Digital Product Marketing Tips for $5K+ Months!
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Are you hoping to separate the relationship between the number of hours that you work from the amount of income you generate?
Digital products might be having a moment on social media right now, but people have actually been selling them very successfully for literally years. Today's guest, Erica, has been selling a certain type of digital product, which she has made a minimum of $5,000 a month with for the past seven years.
So no, this isn't a fad, it's a proper, genuine, in-demand business model if you do it correctly. In order to make $5,000 a month or more, there are really two vital things that you need to know, which most new digital product sellers don't quite get right. So enjoy this marketing and sales masterclass from the absolute expert on digital product sales, Erica from Big Cat Creative.
Okay, Erica, tell us all about it. What digital products exactly are you selling? And also, how long have you been doing this for? So I sell Squarespace templates and have been doing so since 2017.
(Erica:) Seven years? Maybe just under seven years? Is that the right math? Haha!
So quite a while.
It took a little while to get started in the beginning, but within the first year, everything became pretty consistent after doing a lot of marketing and getting everything to a good place.
And since then, it's been generally pretty consistent.
So yeah, that's some good longevity in the website template game.
What kind of experience does someone need if they want to start their own website template shop? What experience did you have before you started?
Yeah, that's such a good question. And I get asked that all the time by people who want to do the same thing.
I feel like there's a difference between experience and skills.
So in terms of my personal experience, I had experience in graphic design and had been doing brands and other graphic design stuff for a few years. And also I had just started with web design.
So I didn't have a ton of experience in web design.
I had been working with clients for that year and I was self-taught. But in terms of actual skills, I would say that I deep-dived on the learning skills portion.
So not a ton of experience working one-on-one with people in that industry, but lots of skills that I learned and taught myself.
I don't necessarily think you have to have any experience working in the web design industry or working one-on-one with clients.
But I would say you want to be really confident in your skills in the platform you use.
So for me, that's Squarespace.
(Wanna give Squarespace a try? You can grab 10% off with code PAIGE10) Yep - that’s an affiliate link!
As well as the platform you need to have great web design skills, and the strategy of web design and never stop learning those skills because you're going to be selling templates and people are going to be looking to you as an expert.
So having those skills is important, I think. But obviously you never stop learning because you’re building templates along the way.
You're going to continue building your skills, so you don’t need to know everything right away, but you do need to have a base level of skills on whatever platform you're choosing to build your website templates on.
Okay, so next up, let's talk about where exactly you sell your templates. Talk to me about marketplaces versus your own website for selling your templates and the pros and cons of marketplaces vs your own website.
Personally, I've always prioritized my own website sales. I've dabbled in marketplaces, and I do know a lot of people that have quite a bit of success selling primarily on marketplaces, but my preference is my own website.
I think you can find success either way, but I also think the best way is having your templates on both of those platforms.
Why would you choose one when you can have both?
I personally prioritize my own sales from my own website because I don't necessarily trust in marketplaces to be around in five to 10 years. Who knows if they have the longevity to last.
You're putting all of your eggs in that basket and things can change.
They could potentially shut down.
Their fees could increase by a big amount.
They just have so much control over your sales and your business that it's a little bit scary putting all of your trust into one marketplace.
If you use multiple marketplaces, that's better.
Multiple marketplaces plus working on marketing your own store. I think that's probably the best approach.
The thing about marketing your own store is that it's yours.
You have full control over it.
You control the pricing.
You control everything and you just don't have to worry about the potential changes with marketplaces and their structures and their pricing and if they'll even be around and you don't want to put all of your trust into that.
Can you talk about what are the best or most common marketplaces to list your website templates if you want to go that route?
I personally only have our templates on Creative Market, but I know that a lot of people sell on creative market and also Etsy. Those are probably the two biggest marketplaces for website templates that I see people having success with.
Particularly Etsy, which I've never delved into.
I do think there's potential there to make a lot of sales. But again, I would always recommend if you are going to use creative market or Etsy to at least have your own shop getting built up on the side.
And so if we wanted to sell the templates on our own website, how exactly are customers supposed to find our templates? How do we get people to our website to buy them in the first place?
I think that's the biggest question, isn't it?
So if we just jump back to marketplaces for a second, the good thing about marketplaces is that they often do have this built in audience.
