Episode #003: The 10K Roadmap for Digital Products
Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast
Episode #003: The 10K Roadmap for Digital Products
Today’s Episode:
Welcome to the Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast! We have some really exciting things to share with you. This week on the show we are talking about how to create $10,000 in revenue from a digital product if you are starting at absolute scratch.
I am really excited about this. In the online marketing space, a lot of times we get enchanted by these numbers. I chose $10,000 because if you can take a product from 0-$10,000 you can actually have a fully flushed out offer or product that you can scale up to various levels of success.
Show Notes:
[01:05] It all starts with really getting clear on how you develop and bring an offer into the world in a way that proves it works.
[03:23] At low tickets it is a volume game and at high tickets, it is a sales game. At mid-level, it is a mix. You need to be good at volume and sales. You have to evaluate what makes the most sense for your goals, your business, and your expertise.
[05:18] Don’t charge your worth. Charge what something IS worth.
[06:00] You can sell at any price point that you want. You can jump in at any level of pricing, but when you sell something you want to over-deliver if not meet the expectations of that price point.
[06:45] Start your business or next digital offer in a way that you feel confident selling, confident delivering on, and is in alignment with your full expertise.
[08:34] Phase 1: Your First $500 is where you validate your idea and make $500. Make it your goal to make your first $500 with your offer.
[09:39] The idea is to develop a low ticket offer and put it in front of your current audience.
[09:39] If you’re just getting started, keep it simple.
[11:53] Phase 2: Bringing that offer up to the $2000 mark where you refine, retool, and reoffer the same thing.
[12:10] Reach out and ask these three questions to learn how to improve your offer. What did you feel was helpful? What did you feel was missing? What kind of results did you achieve? Get feedback and testimonials.
[13:36] In phase two you are taking the testimonials and feedback, refining the offer, and putting it back in front of your audience now that you have social proof and making additional sales.
[13:46] Phase 3: You bring this offer up to $5000 and you invest the time and money into growing your audience.
[13:57] You're going to hit a ceiling with your offer unless you are doing things to grow your social media and email list.
[14:08] Try a few different strategies but focus on only one or two platforms. Run Facebook ads to start growing your list.
[15:43] Choose a core platform where you are going to work on organic growth.
[17:27] Phase 4: Bringing this offer up to $10,000 and this is where you do a formal launch of your product and possibly expand, raise the price, and add depth to your offer.
[19:01] The initial low ticket offer isn’t going to make you millions but what it turns into and what you offer behind the scenes as you scale and evolve that offer, that is where that revenue really starts to come in.
[19:24] A five-day challenge is the easiest way to launch your offer.
[19:56] Phase 5: When you get over $10,000 you evaluate, process, and scale your offer.
[20:31] In the fifth phase you evaluate, create a process you can duplicate, and scale the offer up. Take your offer and ask how you can make it bigger, better, and more efficient.
[22:03] If you like this process and want support working through it, we have a brand new membership called Not Your Average Membership.
[23:02] We have a four-part framework to help you not only learn content but also implement it. Every month we release an action plan. The action plan is about giving you one strategy that generates more leads, sales, and business growth with clear and simple directions on how to implement it.
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
Welcome. This is Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast, episode number three.
Hello, beautiful people. I am so excited for today's podcast because we are taking on a big topic in the online marketing industry. Now, if you listen to episode zero... If you haven't, I recommend you do. And you know that we are trying to change the way that the industry operates. We're trying to change the way that people think about marketing, the way that we think about growing, the way that we think about our list, our memberships, our courses, and there's one topic that's always gotten me. And I think things have really shifted around this topic in the past few years, and I want to talk about it.
And more importantly, I want you to understand why I take a somewhat counter approach to the industry and what people are saying that you should be doing, and really get down to brass tacks about why I think taking a counter approach to the norm is what's going to work in the future.
Now, you might be like, "What the heck is this guy talking about? This is so cryptic, Zach, where are you going with this?" Well, let me just dive right in.
I've noticed this trend over the past few years that quality information has become more scarce as content has become more plentiful. So, what's happening is that people are still publishing blogs, they're publishing podcasts, but they've become really like high-level almost... I don't want to say unusable because there's still lots of great information out there, but they've become so focused on getting you into the next step of the funnel that the value is missing in some of the content that's being published, okay?
I think that there is a lot of reasoning behind this and we'll get into that today, but I think a lot of you listening have seen this in action or inaction, and you've started to wonder to yourself like, "How much should I be giving away for free?" Right?
As information and content seems more plentiful, actionable content and actionable information feels more gated than ever. So, in today's episode, it might feel a little different than what you would expect, but we are addressing when should it be free and when should we charge for it?
