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Need help on making money online by selling digital products?
In today’s podcast we are going to show you how to do exactly that.
Creating digital products is our preferred way of making money online for several reasons, so in this episode we’re going to share the why and how of making and selling digital products.
You will also learn:
- What exactly is a digital product
- The different types you can create
- Why we prefer to make money from digital products vs. other revenue streams
- How to create your very own digital product
- The best ways to accept payment for your products
- How to deliver your digital product automatically
- Where to sell your products
- The best ways to promote your new product
- Our bonus tip!
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Dave Ramsay’s premium podcast and membership site
- Fiverr.com for quick jobs
- Turn your Google doc into a PDF for free!
- Make screen captures using Camtasia for PC or Mac
- Have live meetings with Google Hangouts and they automatically load to YouTube
- Paypal, Stripe or Square – payment tools for your digital product sales
- E-junkie or Gumroad– delivery services for your online products
- Leadpages – sell your products off them
- Bluehost, HostGator or Fatcow – hosting services for your website
- AWeber – for easy email marketing
- BONUS: Our FREE 6 part video series on How to Create and Sell Digital Products
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, today, we’re going to tell you how to create and sell digital products to make money online.[spoiler title=”Click to View Transcript”]
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It’s great to be back with you all again this week. It is really cold where we are right now.
JOCELYN: Really cold.
SHANE: Really cold, it was like 4 degrees when we took Isaac to school this morning and bundled up Anna and got her out the door. Man, we are absolutely freezing. We’re sitting here in flannel pajamas and robes. We’re so cold right now.
JOCELYN: That’s our typical uniform.
SHANE: That’s right, that’s our uniform for the day but we are going to keep this thing rolling and even though it’s cold outside, we’ve got a hot topic for you today. See what I did there, Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: That was great.
SHANE: That was not great. All right, today we’re going to talk about creating digital products and selling them online. That is our preferred method for earning an income on the internet.
We think it’s the best way to do it. It’s focused on you. It lets you really highlight your expertise and you can really focus on your passions and you get to keep most of the money. It’s a great way to make money online when you can create digital products. So today, we’re going to define kind of what digital products are. We are going to talk about how you create them, what kind of systems you need to put in place to take money and to send the product to your customers. First, we are going to read a review from iTunes.
JOCELYN: All right, today iTunes review comes from a FunFuzz2. I like that name. It says, “Easiest five star review I have ever given. I think that Shane and Jocelyn’s podcast represents the wonder and greatness of the internet. Their easy and comfortable style is a pleasure to listen to and they ooze with authenticity.”
SHANE: Authenticity.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that was big word. “Not only do they walk their walk and talk their talk but it is truly enjoyable to spend 20-30 minutes with them during each episode. I look forward to enjoying more.” All right, thanks FunFuzz. We really appreciate your kind words about our podcast.
We love reading your reviews and I’ve been a little bit sad lately because we have not had a lot of new reviews so we thought that we would do a contest. If you have not left a review or even if you have left one in the past, we are about to start our next Flip Your Life ecourse session and we are going to give away a free membership to a course to someone who has left us a review on iTunes. It doesn’t have to be a five star but we hope that it is.
So after you leave us a review on iTunes, head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Review, and there will be a form there, you can fill it out, and let us know your name on iTunes, your email, and all that type of information and you will be eligible to win a free ecourse membership to Flip Your Life.
SHANE: If you have already left a review in the past, you’re eligible for this contest as well. We’re having trouble talking today guys out there in Flipped Lifestyle land, but if you want to enter the contest as well, you can just go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Review and let us know what your review was.
Tell us your name on iTunes, maybe copy the text of the review and let us know and we will enter you in the drawing as well. If you have not left us a review, go do that over on iTunes right now. Just go to iTunes and search for Flipped Lifestyle, or if you have already left a review in the past, make sure you go to FlippedLifestyle.com/Review and let us know.
JOCELYN: All right, so let’s go ahead and jump in to today’s topic which is digital product creation. This is something that is very near and dear to our hearts. We’ve been doing this since 2012, well actually, we’ve been making digital products for a lot longer than that, we just didn’t realize you could sell them.