Unlike your website. You're not going to just get people seeing your website straight away. It's really reliant on how much marketing you do.
There are so many different ways you can get people to your website.
So you can create content on a blog or content like YouTube that is really searchable.
And by searchable, I mean people googling things or looking things up online and you showing up in the search results.
So creating searchable content is a really, really big one. Paige, I know you love it as a marketing strategy as well. Blog, YouTube, and even podcasting is good in a way.
Podcasting isn’t quite as searchable, but podcasts combined with a blog is going to get people arriving on your site through search engines.
And then from there, you can also do create content on all the social media platforms, you know, choose, whatever one you want.
Probably don't do all of them at the same time. It's a lot of work, but there are so many to choose from depending on what you like to use and maybe where your ideal client is actually hanging out.
And also you could use affiliate marketing. I think that's a really, that's a really good way to get people to visit your website through basically recommendations of others that customers trust.
Trying to find a way to reach large numbers of people and get them back to your website is the goal.
There are tons of different ways you can do that through different marketing strategies.
But the first ones that come to mind are always like blogging and YouTube and creating that searchable content, then all of the social media platforms and affiliate marketing.
What’s the breakdown or percentage of your sales that come from Affiliates, versus YouTube versus Social Media?
I know that 90%+ of our traffic and audience building comes through Google and search engine through SEO.
That's really worked for us because that's where we put all of our energy for the last seven years.
So I don't want to tell everyone like that's, you know, this works way better than anything else. I know that it works really well, but if you look at the amount of effort that we put into that compared to all of the other things that I just talked about, like social media and affiliate marketing, it’s the thing we put the most effort into that’s worked the best.
And then talk to me about topics we should be creating content on? Sometimes people are like, oh, well, if I give a tutorial, then they're just going to go build their own website themselves.
I think it really, really depends on who you're trying to attract, as in your ideal client.
So getting relatively clear on who that is first, it doesn't have to be like super, super niche though. You don't have to pinpoint an exact person, but getting like a general idea of who you're trying to attract and sell your templates to and who you've created those templates for, that's going to make creating searchable content so much easier because then you'll know, or you can at least do some research into, okay, what are these people trying to figure out?
The most obvious thing is creating content around Squarespace, creating content around how to build a website or like how to do this or that on Squarespace because we're targeting those beginners.
But you can even niche down more than that because I know a lot of people selling templates, they specifically are targeting, let's say people in the health industry or imagine someone's creating website templates for yoga studios.
You're going to want to create content about creating websites for yoga studios because that's what the people you're trying to target are going to be searching.
So really, really important, you get relatively clear on that first.
Otherwise you're going to create a lot of content that might get clicks and might get people on your website, but it's not going to convert to sales.
So you've got to find that sweet spot where it's like, okay, this is going to get a lot of traffic, but it's also going to attract those right sort of people.
Can you talk about running like sales and promotions in your business?
I think that's a really good question. And I think it sort of depends on what you focus your marketing efforts on for the majority of your business.
Like I said, we’ve focused all of our marketing on this long term SEO or search engine optimization, getting people to click on our posts. And those sort of marketing techniques have last a long time. They're really long term. And because we've done this, we haven't had to rely on promotions.
Promotions are awesome, but we've spent the majority of our energy focusing on that long term stuff.
If you’ve chosen a different marketing technique, for example if you’re using social media and maybe not focused on those longer term things and you are getting most of your audience and your sales through social media, then promotions are probably going to be like a way bigger part of your strategy because you don't have as consistent sales coming in through Google traffic.
So it depends what you've chosen for your marketing.
I think regardless of whatever marketing strategy you've chosen, promos are really awesome and can be a great way to boost your income for a certain period of time and just like even build your audience, get more sales. I don't think they're ever a bad idea, but it's whether you have the time to work on them and whether you need them in your business, I guess.
(Paige:) That's interesting so if I think about the example of if someone's searching in Google, Squarespace website template or website templates for photographers or yoga studios or whatever, then they probably want to buy relatively quickly and so therefore, they probably just buy on a more day to day basis.
Whereas on social media, they followed you at some point because you make pretty stuff. Then when you have a sale, that's the reason to buy. It's a good point about how the marketing strategy relates to the importance or lack of importance of running promotions in the business.
