Selling digital products: How to message to move sales

It's a pretty easy course correction to say, oh, okay, I want to sell this thing, so I need to talk about this situation. I need to talk about this problem. I need to talk about why I think my approach to this is interesting or correct. Right?

Welcome back to the Selling Digital Products series. This is the third episode in our series and today we're looking at messaging and naming. In the first couple episodes of our series, we looked at some of my lessons learned from selling digital products and we looked at channels where you can sell digital products.

So today we're getting into the messaging. Messaging is probably the most important part of selling digital products, but I think messaging can be misleading because a lot of that lift can happen off the page, especially in today's marketing ecosystem where you're looking at social media, websites, email marketing, conference, speaking communities.

There's a lot of lift that's happening across your channels, not just in the sales page, not just in the naming of the product. We're going to unpack all of that today. If you're new here, I'm Lex Roman, I empower creatives to make marketing bets they can win and you're tuned in to the Low Energy leads show. 

The product that we're looking at throughout this series is my Rev Your Referrals System. It is a notion template that I sell on Gumroad, so a lot of these episodes, they're looking through that lens of how do I improve the sales of the Rev Your Referrals System? Where can I add mechanics? Where can I fix messaging? What kind of tests should I run to boost the sales of that?

One of the key questions there is how do I balance that with the other things I'm selling and offering, namely my membership Growthtrackers for creative entrepreneurs who are testing their marketing and building their client pipeline in sustainable ways, and some of my one-on-one offers consulting work that I'm doing. I'm also spinning up another part of my business right now, so I've got a lot going on. I have a lot of things to promote across my channels. 

I only have so many slots to promote. How will I improve the sales of the Rev Your Referrals System?

Here's a couple of things that I've learned since we last came together. I've been chatting with y'all, those of you who listen to this show, I've been chatting with people in Slack groups, I'm in on LinkedIn dms. If I get in a little inkling that someone is testing digital products or that they're selling digital products or they share a win, I come right into their dms and I say, Hey, tell me a little bit about how this is working for you.

So here's a couple of the things that I've learned since we last talked. The first thing is that two entrepreneurs who are coaches and service providers told me that they like to use low cost products as downsells or cross sells. I heard this from strategist Pame Barba who does one-on-one coaching work, and she mentioned that if folks say that it's too expensive, she gets a price objection there. Then she downsells into one of her low cost products.

UX career coach Amy Santee mentioned cross-selling with her one-on-one sessions when she feels like a digital product makes sense based off of the conversation she's had. If you're already creating tools that maybe you were giving away for free, making a little side money on them does not hurt. I think what's especially important to point out there is that there's not a lot of extra sales labor there that is sales labor that they're already doing.

If you find that those recommendations are happening quite a bit, if you find that you're giving away free tools, maybe it makes sense to put a price on them. I've also spoken to three entrepreneurs who are making really good money off of digital products. I'm lucky to be in a couple Slack groups where people post their charts of revenue, and so I've spoken to a couple entrepreneurs who are making this money. They're making multiples more than 10k/ year, and I'm going to dive into some of the mechanics later in this episode that they're talking about.

But one insight one of those entrepreneurs gave me is moving away from just visibility channels. We talk about this all the time in growth trackers, working deeper down in email sequences, working down with people who've already purchased to get reviews back so that you can add that social proof in not focusing so much on that top of funnel content. That's one insight from one of them.

For the other person, they're really seeing LinkedIn pay off and this is someone who is a LinkedIn creator, so they're in the many multiples of thousands of people on their LinkedIn, but they're seeing that's a pretty direct line into their course. Both of them are making solid income from their digital downloads, and that's really good to hear. 

I'm going to dive into a couple examples that I found of people that are making over a hundred K from digital products. We're going to talk about those, what I think might be working for them a little bit later on. I also want to mention, I've talked to several of you who have made some money off of digital products but not enough to make these products worthwhile, and I think it's just really worth asking that question to yourself, at what point of revenue does it make sense for me to pour time and money into this digital product?

