Selling digital products: What's ACTUALLY working for service providers like you

Amy Santee: I opened LinkedIn on a Monday morning to find a person who bought my product and posted about it with a very positive review. 

Lex Roman: Welcome back to the selling Digital Product series. This week we're talking real wins service providers have had selling digital products.

Last week we looked at some messaging lessons from a couple of big sellers of digital products, but it's hard to find those promising examples from those of us whose main revenue is from services. If the bulk of what you're offering or the main way that you make money is through services, you might be asking, is it even worth me doing digital products?

How much money can I expect to make? What channels promote? How do I manage serving multiple audiences? And that's what we're getting into today.

You'll hear from longtime agency owner, Jeff White and UX career coach, Amy Santee. Jeff has a very successful course business that actually serves a totally different audience than his agency does, and Amy has created an online store that is a natural companion to her services and she talks about how the services in the store actually go really well together. I'm really excited to bring you this episode which answers some of the questions that you have sent me. 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. 

Lex: One of the main questions we've been asking throughout this series is, are digital products worthwhile for service providers? Figuring out that line of what it's worth to you is going to be different person to person, and that's why I wanted to share a couple examples today of service providers who do make the bulk of their living from services but still find digital products worth their time. Jeff White is the founder of Step Ladder, a design agency that serves MedTech companies.

Jeff been running stepladder for nearly 10 years and he had many years of experience in design leadership before that. You can go check out his LinkedIn and see where he's been working and in addition to running an agency, which again is his core business, Jeff decided he was going to launch a course on UX storytelling. This is a topic and a technique informed by both his career in-house training designers and his agency experience. 

UX storytelling is a do it yourself course that's currently priced at $150 us. Jeff has had over 700 students take it. You can read about some of his students gushing about the course, sharing what they loved about it on his website, UXstorytelling.io. Given that I found digital product sales to be really tough, I was super inspired by Jeff's ability to manage his agency pipeline and his course sales, and I wanted to know how does he do it. The first thing I asked Jeff was about channels.

He mentioned to me that LinkedIn is the main sales channel and he even skips having an email list, which is sort of unusual. Many people feel forced to have an email list, and it's actually pretty refreshing that Jeff does not feel forced to have an email list. Here's he said about why 

Jeff White: This is a bit of a mystery for me and I would really like to know more about why I didn't find a lot of success in email. I guess a couple of guesses. One is I didn't do it for super long. I think I sent out eight or nine editions of my newsletter over the course of two or three months last summer. Certainly I wasn't very good at it in the beginning, and that's really not enough time for me to really get good at writing newsletters and experiment with what is going to drive course sales and not. I think it was one of those things where I was getting the results I wanted outside of email, but spending a lot of time writing the emails and just deciding to prioritize my time differently and move on. But so it could be that I just didn't get that good at it. Another thing is my course isn't the cheapest course out there, but it's certainly not the most expensive either. It's priced at $150. It's not a high ticket offer, and I wonder if long form email content in the newsletter format is really more like a good middle funnel asset for higher priced offers. And again, that's really me speculating, but it's one of the things that's been on my mind about that. 

Lex: I also have this theory I shared in the last episode about message saturation and expertise building this idea that you must be building your expertise through layers, through multiple channels, through message saturation, putting the message out there multiple times in order to get people ready to buy that thing, buy that packaged version of your expertise. So I asked Jeff, how much had you established an expertise on the subject of UX storytelling before the course came out? 

Jeff: No, I hadn't. I started out on LinkedIn and still am exclusively on LinkedIn, and I hadn't done any kind of social media messaging or marketing myself anywhere else before that.

Lex: Audience size has been a big topic throughout this series. I put a post up on LinkedIn this week calculating what I think the minimum audience size is to sell digital products and get at least a five figure return. I came up with a figure of 10 K. Now that could be a follower count or an email list count. Jeff currently has 40,000 followers on LinkedIn, but I wanted to know where did he actually start when he launched this course? Here's what he said about his LinkedIn audience. 

Jeff: I went back and looked, I had around 17,000 followers when I did my chorus announcement. My audience is definitely for the most part, ux UI product designers. I don't have specific numbers on a more detailed view of my audience. Besides that, it skews a little more towards junior designers, people who are coming into the industry, people really in the first five years of their career, but I know I have a good amount of other more senior roles as well. So getting into senior lead staff, principal management executives, so on and so forth. 