Now, I think that if you're afraid to give away your information because you think, "Oh, my gosh if I give away good information, people won't buy from me because the blog post will do everything they need." It's really a fear or scarcity-based issue.
Now, I don't want too far down the mindset rabbit hole though we will talk mindset on this show down the road, but I just want you to understand that if you're afraid that people won't buy from you because you've given freely, you just have to understand that there are plenty of people out there giving way more information, way more freely, and they're still running successful businesses. I'm going to link up in the show notes, neilpatel.com.
Neil runs a wildly successful SEO company, software as a service company, online information business. He has a successful YouTube channel and he just gives so much content and not just content, but I actually remember when I was starting with content marketing, he had this multiple chapter guide on his blog that walked you through how to create a content marketing plan, no charge, no nothing. And it took a while, but believe it or not, I actually became a user of one of his software's for one of my businesses, because when we were ready for that step, we knew that we could trust him because his information was so good.
Here is the thing, I want to talk about the root of this question because I really think that what people are asking is if I give stuff away for free, why would people want to buy from me? And I use Neil as an example, not because we haven't done this in our business, but because I want you to understand other businesses out there are taking this path and getting wildly successful results.
That's the thing that you have to understand is that the common statement that I hear in the marketplace is, "Give them the what, sell them the how." And we really need to dissect that because I'm not saying that you should give out every step of your process with an extensive how-to guide, but I want to let you in on a little secret.
We wrote this blog years ago called the complete five-day challenge launch strategy. And the five-day challenge launch strategy was basically how to launch with a five-day challenge. And it's a few 100 words long, it's really not crazy, but it walked through how to come up with the title of your challenge, the way that we promote our challenge, how to drive organic traffic, how to get referral traffic, how to run the five-day challenge, how to connect with your audience and the challenge.
And then it offers them the opportunity to buy our $97 product. What's really cool about this is that we get a lot of organic traffic to this page, between 300 and 400 visits a month, just from Google. We're not advertising this page, we're not marketing this page right now, we may down the road, but the reality is we're simply promoting this page organically. And when people land on this page, some of them naturally buy our next product. Even though the post basically says, here's when to send the emails, here's how to come up with the plan, this post actually drives sales.
And this is not our longest post, and we'll talk about epic posts in a minute, but what I want you to understand about this is that I think it's okay to give people some information and offer them a deeper level of information inside your programs.
And so, this is where I think the concern comes in is like, "Well, how deep do I go? How much do I give?" And so, I want to talk about four ways to really give information freely without giving away so much that people don't want to work with you.
The first thing that I want to say is that people don't pay for blog posts and people don't pay for podcasts. And you might be like, "Well, what about membership blog posts or membership podcasts?" Absolutely, but I'm talking in the general sense, people expect podcasts and blogs to be free and easy to read. What that means is that you can give freely on these, but people aren't spending the money or making any investment to be into that content.
Now, there's a whole ‘nother myth on here that's like the more you pay for something, the bigger the transformation, and we'll talk about that in another episode, but what I want you to understand is that when people do buy into something, they are more committed, whether it's $10 or $1000, there's a higher level of commitment when someone buys something. And most people in my opinion, subconsciously know that when they commit to something, they're like taking action. And so, visiting your blog or listening to your podcast, yes, it's a time commitment, but it's even bigger financial commitment to invest in the next step. Right?
So, understand that you're giving people the opportunity to commit at a deeper level where they're kind of paying in a sense to take action. Let me say this a slightly different way. People who spend money have more incentive to use your content because as a society, financial commitment feels more intensive than time commitment, okay? We don't have to like that. We don't have to be in love with that sentiment, but the reality is that we know when we pay for something, we tend to get better results, right? So, that's the first thing, understand that people are more invested when they buy from you. So, simply putting out incredible information means you are encouraging people to take the next step.
The second thing that I want to point out is that some people will take your free content and get results. Y'all, that is a good thing, okay? We have this ultimate guide, we'll link it up in the show notes called the ultimate guide to your first 1000 email subscribers. And it could probably use an update, to be honest. It's been a couple of years old. If you go search it on our website, you'll find it. But I want you to understand that we are really just giving freely the information it takes to build your email list. And in theory, somebody could take them that entire guide, run with it and grow their email list. They could seriously grow their email list a pretty dramatic amount by following that guide. So, why would I give it away for free?
Well, the reality is because I want people to start trusting me, okay? I have made this observation... For those of you who are listening and don't know, I run an agency where we manage ads for people's funnels and launches. And I've made this observation, which is that less and less people are buying cold from a webinar, less and less people are saying, "Yes, I will buy your $1000 course right off a webinar because I trust you in 45 minutes." Because honestly, the marketplace is just getting more saturated.