And the question that we're asking throughout this series is really about audience size because we know digital products work well for people who have big audiences. We know that they can work well for people who don't have a service side to their business. They're only selling digital products, but we don't know if they can work well for service providers. 

We're not sure as consultants, as people that are working one-on-one or in small groups with our clients. Does it make sense for us to turn our attention to these very low revenue products? So ask yourself that. I do want to highlight that because I have gotten some messages from some of you that you're thinking about now reigniting digital products and I don't want you to take that away from this series. Is it going to pay me back? Is it going to pay me back? I used to have a sign up my desk at the agency I worked at in San Francisco that says, are we making money yet? Are we making money yet? And you really got to keep a laser eye on this, especially if you're newer to digital products or like me, you're not great at selling digital products. Alright, so let's get into today's topic messaging and naming. 

As someone who is notoriously terrible with messaging, I am not someone who is with my words. I want to start with a couple insights that I've had about messaging digital products, and honestly about messaging any of your services in your business. Messaging is so, so key. It's really funny that I'm bad at it because it is something that I'm constantly having to overcome in my business and I have navigated around it by doing things like having conversations with people by doing things like hosting webinars and avoiding nailing messaging in some of the more scalable parts of my business, like my email sequences and my sales pages. So a few of the things that I've learned about messaging, number one, messaging is across all your channels. So entrepreneurs who are really saturating a key message that maps exactly to what they're selling, they're doing really well. 

I notice this all the time and we're going to look at a couple examples, but when someone is talking about the problem that they solve, their take on why they're the person to solve it and the fact that they have a solution for it, even if they're not highlighting that they have that solution, they're teeing up their solution in their messaging that is successful, that works, that recipe works. It's super hard to nail, but it's good to know because one of the things that I've noticed about my messaging is that sometimes I'm talking about something that is completely not related to the thing I want to sell, and it's a pretty easy course correction to say, oh, okay, I want to sell this thing, so I need to talk about this situation. I need to talk about this problem. I need to talk about why I think my approach to this is interesting or correct, right? 

When it comes to selling digital products, especially for folks who have big audiences, they're coasting on their reputations that they've built on their content channel. That messaging saturation is key. And I'll give you a personal example of this. I used to do growth design for Silicon Valley companies. I used to talk about growth design quite a bit on Twitter and in blog posts and at conference talks. So when I released a digital course on product analytics, people were used to hearing these sales messages from me. They were used to hearing that they needed product analytics and they were used to hearing that from me. So I didn't actually have to sell that course very hard. I made probably about $3,000 in the pre-order for that course, and that's because I had been already saturating the message of my perspective on product analytics in other arenas. 

So they were teed up for that sale. So message saturation across all channels, that's really important. Easier said than done.

The second learning here is that messaging can be for computers or it can be for humans. Messaging for computers is things like SEO algorithms. Are we gearing towards Google? Are we gearing towards Instagram? And messaging for humans is for your buyers, right? It is for the people that need to be reading these messages, those two things might be different. I was titling this episode and I was looking at my SEO tool tube buddy, which tells me whether or not an episode title will do well on YouTube, which we can extract and say also perhaps on Spotify and Apple. And it told me that my episode title was bad that it wasn't going to do well, and I decided in this case to go with the message that I think is clear to my listener and to take a hit on search engine optimization, to take a hit on organic search in podcast platforms and on YouTube. 

So messaging can be for computers or it can be for humans. When you optimize for computers, there is an advantage to that in terms of getting more eyes on things without extra labor from you. When you message for humans, that can potentially gear towards more amplification, more referrals, more boosts on your work. And obviously it's great when you can do both. Easier said than done. Once again. Last thing, third thing, messaging should be clear over being cutesy. I told this little tidbit of a story to Tarzan K the other day because we were talking about this exact theme of messaging and clarity. We were talking about my learning from naming the stay booked roadmap, the wrong thing. And I was mentioning to her, I used to run a dance film festival with my friend Betsy in LA and when we were naming the film festival, I wanted to call it something really clever, something really artsy like Fat Tuesday. 

