Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s presentation. What we’re going to talk about today, we’re just going to bust right into it and that is how to sell digital products. There are so many services and many people with expertise and knowledge that right now is sitting at home.
What I wanted to do was kick off this idea, but this thing that I have had a lot of experience in, in the last decade, which is selling digital products, coaching, all of that kind of stuff. Because when you’re talking about how to sell digital products and membership sites and e-books, they give you a way to package your knowledge and sell it at scale.
Whether 100 people download your e-book or 1,000 people download your e-book or join your membership site or go through your digital course, then it doesn’t necessarily matter. Because they’re learning from you, it’s just in a prepackaged way.
I actually wrote an entire book on this called Create. The title of the book is Transform What You Know Into How You Get Paid. It is available on Amazon but I don’t think it will probably get shipped to you for the next month. In today’s presentation, we’re going to go through a little bit of what’s in the book.
We’re also going to talk about, and a lot of it, the hyper condensed form of it is available over on Done For You. If you’re on the Done For You Facebook page or on the YouTube channel, you’re going to be able to see this post here. In the question box, I just dropped a link. But basically, that is how to launch and sell digital products, a very, very condensed form.
My goal with today’s presentation was to go through and talk about packaging your knowledge and experience up into products. The different kinds of products that you can sell, what you can get from those products, as in how much you can charge from those products. And then ultimately, how to sell those products.
This literally is, I think this book is 239 pages. We have a lot to cover in the next 30 minutes or 45 minutes or so. Obviously, we’re not going to get through all of it, but we’re going to do our best to move through the information.
Let me just drop my link in here. This is the blog post that we’re going to be riffing off of. This blog post is the ultimate guide for how to sell digital products. And then we’re going to throw this…
Basically in packaging your knowledge and experience up into something that can be sold online and fulfilled online and fulfilled digitally, you don’t have to fulfill a physical product. You don’t have any costs of goods sold, you don’t have the cost of DVDs or any of this other stuff. That stuff was all super, super popular back when I first got started, 10, 12 years ago, people had these big DVD courses where they basically shipped you a box of stuff. There were DVDs and workbooks and textbooks and all kinds of crazy stuff in there. And that’s how they taught people.
These big-box courses, I know the very, very first one that I bought was Carleton Sheets, which was a real estate one, a no money down real estate guide. And it was the first time I ever saw an information product. I remember I actually have pictures of it, way, way, way back in the day as I unboxed it. Because it was the first information product that I had ever purchased myself.
Interestingly, and this just came to me, when I was younger, when I was like 10, 12, 15, my dad used to go to these seminars and he used to buy these six cassette products on how to negotiate better, how to sell better. And what he used to do was I had this cassette player that you can record these tapes and he would have me tape them and tape a version for myself. But in taping the version for myself, he knew that I was going to sit there and listen to it.
Oddly enough, I was a teenager and learning how to negotiate and I didn’t even know it because I’m listening to these tapes. It’s kind of an interesting thought. That was like the beginning of my digital product days or my information product days, was way, way back then.
Progressed to about 10 years ago and the very first e-book that I created was an e-book called Client Crusher and it was 20 pages and it was like 10 tips on how to work with clients and how to attract clients and sell clients and everything else. That was my first foray into that which is selling digital products.
Based on that product or based on that e-book, we created a video course for it. The video course turned into the next offer and the next offer and the next offer. Since I’ve launched a lot of stuff online and figuring how to sell digital products themselves has been trial by fire… We’ve helped hundreds of other companies sell digital products and membership sites and all that other stuff.
Where I start when working with a client is just having them figure out what they are interested in or what they continually get asked. Because if somebody asks you again and again and again, what question do they ask? Because if they ask it, then they know that you have the answer for them or at least they think you have the answer for them. Oftentimes it’s a great way to start the conversation for a digital product and then you just continue building out what that product would look like.
Let’s say you are an accountant and you work on a lot of tax accounting. Obviously, some of the questions that I’m sure you get asked a lot from other business owners or whatever are, how do I save money on my taxes? What can I do to lower my tax liability? Especially this time of year, right? Or maybe not like directly this time of year, but you get it, this year, in particular.
