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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to know when your email list is big enough to start trying to sell a digital product online.
We’re also sharing our experience with creating a digital product to help you start creating your own now.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Read our blog on how to start a business with $100 inspired by Joanne
- ElementaryLibrarian.com
- WishList Member plugin for WordPress- to help protect your digital content
- Ontraport – our current mail tool
- Listen to our podcast on how to create and sell digital products
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
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 up guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. We have a question today from Joanne Westbrook. Joanne is actually the first person to ever have two questions answered on our podcast. She was actually the mastermind behind our long podcast where we talked about how to start a business with $100, what was it? How to start a business in 30 days with $100?
JOCELYN: One hour a day…
SHANE: One hour a day with 30 exactly, there you go. Wait I’m confused.
JOCELYN: Yeah.
SHANE: All right moving on to Joanne’s question, here we go.
“How big should your email list be before you consider creating a digital product or online course? Also, where did you learn to create your online course and do you recommend any certain resources for learning how to create and launch an online course of my own? Thanks again for keeping it real and sharing great information.”
JOCELYN: All right, Joanne, so talking about email list, you don’t necessarily have to have a really big email list before you start creating products. In fact, you probably want to have one product created before you even start an email list and the reason being is so that you can get emails from people who want to get your free digital product. That’s how I started out on my site, ElementaryLibrarian.com before I even started selling anything or really even started growing the site a whole lot.
The very first thing that I did was create a short digital product and that was one month of lesson plans that I put out there so that people could sign up for my email list. I knew that if people wanted that one month of lesson plans, they would probably be interested in purchasing the other months of lesson plans. So that was my number one priority when I was first getting started is to get that initial digital product out there to grow that email list for future products that I would put out.
SHANE: So the moral of the story is none, zero. You should have a digital product available for when that audience starts showing up. If you really want to get into like the course thing, you’re talking about a bigger product here. You know, your first digital product is going to be something small, maybe a 20-page e-book or something like that that you can just use.
It could either sell for a little bit of money to verify that your product is worth something or you want to take an email list and send it to people for free. When you’re talking about an online course, you’re talking about something much bigger. This is a bigger project and you probably are going to need some interest in that before you sell it, but really, you don’t need that many.
I actually sold one of my first digital products and I only had an email list of like 175 people. It sold very well. It made $2,000 and it really doesn’t take that many people if they are very interested in your stuff. That’s what is so important about that first digital product like your e- book that you’re going to give away in exchange for an email opt-in.
You know that the people on your email list then are very interested in what you’re creating so when you make something like an online course, you’ve got a highly targeted group of people that you’re going to sell that to. Let’s say you have an e-course that you’re going to sell for $200, well, if you’ve got 100 people and five people on that list buy it, that’s $1,000. So it really doesn’t take a lot of people if you’ve got a really good course to make a whole bunch of money upfront.
Now let’s talk about creating a course. We don’t do anything fancy when we’re creating our digital course. We basically just spell it out almost like chapters just like we would in our e-book. In fact, when we make e-books or we make small digital products, we usually create those as an outline for something bigger that we’re going to make so we can kind of give away the outline, find people that are interested, and now we know we’ve got people that want to buy that bigger product that we’re going to create.
You basically just make it like chapters and each chapter is going to live on a different page on your website. Let’s say you’ve got 10 videos, they are 20 minutes apiece, and they teach people how to, I don’t know, cut down trees. Tree trimming business, that’s what we’re getting into. I’m looking at my window right now and somebody just cut all the leaves off our trees so that’s where I came up with that. All right, so you’ve got these 10 video series. Video one is about a spruce and video is about chopping oak.
JOCELYN: That’s the only two trees you know, right?
SHANE: That’s the only two trees that I actually know so we’re going to go with that. You’ve got these 10 video series. Basically you just set up 10 posts each post on your website, actually, it’s pages, don’t set up posts because then it will show up in your blog feed. You’re going to set up 10 pages on your website, each one is about chopping down a different type of wood or whatever, and then you’re going to put a plug in on your website where you can actually click a little button or check a little box and it will protect that page so that only people who are logged in can view it.
We have used WishList Member for this process. It’s a plugin, you put it on WordPress, and basically, it just puts this little thing on every page and if you say, “Yes, protect content” or “No, don’t protect content” for every page or post that you make, you can protect those pages and only people who are logged in can access that.
We are currently actually using Ontraport for our membership software. Ontraport is a great service that lets you track a whole lot of information but it actually is really good for setting up e-courses and membership areas on your website. That’s what we are using right now and that’s what we’ve used in the past to protect those pages and really, all you do is put a log in box on your sidebar, people log in.
If it’s corrects, it automatically redirects them to the first page in your course and they can just move through those pages. You’ve got to link them together, like, when they get down with page one, you say, “Click here to view video two” and then you hyperlink that over to the next video in your e-course, and you’re ready and set up to go. That’s how we create courses and that’s pretty much the easiest way to do that.
JOCELYN: We are actually working on a new product. It’s just right now in the infancy stages of how to create a digital course because we’ve had a lot of questions about this. We have so many people out there in our audience who do really cool stuff and it would translate really well to video and e-courses, sort of like what we do in Flip Your Life. Be on the lookout for that. If it’s something that you would be interested in, let us know. We will be working on that and developing it, and helping you guys to start your own e-courses.
SHANE: All right guys, that’s all the time we have for our Q&A today. Make sure you check back for our next episode coming soon. Until then, we will catch you all on the flipside.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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Erika says
Wow love this podcast! I’ve been sifting through several blogs looking for the answer to this exact question. Thank you.