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7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
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Technology Translated
The Digital Entrepreneur
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Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

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Previous Episode:A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values More Episodes Next Episode:The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

Staying Grounded on the Road to Success: A Conversation with JB Glossinger

October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

Finding the Balance Between Pragmatism and Your Ideals

September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

But Facebook Doesn’t Work For … (waily waily)

September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

How to Turn Bad News into Happy Customers

August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

Bringing More Emotion into Your Writing — From the Inside Out

August 11, 2015

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Rainmaker.FM Digital Business Podcast Network

August 4, 2015

My Favorite Tools of the Trade for Writing, Content Planning, and Creative Collaboration

July 28, 2015

How Long Will It Take for My Business to Start Making Money? And Other Impossible Questions

July 21, 2015

5 Things I Learned from Minecraft about Community, Ecosystems, and Business

July 14, 2015

Call to Action: The Awesome Power of Asking for What You Want

July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing (and Other Questions)

May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

Ready to launch a digital product? Here’s are the first steps to get you moving …

One of the greatest things you can do to boost your income, or just expand your options, is to launch a digital product.

The tools, platforms, and options for these are better now than they ever have been. So, how to get started?

In this 25-minute episode, I talk about:

  • Figuring out your market, and how you can best serve them
  • Growing your audience of potential customers
  • Designing your first digital product
  • The tools you’ll need to make your first sales
  • The LORE model of growing your new business
  • Some great resources we’re offering to help you out — and a chance to work with me in-person

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital ProductSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • If this is the year you launch your first (or next) digital product, our Digital Commerce Summit is where you want to be this October
  • For an even more in-depth experience, Summit attendees will have the option to attend small-group, hands-on workshops. Chris Brogan and I are leading the one on online communities, and Brian Gardner is leading the one on WordPress-based business. If you’re joining us for Summit, check your in-box!
  • Our Rainmaker Platform was designed to let you market, sell, and deliver digital products with ease — all on a hosted, secure, turnkey solution. You can even take it for a test drive … with no credit card required
  • I always love it when you say Hi or ask a question over on Twitter — find me @soniasimone ๐Ÿ™‚

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

Just a reminder that the show will be on hiatus in August, and then return in September with a new iTunes feed and hosted on a new site. BUT, the PinkHairedMarketer.FM url will continue to send you wehere you need to go. ๐Ÿ™‚

Before I start — one of the things I’d like to do when I return is to do a mini-course that’s just for the subscribers. This will help me to restore the visibility on iTunes, and plus I just think it will be fun.

What I’m looking for are ideas for the course! I have lots of them in my Evernote and my stack of index cards, but I’d be interested in what you might want to see.

I’m thinking about creating this short free course around the topic I covered at our live event in Denver last year — how to improve your conversion. In other words, getting more people to take the action you want them to take, including getting them to buy things. I got excellent feedback on that talk last year, which is why it comes to mind. Let me know if that sounds like you would dig it, or if you would prefer something else!

Launching your first (or next) digital product

Since we did mindset last week, this week I’m going to get very practical. I did a call with my friend and business coach, Gary Barnes, on this subject the other day, and I think it’s probably something that would be useful for a lot of folks.

So today I’m going to talk about how to get started with a digital product — that’s a product that exists purely in the digital world.

Just a quick pitch — we have an entire live event devoted to this coming up in Denver, Colorado in October — where we’ll really walk you though all of this and more in depth. It’s going to be a very action-oriented session — a bit of a cross between a class and a conference, which is always how Brian Clark likes to set our events up.

I’m also going to deliver an optional additional workshop with Chris Brogan, so I’ll give you a few more details on that in a few minutes.

Step 1: Who (and how) do you serve?

I think we’ve said this about a million times on Copyblogger —

Everything good comes from the audience.

You have to know who you’re helping, and you have to know how you help them.

One of the most important things we do with content is to attract those folks, and then give them some meaningful help for their journey as a way to get to know one another.

So this is our blog posts, our podcasts, our YouTube videos — all of that great publicly-findable content on the web.

Most folks working on this aren’t getting specific enough.

I see a huge amount of “I help people make meaningful change in their lives.” OK, awesome. What kind of people?

The answer might be demographic — women between 20 and 50 who live in large cities — or it might be psychographic — people who identify as spiritual and not religious who are interested in social justice causes.

Or it could be both demographic and psychographic, if you’re into that. To some degree, you learn this by putting a message out and seeing who shows up. The audience that appears may or may not look like the one you intended to attract. As long as you still like them, go with the flow.

And if you don’t like them, try a little strongly-worded values conversation — get very real about what matters most to you. That will chase them away if you aren’t on the same page there.

Then … what kind of meaningful change? Health? Relationships? Finances? Time management?

And finally … how do you do that? Specifically? Could you come up with a memorable, simple label for your process or methodology?

Step 2: Pulling the audience together

If you haven’t started some kind of content hub to build your audience, do that now. You really do want something you control, and you also want a way to keep talking with them. Normally that means an email list.

I’m noticing — not for everyone, but for many — that some folks who have put together large and loyal groups on Facebook have a terrible time when they try to sell those folks something. Because people spend a lot of time in Facebook groups when they’re looking for free advice.

Not a thing wrong with that, except that these people don’t buy, therefore they’re not your customer.

In general, I’d much rather have an email list of 500 people who buy than a Facebook group of 5,000 who don’t.

