Turn your expertise into a thriving digital product business with these proven strategies
In the last issue, I spoke about why I will forever shout about the benefits of starting with a high ticket offer first before venturing into digital products.
But I know that, like many of the people who join me inside Life-First Business, there’s a subset of this community who have locked everything in with your high ticket offer and graduated from what I call the Foundations phase.
- You know your ideal client intimately and are getting them results.
- Clients are extending contracts, resigning or spreading the word about what you do.
- You don’t struggle to fill spots when they come open. Your marketing is dialed in to the extent that your audience is crystal clear that you are the person they want to be led by, which is why they’re willing to wait for a spot to open rather than going elsewhere.
- You have a baseline of recurring income locked in that covers all of your business expenses and allows you to be properly compensated.
You’re ready to make the transition and step into, what we refer to inside Life-First Business as the Refine phase…
That special inflection point where you’re taking the frameworks and methodologies that have been getting your private clients results, and packaging that into a signature scalable offer that you want to be known for.
This is where we lean on the insights and proven messaging to now sell to people who don’t know you, and scale your sales with copy, rather than your energy or one-to-one DM or sales conversations.
It’s the stage where you set up the infrastructure to scale your reach, conversions and revenue, in a way that’s independent of your time.
This is the Refine stage in a nutshell and in today’s issue, I want to break down some of the key things I wish I’d known so that you can integrate them and have them in your back pocket.
It’s all very front of mind for me because it comes off the back of the sold out Voxer Mini Mind that I hosted last week, where we dove into so much of the behind the scenes stuff that I don’t think people share about enough:
You know I don’t gatekeep.
And I’m also aware that oftentimes you don’t know what you don’t know, and therefore don’t know what to ask.
So off the back of those powerful conversations, I’m going to break some of those things down for you, rapid-fire style today.
If you have any follow up questions or things you’d love for me to dive into in upcoming issues, you know I’m all ears so just click reply and let me know.
But before I dive in, here’s a little bit of context that’s worth knowing.
I created my first digital product eight years ago.
It was a course all about how to generate PR and strategic partnerships – and I sold it for around $450-ish dollars.
For those of you new to me, before starting the business I worked as a fashion editor, and when I did branch out and start coaching, the majority of my private clients ran product businesses.
Alongside the coaching, I had a done-for-you studio, serving well-funded small to large fashion and lifestyle brands on events, strategic partnerships and marketing campaigns, so those initial clients wanted access to those insights and my editorial experience.
I sold the course using an open/closed model and used a live webinar to invite people in. No sales emails. Just a live class, where I shared the link to purchase.
Since then, I’ve sold digital products that are more of a hybrid model, combining pre-recorded lessons with live Q&As.
Then I transitioned to selling different live programs that I sold the recordings to, followed by an all-access pass offering.
These were all more traditional open and closed launches, sold via social media rather than a sales event.
For the past 18 months, though, I have sold one signature course – Life-First Business – and I’ve sold it entirely evergreen.
So when I say, I have tested and tried just about every form of offer structure and sales method that you can imagine, I really have.
And that’s before you factor in all of the different styles I’ve seen first hand from clients over the years.
Nothing I’m sharing is theory – and I think it’s important for you to get an overview of how I’ve landed here to give context to everything I’m about to share.
Okay, now with the backstory done, let’s get into the good stuff.
I had so much to share that I’m breaking this into a two part series, so let’s dive into part one.
Front end memberships are one of the worst business models for scaling a business by selling your expertise
People tend to gravitate towards memberships as a front end offer because they’re usually cheaper than courses, and in theory, an easier “yes”. But these assumptions don’t often stand up.
When people get access to everything at once in a membership, it subconsciously devalues the content for them.
Business owners think that people will want to pay for ongoing access but what often happens is once people get access to everything, they don’t value it as much and engagement begins to drop off.
The other thing that people fail to mention with memberships is that recurring revenue in this context means recurring work. There’s nothing passive about it. The only way to keep people happy and engaged is to create more stuff. So you end up moving away from 1 on 1, only to find yourself having to create a mini course every month for a fraction of the price.