So 2012 is sort of when we opened up our eyes and said, “Wow, we have a lot of information in our heads. Maybe somebody else will be interested in purchasing that information.” That was really a decision that truly changed our lives.
Before we get into digital products too much, lets’ talk a little bit about what a digital product is. A digital product could be a lot of different things. It could be an ebook and that’s what a lot of people think of when they think of digital products, things like Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, it could be a Kindle book, any type of words that are on paper that you could transfer on the internet via email or their Dropbox or whatever the case may be, just some kind of book that you could share with someone else.
Maybe it’s a video, something that you record. It could be a screen capture video where you show your audience your screen. It could be a video that you’ve placed on YouTube, something that you have recorded of yourself, whatever the case may be, any type of video that you record could also be considered a digital product. Also, audio files or podcast, this is a digital product. It is a free digital product but this is a digital product. There are other things that you could sell via audio as well.
SHANE: Some people even charge for premium podcasts. Like Dave Ramsey, he has a podcast that he comes out with every day. It’s like 45 minute of his three-hour radio show and if you pay for a membership, you actually get to be in Dave Ramsey’s little membership site and you get all three hours of his podcast. You can even charge for like a podcast basically.
JOCELYN: Another type of digital product could be a course. We actually offer our course, Flip Your Life. It is a digital product. It is a series of videos, accountability group, and several different things packaged all into one that we show someone how to do something.
In our case, we show people how to create their digital product. You can make a digital product about anything, like an ecourse. We know people who have done ecourses about financial aspects of life, people who have done about travel, even keeping your kids safe, beekeeping. There are tons of different options that you could create an ecourse about.
SHANE: There was a cool one in one of Flip Your Life ecourses where someone made one about living in an RV. It was all about how you could sell everything you own, live in an RV, and travel all over the country.
So basically, anything that you do, anything that you know can be turned into a digital product if people are looking for that information. If they have a problem and you have the information to solve it, you can turn that into an ebook, a video, audio file ecourse, whatever you want to do, email them the information, they give you money for that, and you’ve made money.
We’ve talked a lot about different ways to make money online. There are ways, you can sell advertising on your blog if you have a lot of visitors. You can do affiliate marketing where you sell other products for people. You can even sign up for things like Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate programs to put little bitty advertisements and maybe get $1 a click or something like that on your website. Those are all fine. Those are all good. Those are all legitimate ways when the conditions are right to make money, but we believe and we have seen in our own life that the best way to make money on the internet is to sell digital products.
There are a couple of different reasons why digital product creation, information products, and things like that are so good for making money on the internet.
The first reason that digital products are the best way to make money online is that everyone has the resources to create them, available to them free online. All of the tools that you need to create ebooks, to even record your screen captures and your videos, you have available to you for free on the internet or on your phone.
There’s no excuse technology wise for anybody not to be able to create a digital product and get it for sale online. Also, the information that you need to write your ebook is in your head. You may not be the best writer, you may not be the best creator, but you do have the information and if you can just put it on paper, you can go online to somewhere like Fiverr.com or other places and hire someone to proofread it and maybe tidy it up a little bit for you to make it sound good.
So there’s really no excuse not to get out there and create a digital product because no matter what level of technology you have if you can get on the internet, the things are out there and available to you to get your
digital product created.
The second reason why it’s the best way to make money online is everyone knows something that can solve somebody else’s problem. You don’t have to have a formal education to create a digital product. You don’t have to be the best or the most prominent expert in any given field to write an ebook.
I sell thousands of dollars worth of playbooks. I have never been a division one head coach who has won national championships. I’ve never won the Super Bowl. I’m just a high school coach that wanted to win more games and I put all my information on paper and a bunch of other coaches who wanted to win more games found it and they paid me for it.
You don’t have to have anything or be anything special to create digital products. You just have to be expert enough. All you really need to know is more than your customer. If you’ve got someone looking for a solution to a problem and you have the solution to their problem, you are the expert that they need and most people will be willing to pay to solve their problems quickly. That’s a great thing about digital products is anyone can make them, anyone can put them online, and anyone can get them for sale and make money off of it.