But by and large, people are going to be asking you about tax-related accounting strategies. At the end of the day, you can put together a product for business owners on how to lower their tax burden or whatever. I hope that shuts off. There it goes, it turned off.
But the digital product can take one of several different shapes. Actually, I’m going to flip the screen here. I’m going to share a different screen. I hope this one… Oh, there it is. Okay.
I actually just dropped this e-book last week because I thought that folks needed to read it. We updated it all. It’s called Funnel Factor. Here’s a link. I’m just going to throw the link up here in the Facebook chat, so you can go ahead and download it there. Just doneforyou.com/resources/funnelfactor.
This report, if you scroll down to the table of contents, we’re just going to look at this piece right here. If we look at what to offer, there’s really a lot of things that you can sell online. Of course, you can sell digital products, physical products, you can sell coaching, consulting. There are so many different things.
But when it comes to information products, there are e-books, there are video courses, there are membership sites and there are audio programs. Your e-book is going to end up being a PDF, kind of like the one you’re looking at here, like this Funnel Factor book. This particular book is 274 pages long, but it doesn’t need to be that long. You can have an e-book that’s 60 pages and charge $27 or $19 or whatever if it’s sold from your website.
The other way you can actually work with an e-book is you can upload it to Kindle or Apple iBooks. You can go to kdp.amazon.com and upload it there. I’m going to share my screen again. I’m going to flip around here.
If we go to this, all right, then we’re going to go to kdp.amazon.com. KTD stands for Kindle Digital Publishing. With Kindle Digital Publishing, you can upload your e-book and it gets added to the Kindle marketplace. You can sell on Kindle.
Kindle Digital Publishing also now does paperbacks. Our paperback, this one, was actually created in, it was CreateSpace. Amazon bought CreateSpace, rolled it up into Kindle Digital Publishing. Now you can create your e-books through Kindle Digital Publishing. They actually also, Kindle, have a piece of software called Kindle Create, which is software for… did you download to your Mac or your PC?
And it’s very much like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, but it downloads, and then you can put your book together and format it inside the software and then upload it to Kindle Digital Publishing. It makes a nice seamless transition when you’re uploading, or when you’re going to list your e-book. If you have a report or an e-book that is 80% done or 60% done or 50% done or whatever, you can upload it to Amazon. Then start generating revenue that way.
One of the ways that a lot of people leverage e-books is they include links to their more expensive services. When somebody downloads your book, they are a buyer, that’s why you see books for 99 cents on Kindle. Because that person, they have a credit card, they pay 99 cents, they value information to a degree. If they opt into anything after that, they’re already a buyer. They’re going to be worth a lot more to your business than not. That’s one way of leveraging e-books in particular. Kindle Creates as a great way of doing e-books.
Way, way back in the day, we used to just export as a PDF and then list it for sale on the website. And then we would include a video sales letter or a sales page that would sell that PDF and you could charge a little bit more. You could charge like 20 bucks or 27 or 37 or even $47 for a PDF with a couple of bonuses, a couple of bonus PDFs. that has worked out nicely.
But e-books now are synonymous with Kindle, they’re synonymous with tablets. You can still get them, you can still sell them on a website, but if you’re going to sell an e-book you want to make sure to key into the platform.
The nice thing about Amazon is, Amazon is the number three search engine in the world. If you have a book about a topic and its keyword loaded correctly and it gets some reviews and all that other kind of Amazon ranking stuff, then your Kindle book, you can get distribution through Amazon’s buyer network, basically. Amazon is a built-in traffic source, it’s a built-in traffic channel for you. It’s a nice way of reaching out to prospects who don’t know who you are yet. That is a bonus.
As far as kicking back into this idea of how to sell digital products, e-books are a great way of getting started. It’s a great way of starting your digital product empire if you will. It’s not the end-all, be-all. You have to sell a shit load of e-books to make any kind of decent money. Oftentimes the book is meant as a way to raise awareness for the rest of the things you do. And the rest of the things you do are largely important when you sell digital products from your website.