There’s so many other things I can say about this, but I’ll leave it there.
Instead, I teach my students to leverage membership or mastermind models as a strategic back end offer to drive long-term profitability, which is what I have with our TLE alumni membership mastermind, Traction.
Creating – and then learning how to scale – a signature digital product will involve a lot more money and time that you anticipate.
First, you need to map out your offer suite and customer journey at a macro level to make sure there’s a clear pathway within your business, and that it’s a pathway that aligns with your capacity, strengths and the seat you want to occupy in your business.
Next, you want to think about the promise of your offer and how that matches up with that customer journey.
You need to hone in on what your audience needs to learn from you and when. Then, and only then, can you begin to build the curriculum and the core offer, which, if you’re doing it thoughtfully, takes time to revise and curate before you go into create mode.
Remember, while you’re working on all of this, your digital product is NOT generating income for you.
Sure, you can pre-sell it to offset the costs involved in diverting your attention and resources here, but that’s a one-off cash injection, not something that can sustain you throughout the entire process.
Can you see why I recommend getting your recurring income locked in first?
That way, you don’t have to worry or get distracted by dips in your income when you should be focusing on building.
You may need to reduce your income to give you the capacity to build
You can see from what I shared above that the process is very involved.
One of the things I teach inside LFB is about building your digital product within the confinements of your existing working hours.
Working harder or longer hours to scale isn’t something you want to get into the habit of doing, which means it’s important to look at your business and make decisions that serve it long-term.
Maturing as a business owner and shifting from thinking about cash injections in the interim towards setting your business up to scale sustainably over time becomes crucial during this period.
So does managing your mind around any income dips.
Wobbling after making this decision will only distract you and become an energy leak from the project at hand.
A product that performs well with your warm audience doesn’t guarantee that it will perform with cold audiences
One of the biggest mistakes is assuming that because past clients and students love you for something, that it will translate to people who have never heard of you before.
In fact, it’s a lot easier to be vague or use your ‘energy’ to sell your offers to people who already have a relationship with you.
Cold traffic doesn’t know you so that’s not going to be a reason why they buy.
If the outcome isn’t clear and your copy isn’t persuasive enough to explain exactly how your offer is going to take them from point A to point B, they won’t buy.
And that’s why many people feel frustrated because they know their offer is good, they have tons of happy past students or clients, but they’re still struggling to get new people to buy.
Selling to warm audiences can give us a rose-tinted view of how things will be when we sell scalable offers and doesn’t encourage us to learn the copywriting and messaging skills that are required to sell at scale.
97% of people will NOT buy right away so what you do after they decide not to take you up on your offer is crucial
Most people aren’t communicating with their list enough or aren’t consciously planning their editorial calendar to consider what their audience needs to hear from them in order to want to take the next step with you.
That is the sole purpose of your regular content, and if you’re only emailing people every so often, you’re missing lots of opportunities to forge a relationship with them, not to mention all the data insights that can help shape future decisions.
You need to know how to create desire and demand through your weekly content.
Again, it’s not about creating tons of content. It’s about learning how to make the content that you do create work for you.
You will leave a lot of revenue on the table if you try to sell your digital offer exclusively on social media, without a sales event.
You want to sell your digital product with persuasive copy and a curated experience, not through individual conversations.
It’s impossible to scale if someone needs to talk to you or have you explain your offer in order for them to feel okay to move forward.
That’s the role of your sales event, email sequences and your sales page.
A sales event allows you to analyze concrete data that gives you clear insights about what is and isn’t working so you can get to work with clarity.
When you launch only on social media, you rob yourself of that, which makes it unclear what ultimately made someone buy or not. And when you don’t know that, it’s impossible to replicate and do more of it.
There’s an art to creating sales events that convert and it will likely take a few revisions before you get it converting at the level you want it to. After that, it simply becomes a math game. You will know exactly how you need to be performing on a few key metrics in order to produce the sales you want, and I can’t tell you how liberating that is.