JOCELYN: I don’t think I’ve ever received an email being like, “Oh, you’re not a good enough librarian for me to buy your lesson plans.” I’ve never received an email that way. Get that out of your head. Don’t worry about if you don’t have a PhD on whatever your subject is. It doesn’t matter.
SHANE: I always tell the story, I’ve told this a couple of times on our podcast where someone wrote me once and said, “Who are you, Nick Saban?” Who is a very famous football coach. So I emailed him back and I said, “No, but last I checked, Nick Saban won’t email you back.” So I actually have an advantage selling playbooks and stuff online to all these high school coaches all over the country because the big time guys, they can’t talk to them but they can talk to me and I have the answer to the problem that you need.
Finally, and this is the most important reason to sell digital products over advertising, over affiliate links, over any other way to monetize online is that you get to keep 100% of the money.
When you create an ebook, I created my playbook three years ago. I’ve changed it one time since then but it keeps making money month after month after month after month because I put the work in, I did it, it’s done. It’s online forever, and every time someone clicks that button and it gives me the money and automatically emails them the file, I get to keep every penny of that besides what we have to pay for taxes and stuff like that.
You get to keep so much of the money. If I’m selling Google AdSense, if I’m trying to build up a lot of traffic and use Google Ads, well that’s great. You’re going to make some money off of it but you’re only giving like a little bit of a click. You’re only making a little bit of money per click.
If I sell something on Amazon for like $50, I might get $3 out of it but if I sell my ebook for $100, for $200, for $300, every penny of that is going into my PayPal account. By far, it is the greatest return on your investment of time that you can do online.
Digital products are what we’re going to really focus on today and now we’re going to show you the process that we use to create the digital product, to sell the digital product, to receive payments for the digital product and how we distribute those files after people buy them from us.
JOCELYN: Okay. So we’re going to get into today’s content which is going to be five steps for creating a digital product and getting it for sale online. These steps, we’ve already talked about it. You don’t have to be anybody special to do them. All you have to have are some very basic tools that are available for free on the internet for the most part and you can get started selling a digital product.
We hear from people all the time just different reasons why they haven’t started yet and we’re trying to help you get past that because we believe in you and we believe that you can start this product here in 2015 and get it going and hopefully have a successful online business for the rest of the year.
SHANE: All right, the first thing that you need when you’re going to go into the digital product creation business, when you’re going to sell information products is you need a way to create a digital product. You can’t let people peer into your brain so you’re going to have to somehow get this data from yourself for the things that you know “onto paper” where other people can consume it.
There are a number of different ways you can do this. By far the easiest way to do it is just to create a document. This could be a Word document. You can go to Google and sign up for Google Docs and use their software for free to basically just type out all of the information that you have into an ebook.
You can go online, search for some pictures that are royalty free or maybe pay a couple of bucks to get some good images that go along with the content that you write. You save that into a PDF and boom, you’ve got an ebook. That’s all it is. You don’t even have to save it as a PDF.
We had that question once in one of the sessions of Flip Your Life. If you want to just type a Word document, in Microsoft Word, and hit save, you now have a digital product. If you’ve got a 20-page ebook that answers a really good question for an audience, people will pay you for that Word document so you don’t even have to save it in a form of PDF.
JOCELYN: And saving into a PDF is not a magical thing. We had this question just the other day from someone in our family. She was like, “Oh do I need some type of special software to save things as a PDF?” No and pretty much, every type of Word Processing software right now, you can go up to the little file and save as and there’s a little option there for PDFs. So that’s nothing magical either.
SHANE: That option is actually available in PowerPoints. I have a digital product that I sell to history teachers and we sell PowerPoint presentations for people to show to their classrooms. The cool thing is, someone may not have the right version of Microsoft PowerPoint or whatever, so I just include a PDF version of the PowePoint slides and all it does is it saves it where each page in the PDF or the ebook is one of the slides so people can show that on the screen.
Like Jocelyn said, that’s not some kind of magical thing that you’ve got to have Adobe Acrobat or anything like that that costs $400 to save. Almost everything will save into a PDF. So the easiest thing to do if you want to create a digital product is just write it, save it, and now you have a file that you can basically email to people once they give you money.