More and more people are coming in, more and more people are offering courses and trainings, and it's harder to discern who to work with. I think that's just the reality. But the other thing I want you to understand is that in a sea of saturation and sameness, it's easy to stand out.
What we get told is that in a saturated market, we need to stand out and in a saturated market, we need to be different. But what I'm saying is in a market where everybody's trying to sell you all the time, giving freely sets you apart. And so, we write these blogs that still get traffic, still get page views. We wrote a couple of blogs where we were talking about how to launch your entire course in 60 days and that blog over the last 30 days has gotten over 100 visits. And you might be like, "That's not a ton." But y'all, think about it. If you write these epic pieces of content and you do it on a regular basis, you're going to be able to start to see the results, and it's going to add up over time.
And so, that brings me to my third thing that you need to think about, which is that really quality content gets better reach. How many times have you read a post where you're like, "Oh, my gosh, this is so good. I'm going to share it with my friend. I'm going to post it on social media." That's not news. Like realistically, when's the last time that happened? For me, it's pretty darn rare.
I very rarely find a piece of information that I go, "Oh, my gosh, this is so good that I have to let everybody know about it." What if your content did that? What if your content was so good that people wanted to share it, right?
When we create our epic blog posts, we find that people actually share them. People actually put our content out into the world for us. People share our Facebook posts. People share our blogs. People talk about what we're doing. And it means that we are creating really good content because a 500-word blog post about how to run Facebook ads, isn't going to cut it anymore.
We actually wrote this really long-form guide called how to launch your course with Facebook ads in 2021. And it's just this really long-form blog post that does pretty well. It's still in the process of kind of ranking in Google, so we haven't seen a ton of Google traffic, but what we did see is that when we launched it, we got hundreds of views in a short period of time, and people started sharing it on social media. And that was really, really powerful.
And so, I just want you to start thinking about the value of really quality content, not to go too much on a tangent, but there are actually business owners who literally run their entire business-building content that is shareable, Pinterestable, Googleable and they market themselves and they just promote their content. I want you to understand that quality content also makes you more likely to rank in Google and be discoverable.
Now, I'm not going to get into how do you rank into Google and how do you show up? Because what I've found from my business is that by just creating consistent quality content, that more people come to our website, that more people find us, that more people click our content, that more people opt in, okay?
And that brings me to the last point, which is yes, organic content is great, but when you layer in paid advertising, you can market to all of the people that are reading and engaging with your really quality content. So, for example, what we do in our business is I told you, we have that blog post about how to launch with a five-day challenge. When somebody reads that blog post, we actually run Google ads to them that show them how to get to the product. So, if you read a blog post about how to run a five-day challenge, you're going to see from Google ads opportunities to buy our challenge launch toolkit. That's just Google ads.
Also with Facebook ads, we can retarget people who have been to our website. We can retarget people who are engaging with our podcast if we put show notes on our website. And so, as a piggyback on number three, I want you to understand that you are actually creating quality content that attracts new viewers, and you can advertise to those new viewers to bring them deeper into your fold.
And as a little bonus, I just want to throw this in there is when you were getting started with your business, when you were getting started with your journey, whether you teach health and wellness, gut health, yoga, painting, watercolor, dog-walking, dog training, when you were first dipping your toes into the water, what is the content you wish was here?
Especially, if you're in business, have you ever made a big, scary investment without knowing much about that person running the course of the program and then thought, "Oh, my gosh, did I make the right choice? Did I not make the right choice? What's going to be inside?"
When you provide high-quality content and you give this quality content away, you deepen the level of trust with your audience.
So, let me just do a quick recap of some of the stuff that we covered. If you're kind of wondering like, "Why should I be giving stuff away for free?" Well, number one, you can rank higher in Google and get more organic traffic. Number two, that traffic is more discoverable. Number three, it builds a much deeper level of trust. And four, there are clues out there that this type of marketing works, right?
Because as content has become plentiful, quality information has become scarce. And in a sea of sameness, standing out is easier when you create high-quality content. Now, up to this point, we really just kind of talked about why you should be giving away really good content, but we still haven't really addressed that root question of like, if I give stuff away for free, why would people want to buy for me? Or it's a higher-level question, what do I give away for free?
So, let me kind of tell you how I decide what I'm going to give away for free. If this was like the straight shooter, "Zack, just tell me what to give away for free?" So, giving away for free would be guides, ultimate guides, how-to videos, walkthroughs, trainings, webinars, video series with quality information in them. That's what I'm giving away for free. What I'm going to hold behind my paywall is like fill-in-the-blank templates, quality walkthroughs that are broken down over an hour, action plans that people can actually take, and implement, video training that's accompanied by resources or downloads. Okay?