Lex: Of course, if you're thinking about using LinkedIn, you might want to know how much Jeff is actually posting there. Here's his posting schedule. 

Jeff: For the most part, I've tried to get out five posts per week, so one every weekday. I've gone through phases where it was less than that because I was taking a break because I was lazy or whatever it is. For a while, my strategy changed and I was experimenting with just three posts per week, but really I've tried to do one every weekday since I started writing on LinkedIn with varying degrees of success and meeting that goal. 

Lex: Another question that comes up a lot with social media is how much to sell and directly promote something that you're offering versus soft selling. Talking about the topics of the course, this idea of message saturation, establishing your expertise, so I asked Jeff about this hard sell versus the soft sell, how he mixes up his messaging. Here's what he said about that. 

Jeff: Most of my posts have some sort of little PS or a little tag at the end that says, Hey, by the way, I have a storytelling course. You can check it out. So that's pretty, pretty present and most of the things that I write, I don't always do that, but I do do it pretty frequently. I've done less of a post just dedicated to, here's something about my course, please buy it. That's probably been, I would guess five 10% of the total content I published on LinkedIn around storytelling, which is what my course is about. So I think it's a minority of the time. Another type of post I do as much as possible is posting case studies, testimonials, real world stories from results and different experiences that my students are getting, and I don't know if you count that as heart selling the course or not, but that's another content type that I've put out there

Lex: So we see Jeff has had this stellar success with the course, over 700 students taking this course, gushing about it, raving about it. You can see all the reviews, but what about the agency? How does he balance those two things out? LinkedIn is actually a really common platform for agency owners, for service providers, so I asked Jeff, how does he promote both the agency and the course, especially if he's using LinkedIn as the main vehicle for both. Here's how Jeff thinks about balancing the promotion of the agency and promoting the course. 

Jeff: This one has been a real challenge for me. Admittedly, for a long time, my LinkedIn profile was just 100% revolved around my course and coaching business, and that is the way I prefer it. I strongly believe in a single position performing better than a dual position, which is what I have now. So if you go look at my LinkedIn profile now, it's prioritized towards the agency and then the course and coaching business plays second fiddle to that.

I think it'd be better for either one, for either my agency or my course and coaching businesses if my profile was just focused on that one thing, but it's just the reality of the businesses I'm running and what my world looks like right now that I have to have this dual position thinking about how to prioritize between the two. It's definitely skewed right now more towards my agency. 

The reason for that is that I view the course and coaching business as more of a side project, not that I care less about it. I really love doing it. I'm going to continue doing it for a long time, but in terms of overall earning potential and where my two businesses can grow, what I believe to be the growth potential of the two, I definitely have to prioritize the agency more because there's more opportunity there. I spend more of my time there, just a more part of my life and my kind of business landscape. When you go to my LinkedIn profile, most of the messaging, most of the visuals you see, most of the pixels there is really skewed towards the agency instead of the course and coaching business. 

Lex: Now, Jeff has a really interesting dual strategy on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of those really interesting channels where you don't just have to post. You have a lot of mechanisms at your disposal, everything from sales navigator to dms to AI tools that you can plug in with LinkedIn to LinkedIn lives, and Jeff is actually using quite a range of those things to target these two audiences. Here's Jeff again to explain how he's thinking about LinkedIn for both his agency audience and his course audience. 

Jeff: All of the content publishing I'm doing right now is skewed towards the course and coaching business, so all of the content is about that, but if you go to my profile, it's skewed towards the agency and the reason for that is I'm writing all this organic content on LinkedIn. It's hopefully serving as the top of the funnel for designers to engage with my coaching business, and then there's a behind the scenes cold outreach program I'm doing for agency clients. So the thinking is I send a message to a potential agency client. The first thing they're going to do if they read my message and want to know more is probably click on my profile and check it out. So I want the whole profile to speak to the message I just sent them to reinforce my position as an agency owner in a certain space that they're also in. 

That's kind of the funnel for agency clients, so that's why my profile is geared towards the agency, but then all the content is geared towards the course and coaching business. One thing that's really been painful for me is that if we think about the course coaching content and that being the top of the funnel for designers in that business, I don't want them engaging with my content and then going to my profile, which is oftentimes the next step if they're going to engage further with me and then just see a bunch of stuff about healthcare software, UX design, which is what my agency is about.