(Erica:) Yeah. And I think you can bake promotions into your strategy. Having promotions is a strategy in itself. It's not something we've done because we haven't had to and we've spent the time that we could be focusing on promotions on more blogging.
But if you bake promos into your strategy, I think they are a really, really awesome way to boost your sales.
And by the time you get to the end of the year, you'll notice that your sales will be less consistent than if you were focusing on something that had a more consistent return. But at the end of the year, it might look the same overall because you've had big highs and it's gone up and down. So yeah, I think that's, they're cool.
How many promos do you actually run in a year?
We used to focus way more on putting more effort into our promos and we put way less effort into them now for that same reason. We're spending all of our time doing other marketing stuff that we prioritized.
When we did put more effort into them, they saw a much bigger return.
So like I said if you're going to bake that into your strategy, you can really put a lot of effort into those promos and you can see really good results from those like we used to. But it does take time and, you know, it's like there's only so many things that you can do.
Right now we typically run maybe like two or three a year. We usually do Black Friday and maybe mid-year sale.
And then we might have a couple of template launches where we'll do a little bit of a giveaway. I wouldn't say any of those are worthy of me saying that they're like big promotions because we just didn't put like enough effort into them for them to be like really successful.
They still generate more sales (even with minimal efforer and depending on whether it's a giveaway or a sale or like some sort of promo. our audience will grow on Instagram or our email list or however we've decided to run it.
If you want run a promo week or whatever, like Black Friday, for example, what does that even entail?
Well, like I said, it sort of depends on the kind of promotion you're running.
The one thing we do when we launch a new template is we often do a giveaway week.
So just to promote the launch of the new template, we'll run a giveaway on social media or through our website.
And basically people will enter by commenting or you can choose whatever entry requirements you want.
Sometimes we get them to sign up for our email list, whatever we decide we want to do that for that promo period.
And it just generates a bit of buzz and a bit of traffic and a bit of audience building around that giveaway.
So that's quite fun.
Otherwise, we generally do sales.
So whether we've launched a different product or whether it's just like a sale period, like I said, we run a maybe a mid-year sale and a Black Friday sale, then it'll just be like 25% off or 30% off for this week.
For both of those promos, we generally send out a few emails to our email list and we post extra on social media about it, on our stories and on our feed.
But like I said, it could be done a lot better.
Don't use this blueprint for promo haha!
But I do think like emailing your list, if you do have one, if you don't have one, find a resource. Because that can be really important, especially if you're going to do sales and promos.
But it could also just be really, really helpful and really good for your audience to run some sort of event too. There are loads of options!
Over the last like seven years what have you done to make your templates sell better?
Did you tweak your sales pages to get better conversions? Or did you do things like switch from Photoshop graphics to Canva graphics?
Were there any other hesitations to buy and that you like changed that you stopped maybe coding on the website so people were less afraid of the website templates or what did you do to make these things sell better over time?
That's a good question!
OK, thinking back to the last seven years, we've definitely changed a lot of stuff. But I would say that the majority of stuff that we've actually changed about the templates is on the back end.
But that doesn't really correlate to the sales.
So if we're just talking stuff that actually helps the template sell, I would say just making sure that you're hitting those up to date designs that your audience is looking for.
At the end of the day, the longer I'm in this business, I really see that like the design is super, super important. People buy because they like a design and making sure those designs hit the mark.
So when a design doesn't hit the mark, we do less of those and we do more of the things that are working.
So basically experimenting with the different designs that we've definitely tried a variety of designs. And it's pretty clear what ones are more popular. And so we do more of the ones that are more popular.
And to be honest, from where we started, which was very, a very, very basic website to where we're at now, which is much more advanced, longer sales pages, hasn't made that much of a difference.
I think the majority is getting the marketing out there and having people like your designs. They’re the two biggest things.
Well, that's what I always tell people because a lot of people compare their template business to ours, which looks like a lot from, you know, you go on our website and there's a lot of stuff on there. We do a lot of marketing. Our website is big.
And I just tell people like you don't really need that.
You just need really good design that you're confident that is going to sell to your ideal customer.
And you need to work on your marketing and just ignore all the other stuff we're doing because we've been doing this for seven years.
