Selling Digital Products in 2024? Read This First.
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I totally understand: you desperately want to sell your digital products, but all the marketing & sales methods out there seem impossible or MASSIVELY time-consuming. ⏳
You've probably heard that you should build your email list in order to sell digital products.
But when you look at your list size, and how long you've been working at growing it, you just think…
“At the rate I'm going, I'll be 72 before I have a list big enough to sell to.” 👵🏻
And then you remember, you're an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneurs entire job is to see problems, and find a creative solution around them.
Thinking outside the box is basically half the entrepreneurial job description.
So if everyone says…
"Build an email list to sell your digital products"
And you think…
"That's never going to happen!"
You start thinking of clever, outside-the-box solutions, like any good entrepreneur does.
You consider the following.
Maybe social media is the answer…
It's a free tool which tons of people use to pitch products and make sales through. So it definitely has potential!
Or even better, affiliates!
If someone has already built the perfect audience who would want your product, they could just speak about it for you and do the promo & selling.
With affiliates you figure, you're cutting the work time of building the audience down to nothing, because you're just being savvy and instead of spending years building an audience, you're immediately getting in front of a perfectly aligned, existing audience.
Genius! 🙌
You could also consider running ads to get sales…
Of course, that comes with cost, but you need to spend money to make money right?
Not so fast.
Let's look at all these 3 sales solutions in depth and evaluate, just HOW good are they for selling digital products. What are the pros and cons of each, and which one is actually worth you investing time & effort into?
First, a little public service announcement 📢
I'm hosting a live masterclass in just about a week on "How to build an email list of buyers" and you're reading this, it's basically tailor made for you.
It's 90 minutes long, so we're going WAY more in depth than I can in a single blog post.
I only host this masterclass ONCE A YEAR, so if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the event, take this as your sign to register.
SOCIAL MEDIA:
Let's talk about what social media is good for.
Discovery 👀
This is all about finding new audiences & new audiences finding you. If you're smart enough to focus on producing content with whatever the latest feature of a social platform is, that platform is going to reward you with a lot of new eyeballs.
Social platforms are all competing against each other. For example, Instagram released reels to compete with TikTok. So if you created reels right when Instagram released it & therefore were an early adopter of reels, you would greatly benefit from Instagram pushing your content out to new people, and be discovered and grow a lot as a result.
Social media is the very "top of the funnel" as we call it in the marketing world. It's where you get found by new people. It also is possibly the best tool for this next extremely valuable business asset….
Relationship Building 🤝
Nothing is better than social for bringing people into snippets of your life, sharing your personality, and building the know-like-trust factor with that new audience.
So if social is great for building a new audience and relationship, it must be fabulous for sales too, right?
Oddly, this is not the case. Here's what the data from Social Insider says:
So if you feel like your people are seeing less of your posts, you're not crazy, it is actually happening.
Campaign Monitor also found that “4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something compared to 0.59% from social media.”
Social is great for discovery & relationship building but not great for sales.
It obviously could be that during a sale or launch, you want a lot of people to go do one thing at one time: buy.
If your posts are only reaching 7% of your following, they're not going to see the multitude of marketing messages and have the number of touch points they need to make a buying decision.
The problem with social is: A fraction of your posts are making it to your people, you don't have a direct connection to them, and as such, social isn’t typically where sales happen.
Okay so if social isn't the answer for selling your digital products, what about affiliates?
Pros:
They already have an audience that you can basically just "borrow" during your sales period.
The model has already been proven by people who sell digital products. You can probably think of a few really successful affiliate programs selling courses and templates, and you may have even heard about how I used affiliates to raise my businesses revenue by $400k last year.
BUT there's one big drawback you need to understand. QUALITY MATTERS.
Kind of like when last year I bought a cheap vacuum which within 2 months failed to actually suck anything up, I then realized I had skimped on quality and finally ponyed up the money for a Dyson which works like a charm. 😅
Just like there's a difference in vacuum quality, there's a difference in affiliate quality too.
When people ask me to affiliate for products, I have a list of about 15 questions I ask them first. One of them is:
"What was your conversion rate on your last sale?"
My audience drives an incredible amount of sales for products I affiliate for. One time my audience literally drove 89% of an entire course launches sales.
And as an experienced affiliate I want to know, if I'm going to send a ton of traffic to something, is it going to convert?
So I don't affiliate for new products or untested items. Again, that's not my only criteria, I look at a LOT more than just that, but a stellar conversion rate is a minimum bar. Now of course, I'm not the only potential affiliate out there and not everyone thinks the way I do. But I hope what I look for does tell you something:
Experienced affiliates look to affiliate for proven products which sell well.
And if you're a beginner in selling digital products, you're unlikely to be able to get quality affiliates. You can probably get a few other entrepreneurs newer to business, but they tend to take…
A lot of time to manage because they're inexperienced and
Aren't all that great at actually driving traffic to you.
So while I do think an affiliate program is an incredibly effective marketing strategy, I would hold off on it until you have the track record which experienced affiliates are going to expect, as otherwise you're going to put a lot of time & energy into a strategy which, without the right affiliates, is likely to produce pretty mediocre results.
When you get your product converting well and have a ton of social proof & success stories and have a team to manage the affiliates, that's a good time to add affiliates.
Okay so now that I've just destroyed your social media and affiliate dreams…🙈
(sorry, but I want to share my honest opinions, which while maybe not massively fun to hear now, I want to stay in integrity and share the truth with you... )
What about ads?
Let's look at the math on that:
I covered this in my last blog, so I'll run through this very quickly here, but do feel free to read my blog from the other day if you want the longer explanation.
Ads cost on average $8 - $12 per quality lead right now.
So to build a 1,000 person list that costs $8,000 - $12,000.
Plus the cost of ads management for 3 months is easily $9,000,
So to run ads you're looking at a cost of $17,000 - $21,000 to get started with ads.
You obviously need to have a fairly high-priced digital product to make an ROI on that cost AND again, you're going to want to be darn sure your thing converts well before investing $20,000 to get eyeballs on it.
If you have $20,000 and a well converting product, ads are great. But I realize most beginners do not have that kind of budget, so ads tend to be a non-starter for most of my audience.
So... if ads, social & affiliates aren't great options, what the heck ARE you supposed to do?
Remember how we talked about an email list earlier?
And how building it is time-consuming & difficult, so an outside-the-box-thinking entrepreneur looks for other options?
The truth is this: the stats don't lie.
An email list is the most effective sales tool we have. 90%+ of my revenue comes from my email list, and that's the same for more successful digital product entrepreneurs.
Your creative solution to getting sales shouldn't be to pick a less effective strategy like ads, affiliates or social, you should put that creative energy into finding a better list building solution.
For 90 minutes I'm going to explain the complete strategy for list building to sell digital products. I'm hosting a live masterclasS:
How to build an email list of buyers (without spending a second on social or a cent on adS
This masterclass is happening live, so if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the event, take this as your sign to stop trying to cut corners and instead invest your time into learning how list building is done properly. 👇
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