GSD 209: Why Digital Products Fail

Welcome to GSD Daily. Today we’re going to talk about why digital products fail. To put it very, very… Well, so why digital products fail is what we’re going to talk about. Why digital businesses fail is the broader, overarching kind of thing that we’re going to discuss.

Let me put this in your mind. There are billions of websites. Many, many, many billions of websites. So many websites, I mean, you can’t even fathom that number. Billion is a giant fucking number, but here’s the thing. When you set up a website and you put it online, you are one of the billions of websites out there. Nobody cares. Nobody cares, nobody is going to chance upon it. It’s not like somebody is going to drive by it or they’re going to walk past it. It’s there and nobody knows. It’s a star in the galaxy amongst millions of other stars. Nobody knows. Nobody’s going to chance upon it unless you give them a reason to. That’s the important part unless you give them a reason to. Unless you can give them a purpose. Unless you can attract them into your world somehow.

Now, as marketers, there are lots of different ways that you can do that. You can do it through social media, you can do it through content, and search engines. You can do that through paid advertising and TikTok and Facebook and YouTube and all of that stuff. You can drive that traffic to your website. You can influence them a little bit. You can help them care about what it is you’re doing or what it is you’re selling. Without that, there’s nothing.

Way back in the day, when I first got started, I went from being a Pepsi truck driver to starting online. I think I topped out at maybe 15 visitors a day or so to my blog when I first got started. This was in 2006, so there were fewer websites out there then. That led me down the path of internet marketing. I was trying to find ways to get people to come to my website. That’s what led me here.

Now, if you just put up a website and do nothing else, nobody is going to be coming to your website. For some of the simple low barriers of entry stuff, you can post your website on your social media. Maybe you can do that once or twice a week. If you have 50 or 60 friends or fans or whatever, then a couple of them might click. Will those couple of people buy it? No, most likely. Maybe they will. Maybe once. They’ll buy it once. Getting that steady supply of customers is where sales and marketing come in. That’s why you create content and create webinars and run paid traffic and do the silly stuff on TikTok, and that’s why you do all of that stuff, to get traffic to your website, to ultimately be able to make money.

Now, the question originally was, why do digital products fail? Well, digital products fail for the same reason websites fail. Nobody knows they exist. Again, it’s ones and zeros, it’s bits and bytes. It’s an ebook housed on a website that nobody knows is out there unless you give them a reason to know it’s out there. You can take it a step further. If that digital product is a Kindle book and it’s on Amazon, then you have a better chance of attracting some eyeballs by the way you write the product description and the title, and everything else. Because Amazon commands all of that traffic, it’s a gateway. Same with Audible. If you have an audiobook or an audio product and you put it on Audible, then people will chance upon your listing every once in a while, depending on the keyboards that you use.

The thing that will help your product not fail is the marketing piece. It’s creating Facebook posts. It’s creating content and blog posts. It’s doing the marketing things that are going to drive traffic to that product. At the end of the day, that’s all, it’s what it’s about. Yes, products fail. Products fail because they don’t have the marketing, they don’t have the traffic, and they don’t have any way to get buyers. They’re just not out there enough. They don’t have any eyeballs coming to them.

Then once you start getting buyers, you’re able to start scaling that product. You know which traffic channels you’re getting buyers from, you know where people are coming from, and you know how they’re interacting with your product. Great example, we have a client that I talk to. They have a digital product. It’s a digital service actually, but it’s very productized. We were putting together a sales process for them, and they were like, “Well, we really don’t know how to sell it from a sales page yet, and we really can’t sell it from a sales page yet. How about we just get folks on the phone and we sell it on the phone so that we know what all the objections are going to be before we put the effort into building a sales page?” I was like, that is great, perfect… It’s a perfect idea. It lets you test things on the fly so you know what works in real life, then you can put that on the sales page. Those are some of the things that help you go from zero to one and one to 100, are those kinds of testing and that kind of iterative feedback.

Now, if you’d like a hand going through and putting together an inbound marketing funnel, driving traffic, and doing the marketing, go to DoneForYou.com/start and fill in the action plan form. Jump on a call with me and we’ll take a look at what you got, take a look at your website, take a look at your product, and figure out what we can do to get the ball rolling.

If you like this kind of stuff and you would like to learn more about scaling a business, marketing, starting a business, and all that, go to GSDdaily.io, fill in the little form for the freebies and stuff, and you will be sent the stuff in the inbox.

If you have any questions at all, leave them in the comments below. Like, subscribe. I will talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.