The same thing goes for screen captures. We’ve all been on YouTube before looking up how to do something like, “Where do I find how to highlight all the sales in Excel?” You go to YouTube, you type “highlight sales in Excel” and somebody has recorded a video where you can watch what they are doing on their screen while they talk to you and tell you what they are doing. You learn how to do it and you go and complete the task. That is a digital product.
People will pay you for those screen captures if you’re showing them how to do some tasks that they may not know how to do. There’s a lot of different ways to record your screen. The tool that we use is a paid product called Camtasia. It takes amazing screen captures, any of the videos that you see on FlippedLifestyle.com where we’re doing screen captures are recorded with Camtasia. We’re doing it on a Mac but that software is available for Mac and PC but there are also free ways to do this.
You can actually go into Google Hangouts. It’s actually a way to set up a meeting between multiple people on the internet but you can actually start a Google Hangout by yourself and you can hit screen capture and you can record everything that you do on your screen and when you’re done, it will save that video into a YouTube video, so basically, that will now be available in YouTube.
But you could take that video and you can make it private, and you could put it behind a membership area where you could charge people to actually go into that page and watch that video. So even if you want to do some kind of screen capture, there’s amazing tools that lets you make super high quality screen captures that’s why we use Camtasia because we want them to look really good, but if you’re just getting started out and you need something for free and you don’t have the $200 to go buy Camtasia.
I think it’s like $100 and $200 for PC but if you don’t have that, you can go to Google Hangouts and you can start a Google Hangout, do the screen capture, and now you’ve got something that you can give to people either for free or that you can charge them to get to a certain page on your website to watch.
Finally, I’ve got a buddy who sells videos and all he does is set his phone up with him in front of a dry ease board, he’s a football coach, and he draws plays. He just sits there and draws plays and he creates play books on the dry erase board with a pen.
He is recording them with his iPhone and he goes back in, he trims it up a little bit, and boom, he uploads that to YouTube or Amazon and he is able now to sell that video because it’s content. So if you don’t even want to do screen captures, you don’t care to be on the screen, you can just get up in front of a camera or in front of your iPhone, draw on the board, do a presentation like you would in a classroom and that information if it does what it needs to do, solves a problem, helps people with some kind of a solution, that can be a digital product.
If you have an internet connection and you have a Google Account, you go sign up for Gmail, you already have all the software you need to write ebooks, to create PowerPoints that you can sell, to do screen captures and sell those videos, and if you have a cell phone, you’ve got a good enough camera to film yourself doing anything and selling that content online. When you create a digital product, all you have to do is put the information in some kind of form that you can send it to other people and you’re ready to start making money on the internet.
JOCELYN: All right, so once you’ve created your product, the next thing that you need to do is have a way for people to pay you for it. That would be nice if you want to start collecting money for your product. The easiest and least, well not the least expensive, but the easiest way to do this is to create a PayPal account.
The PayPal account itself is free. You will pay a transaction fee. I want to say it’s around 2-3%, I’m not sure if that’s right, per transaction but it’s totally worth it and you can just build that into your cost of the product. So people get on, everybody has a PayPal account pretty much, and they can just jump on there, they pay you through PayPal. It’s very secure. We’ve never had any issues with PayPal.
There are other options out there if you don’t want to use PayPal for whatever reason or if you just want to see what else is out there. We use one that’s called Stripe and it’s just a credit card processor basically.
There’s another one called Square. There are tons of different payment processors out there that you can use but just starting out, you should definitely look into getting a PayPal account. It’s super easy. They even send you a tax statement at the end of the year. We started out that way. We used PayPal only for a little over a year.
SHANE: Things like Stripe and things like that are a little bit more complicated because you’ve got to go in and set a bunch of things up manually. The cool thing about PayPal is most people have a PayPal account. If they don’t, it allows you to accept credit card payments without having to sign up for any kind of credit card system and basically, everything just happens through buttons that you create in PayPal.
It’s inexpensive, it’s easy to use. The fees are nothing. If you sell something for $100, you’re going to end up paying like $2 and something off of it. It is well worth it because it’s so easy to use and it’s another free tool and easy to get started with.
