Selling digital products: How I started and what I've learned so far

So I can sell something that's a thousand dollars and up, but when it comes to those a hundred dollars tens of dollars, $5 offers, I really struggle to figure out how that should become a sustainable revenue stream for me and my business.

This is a brand new series on selling low cost products. This series will probably be five or six episodes depending on the topics that we surface, and you can help create this series with me when you join me on Fridays on YouTube for live streams, you can sit in as a guest or you can just tune in and comment. If you're new here, you may not know me.

I'm Lex Roman and my background is in consulting work, and so I've been selling higher ticket medium ticket offers for about four years, and I personally have never cracked this puzzle of low cost offers, and it's always seemed to me like it's the same amount of effort and often even less effort to sell something that's higher cost than to even bother selling something that's lower cost. 

So I've personally have stayed away from things like courses and digital downloads for the most part in my business.

However, I have been dabbling with courses and I have been trying digital downloads on for size, and especially with the existence of this podcast with my interest in growing my newsletter, it makes sense to have some of these low cost offers because I am attracting more people into my orbit. I'm not necessarily bringing in consulting clients with the work that I'm doing, and I really like making content. I really like helping new business owners and early stage entrepreneurs figure out how they're going to drive leads in their business.

And so to the extent that I'm doing that, I've got to figure out how to pay my time back for that, right? And so one way to do that is through something like a sponsorship. Another way is affiliate income, but it also can make sense to create and sell these low cost products. So I'm interested in cracking this year. I'm interested in helping you crack it if it's something that you're exploring in your business. And so we're going to take a few episodes to unpack that. We're going to see where we get with how to actually grow a sustainable revenue stream from a low cost product.

I'm Lex Roman. I help creatives make marketing bets they can win, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show. 

I'm going to start this series off by talking about what I've learned with my digital products. When I say turning a low-cost product into a sustainable revenue stream, what I really mean by that is making the effort it takes to sell worth the money that it brings in. Low-cost products generally require a lot of configuration, right?

A lot of things like email sequences, landing pages, trip wires, sometimes ads, events and promotions, affiliates. There's a lot of things that go into selling a low cost product and you just don't need all those bells and whistles when you sell high ticket consulting or even a medium priced membership. You can actually rely on conversations and one-on-one emails and actually personalize that experience more because if you're going to give me a few thousand dollars this year, then I can afford to spend 30 minutes answering all of your questions, right? 

And I'm not going to do that for a $30 download, and so that makes it harder. You have to know exactly what your customers are asking. You have to know how to address those things, and you have to know where that information should be, what order it should be in.

There's a lot of factors to get right. I have two digital products that are out right now. One of them is called the Stay Booked Roadmap, and the other one is called the Rev Your Referrals System. What I'm focused on selling right now is the Rev Your Referrals system, but we're going to have a look back at the data from the Stay Booked Roadmap to inform how I'm going to grow the revenue on the Rev Your Referrals system. Many of you who are listening might already have the Stay Booked Roadmap, and you also might have it under its original name. 

7 Steps to Getting More Leads launched in October, 2022 for a summit that I was doing. This was my first ever digital summit. I had been a conference speaker, but I had never done an online summit. And if you're not familiar with summits, they came about in my world during the pandemic, and what became normalized in the summit landscape was the idea that you as a speaker were not paid, that you would provide a free resource, like a freebie, a lead magnet, digital download, that you were already offering your audience for free and that you would provide a low cost paid resource that you would gift the summit attendees for free in exchange for hypothetical affiliate income from the summit. I say hypothetical because I have come to think of summits as an MLM type pyramid scheme scam, but at this time I was very hopeful about it. 

So I joined the summit. I gave a free talk. I offered a free download that I had, and I created what became the Stay Booked Roadmap as the gift, the VIPs of this summit.

When 7 Steps to Getting More Leads launched. It was an audio course, primarily like a private podcast feed, and then I also made a workbook because I realized that a lot of the concepts were kind of complex and that it would make sense to visualize them, give people some tools, and I had already launched Growthtrackers at this point, so I had some worksheets that I could include and modify for this download, but I really placed the emphasis on it being an audio course.

To me, that was relatively novel and interesting because I don't like video courses, and so the idea that people could subscribe to a private podcast and drive around and be running around and listening to it, to me that was really compelling. 

However, I've come to believe that the word course is sort of toxic unless you're dealing with students and people that are actively looking for courses.

Most business owners are not looking for courses. What they're looking for is an outcome. They're looking for a transformation in their business. They're not looking to learn things. They really wish that they had already learned these things. Before the summit launched, I got six early adopters, so these early adopters came from networking circles and communities that I was in. I talked about the creation of this resource and people were like, Ooh, I'd really like to try that or let me know when that's out. And so I gifted it to six people as early adopters so that they would give me feedback and input before it went to the summit crowd. Now, that didn't work so well. Those people because they didn't pay for it, they didn't give any feedback, and I'm not even sure if they utilized it. 