Not Fat Tuesday, but something like that. Something that made no sense. Honestly, it made no sense. It was just too cutesy. And Betsy was like Lex, let's just call it the LA Dance Film Festival. And obviously Betsy was right. We got so much organic search juice off of that on Instagram, on Google. And then most importantly on the film festival platforms, we had no problem filling our lineup. We had no problem selling tickets, and we gained so much momentum off of that very clear, very practical name. As I'm talking with people that are having success with digital products. Similarly, their products are extremely straightforwardly named. I am not seeing people having success with cutesy names. This goes for even the biggest creators, the biggest creators, even their products which you think could sort of overcome their name. They are keeping it really simple. Now, before I dive into some message tests that I'm thinking about for the Rev Your Referrals System, I'm doing a little research about what to fix about my messaging. 

I always prefer to anchor off of my own evidence. It is key to work off of your business data. I think one of the big mistakes people make is they look at someone else's success and they think they can copy it, and that's just not true. As many of you probably already know, you're going to move faster. If you can look at your own data and say, okay, here's what's working for me. Here's what's worked when I did this. And that's because it solves for skill gaps. It solves for messaging problems you already have. It solves for your own resources, right? You're not missing the mark because you know what you have already working and you can build off of that. But messaging has never been my strong suit and it's kind of tricky to test messaging in my size business with the volume that's coming in for this product right now and for the volume that's coming in for my other product. 

It can be hard to test messaging. You can't really run an AB test in a small business context. You need a lot more volume for that to give you any kind of direction. So to give myself a leg up here, I'm going to look at a few products and I'm going to analyze what I think might be working for them and that's just going to inform my test, right? I'm still going to test it and see if it works for me, but it's going to inform my tests. So I like to work off my own evidence, but it's also okay to use someone else's evidence. Obviously it's better if you have data from them. So in this case, I'm only looking at digital products that I know are making money, specifically digital products that have made over a 100k in revenue. As I'm looking at these digital products, I want to know four things. 

• Naming: What do they call their products? So naming
• Key messages: What kinds of loud messages are they hitting on their sales page, meaning the things that when I'm skimming, they jump out as key messages. They're trying to communicate.
• Credibility: How are they establishing their own credibility and how important does that seem in their case?
• Message saturation: How much of their content outside these sales pages maps back to these products? This is one of the things that I shared earlier. I think this is a big deal when it comes to people who have slightly bigger audiences especially, but even for those of us small creators, small business owners, the content saturation outside your sales page can lift your sales page. Meaning that your sales page can be worse if you're nailing your messaging outside the sales page. So I'm going to look at that as well, not just the sales page. 

So what are they calling their products? What kind of loud messages are they hitting? How are they establishing credibility and what's their message saturation like? I'm mainly looking for things that seem unusual or surprising to me that are not already included on my sales page because my rev view referral system is being sold on Gumroad.

The first thing I did was I went to the Gumroad marketplace, which is called Discover, and I looked at their most popular products. Now you can see on Gumroad how many ratings something has, which can give you an indication of how much revenue it has. But in this case, I looked at a creator who also shared their revenue numbers in Gumroad. So this is a creator named Pascio who does Notion Template sales, and I can see that they've made over a hundred thousand dollars in sales revenue, and some of the creators on Gumroad actually show their sales numbers on their sales page. 

So you can see how many products they've sold and you can multiply by the price to get a sense of their revenue. So this is an interesting product for me for two reasons. One, obviously the revenue account, but two, it's a Notion template. This is a notion creator, which is really similar to what I'm doing when we're talking about evidence for your business. In my case, I want evidence of the things that I'm doing. So a notion template seller on Gumroad is really close to what I'm doing, which is selling a notion template on Gumroad. 

So as I'm looking at evidence, I'm not looking at apples and oranges, I'm looking apples to apples. This is the Notion Creator Manual. It is 19 bucks on Gumroad. As I'm looking at this page, I see a very simple title, Notion Creator, manual Notion Creator, manual Notion template creator manual used Interchangeably Here, notion Template is a big tag on Gumroad. I noticed that when I was looking at the marketplace earlier, so I'm keeping my eye on that, and this is a fairly short sales page. It's shorter than my sales page. Maybe it's about the same as my sales page.