After you’ve created your digital product, whatever it is, we always recommend starting with an ebook because it’s the easiest and the fastest to get done.
Once you’ve created that ebook or that digital product and you’ve got a way to take payments through PayPal, the third thing you have to have is a way to deliver your product. Now you could, if you wanted to especially just starting out, you could just make PayPal buttons.
People could pay you and then you can have a little note that says, “I will email you this file within 24 hours.” You could manually send people the files but that kind of defeats the purpose of online business. We don’t want to trade time for dollars and it also kind of makes people mad because we live in a very instant gratification society and world now where I order something from Amazon and it shows up in three hours or if I order a piece of software, I want to download it now. I don’t want to have to wait for that.
What we want to do is we want to automate this process to where we can create a button, they click it, they pay us with PayPal. PayPal knows that it has the money immediately, so you’ve already got your cash, and then it sends them the file automatically. There are a lot of services out there that do this.
The easiest and simplest one to set up at first is called E-junkie. E-junkie is a great shopping cart solution for people just starting out who only have a few products, less than 20. I still use E-junkie today for all of my Coach XO products.
I know a lot of people online that use E-junkie, big names like Chris Ducker actually was just selling his Tropical Think Tank tickets and it was done through E-junkie I’m pretty sure. Another one I saw the other day was for a plug-in that we ordered. I can’t remember exactly what it was but we ordered a plug-in from WordPress and they were using E-junkie and it was a pretty big name.
So there are a lot of people out there that use E-junkie for things, just one off products or if you have a very small product line. If you have something like 200-300 products, eventually, you’re going to be switching to something more complicated but when you’re just getting starting out and you’ve got only a few products that you’re selling, E-junkie is a great solution to automate delivery.
What happens is you sign up for E-junkie and that’s E-junkie, J-U-N-K-I-E.com, E-junkie.com, you basically sign up for E-junkie, you go in, you create a product, you upload your file to E-junkie, you set the price and then you connect E-junkie to your PayPal account. They are going to be connected so that they can talk to each other. Then, you take the button that is created in E-junkie and you put it on your site. When people click that button, they are taken to PayPal and then once they pay their money on PayPal, they are redirected back to a page where E-junkie give them the download like for your file.
So now when you’re asleep at 2 AM and someone is up and they find your digital product, they can order that, they can give you money. You’ve made money while you were sleeping, they get sent the file, and you never even have to see it or do anything with the transaction.
All you did was create an awesome product, solve their problem, and they gave you money for it. You have to have some way to get your product out. You can do it manually. If you want to just really tiptoe into this, that’s fine, but if you want to make passive income, you want to earn money 24 hours a day, seven days a week even when you’re sleeping, when you’re on vacation, do stuff like that, then you’ve got to get some kind of shopping cart solution and the best one starting out we believe is E-junkie.
JOCELYN: Okay, so once you have your product created and you have a way for people to pay you and a way to deliver your product without you being there to actually physically do it, the next logical thing that you need to do when you’re creating a digital product is to have a place to sell it.
We definitely recommend that you have a website. People really want to see a website. It makes you more legitimate, I guess you would say, and eventually, you do need to get to that point. However, it is not absolutely necessary to have a website.
You can actually sell your product through LeadPages and we’ve been using LeadPages for a while now and it is pretty great. You just set it up. You include a button with a link to whichever product delivery system you’ve chosen, whether it’s E-junkie or Gumroad or whatever it is, you just link to it in your LeadPage and that’s it. LeadPages actually will host that page for you so while you’re working on your website, if you want to go ahead and get your product for sale, you can just stick it up on LeadPages.
SHANE: This kind of takes a lot of pressure off of people when we tell them this because people think, “Oh man, but everybody wants me to sign up for a website immediately,” and I always tell people, “You do need a website but here’s the problem with that. Websites are complicated to set up. They are not as easy to set up as everybody makes it look like.”
A lot of people online are trying to get you to sign up quickly for a hosting package like with Bluehost, HostGator, or FatCow or something like that, and that’s fine because they get an affiliate commission off of that but they are just going to get you far enough along to get that HostGator or that click from Bluehost, move you one, get the affiliate commission. Yeah, you’ve set up your website, yeah, you’ve got an About Page, but you don’t have everything else done.