So that was a really good lesson. Six early adopters, none of which gave me the input that I requested. Some of them did actually come back and purchase it later, which was really funny. I had gifted it to them. Alas, when the summit went live, I got 23 takers. Now, again, these were free takers, so they had paid for a VIP ticket to the summit, and in exchange they got access to my tool for free. So 23 people took me up on that. There were all kinds of tools in the summit, right?

Theoretically they could have not chosen mine, but 23 free takers. A couple of those people actually did end up later becoming growth trackers. So to that extent, it was worth it, right? As a lead magnet for Growth Trackers, it's compelling. However, it is generally not a lead magnet for Growthtrackers. 

That was an exception, and so I've stopped seeing it that way. When 7 Steps to Getting More Leads launched, it was $49. The idea was like $7 a step, right? 7 times 7 equals 49, and then I increased it to $79 because I started getting feedback that people who were using some of the steps, even just one step in that course were getting clients off of that step, meaning that they were booking at least a thousand dollars, usually more multiple thousands of dollars off of a step.

So $79 felt like a very fair price for something that would return thousands of dollars to you. I found that that price point was really challenging. It was both too high to be a quick yes and too low to be a substantial gain for me. So I did a sale for Cyber Monday. This was November, 2022, about a month after the release of this tool, and this is where I made the most amount of revenue for this edition of this product, maybe six or $700. 

Overall from 7 Steps to Getting More Leads, I made $956. That is the sales total from October, 2022 to June, 2023.

And I also didn't try that hard to sell this. It wasn't in that many places in my marketing system because my primary offers were growth trackers, my marketing membership and one-on-one consulting work. I want you to either work with me, one-on-one, or I want you to join my membership because in those cases, I'm getting paid sufficiently for my time and expertise. In this case, you're getting my expertise at a deep, deep discount because of the form factor, and that exchange has just never quite made sense. I've never been able to reconcile that, and that's a big part of why we're doing this series.

So from October, 2022 to June, 2023, I did not try that hard to sell 7 Steps to Getting More Leads, and that really shows in the revenue making just under a thousand dollars the whole time. And in June of 2023, I decided I was going to take it more seriously and figure out how I could properly integrate this product and get it making more money for me without having an effect on my primary offers, the real ways that I want people to work with me. 

So I did several things to make this shift. I decided I was going to change the name to the Stay Booked Roadmap. This decision came out of the fact that when I had talked to early adopters of 7 Steps to Getting More Leads, they were getting stuck on step one or step two. Now they were getting results from step one or step two, but they weren't making it through all the 7 Steps, and it felt like a lot for them to do all the seven steps. And so I took that to heart with the name and I decided to make it feel more actionable with the name, the Stay Booked Roadmap, I also dropped the audio course. Now, that was a decision I made purely because I would have needed to rerecord the audio course because I mentioned the name of the course so frequently, and so to avoid that work, I just was like, let me just cut the price and I'll drop the audio course. 

So I dropped the price down to $39. It was just the workbook, no more audio course. I retitled it and I moved it to Gumroad. I did all of this in two hours. If you follow me on Instagram back in the day you remember this because I announced that I was doing this and I was like, I'm going to time box this to two hours because I want to prove that this is a direction that's worth going. I want to see some signal from these changes before I invest more time within a day or two of me making those changes, removing the audio course, retitling it and uploading it to Gumroad, it made a sale and I was like, okay, it's worth spending some time on this.

This is already starting to pick up more than it was before. So I immediately saw a little bit of signal that made me interested in doubling down and trying to get more out of this shift. 

Here are some of the things that I've tried and what they drove in the new version called the Stay Booked Roadmap.

The first thing is renaming it and not calling it a course. This is not measurable, but this positioning seems to have improved sales overall. Again, I have no data for that. It's really hard to measure something like that. Some things that you do are not going to be easy to measure, but I definitely think this name has helped because it's the biggest thing that changed about this product. And when I say the name, I mean both stay booked, but also the fact that it's no longer called a course.

The second thing is being on Gumroad and specifically Gumroad's Discover Feature. Now, this is one of the reasons I wanted to put it on Gumroad because Gumroad has a marketplace where they will show your products to people that are searching for tools, and Gumroad is famous for tools like the Stay Booked Roadmap. 

So it was a natural fit where they'll promote you and they take a cut of the sale and you can actually give them more revenue if you want them to promote you more, which I do because these things do not bring in enough money that it really matters what the money is. In many ways, this is a gateway to my business.

The Discover feature on Gumroad brought me 63 views and only one sale, but one sale is signal. So there's an opportunity there to improve how I show up in search results. The categorization, I have not experimented with that at all, and that is a good data point for the future. That is an area where I could double down and expand, see what other people are doing, try to improve my strategy there. The next thing is plugging a fast action discount after mailing list, subscribe. 