I’m going to share my screen again. We’re going to go back to this Funnel Factory book. Video courses, membership sites, audio programs, coaching, those are all some of your higher-end, in terms of how to sell digital products, information products, video courses, membership sites, and audio programs, things that they can capture your knowledge and then be streamed and then be sold as a product, as a package.
And in terms of what to charge, I’ve seen 20-page e-books literally sell for $1,000 and 20-hour video courses sell for $1. Really a lot of times it depends on the value, the perceived value that that material has. A $1,000 e-book is meant less to sell and more importantly to establish perceived value.
Your physical book is a product. Furthermore, you can package your information up into a physical book and sell it. You can sell it on Amazon through something like CreateSpace. You can charge 19.95, you can charge 12 bucks or 14 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever.
The e-book is the digital form of that. If you’re selling it on your own website, it’s going to usually be like $27 to $37. Unless it is meant as a positioning tool, like a tripwire, where you basically establish a buyer lead, and then march them through a sales funnel, in which case your e-book might be $7 or $9 or $4 or whatever. If it’s on Kindle or iBooks, then you’re probably looking between 2.99 and 7.99. Or 2.99 and 9.99 for an e-book.
Audio products are less important now. They’re less mainstream now than they were even four or five years ago. Four or five years ago, you saw a lot of cassettes, a lot of audio products, CD products, because they were low bandwidth. Now, I’m streaming a video right now, everybody expects video when they purchase a digital product, they expect video. Or like an e-book or a worksheet or a workbook or whatever and oftentimes they expect all of it.
They expect having a video, they expect having an e-book, you need to have both modalities to sell for any decent money anymore. $97, $197 or $497 or $1,000 or whatever. You need to have a video. You need to have e-books and workbooks and supporting material. The audio product is a bonus now. What you do is you create the video product and then you export the audio, you pull out the MP3 and then you add it to the lesson as an MP3 file, that somebody can download and listen to on their phone or their iPad or whatever.
I love the audio piece to it, because personally when I’m going through a product and they have audio, I’ll pull them all down to like my mobile phone and then listen to it when I’m mowing the lawn, so it ends up being nice that way. I can get a refresher of the information as I’m doing some work around the house.
But audio products you still see every once in a while. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of making an audio product, just do a video course. And just do a video course or a membership, go through, create the PowerPoint slides, talk to the PowerPoint slides, record yourself on camera kind of like this, get them transcribed so that you can create e-books and stuff out of it.
The video course should be four to six modules. Have one central underlying idea of what it is you want to cover, and then break it down into four to six modules. And if you don’t know what those modules should be, if you have a list of friends or customers or whatever, ask them, if I was to teach this, what would you want to know? Give me a list of questions that you would ask me so that I can put them together in a digital product. And then you can go through it and I’ll give you access to it for free. That’s a nice way of giving the ideas to create it.
The modules, four to six modules, oftentimes you don’t necessarily want to give them all the modules at once. You want to drip the material out. We’re so ADD that oftentimes a course that is a big box of shit, just, boom, like it’s difficult to get through it. You start and then you’re like, wow, I’ve got so much more to do.
Oftentimes, like a lot of our clients, we drip it out week by week. Week one is module one, week two is module two. It will really help when you purchase the product through a payment plan, like a three payment plan or whatever. Then you can drip the material out. The whole course will be released once they are done paying for it.
But even like a full payment at the beginning, we still try to drip the content out with like workbooks and homework and stuff, so that they still consume the course in very bite-size packages. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a ton of information every week. It might just be 20 minutes or 40 minutes or an hour.
We say typically a week’s worth of content should be about an hour. It can be as little as 20 minutes and then cut up into videos or 20 minutes in a workbook. It really just depends on the material and how dense it is and how much people have to think about it and work at it. And is there a time that somebody needs to spend over and above what is in the course? That kind of thing.
Big box courses we talked about, this is very much like a masterclass. When figuring how to sell digital products, a great way to do this is the packaging.