It’s going to take you a couple of weeks, maybe even a month or so to really flesh that website out, get it set up where it looks legitimate and have plenty of posts where when people get there, it doesn’t look brand new. You can go ahead and get LeadPages, set up a sales page for your product, whether you have a web page or not, and you can start sharing that link and selling your product even while you create, just like Jocelyn said, while you’re creating your website in the background.
We do think you need a website eventually but we believe you should start out with somewhere to sell your product and the best solution that we’ve found for sales pages is LeadPages.
JOCELYN: It may sound a little counterintuitive to not have a website first and there are a lot of people out there that would probably say we’re crazy for saying that but the fact of the matter is, if you wait around until you get a website finished before you start selling your product, you’re probably going to lose interest, other things are going to come up, and that’s why we feel like it’s really important to go ahead and get that product out there, get it on a lead page.
LeadPages is great because all you have to do is go in and change the text. It’s already set up for you, there’s no kind of coding that you have to do, anything like that. It’s just there. You change the wording of it to fit your situation, and you can start selling your product like that same day.
SHANE: In that way, now when you’re working on your website, every time that you write a blog post from then on, at the end of your blog post, you can say, “Oh by the way, check out my product” and you can have a link over to your lead page which is a sales page you have created for that product.
From day one, you have a chance now to earn money instead of spending 3-6 months getting burned out and looking back and going, “Man, I did all this work and I don’t even have anything for sale.” We highly recommend that you get your LeadPages set up. You’ve got to have somewhere where that thing lives immediately.
As soon as you’ve written your ebook, don’t let it sit and collect virtual dust on your hard drive. Put it out there. Put it for sale, what if two or three people buy your $100 product before your website is even created? Then all of a sudden, you have capital in your hand that you can go reinvest into your site.
JOCELYN: Not to mention momentum. I mean, that is just a great motivator. If somebody is already buying your product then what an incentive to get everything else finished.
SHANE: Yeah, read the comments on a lot of blogs. How many people have you seen like, “Oh, I’ve got all my website and stuff set up but man, I just got nothing for sale. I’m not generating any money.” But when you do Flip Your Life, we always see people like, “Holy goodness. I’ve got a book in my hand. This is crazy.” They get just so pumped and excited that that momentum carries them months and months after they are done.
After you have a way to deliver your product, something like E-junkie, then next thing you want to do is sign up for a service like LeadPages.net, get a sales page up for that product, and then later on, you can move on and start working on your website.
All right, so we went through the four steps so far of creating and selling a digital product. We’ve made the digital product with tools that we already have available to us online. We’ve signed up for PayPal so we have a way for people to give us money. That’s always important when you’re trying to make money online. We have a way to deliver our product with a simple service like E-junkie.
We are not going to get into some complicated software just because some guru recommended it. We’re going to pick the simplest solution that gets the job done, and E-junkie is one of those solutions. We have a place for our product to live. We have created a sales page with LeadPages.net and that way, our product is available while we work on our bigger website.
Now the fifth thing you have to do when you’re selling digital products online is you’ve got to have a way to promote your product, you’ve got to a way to get it out there so the world can buy it. That’s where a lot of people look at our step four and say, “But wait, I don’t even have a website. How are people going to find me?”
Well, a lot of people talk about growing in Google and getting into search. All that is going to happen over time but you already have access to a way to get it in front of people right now and it’s called social media.
All your social media accounts right now, you can create business pages for free. You can create groups that talk about the topic in your information product and you probably have 500-1000+ friends right now that you can go ahead and say, “Hey, check out my sales page for this awesome new product. If any of you need to, I don’t know, fix your toilet, I just wrote an ebook about how to change your toilet. Disconnect it, go buy a new one, and put it in yourself.” DIY Toilet Control, there you go.” That’s our product for today. I’m going into toilets here.
Anyway, that’s just an example, folks but like say, you write an ebook about fixing toilets and it’s for sale. What if your neighbor down the street broke their toilet and they are like, “Hey, I’ll pick that up for $10.” Boom, you’ve got some money.