The top message here is learn how to create and Sell Notion templates. And then he establishes who he is, who am I? I'm an official Notion ambassador, and then he has a screenshot of his sales. I've made over a hundred thousand dollars in online income from building, launching and selling notion templates. 

So he's establishing his own credibility right away. And then he's got a set of problems you may be facing. He's got six problems there, problems you may be facing. I'm unsure what template to create. I don't know how to launch my template. I have no followers. Then he breaks down what's in the product, which is very common.

Obviously for a sales page. He's got a little set of FAQs, pretty typical. So nothing too special here. I think for me, the things that stand out about this is one, how simple this product is named Notion Template Creator Manual, extremely obvious what that is. The fact that he established credibility by using a screenshot of revenue because that's really what his target market is caring about here. How much revenue has he generated off of Notion, which would indicate that he can show you his ways? This is an interesting note for me. 

The translation for me would be something like how many referrals my toolkit has driven for me or my clients. When you can show those tangible results, people love that. I know that from Growthtracker's realm, it's a little tricky With a newer product, it's been easier over time with the stay booked roadmap because I have gotten report backs of those tangible results. And then I also really love the problems you may be facing. Section, what's great about that is it's really skimmable. He's got that set up in bullets, so it's very easy to figure out whether or not the thing that he's selling matches the thing that you need. Now in terms of messaging saturation, especially off of Gumroad, so this creator Pacio has a whole Gumroad store packed full of notion templates. Just on Gumroad alone, they have message saturation, building credibility for being a Notion template creator. 

So they're selling Notion templates because they have so many notion templates. They sort of self-identify as the person for notion templates. When I look at their Twitter, their Instagram and their YouTube, literally every post is about notion. Every post is about notion. So this is exactly what I'm talking about when it comes to message saturation. Do you know how many posts I've put up about notion templates? None. I've done none. So the fact that this person is hammering away their expertise in notion, if you go to this person's Instagram feed, it is Notion logo, grid of how to use Notion. And so they are saturating this message of being the Notion template guy. It's in their bio, it's in every video title, it's in every feed, post Notion, notion, notion, how to use Notion, how I set up notion for this, how I'm selling with Notion. 

So there's a lot of lift that's happening. This person has the most followers on X, they have like a hundred thousand followers there, but on YouTube and Instagram, they're in low thousands. So they're sort of a small social media creator, but for everyone who's following him on all these platforms, they're being teed up to buy Notion templates from the Notion Template guy. And so then when they go to his store and he's selling Notion Templates, it's a one-to-one. Yeah, obviously I'm going to buy a Notion template from the Notion template guy that I've been following on all these platforms. So I love this. I think this is a prime example of message saturation and establishing credibility through redundancy by saying the same thing over and over again. I'm really into notion, I'm really into Notion templates. I've made these notion templates. I can show you how to make money from notion templates. 

It just makes sense. Now, he's an example of someone who is making their digital products the forefront of their business. They do have some services that they offer, but the main calls to action here are buying the templates, buying courses to be a template creator yourself. So I would guess that they don't make that much money from services and the revenue numbers that they're sharing are about digital products, not about services. They're sort of the converse of my business. They're making this their main revenue stream. That's at least my assumption based on how they've set up all their channels. I haven't spoken to this person personally, so that's what I can read from the internet. So Notion, template, creator manual, one of the most popular products on Gumroad, go check that out. I'm going to link it in the show notes.

The other product I want to look at is Justin Welsh's LinkedIn operating system. 