That Masterclass has a lot of video, workbooks, maybe a software element, a coaching element, some sort of a group chat element. They’re pretty hot for any longer commitment course. If the course is four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks or whatever, then usually it is based on this assisted learning platform, where you have some videos every week, and then there’s some homework every week. And then there’s some sort of group coaching call or office hours or something like that. That tends to work out really nicely from a big box course standpoint.
Now oftentimes these courses sell between $1,000 and $5,000. They typically have a longer prospect journey, a longer ramp-up time. Somebody becomes aware of you. They sign up for a lead magnet, they’re on their email list for a little while, they jump on a webinar. On that webinar, you make the pitch into the course. They purchase the said course, and then they go through it week by week by week. Every week you can think about it as a college university class.
Every week you have your instructional material. You have your book and might just be worksheets. Also, you have your book and you’re going through your book. You are doing the homework and whatever. And then you have like office hours, so think about, that ends up being how these multi-thousand dollar courses, digital products are sold and packaged.
Oftentimes, you can only do so many students. It might be two students or four students or eight or 10 or 12 or whatever. But they’re pretty high touch. So we’ve, for the most part, like one person can handle about 20, 30 students at the same time, which is important from a revenue standpoint. It’s still great revenue. If you have an eight-week class and you have 20 students, who each paid $5,000, then one of the problems is you don’t get paid again until you run that class again. It’s just something to manage and consider.
Now, this video is very much about how to sell digital products. Coaching, consulting we talked about yesterday or we talked about consulting yesterday. Going through and providing advice and providing strategy and stuff to clients is a function of digital products is an upper-end, higher-ticket function of digital products. It should give you a pretty good idea of the way to sell digital products because of how they are packaged.
Now, let’s kick over here into talking about how they are sold and the pages and the assets that you need to have in place, to actually get it done. So we’re going back to this window.
To Sell Digital Products
We talked about Kindle Create. All right, so in selling digital products, so the first thing you need to do, you got to make sure that you have the product. And if you don’t have the product already, that’s okay. You can actually sell the product and then fulfill the product.
What a lot of people end up doing is they sell the product, they shotgun the product, I should say. They jump on a webinar and I’ve done this before, not anymore. I haven’t lately in a really long time, but they jump on a webinar, they invite their list to a webinar, run paid traffic to a webinar, and then on the webinar, they offer a live course. The live course starts in two weeks or three weeks or whatever. And then they pre-sell seats to this live course. Then they do this live course live, so they go through and fulfill the content.
It works. It’s nice. When you can get enough people buying the course, it makes a lot of sense because you get paid to create the course.
One of the downsides to it is you’re creating the course on-demand. A lot of times, I find that this is probably just me and my skill set and the way I operate. But oftentimes I’ll go and I’ll write all the course material. I’ll do the entire course and write all the material in a couple of days’ chunk. I might write like 600 slides in a two or three-day time span.
Also, I usually wait a week or two weeks or a month and come back. I record after I’ve let the idea in the material sink in. Because what ends up happening inevitably is you end up having realizations about the course material. You do something down the road and you’re like, wait, wait. Actually, I had a PowerPoint slide about that and that’s not how I did it or whatever.
The first run-through is great when you have to create the material on demand. The first run-through, everybody’s jazzed, everybody’s excited, whatever. Then you go to resell that material, and you try to sell it the same way you did the first round and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as well.
Then people go through the course and you’re not creating anything live. You’re just restreaming the stuff from previous streaming.
Whereas if I take my time and deliver in create and fulfill and record the course the way that I do and give it some time and thought, then the experience ends up being a lot better and the material ends up being a lot better and it’s a lot more thought out. Even these videos where I use some blog posts and some stuff I’ve already created, just to help spur ideas. Because I literally don’t have a script. You can probably tell. But all of these are just winging it and responding to questions and feedback and whatever. That ends up, it’s just in creating courses it’s typically just how I do it.
Now, the offer itself, there’s a couple of different ways you can get paid. We talked about the money that you can make. There’s a couple of different ways you can position the offer. You can do a single one-time payment, like a $67 payment or a $97 payment, or a $5,000 payment one time. You can have multiple payments spread out over a term. Three payments over 90 days or two payments over 60 days or whatever.