So if you subscribe to my newsletter through many channels, not all channels, but many channels, you'll get redirected to a landing page where it says you've unlocked a code. That code includes a discount for the stay booked roadmap that has driven 12 sales.

The fourth thing is affiliates sending info to my affiliates to plug the Stay Booked Roadmap. So explicitly sending them emails about the stay booked roadmap, giving them samples of the roadmap and providing them ways that they can promote it. That has driven two sales. I added a free sample of the roadmap, so this is maybe four or five pages that are linked on the Gumroad store.

This has produced no measurable change to purchases. I don't think it hurts, but I can't tell whether or not it's helping. The sixth thing is adding more social proof. So I've run a lot of social proof experiments around both the 7 Steps to Getting More Leads and the Stay Booked roadmap. 

In the Gumroad banner, I added a Senja widget that shows that I have over a hundred downloads on the roadmap, and I've added more reviews also using Senja's review tool. If you have not used Senja, I talked about it in a previous episode, it is a way to capture reviews and if you've bought the roadmap, it's something that you've probably received. It's the form that you received and then puts it in my review database in Senja, and they make it really easy for you to screenshot or download things, widgets and static images that you can put in your landing pages.

So in the Gumroad header, I've got the number of downloads, and then below that in the page context, I have some of the reviews and quotes. Now, this also would be on unmeasurable if it were not for Abhishek Kumar who told me via DM that this social proof pushed him to purchase specifically, he called out the number of downloads. 

He said to me, even on my podcast, if you listen to our interview, he talks about how knowing that so many people had downloaded the roadmap made him want to purchase it. So that anecdote shows me that that is at least responsible for one sale, hypothetically could be responsible for more. We will never know unless more people speak up. And then lastly, I ran a Black Friday sale against the Stay Booked Roadmap last November.

That was 2023, and I also offered a live event called Stay Booked Live, where I would walk people through the roadmap and help them figure out where to start with it. The roadmap is self-explanatory, but some people might be farther along and could jump ahead. So that's what we talked about in that live event. That live event went really well, by the way, and I got 27 sales from the Black Friday event. 

Overall, since we've moved to Gumroad, the Stay Booked Roadmap has generated $1,703.14 in revenue.

$1,700 is nearly twice what it made in its past incarnation and in less time seven steps to getting more leads was in that state for nine months, and it generated less than a thousand dollars. The Stay Booked Roadmap has been in this state for roughly six months, and it's generated $1,700, so we're in a better spot with this product.

The takeaways from this that I'm going to apply into test for the Rev Your Referrals system are the following five things.

One is that naming has a big impact on sales.

Two is social proof and the importance, especially about the number of people that are doing something, the volume of people that are doing something. We see this on social media. If there's more like on something, you're more likely to watch it. It's convincing to people that they should pay attention.

The third thing is that discounts drive more action, possibly live events and bonuses too, like my stay booked live bonus discounts driving action can lend itself to some promotions throughout the year, especially on a low cost product where I don't necessarily lose money if I'm giving a discount.

The fourth along those lines is that fast action discounts after email subscribes work to drive sales that I didn't expect. I think the most surprising thing about this is that a lot of the people that have purchased in that fast action moment are not people that already knew me or I at least was not aware of them previously, with 7 Steps to Getting More Leads. People were still having to warm up for several months to buy something that was putting $40 in my bank account. But some of the fast action sales are people. 

They're just meeting me and they're trusting me on subscribe to purchase. That is really compelling, and it speaks a lot to how much naming and social proof can help to seal the deal on that purchase, even from people who don't know me and don't have a lot of trust with me yet.

And the last thing is that affiliates are interested in promoting, and when I give them the tools to do so, they promote.

This is probably the biggest untapped resource in my business. It is probably also the biggest untapped resource in your business, whether you call them affiliates or referral partners. I see it all the time with the growth trackers. We all leave this collectively. We all leave this on the table, and so these five things are the areas that I'm looking at naming social proof discounts, specifically fast action discounts and affiliates as I look to boost the sales and make it easier to sell the Rev Your Referrals system. 

Now that I'm not doing video episodes as often, you're definitely going to want to get on the Low Energy Leads Newsletter.

I'm going to share more of these takeaways and some of the data in the newsletter as we go on this series. I'll also be doing live streams to talk about these episodes, so if selling low-cost products is of interest to you, if you're inspired by this episode and you want to talk about your experience selling your low-cost product or ask questions about how you might approach this, you can sit in as a guest on the show or you can comment during the live stream if you're interested.

Either way, click the calendar in the show notes and get your ticket for the next live. If you liked this episode, you might also like the one I did on my email list growth experiments, zero to 1000 subscribers. You can find that anywhere you're listening to this episode.

Until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.