I've been hearing about this product from some of my clients and some community members. And Justin, well-known for being a multimillion dollar digital product creator. Now Justin does have a big audience, so that's an important caveat here. So yes, we know he is successful, but we also know that he has a big audience. Interestingly though, his product is about how he built that audience. So I'm on one of Justin's landing pages for his LinkedIn operating system. I know this product as being called the LinkedIn operating system, but he actually uses a lot of different names for it. And on this page I don't actually see that name very prominently. Instead, he's leaning on key messages. So he's got establish, grow and monetize your personal brand on LinkedIn, go from undiscovered to growing and monetizing your LinkedIn account. So we're hitting a couple words here a couple of times growing and monetizing. 

We've hit twice. And then at the bottom we've got an FAQ and the most important thing about this page is how he's slamming us with social proof. There are reviews activating on the side right on top. There's videos carouseling through right below that. And then there's a wall of reviews. There's a widget showing me how many students have taken this and that they've given 4.98 out of five stars.

My assumption here based on what I understand about Justin Welsh and what I heard from another creator is that the reviews are doing a big lift on the messaging side. Just having this much social proof is making his conversions easier. So I don't know how much his message here is actually doing this versus the social proof. And as I shared in the first episode in this series, I found too that social proof made a big difference in my conversions on my sales page as well. 

I'll take that as another lesson that social proof is a big deal and that I should maybe even bump it up more. Now, Justin Welsh is a little different than Pascio in that he doesn't prioritize LinkedIn necessarily as his main message everywhere. He's not like the LinkedIn guy, but he's very close to being the LinkedIn guy. And the top header on his LinkedIn profile is an ad for the LinkedIn operating system, and it says the operating system for LinkedIn creators featured in Forbes, business Insider, entrepreneur and Vice. So he's got his credibility in three ways really. One is the volume of students that he's had taken the course and the fact that he's touting over 20,000 people have taken it on his pages. Two is the words of his students. The fact that they were all willing to write reviews or enough of them were that it's an impressive amount of reviews. 

And three, these press mentions, Forbes, entrepreneur, business Insider and Vice. And then on LinkedIn, his featured link, the only one there is the operating system for LinkedIn. His Twitter profile is different than that, and in his Twitter profile it says, start an internet business, make a life that's yours, which is quite different than the LinkedIn operating system message. It's for creators, right? It's for people who want to be like him. The LinkedIn operating system is also for people that want to be like him, like Pacio sharing his revenue numbers as a credibility driver too. So he's saying in his bio, he wants to build his business to 10 million. He's saying in his pin tweet that he crossed 5 million in 2023 in fall of 2023.

Now, Justin's posts are a little bit different than PAOs. They're not as one-to-one on LinkedIn. They are about all kinds of things. They're about life, they're about reward, they're about his friends. So his post saturation is a little bit different now because he's the guy who created the LinkedIn operating system.

We can assume there is a system here behind the posts and that because he's just getting enough engagement on these posts, people want to know, well, why is Justin getting so much engagement on these posts? And what's the answer to that? The LinkedIn operating system that Justin sells, it's not quite the same thing as message saturation, but it is teeing people up to ask the question, how do I be like Justin? And then he says, buy this product. Justin has another product that he sells, and then he is got a newsletter and I think a couple other revenue streams. I know he does one-on-one consulting with Intro where you can book time with him, but he doesn't have this huge offer suite, and so it is more straightforward for him because he's just got these digital products that he wants people to know about. 

I do think that makes this a lot easier, but some really interesting takeaways in terms of how he's establishing credibility in numbers, the amount of students, the amount of reviews, the amount of revenue. Those are shared traits between these two pages, and those are things that I am not pulling forward in any of my messaging for the Rev Your Referrals System. So here's three of the lessons I'm taking forward when it comes to messaging and naming. One is message saturation across channels. How I set myself up to be the credible source of this information, repeating the same message and being known as the person, the go-to person for this type of thing. I don't think those channels have to be social media, but as we looked at last week, I don't have that many channels that I can hit this message. So I need to think about where can I saturate the messages around referrals? 

How can I make people feel like I'm the go-to source for this?