Use your social media – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest – everything that you’re already a member on. If you’re talking in forums, one of the first places I sold my playbooks was in football forums where coaches were talking about football already.
I didn’t need Google to find some magic website that took me six months to create. I just had to have a link to a page where I had something for sale and I went to that forum and I shared it there. Coaches bought it. I can trace sales directly back to those forums even to this day where people have stumbled across my materials.
You don’t have to wait for months and months on end and perfect your SEO, and build some gigantic website that builds authority and all that to get things growing online. All you have to do is have your product, have a way to get money for it, have a way to send it to people, give it a place to live on LeadPages as soon as possible.
You don’t have to create a website, you don’t even have to have a page on your website for it, and then get the word out using the things that you use everyday – social media forums, comments, things like that.
Email people you know that might be interested. I’m sure you’ve ran into people who are interested in similar things or similar topics. Well, if you’re in a group or something on Facebook and they always talk about this problem and all of a sudden you solve it with a digital product, go share that there with permission of course.
You just don’t want to spam them up but go out there and use the tools that are already available to you so you don’t have to wait a year until your website finally gets on page three of Google and you accidentally get found by somebody. You have everything you need right now within the next month to create a digital product, have it up for sale, take money for it, send it to people, and market it effectively online.
JOCELYN: All right, so let’s recap our five steps for creating a digital product and getting it for sale. 1) Have a way to create your product. 2) Get a way for people to pay you. 3) Find a way to deliver your product. 4) Find a place to sell your stuff. 5) Have an easy way to reach your customers.
We actually have a bonus tip for you today and that is to build an email list. Once you start your website, from day one, you need to have that email opt-in box there. I don’t care if you only have an About Page. That is the most important thing.
SHANE: And also on LeadPages, you’ve got a way to collect emails from day one on your sales page because when people click that button to buy it, you’re going to need a way to catch their email first because if you make another product later, you can go back and resell it to those people because your best customers are always people that have bought from you.
JOCELYN: That’s why you need to make sure that you have that on there from day one. Make sure that you are collecting those emails so that whenever you do create more products, just like Shane just said that you are going to have their emails, you know that those people are interested and you will be able to contact them.
We have always used AWeber for our email collection. It has been great for us. We really, really love it. It ties in directly to LeadPages and also with E-junkie so you can collect those email addresses from not only your customers but also potential people who just happen upon your website and may want to buy something.
There are a lot of other email services out there. There’s MailChimp, there’s Constant Contact, there are several others I’m sure but we really like AWeber. We’ve used it from the beginning and we know that they will treat you right.
If you would like to get some more information on how to create and sell a digital product, we actually have a free video ecourse over at FlippedLifestyle.com that shows you these steps in more detail and there are eight videos there that give you an overview of everything that we have discussed here on the podcast today.
Also, a few bonus videos to really help you get started online. All you need to do is just head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com and click on the orange “click here to learn more” button. It’s over on the right side bar and you will get access to the videos.
SHANE: Also, we’re excited to announce that our next session of Flip Your Life is open for registration right now. This course is our detailed step by step, we hold you by the hand and help you through this process of creating your digital products, getting it for sale online, and getting all of your infrastructures set up.
We show you how to connect everything together to make sure that you can automate all of your delivery and payment collection. Our next session is about to start but you can sign up for it right now. We provide all the resources and accountability that you need to stay on task, to get this thing done.
We have a private mastermind setup for you guys over on Facebook for anybody that signs up for Flip Your Life and we really want to stress that this is a very hard thing to do alone. A lot of people I think fail when they try to start their online business because it’s like them at midnight trying to make everything work and they get frustrated and burnout. So groups like these are critical. We believe in mastermind groups so we wanted to make sure that that was a part of the Flip Your Life experience.
If you have been putting off starting an online business because you don’t know what to do, you don’t know what to sell, or you have an idea that you know would make a great digital product, then head over to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife and you sign up for the next Flip Your Life course, which I think starts in about two weeks. We want to stress that every Flip Your Life session we have ever hosted has sold out in a couple of days so make sure you head over there right now and grab a spot.