To get around that, I started doing the custom button, the little link in everyone's posts at the top of their name that says, view my website, and that is there to intercept the course and coaching designer traffic and send them to a website where actually the course is promoted more. Two different funnels, two different businesses. 

Lex: Isn't that novel to use the same channel for two audiences, so fresh, so hip, well done, Jeff, you inspire us. 

Throughout this series. I've spent a lot of time talking with Amy Santee about her digital products. Amy is a UX career coach and strategist. She works with designers who want more fulfilling careers. She's also a podcast host. She hosts a popular podcast called What's Wrong With Hiring. Amy's been keeping me up to date with how she's using digital products and since she's also a service provider, I thought you'd enjoy hearing how she positions these offers in her stack. If you head over to Amy's website, you'll see that shop is in her top navigation. She's got six tools there in her Gumroad store.

In addition to her podcast, Amy also has a newsletter. She's an avid blogger and her blog actually gets views. Amy's blog still gets traction partially because the topics she talks about are so relevant and so fresh for her industry. She's covering things like layoffs, she's covering the job market, things that are very much in the topic of discussion. Core problems folks are facing right now, and Amy's LinkedIn for context is at 22,000, so she also has a pretty sizable audience. She's pretty well known in her space. She's going to talk about that a little bit as we get into her interview. If you haven't started selling digital products, you might wonder why some of us venture that way and what makes the time, right. Here's Amy's answer on what motivated her to start her shop. 

Amy Santee: I've had a Gumroad shop for about a year, and I opened it along with my buy me a coffee page, which lets me put a link on my newsletter or blog posts or other places. My intention with both of these things was basically just to get some extra cash coming in, right? That's why we all do it, and for the past few years, I've been a service-based business providing one-on-one coaching directly with individuals, and so putting out products, selling my services in a more productized way.

That was definitely a shift for me and it took me a while to do these things and embrace scaling in this way or embrace these channels partially because I've always taken pride in giving away so much free awesome stuff, supporting the community and just being generous, which is of course beneficial for my business, but also to monetize myself essentially to monetize my services. That was also another change in mindset that I had to adopt. I've developed a lot of free materials to work with over time in my coaching practice and as a consultant and with my Gumroad shop. I think I have about five or six products in there right now, and I started with one and added another one and have slowly added a few things over time, including both paid and free items. 

Lex: Amy's also been running some experiments on her store, like changing up the sales pages in Gumroad and running Flash sales. Here's what she shared about some of her product tests

Amy: Experiment with different products, different titles, product descriptions, pricing, and saw lots of mixed results, like some positives, some not so great. I have a product on there right now that I think is really amazing, but it hasn't sold a lot. I have something on there that didn't take me a lot of effort to repurpose, but I was able to sell it at a much higher price point, so it's all been a big experiment. Eventually, I started marketing these things in my newsletter with discount codes and at events also with discount codes, which led to a handful of sales. Each time I do that, I tend to get one or two sales, but recently I decided to revamp my entire store and it's been on my to-do list for several months to make some improvements to the content and the design of my product pages, and I finally got around to it. 

Lex: Now, experimenting with your own business ecosystem is key, right? Build your own evidence for your own business because I find there's a lot of silent factors that play in other people's success. Sometimes they don't recognize them or they don't know how rare they are. Luckily, Amy's pretty good at being explicit, knowing what's working for her. I think it's probably due to her background as a UX designer. Here are some of her lessons learned about what works for her when she's selling digital products. 

Amy: In terms of results, I have a few things. One is that obviously marketing works, so cross-selling to clients or downselling to prospects who don't become clients. My email newsletter, coupon codes, mentioning my store at events, posting on LinkedIn, all of those things work, but they work better when you have a system set up where they can all kind of work towards the same goal but doing different jobs.

Secondly, social proof, so asking people for reviews and testimonials, LinkedIn recommendations, product reviews, podcast reviews. This is something that I do regularly just in moments where it occurs to me to follow up. Someone lets me know that they like my podcast. They love the recent episode. Oh, cool. Thank you so much. If you have a moment, I would love a rating and review on your app. Anytime I finish with a client, I ask them to fill out a customer feedback form, and also if they're willing to leave a written LinkedIn testimonial on my profile, and I think I have over 50 of those at this point because I always ask people, and then of course for my Gumroad shop starting from scratch, you don't have ratings, you don't have reviews, but you want to get that proof that indicates that the products you're selling are valuable, and then having a strong network and reputation I think is so important here because it makes the marketing work even better, and I've been building mine for over a decade now. 