Like it's a it's just like a buildup of stuff for us, you know, and it's not none of it is super necessary.
I think having a really solid design and people actually getting traffic through marketing. So people actually see it.
Like I said at the beginning, the majority of stuff we have actually changed is on the back end. That's to keep the existing customer happy and to keep the or to improve the success rate of people using our templates.
So that's different than what's actually selling them in the first place, because I feel like what actually sells a template is different from what gets a good review of the template.
It makes people actually successful with it and actually be able to build their website with it.
So I would say we've learned more and have changed more and have done lots more trial and error on that back end stuff just to make sure our customers are finding as much success as possible. Front end stuff just comes down to a good design and marketing.
Paige here! If you want more details on like what makes a good design, Erica and I actually created an entire video where we talked a lot more in depth about that. You can catch that below!
So now as well as website templates you have social media graphics and you have sales page templates. Can you tell me why did you make the decision to start offering those things?
So sales page templates was actually one we just got asked a lot about if we had them.
So always listen to what your customers are asking for, because that's obviously going to sell.
A lot of people asked us, do you have a website template that has a sales page in it or do you have just like a single page website or just, you know, people ask, do you have a sales page template?
So we made sales page templates.
We partnered up with one of my friends who's a sales page copy and strategy expert. And we worked together to develop this amazing sales page.
And it's been awesome.
People have loved it, but I knew they would love it because we were getting asked about it.
So that is the biggest reason we created those.
And the social media templates, similarly, like people will ask if we have matching social media templates.
If I could create every single template that a business owner would ever need to DIY any of their design, I would like I would create so much more if I had the time!
There's like a laundry list of things that I want to create, but we've prioritized marketing and working on our Squarespace templates.
But at my heart, I want people to be able to DIY all of their designs.
So that's really the reason why.
But they just they work together perfectly.
Obviously, sales pages are just an extension of your website. And it's just great for selling, which is, the priority for most of our customers who want to make money online. And social media templates are similar. It's so good for your marketing and the opportunity to help our existing customers in a slightly different way.
And I was just I couldn't say no to that. So that's why.
Thinking about like percentage breakdown of those different things? People always want to know that. So what's the percentage of website template sales versus social template sales versus sales page sales?
The majority of our sales are definitely for our standard Squarespace website templates. And that’s because that's what we've marketed. That's what we've put all of our effort into for the last seven years. I strongly believe that if you just sold sales page templates or if you just sold social media templates, you could definitely find success in just those.
But you need to be creating content around them.
You need to be marketing them. And we've just spent all of our time and effort marketing those website templates.
And so the sales page templates and the social media templates are more of an add on and like an additional thing to buy alongside a website template rather than their own products.
And that's only because of the way that we've positioned them.
We've done that purposefully because I just don't have the capacity to market another product as heavily as our website templates.
So if someone's thinking, I'm interested, I want to test my hand at building website templates. What would be like the best place for them to actually start? What do they need to do first?
So I'm assuming that you guys want to use Squarespace, but it’s kind of the same thing if you want to use a different platform to do your templates.
Either way, you need to learn the skills.
So dive into Squarespace and start learning Squarespace skills. There's tons of resources online. Just get in there, start practicing, start building some mock templates.
If you have friends or family that might need a website, that's a really awesome way to learn new skills and practice your Squarespace skills.
Start working with some friends and family and then ideally choose an ideal client. So who do you really want to work with? And that can be relatively broad, but you want to narrow down to a certain extent that you can say, like, OK, this is what they might be looking for in a website template.
And these are the sort of people that I want to work with. And maybe go try and find some of those people, reach out to them, see if you can start practicing your skills by creating websites for them.
You might be doing this for free or for really cheap at the beginning.
And that's fine because you're just learning.
So it's really just about diving in, learning those skills and web design.
You can learn so many of them online for free through our blog & our resources. Oh and of course our Youtube channel!
Erica clearly knows her stuff, right?!
Now I'm guessing if you read all the way until the end, you're pretty seriously about trying your hand at creating and selling templates, in which case, it's time to educate yourself on what they keys are to taking on thie project and doing it successfully! you have to GRAB (with both hands) Erica’s awesome free training! It’s SO GOOD!