Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. Best to presume they all are. This means that if you click on a link and purchase the item, I will receive a commission. There is no additional cost to you.
When you decide you’re going to sell digital products, the options may seem endless. But becoming an affiliate or getting rights to a digital product is about the quickest and simplest way to get started with something you can promote, market, and sell. But what about making your very own? If you think you might be ready to make your first information product, read on!
Why Create Your Own?
There are a lot of benefits to being the product owner. You build your list faster, you add buyers to your list, and not only do you make all the profit on your own sales, but you also get a cut of all of the affiliate sales. What more could you want for your business? But when it comes to making the product yourself, how do you go about it? Where do you start?
A lot of people are scared to create their own product. They think the process will be too complicated. It can be if you make it too complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes people think they don’t have enough knowledge to succeed. But in most cases, they only think that because they’ve never done it.
As a wise young man once said to me, “everything is easy once you know how”.
What To Create
The easiest place to start is with an information product. These take the form of reports, ebooks, audios, or videos. As far as the creation of these types of products, the simplest approach is just to do it yourself. If you are going to make an ebook to promote, you can create a long document in Libre Office Writer (free) or Microsoft Word. Create headings and sub-headings, add some appropriately licensed images, and convert it to a .pdf file. Boom! You’ve got a product.
On the other hand, if you want to do videos, these days most people can do that on their phone. Whether you use your phone, a webcam, or a camcorder, once you get the video on to your computer, you can use video editing software like Camtasia or Screencast-O-Matic. Then upload to a free YouTube account or a paid Vimeo or Wistia account.
Prefer to do an email course? Even easier! All you have to do is write the emails. Next, you’ll upload them to your autoresponder service and queue them up to go out on demand. The best options for this are GetResponse or Aweber.
Make It The Best It Can Be
As you go through the process of creating a digital product, you want to create something that you will be proud to show off and share with others, as well as something that will showcase your strengths. If you are proud of the product you come up with, you will be much more enthusiastic about showing it, demonstrating it, and selling it. Everything will be easier and people will be able to see your passion. That will make people believe in your product before they’ve even bought it. That rocks!
If you aren’t proud of your product, your promotions will not have as much conviction which could cost you sales, and it certainly doesn’t encourage repeat purchases by those would-be customers. When you create something to showcase your strengths, you need to pick a topic that you have a lot of information about. Plus it absolutely has to be relevant to your website’s niche and you need to create your product in a format that you are good at. Figure out what type of product you can create well and create that type of product. If you are uncomfortable on camera but like to write, create an ebook.
On the other hand, if you are not comfortable writing but you have the “gift of gab” and a cell phone or camera, make videos. Make single videos, or make a series of videos. Or, if you are uncomfortable on camera and don’t like writing, make a slideshow video and narrate it. Another idea is to outsource the product creation. Or split the difference.
Outsourcing On A Budget
Lots of people say “Oh, outsourcing is going to be so expensive…” not if you can do the recording process yourself but have a friend or sibling help you out by being your spokesperson. At least for that video. A lot of people would be flattered that you would ask, and many of those folks would probably enjoy helping you out. But short of a relative or friend for free, don’t forget, there are all kinds of people on the web just waiting for someone to hire them for a project, and the costs are not always excessive!
There a number of places on the web where you can find people to do your outsourcing work. Two of the biggest offer a wide variety of services in the world of digital marketer outsourcing. You can turn to Upwork or Fiverr for anything from logo design to .php script installation on website servers, to marketing plan development or just content creation services. Between Upwork and Fiverr, Fiverr used to be looked down on, but higher-grade talent has migrated to Fiverr over time. But, while Fiverr now has top-level talent too, you can still get great deals from extremely talented people who are in the process of establishing themselves. And they still have lots of people offering reasonably priced “spokesperson for hire” services.
Start Simple With An Ebook
For the sake of this discussion, we’re going to stick with creating an ebook for your first digital product. If you don’t want to write the content yourself, here are a number of places you can consider for buying content:
At Upwork or Fiverr, you can get original, unique content, but you’ll want to test it with a plagiarism checker to make sure. Material from most of the other sites listed will probably require heavy re-writing.
Remember that for the most part, quality is determined by price. So if you are on a tight budget, check reviews, look for samples, and proceed cautiously.
How Much To Charge For Your eBook?