I know that's really high level and I want to actually point out one more thing, which is that there could be crossover. So, I might take a piece of my course and give it away for free, as like a blog post with an opt-in, and I've done that before.
And you might be thinking, "Oh, my gosh, if I give something away for free, can it be in my course later?" Y'all, yes, okay? Because I think one other thing we need to touch on is what do people buy a course training coaching for? They buy for access to you. They buy for sequence of information, so they don't have to go finding it all over your blog. And they buy it for condensed information, to get it quicker, faster, easier across the finish line.
So, the reality is if I were to make a course called your first 1000 email subscribers, and I talked through everything in that blog post with like a Facebook ads walkthrough, and a workbook and bonus videos, and maybe a training on your first email funnel, that's my paid product, even though the free blog walks through the exact same steps.
So, again, you need to be thinking that it's not about withholding information. It's about giving information freely in the context that you can provide it. So, for me, we try to write four to six epic blog posts a year, which are minimum 4,000-word posts that walk through a very specific thing in our industry that attracts new customers, new engagement, new sales, new shares, all that good stuff. We try to do that several times a year. Plus, we've launched this podcast where we kind of go against the grain and talk about why we disagree.
Now, I want to address one last thing, which is people are now saying, "If I create how-to content, then people won't get results." And I want to say that I don't think that's true. Okay? There's a lot of talk in our industry about like, "Oh, well, if you don't actually change the way people think about their business, their life, their weight, their et cetera, they won't get results."
Y'all, there is some truth to the fact that people need to believe in themselves. They need to trust the process. They need to trust you. They need to trust themselves. I'm not saying that's not true. What I am saying is YouTube is a thriving place. And you might be like, "What does that have to do with anything?" But just hear me out. YouTube is a thriving place built on how-to videos, okay?
I have a couple of friends, Mike and Justin, over at Primal Video on YouTube, over a million subscribers. And I'm just going to read you a couple of their video titles so that you can get a sense of what's going on, okay? How to create a YouTube channel with almost 6 million views. What's the best video editing software for Android, 2.4 million views. How to make a thumbnail for YouTube videos the easy way, 2.3 million views.
Y'all, they run a massively successful business. They have a membership, they have affiliate marketing, they have YouTube revenue and their business is built on how-to information. So, one thing that I love to tell people is that when I'm trying to change the way I think, I'm trying to evaluate something in the marketing industry. I like to look at different industries. YouTube is a totally different world, and yes, you can be famous on there for your personality, but lots of people create massive brands around how-to content.
I'll give you another example, just to really solidify this. Think about all the recipe bloggers who get book deals. This is a wildly normal thing for food bloggers to be creating recipes and then get a call to offer them a book deal, or they put in the work to get a book deal. I don't want to say it just falls in their lap because it's not what I mean.
But what I am saying is if the argument we were making was true, if free content prevents paid opportunities, then how could recipe bloggers, food bloggers put out hundreds, if not thousands in some cases of recipes still get a book deal, still have people buy their book and still have people joining their memberships, meal planning programs and backend offers?
Because the reality is the free information is not the same as the paid information in the sense that there is an investment, there is a deeper level of access, sequence, and condensation. And there's just a clear line. That's it. It's a clear line where it's like, you're going to get the resources to make it happen and the support to bring it to life versus I'm telling you what and how to do it.
I want to leave you with this final thought on this topic which is, if you're holding back the information that you give away, I challenge you to just put out more free content. Some of the most successful people that I know create content that serves. And a lot of us are here to make a deeper, bigger impact personally in our life and professionally, with our clients. And the truest way to make an impact is to serve. And is it really of service to hold back information? Because we think people need to shift their mindset or change their beliefs or change who they are before they learn. I would argue that the most powerful thing we can do is show up and give freely. And for those that want to go deeper, present an opportunity.
So, with all of this being said, I challenge you to do one thing, get out there and create a really epic piece of content, give it away. Write the amazing blog posts, record the podcast episode that's an hour long, and walks through your entire launch process. Send out the workbook that you would have charged for, but you just want to build goodwill with your audience. I'm not saying give the shirt off your back, but I am saying it's easier to stand out when you truly serve first.
As we wrap, I just want to remind you the Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast is going to be coming out every week. And because we are returning on the scene, we would love it if you could leave us a review. So, take a moment, head into your app, drop us a review, let us know what you think of the rebranded, updated, improved, new and amazing show, and we'd super appreciate that.
And if you got lots of value out of this episode, don't be afraid to screenshot it and tag me @heartsoulhustle on Instagram, that is my handle as of right now that may be changing soon. I would be so honored to see you watching, listening. I guess not watching, I guess, just listening. I'd be so honored to see you listening, and I hope that you got tons of value out of today's episode, and we'll see you on the next one.