When you’re really starting out and you have no one, you want to think about partnering and finding those audiences that have already gathered around someone you might partner with. You can also absolutely do something like Facebook advertising, if you have some extra cash and a lot of time to get good at that. It really depends on what resources and contraints you’re working with.

Step 3: What’s the smallest meaningful change? (MVP)

Once you know who you serve and you’ve started to pull them together so you can talk to them, your first step is to listen.

What’s bugging them about your topic? What are they struggling with? What’s frustrating or annoying?

You’re looking for opportunities to solve an annoying problem with your digital product. Maybe you’ll help people finally get consistent about an exercise habit, or learn how to catch Pokemons in Pokemon Go, or get a promotion at work.

Most business — and nearly all digital products — solve a problem.

The trick at first is — look for small problems to solve first. Initial steps on the larger path.

If you try to launch a massive membership community that’s going to create complete transformation, unless you have an incredibly strong relationship with your audience, it’s too much, too soon. You’re moving too fast. Solve minor annoyances, then bigger headaches, and work your way up.

As far as what you actually offer? Literally, if you can re-create it in a digital form and take money for it, you’ve got a product.

Some examples are:

Cheat sheets, mind maps, process maps, workbooks, ebooks, checklists, video tutorials (these go well with workbooks), audio tutorials.

As you start working your way up to bigger audience problems — and bigger solutions — you start getting into the e-courses, membership communities, virtual coaching groups, that kind of thing.

My friend JB Glossinger has a premium podcast called Morning Coach — Monday is free, Tuesday through Friday are a paid subscription. That’s an unusual model but it works well for him and his audience.

Make it small. I like checklists and cheat sheets for the very beginning of the process, then simple tutorials (audio or video) with a PDF workbook. When I say “workbook,” realize that can be 3 pages.

Think small.

Step 4: Options for tools

Actually delivering the digital product to the customer and getting paid for it has, frankly, been a giant pain.

When I created my first educational community, the technology side of it was a bear — and it was not cheap. Numerous products had to be stitched together, then styled by a designer to look good and work well. Then there were those couple of weeks we had Russian hackers putting porn images into our library, that was awesome.

Now, if you have any revenue at all, I really recommend our Rainmaker platform. You get the public side, so the podcast and blog we were talking about, and then a membership side that manages all of the login information for you, manages multiple products when you’re ready for that, lets you provide “free products” as well as various levels of paid things, and all of it is hosted, turnkey, and secure. It’s just a very good solution for this.

If you’re talking a checklist for .99, Rainmaker is a paid service and it’s not a rock-bottom price, so it may be that you won’t feel ready right now. That’s fine. My advice in that case is, go as simple as you possibly can.

You may want to go with a service like Clickbank or E-junkie to make things simple. They’re fine when you’re starting out, but at some point you’ll probably find it makes sense to upgrade.

Step 4: LORE: Launch, observe, rework, evolve

I think we’re addicted to creating acronyms — this one sort of popped up as I was planning out this session: LORE.

Launch, observe, rework, and evolve.

In other words, get something out there — it might not be too fantastic, but there could be something to it. It reflects an idea you’ve seen in the audience that you think might resonate. It helps solve a problem you think people might care about.

Then you see what happens. You talk to buyers. If no one buys, try to talk with some non-buyers — you can just get onto your list and ask for a few folks to chat with about why the product wasn’t a good fit.

You rework it so it’s better, based on the feedback, and then you evolve the product to a better version.

You don’t have to have the world’s most stunning idea. You just have to start with a spark that will catch — and that’s why we start with those micro-products. That’s how you find the spark that can catch. Then you fan that flame and make it bigger.

So: If you think you’d like to start a digital business — and most of these start as small projects “on the side” that can be grown into something bigger over time — just a reminder that our live event this year is going to be focused on that.

It’s called the Digital Commerce Summit, it’s in October this year in Denver, Colorado, and it’s designed to actually walk you through this process in much more detail. Understanding who you serve and then finding those folks and building your audience. Developing your product idea. Producing the product, then launching, and of course going on to evolve and grow over time.

You can find that at DigitalCommerce.com, you can click the summit section or if you’re very good at listening to URLs, just jump to digitalcommerce.com/summit.

This year, we’re trying something new — Chris Brogan and I are going to do an optional supplemental workshop on putting together an online course.

Both Chris and I have done quite a lot of this — an online course was really what got me out of the stress of chasing freelance clients and on to a much more sustainable and (for me) enjoyable business model. We’re doing a hands-on workshop for the folks who attend Summit — attendance is limited and there’s an additional fee, but actually that fee is really reasonable right now. This is a roll-up-your-sleeves and do it thing, with Chris and I there to guide and help you as you put your business plan together.

It’s going to be fun and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll get you a registration link in the show notes if you’re interested — we’re pinning down venues, but the spaces for this are going to be limited so we can really focus on you as an individual. It should be a blast.

So, as I understand it the workshop is only open to folks who are attending Summit, so the place to do that is digitalcommerce.com, slash, summit. Then we’ll let you know how to get signed up for the workshop with me and Chris if you’re into it.

Thanks so much for your time and attention and I’ll catch you next week. ๐Ÿ™‚

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Comments

  1. Hashim Warren says

    July 19, 2016 at 6:37 AM

    One small product that’s easy to make and highly valuable is the “curated examples”

    Sonia, the mini course I want to see from you is the behind the scenes stories of 5 Copyblogger launches. Let us know the good, bad, and ugly.

    Reply

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