If you want to work with us personally to create your digital product because they will go quickly and once they are full, we will not open it again for about 2-3 months. So make sure you head over to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife or you can text the word “Flip,” F-L-I-P, to the phone number 38470 if you’re not near a computer and we will text you back a link to that information page so that you can sign up when you’re ready to do that.
JOCELYN: All right. That’s the end of our steps for how to create a digital product for today but before we go, we want to share this week’s Can’t Miss Moments. I was really excited this week because we went on a trip down to an indoor water park. There was actually a ropes course there and my son, Isaac, really wanted to go up on it. Shane, he wasn’t really wanting to go up.
SHANE: I’m a big guy. I’m a big man. Those ropes look really scary and it looked really high so I stayed on the ground and took pictures.
JOCELYN: He opted out of that one.
SHANE: I opted out of that one.
JOCELYN: He actually went to play golf with our little girl, Anna, but Isaac and I went up the ropes course and it was a lot of fun. It was a little bit scary because pretty much you’re up there with a harness and there are a few things, which is like one rope, and you have to walk across it.
SHANE: The funniest part was Isaac got totally hung on one and he was literally dangling there, swinging like Tarzan back and forth, and Jocelyn was like, “I can’t go get him.” It was very funny.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we just went up there and just had a really good time. It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that.
SHANE: My Can’t Miss Moment this week actually happened just a little while ago. My little girl was here this morning. Our babysitter’s pipes froze. That tells you how cold it is here. So she didn’t have water this morning so Anna stayed here with us for a little while.
I was sitting here doing some emails and Anna came here and said, “Daddy, stop working. Let’s go have a tea party.” I basically just looked at her and said, “Done, let’s do it. I’m not passing that up.” So we went in there and we had a little tea party and played some board games, and just had a great morning. It was awesome to have that freedom to just stop everything, put it down, and get over there and have a little fun with my little girl this morning. I was just very thankful that we have that opportunity to do so.
JOCELYN: All right guys, that was all that we have for you for this week. Keep those comments coming on Facebook and on Twitter. If we’re doing something that resonates with you or that you particularly enjoy, we love reading your comments and just what we’re doing to help you. That makes us happy so if you can just tell us about how we’re doing, how we can help you more, we’d love to hear from you. Let us hear from you and that is all for today.
SHANE: Before we go here, don’t forget to go and leave an iTunes review and then head over to FlippedLifestyle.com/review so that you can enter the contest for a free Flip Your Life ecourse next month.
JOCELYN: It’s going to be great. We can’t wait to see you there.
SHANE: Bye, catch you on the flipside. See you.
JOCELYN: Bye.
SHANE: Do you need step by step instruction? Do you need us to help you create your digital product and get your online business started? Well, you can do that. We actually now offer a course called the Flip Your Life e-course where we show you how to create your first digital product in 29 days or less.
All you have to do to get more information on this program is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife, and that’s all one word, and you can check out everything that we do in that course to help you get your digital product created for sale online even if you don’t have a website. That’s FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. You can check when our next session is starting at that link. [/spoiler]
Anna says
Thank you guys! Another great podcast! You explained the whole processes in non-technical, easy to understand way. Yes, most of us have everything we need to create a product..but self-confidence. Sigh…
Chris McCall says
Hi,
I left a 5 star review, “I enjoy the pod cast and looking forward to the next eCourse release”
Chris
Nathan says
Does e-junkie have a feature for coupon codes? Can it capture email addresses to put into my existing MailChimp list, or even better–put them into mMailChimp for me?
Shane Sams says
Yes it does. You can link it with Aweber, not sure about MailChimp (I’m sure it probably can). It also has a newsletter function to contact your buyers.
Hannah says
Heard about you and this podcast from a Friend and I am so glad I listened. Thanks for offering it for free!
Have a wonderful life and God bless you and your family. =)
– Hannah
ReneRodriguez says
Great podcast. Very informative. I love the step by step process. Thanks for all the great links, especially the one for the FREE 6 part video series on How to Create and Sell Digital Products ( I found it – LOL). Looks like I really do have everything I need to make my digital ebook or video product. Thank you very much. I will let you know when I finish the first one.