It's something that I've always done very intentionally to help me with different phases of my career, find clients not have to kind of struggle with the feast and famine cycle of being a consultant, for example, and then when I switched into coaching, it just continued in that direction, so I think that's really the foundation that's needed for success with all of these things. 

Lex: One thing Amy called out was the importance of social proof. We've covered this a lot in this series. Social proof can range anything from testimonials to someone writing a blog post about your product recording, a YouTube video about your product to a star reading review or even a comment on one of your posts. Just last week, Amy got a surprise post from someone who purchased her UX job search strategy guide. This person posted on LinkedIn a rave review for the guide linking to her store. I'm going to link this post in the show notes for you to check it out because it's really helpful to see it in action. Public reviews when you can get them go so far towards more sales. Amy led us in a little bit on how it worked in her case. 

Amy: I opened LinkedIn on a Monday morning to find a person who bought my product and posted about it with a very positive review, which totally made my day. This was really great timing because honestly, I was just moping around that day and not feeling very productive and to get a sale, it was a $15 product, but that feels really good. That feels really validating, and of course lots of sales of a $15 product are a good thing, and this was actually a 15 page guide of how to approach job searches strategically, including a checklist of all the different activities that someone can do in their job search. It's something that I provide to all of my direct clients, and I didn't know this person. We weren't connected. I had never even heard of them before or seen them on LinkedIn, and it turns out she discovered me from a job search mastermind group run by a guy who I had a chat with a few weeks ago because he's interested in doing coaching like I do, and he wanted to learn more about my experience, so that's a great example of the benefit of having networking conversations with people in your space, not exactly knowing what the outcome can be. 

The post that this person did got just a handful of comments and not too many reactions or likes, but it actually led to several more purchases within the next couple of days, and I checked the numbers on Gumroad, and that product page actually got hundreds of views, which is an interesting comparison to the number of likes or comments because you would expect them to both be low, but it seems like a lot of people clicked onto my shop or onto that product page, but who didn't actually like that person's post or respond to it with a comment.

This person is now in my network. I see her on LinkedIn, she comments on my posts, and I followed up with a DM on LinkedIn to thank her because it really did make my day, and so I gave her a discount code to use in the future. It doesn't expire. She can use it on everything, and I'd rather build goodwill by doing something like that. The dollars in this case don't really matter for the value of that favor and the potential impact that that can have on my business in the future. 

Lex: When that post happened, both Amy and I were so excited. It's pretty rare that public praise happens unprompted, but it is so, so cool when it does. I also want to highlight that you can also ask for this type of public praise, and if you see someone getting a lot of public praise, it's very likely that they're asking for this because the more that you ask and reward people who do this, the more it will happen.

Speaking of social proof, next week we're going to get into how to collect it and use it across your digital products using my favorite review tool. I did an episode really early on about Senja. They're one of my hands down favorite business tools that I use. They make it really easy to collect these reviews to gather them from all kinds of places. For example, if someone posts about you on LinkedIn, you can pull it into your Senja database, and then they can turn it into all kinds of widgets and images and even metadata for Google searches. 

We're going to talk about that next week. Also, coming up next week is a live stream with Chris Nguyen of UX Playbook. That'll be next Friday, March 15th at 8:30 AM Eastern. Yes, it's a little early for the US folks. Chris is in Vietnam, so get your coffee and hang out with us as we talk about all of Chris's different revenue streams, what he's tried with paid and free products, what's working the best and what's not working at all. Chris is super transparent. He and I have had a couple conversations about the UX Playbook ecosystems. It'll be really fun. Come wake up with us with a little live stream.

You can catch all the episodes in this series on selling digital products at lowenergyleads.com and make sure you get on the newsletter. I share bonus tools, stories, tips, and fun stuff I find on the internet to help you get more leads, make more money and waste less time. Get on that list at read.lowenergyleads.com.

I'm heading out this week to see our favorite YouTuber, LaShonda Brown, and word on the street is that we might be taping an episode together. I'll have more updates on that from the road. Until next time, keep your energy low until the value will be high.