Does this describe you?
- You spent hours and hours creating a digital product, whether it be an e-Book, video series, or otherwise, and you know it’s great.
- You know it has the potential to sell and help a large number of end-customers.
- You’ve created an excellent landing page (the page in which potential purchasers see), your copy (text which you’ve written to explain what the product is and why they should buy it) is well-written, and “the price is right” – as in it’s not too low to seem unworthy of sales, but not too high to make people think, “Why would I spend that much?!”.
The problem remains – how to get people to purchase it. How to get people to know what you know (that if they buy it, they’ll become greatly benefitted).
Consider these steps to creating a digital product that allows you to wake up in the morning and see invoice after invoice of purchases. That’s called passive income, and I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t mind it.
1) Don’t merely focus on free ways to drive traffic to your landing page – you’ll be missing out a huge number of potential customers. Consider Google Adwords. This is a paid form of driving traffic to your landing page which can cost only 5 cents in many cases (depending on how popular the phrase is that you want your advertisement to rank for). If for every 100 visits you receive 2 sales and you spend 5 cents per visit, that’s a total of $5. If your product sells for, say, $27, you made over $50 for spending $5. Scale this and you’re bringing in some big money.
2) If you have an organic visitor, someone genuinely interested in your product but possibly not wanting to make a purchase right then and there, don’t lose them. Have an option for them to sign up for an email newsletter. Make them aware that signing up for the newsletter means they’ll receive exclusive monthly content, a free e-Book, or a special discount offer (something enticing… otherwise they won’t subscribe!). You can then in the future put in a plug for your product and why they should buy it. Offer a special discount or an extra “oomph” to push them over the hurdle of maybe buying the product to definitely buying the product.
3) Join a network such as Clickbank. This is one that I personally use. If your digital product is accepted by their staff you open up the ability for thousands and thousands of people looking to promote affiliate offers to stumble upon yours. You can write a description of what your product is about, offer banner advertisements to help affiliates promote your product, and in return you’ll offer them a percentage commission of every sale they make. Think of it this way – imagine having 1,000 other people promoting your product. Even if you only make 50% of every sale instead of 100%, those sales that are derived from affiliates would not have been realized otherwise. Clickbank makes itespecially easy because they do all the payment processing, all the affiliate commission splitting and even process refunds. Everything is super easy and integrates beautifully with third-party websites such as e-Junkie (instant delivery for digital products via email so you don’t have to send an email manually every time a sale is made), email marketing solutions (i.e. AWeber, iContact, etc), and so on.
4) Don’t be all talk. If you are selling something and want people to take you seriously, unless you already are standing on a large reputation, you have to earn it. Give something for free on your page (this is a perfect way to capture emails for future sales, by the way). Maybe write a several page e-Book to give away, or maybe special access to a video series. Leave a cliffhanger at the end so if they want to learn more and really derive large benefits they’ll have to purchase your paid product. You can say you know what you’re talking about all you want on your sales page, have all the testimonials you want, but until you prove yourself to a potential customer by actually showing them, or rather teaching them something they didn’t previously know, it’ll be very hard to create high conversions and a successfully selling product.
5) There’s no better way to drive sales than through ranking highly for keywords related to your product. Think of keywords that people would search for and want to end up on a page like yours. Create an SEO (search engine optimization) campaign around these keywords. This is done by building backlinks to your site from other high-authority sites. For example, say your product is in the weight loss niche. You want your site to come up when people search “best weight loss plan guide”. To rank for this keyword, you need sites to write about you and have a hyperlink with those words directing to your site. This gives you the SEO juice needed to begin advancing up the Google ladder onto page one.
6) Address questions you would have if you put yourself in a buyer’s shoes. Don’t leave any questions unanswered such as what the refund policy is, what is included with the purchase, when the order will be fulfilled (i.e. when the customer will receive their product via email), and what differentiates your product from competitors. While it’s easy for someone to send you an email to have the questions answered, a lot of people simply won’t do it. Instead they’ll leave the page and never come back (say bye-bye, potential customer!).
7) A sales page with only text is extremely boring and has very low conversions. Add color, a video, graphics, etc. – see what works for your product because it’s not a “one size fits all” sort of thing. You might have heard that “a picture is worth a million words”. Being that an average online-user stays on a website for an average of 7 seconds before deciding to leave, your time is limited and you have to provide reason for visitors to stay. Take advantage of what’s “above the fold” – this is what shows when you land on your website without having to scroll down. After all, customers may never end up scrolling down if what’s above the fold is not enticing enough. Have a video showing with quality audio, a graph or image that really explains your product well, and make sure the copy is perfect (draws the reader in, absolutely no spelling errors, etc). Maybe you’ll end up with a little bit of everything. AB testing is great for this too. Try one style for a week, another style for another week, and compare the results. See how long visitors are staying on the page and maybe the number of sales per visitors will change slightly (or drastically) too.
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