.
Deep relationship building:
Someone choosing to watch a 30-minute video or listen to an hour-long podcast is incredible relationship building.
Helps people for free:
I love that I’m both doing my marketing and public service for the internet at the same time. I’m genuinely helping people for free with my long-form content.
Budget-friendly:
Starting a blog literally cost me a laptop (which I already had) plus the price of Squarespace for a year. So it truly is the cheapest marketing strategy you could ever invest in.
Perfect synergy with email marketing:
When you build an email list, you are going to need to send those subscribers content (preferably weekly) to keep them engaged. If you are already creating blogs, you can literally just put a piece of that blog into an email and viola! two birds with one stone.
Cons
Requires consistent effort.
Long-game strategy:
This strategy is not a quick overnight fix. It’s something where you have to really put in consistent effort before you start to slowly see stable growth.
The Power of Email Marketing
No matter which marketing strategy you choose, you are going to want to combine it with email marketing and here are the reasons why:
Email marketing is crucial because it drives the most sales. Stats show that email marketing has higher conversion rates and ROI than any other channels.
Every single successful online business owner will tell you that email marketing is key.
Still not convinced? check out this stat from Campaign Monitor:
4. Email marketing generates $44 for every $1 spent. Ads have NOTHING on that kind of ROI.
5. Lastly, to really drive the point home, lets look at one other piece of evidence from The American Genius:
I’m not going to hide it, i truly believe that this is the best formula for success in digital products:
Long-form content → Traffic → Email List
Because i believe that so much, it’s also the exact strategy I used to grow my business:
I started with a blog because that was what every expert online was saying I should do. I figured I’d give it a try instead of reinventing the wheel and it was the best decision I could have possibly made. Blogging consistently increased my traffic, grew my email list, and led to significant sales.
In each blog post i would promote my email list freebies. And as my blog traffic grew, so did my email list.
My first course launch in 2018 generated $18,800.
My second launch later that same year made over $80,000.
Over the years, these courses have made millions.
But I’m not gonna lie, it took a lot of unpaid time and effort.
It took consistent blogging (twice a week) for about a year before I started to see progress.
Content creation and email list building is the long game. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. It grows slow to start but with consistent effort, it can become an avalanche of traffic and sales.
Pro tips:
Over the years, I’ve podcasted and done a fair amount on youtube but I ALWAYS made sure to create an accompanying blog post for each piece of content. Why? because I know that the written form is still the most likely to appear in Google results.
Podcasting and creating video content take a lot more effort and time than blogging does. You basically do double the work for every piece of content. So it’s definitely a good idea to start with blogging because its the easiest. Remember, you can always add more platforms later on.
I’m not the only one who found success through blogging…
A past student of my Audience Academy course, Tiffany, blogged to build traffic to her opt-in gifts and built her email list to 530 subscribers.
She then proceeded to launch a course to the tune of 10K and shortly after that decided to sell a higher tear program through which she generated $48,000! 🤯All with just a 530 person email list!
So remember, even though it’s the long game, you don’t have to have a 10,000 person list before you start to see results
Check out Tiffany’s blog here! 👇
It’s your lucky day because that same course that Tifanny took: Audience Academy is having a summer sale until July 13th and it’s 25% off!
Audience Academy covers the complete strategy for building your audience, generating traffic, ranking in google, and growing your email list to sell your digital products.
A few of the things I cover in the course:
Proper SEO for posts to rank in Google
Post ideas
opt-in gift creation
Editorial calendars
Email marketing software choices
Optimizing landing pages & opt-ins
Writing subject lines for emails
Engaging your audience long-term
Getting started on YouTube or podcasting
Much MUCH more!
Head to paigebrunton.com for all the course details and info on the summer sale. 🌞
warning: whether you join the course or not, please promise me you wont make this common mistake:
Don't build your digital product first and then figure out the “audience thing” later.
The best digital products (the ones consistently bring in $10K+) were all created to serve their audience.
Not doing it in this order leads to not knowing how to correctly position it or sell it.
Build the audience first, then the product. This is the fastest way to success.
If you are worried about pouring tons of effort into creating a digital product that nobody is going to buy, the best protection against that is to:
Do your market research.
Validate your product idea and ensure you have an audience that's primed to purchase.
That way you have peace of mind knowing you are not launching to an empty room but to an audience that actually adores you.
Audience academy shows you how to do all of this so don’t miss this summer sale happening till July 13th 2024
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