So you’ve created your content or had it created. You’ve formatted everything, added links and pictures, and a cover page, and you’ve converted it to a .pdf file. It’s now an ebook. So how much to charge? If it’s a short report of 5,000 to 7,000 words you might consider charging around $7 for it. For a full-length eBook of 10,000 words or so, you might consider charging $17-$27. You can charge more. In fact, there are some ebooks that go for $50, $100, and up. But those are often upsells in a funnel where the buyer has already been “warmed up”.
If you are going to charge $50 or $100 dollars or more for an ebook it had better be super high quality and really high value. Too many times books at this price level fail to provide sufficient value for money. This can cause customers to become upset, even angry with you and it can damage your reputation. Plus, when you are just starting to market your own digital products it’s easier for most people to start off selling a lower-priced book. Charging less but keeping the quality and value high will help you build your reputation in your market as a trusted vendor who consistently provides those things in his or her products.
So start with something high quality, but low price. Learn the process, test the market, and if it works then blow it up by scaling. Don’t try to hit it out of the park on the first swing. Don’t try to create the ultimate ebook the first time out.
Start Simpler With The SMALL Ebook
Better yet, why not start with the “report” type ebook we mentioned earlier? Something small, say 4000 words that you sell for $7. This way you can start refining your marketing plan and generating sales without risking a lot of your time or money.
When you have worked out all the kinks in your marketing process and figured out how to make a consistent profit, that’s when it’s time to step up the investment in your business by creating a bigger, more expensive product that will sell at a higher price. You’ll want to test different price points as part of a split testing process to make that product as profitable as it can be.
Make A Landing/Sales Page
To sell your own product you have to create your own landing page. This is a critical part of your marketing process. This can also be called a Sales Page. It’s a web page that is designed for the sole purpose of convincing a visitor to purchase the product or service that is promoted on that Sales Page. One Sales Page, one product. They even look different than the other pages in a site. There will be several ways to get to a sales page, but once on it, the only options are to close it or click the buy button. It will not have navigation buttons, or links to other pages, no other advertisements, or extra images.
Everything that appears on the sales page is there to encourage sales of whatever you are promoting. You’ve probably seen these pages on the internet. They’re often called “long-form sales pages” because they have so much text that you scroll and scroll before finally reaching the bottom of the page. Of course, you’ll find several ‘Buy Now” buttons along the way so that a visitor can go ahead and purchase before reaching the bottom of the page. On your Sales Pages, the Buy Now buttons will lead to your payment processing page where people can put in their credit card number.
What’s It Worth To Them?
On any landing page or sales page, it’s the text that really works the magic. Every bit of text on a sales page is focused on getting people to want the product. This is where you’ll make your money or go broke. You have to balance being as persuasive as you possibly can while making sure you don’t misrepresent whatever you are promoting. It’s important that you keep your “value proposition” in mind at all times. How do you do that? You focus on what your product does for your customers.
In other words, how will your product improve their lives? Will it make them more successful financially? Will they start dating more? Or will they just be happier than they are now? That’s your objective, to get them to imagine that scenario and then make them crave that outcome. One way you can make them want that change in their lives is to point out the typical failures that people suffer in that area of their lives. You would also mention how their previous attempts to improve their life would have been more likely to succeed with your product instead of failing like they have in the past without your product.
So, basically, you illustrate a problem and then introduce the solution – in this case, your product – your ebook.
Now, Back To The Landing Page
If you have a site running WordPress you can go with a full-blown package like:
Optimize Press
or
Thrive Themes
Or you can consider one of the WordPress landing page plug-ins.
You can also look into page builder services, some of which offer page hosting like:
Convertri
or
PageDyno
or
Groove Pages
Once you’ve chosen a platform and created your landing page, you’re ready to start marketing your product.
Ready, Set, Market!
At this point, if you use paid advertising you just need to be sure those ads are sending the right kind of traffic to your sales page. In fact, you can promote your sales page in any number of ways. From printing flyers to posting on social media, to buying solo ads. If your sales page copy is well written and conversion-oriented, you can expect a significant number of the people that land on your sales page to be converted from site visitors to paying customers. And that’s what it’s all about.
‘Til next time,
Dave
Owner/President of DUH Web Media Group
Sites:
DUHWebMediaGroup.com
DUHWebMarketingInsight.com
DUHWebMarketingReviews.com
- Maximize Social Media for Unparalleled Marketing Success - December 21, 2023
- Success With Irresistible Internet Marketing Strategies - December 15, 2023
- Effective Email Marketing Strategies - December 9, 2023