Back when I first got into digital marketing and how to sell digital products, there was a really popular way to pay, which was two payments of $97 or three payments of $97. You’ll get to save a little bit of money if you paid in one chunk. It’s a way to spread some of the payment out.
From a procedural standpoint, you don’t always collect all that money. You don’t always collect that third payment, but it’s just something to know. Also, you can do monthly payments, like a normal membership, and for as long as your subscriber remains in the program. You don’t want your stuff just hanging out there.
No matter what you do, you’re probably going to have a membership install for this, just to protect your content. You can also do a front-end down payment with smaller monthly payments or you can do free trials with memberships. A 14-day free trial.
I think I talked about it on a previous live stream. I did just see that Visa said if you’re doing a $0 free trial. Then you need to re-email the person seven days before so that you remind them. You notify them of their next billing. If you don’t do that, then you’re in breach of Visa’s program, but the simple way around it is just to charge a dollar. When there’s a free trial the merchant processes a $1 authorization anyway. The $1 payment hits their credit card and then gets taken off. You might as well just keep the dollar.
Now the sales funnel for you to sell digital products, there’s a lot of different versions. We’ve talked about the webinar sales funnel quite a bit on these live streams. Let me just make this a little bigger for you.
The webinar sales funnel itself is the model that you’re probably going to use for anything above $1,000, and then the video sales letter funnel is going be the one that you use for anything under, usually for anything under like $200, and then in the middle is going to end up being like a multi-video launch sequence. Your webinar sales funnel is Facebook traffic into… Facebook traffic we’re targeting email in your free report and then a webinar, an automated webinar. And then it goes to the call to action, then fulfillment.
The video sales letter is going to go, you have your traffic sources, then it goes to the landing page, and then it goes to the video sales letter, and then it bounces through an upsell sequence. The first product might be that $37 e-book, and then the next product might be a $97 digital video course. And then the one after that might be a $297 mastermind offer, a coaching offer, or something.
Each funnel starts with a landing page. This is the landing page that we use. It’s always R control whenever we start something new. And then there’s a sales page with a sales video. The sales video is a video sales letter.
We have since jazzed these up quite a bit and thrown in some B roll and some live-action stuff, just because the video is easier to create anymore. There is a… Siri activated, lovely. Here’s an automated webinar page that we run.
Every sales funnel has these sales assets and the sales assets or the marketing pages, you have your webinar registration page, your lead magnet landing page, or lead magnet confirmation page. From a sales standpoint, you have your sales copy, your sales videos, your webinars, your lead magnets.
Once you set up all the stuff, you need to get traffic. And there are so many different ways of getting traffic now. There are Facebook Ads, there are Google Ads, those are the two big, or YouTube ads. Those are big like paid traffic sources, and right now, ad prices are dropping huge because everybody’s pulling their advertising dollars. And it’s all based on supply and demand. And inventory shot up, because Messenger, Google, Facebook, they’re all being used like 50% more. After all, everybody’s at home now. It’s a really, really great time to jump into paid traffic if you want to move your business forward.
To learn more about creating funnels to sell digital products, check out the Funnel Formula Course today!
The other way is organic traffic, so search engine optimization, writing blog posts, content marketing, all of those kinds of things. We are going to do a getting traffic live stream probably next week. We’re going to get that thing kicked off.
In the meantime, are there any questions? In the chatbox, go ahead drop any questions. I’m going to figure out what we’re going to be talking about tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be the same time, 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Tomorrow we are going to be talking about… let’s see, how to promote a B2B product we covered yesterday. I just have a note list of ideas for stuff to talk about. Automated webinars, we talked about that yesterday. Writing emails that convert, marketing… sales webinars. I don’t know, I don’t know. We’re going to figure something out.
If you have any questions at all, go ahead, let me know. Go to doneforyou.com. If you want an action plan, we can get that setup. If you have any questions, there’s a chat box at the bottom of all of the pages on Done For You. We’re going to be launching something really, really exciting in the next couple of days whenever I can actually get a chance to put it together and get it out. Keep an eye on that and I will talk to you soon.