The second thing is establishing credibility with numbers. I've known that this is really key. I always hesitate to do it. I know you do too. But looking at these two examples of Pascio and Justin Welsh, them screenshot their revenue, showing how many people have downloaded something with the review count, with the review rating, with the number of reviews that they're showing. And also going back to episode one in this series, knowing that my own social proof and the count of people downloading something impacted at least one sale, establishing credibility with numbers is really key. It is not something I'm doing on my product and I need to rethink how I can do that. I'm thinking about the parallels for that in my own work, which is really more about how much money I make my clients. 

And then the last thing is making the name plain and simple. These two products are named very straightforward, the Notion Template, creator manual, the LinkedIn operating system. I need to take a lesson from my partner, Betsy, and make it really straightforward, make it expected. That's how you play for both computers and humans.

So back to my question of how big the audience needs to be, I think Pascio shows us that you don't necessarily need a big audience to make a lot of money from digital products. Their audience is actually what I would consider pretty small from what it looks like. They're leaning into the Gumroad mechanisms and they're playing up the Gumroad and notion mechanisms and probably getting a little bit of juice from Google in order to sell those digital products. So that's really encouraging. It is a standout example of somebody who is selling digital products without a big audience. 

Now they're still selling digital products without having to sell services, right? They're prioritizing digital products, but it shows me that there might be a path forward for small creators selling digital products.

I'm recording this part from my car. I was driving around and thinking about this episode, and one of the things that comes to mind is how consistent these guys are with their messaging across all of these channels. In some ways, it almost comes off robotic, and I don't know, honestly, I don't know if I can make my online presence that flat is how I would describe it flat, where it's just like I am this package thing. Fit me in this box, buy the thing that's in this box that I sell in one way. I really admire it because it's like that consistency is what wins. On the other hand, it's just on a human level. 

Hard for me to imagine flattening my personality down that way. I've never been able to do that in the past, and it's something that I'm wondering how much that needs to be a factor here. The one counter example I have to that is a designer that I know named Pablo Stanley, who I worked with at Invision. Pablo is someone who is wildly successful online in a variety of revenue streams and form factors. He's a serial entrepreneur. He definitely sells courses and digital downloads. He had an illustration company. Pablo has a ton of personality, and he also doesn't sell one thing. He's been reinventing himself for many years, so he's one counter example to that. At the same time, there's a lot of consistency in his presence, right? It's always been about design. It's specifically really been about visual design, and so there is a message saturation there, but it's not a flat. He's not presenting a flat personality. Something to keep in mind, something for me to take note of as I continue to add examples to my list of people that are having good success with selling digital products.

What does their online presence look like across all their channels, and how consistent is that messaging wise? How consistent is that? Does it need to be flat? Does it need to be boxy? Does it need to be robotic?

In a couple weeks, I'm having UX Playbook founder Chris Nguyen on the live show to talk about his digital products. He's a really interesting creator, focused on UX designers building their careers. Chris offers all kinds of stuff, cohorted courses, one-Time services, digital downloads. He's got lots of freebies. He's super popular on LinkedIn. We're going to hear about his experience selling expertise in different formats, and it's really notable because Chris has a large audience of 35k+ on LinkedIn. He's got a sizable email list in the many thousands of designers, but as he's mentioned to me, this hasn't come easy to him, and he's not necessarily feeling like digital products are a key revenue stream for him. So we're going to dive into his revenue streams. We're going to talk about what's been challenging about digital products with Chris. He is a successful creator, but his revenue streams might look different than what you'd expect.

Last week, I interviewed Stylist, Katie Allen on the live show. We talked about how she stacked her offers between a one-on-one service, a membership, and her digital product. You can find the link to listen to that in the show notes. It's a ton of fun. Katie is hilarious, and we whiteboarded this all out to talk about how she prioritizes what thing on what channel. I'll be back next week with another episode in this series.

And if you're selling digital products, whether it's going well or not going well, I want to hear from you. Leave me some feedback on this episode. Shoot me a note. You'll find all the info in the show notes.

If you're not on the Low Energy Leads newsletter, I'm sharing other information, additional visuals, additional tools about selling digital products, and I'm always talking about how to get more leads. Get on that list: read.lowenergyleads.com.

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