Selling digital products: Where to promote them

Do you need a large audience to make selling low cost products worth your time? At what size? Does that make sense? Welcome back to our series on selling digital products.

This is part two in our Selling Digital Products series. Today we're talking about channels. Where can you sell your digital product?

Throughout this series, I'm looking at how I can improve the sales of my your referrals system, which is a notion template that I developed and we're pulling it apart piece by piece in every episode of this series. And if you missed episode one, I covered some of the lessons that I've learned selling my own digital products, but just to give you the two long, didn't listen.

A couple of the things that really worked for me with that Stay Booked Roadmap, renaming it made a huge impact on sales, plugging a fast action discount after people sign up for my newsletter, and then social proof became really important. So armed with those learnings, I'm moving into this episode. We're going to talk about where I should place my new product in my different marketing systems.

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. 

Since last we came together, I've heard from many of you about your trials and tribulations selling your own digital products, and so if you're interested in speaking with me about this, I highly encourage you to get in touch.

I'm just a person on the other side of this microphone and I would love to hear from you whether digital products have been going like crazy for you, you've had wild success with them, or you've struggled like I have to figure out how exactly they fit into your business and how much time they're actually worth.

I'm going to continue doing live streams throughout the course of this series, and I'd love to hear from you whether or not you want to be on a live, what have you learned, what's worked, what hasn't? Please spill the beans. Now the thing about my digital products, as many of you voiced to me is that it is not the main thing I'm selling When we're listening to advice from other people who sell courses, digital downloads and eBooks, this is something to keep in mind. 

I find that a lot of people who are selling those things, that's the main thing that they're selling. Maybe they're doing sponsorships or they're getting some platform monetization. Maybe they're at YouTuber or a podcaster or a talker. But for those of us who sell other things aside from digital products, in my case, I sell services and I sell a membership. These digital products are not my primary offer.

They are far from it. They are in many cases a downsell. So I don't want to cannibalize the traffic and interest that I'm getting in other channels towards a $30 $40 offer. I want those folks to come in to my membership or to hire me for consulting work. So this has me looking at six different channel arenas in my own marketing system, and those channels are my website, my newsletter, my podcast and live streams product marketplace. 

In this case, that's Gumroad verbal call to actions and affiliates. I'm going to say those again quickly. Website, newsletter, podcast, product, marketplace, verbal calls to action and affiliates. Let's talk about the website first. I just relaunched my personal site, lexroman.com, and from there I link out to a lot of my other projects, including my membership growth trackers and this podcast and on the news site. Now this is different than the site that was up last week. I have a shop page in my navigation and that links directly over to Gumroad.

My top call to action on my website has been my newsletter sign up for a while. I have found that this is the most effective way to grow my audience because when the newsletter is front and center, more people join the newsletter, and that gives me an opportunity to stay in touch with people longer than if I put an offer there. 

So I don't put a buy call to action at the top of my website.

My calls to action are lower down and they share equal weight. So I have four sort of work with me calls to action, and the shop now sits among those. And again, it's lower down because it is not the main thing I want people to do. And if you click on that call to action, you head over to Gumroad.

This is a minor improvement from how this was last week. I've been working on this personal site for a bit and I finally bit the bullet and stayed up late on Saturday to launch it, mainly because I wanted to make sure that all of my different offers were on this site, but it is not getting the priority here. It just cannot have the priority here. If I'm going to prioritize anything, it's going to be growth trackers, and if you go to my website and you click work with me, you'll see that I have a big banner across the top that says Best way to work with me Growthtrackers and the shop stuff is actually pretty low down on the page. 

That's just how it's going to be. I do want people to know about these products, but it is not the main thing I want them to know. So it's going to get third billing in this case, and I'm fine with that. That's what we're going to do. So that's just the website overall. Now, there's a couple other places on the website where it does make sense to plug this offer. Thank you confirmation pages and blog posts. Now, I don't have a lot of blog posts on this site. I've removed a lot of the blog posts, but to the extent that I'm adding blog posts, there's always a call to action in the blog post, and especially for the blog posts about referrals which are applicable to this toolkit. That is the right call to action to direct them to. So I'm going to go back in and see if I should add any blog posts around referrals. 

I haven't fully moved my blog over to this site, but I probably do have some posts about referrals that I could put up here and I can even check if they were ranking in Google. And then the rev review referral system makes sense to be the call to action on that page. So for people that are coming in from Google, sometimes those folks have a specific question and they're not necessarily cut out for any of my other offers, and their question is best answered by a low cost digital product. So mapping a blog post to a low cost product can make sense.

Now, as an aside, you might say, Lex, it's really weird that you just ditched a bunch of blog posts that were ranking on Google and killed your SEO traffic. And to that, I say I legit do not care about Google traffic. 

It's only important to me that you're able to Google my name or the name of any of my projects and find my websites, which you can do. It's not that important to me that you can Google a random question about something that I know the answer to and arrive on my site. I have not found Google to be an important lead source. So yeah, I didn't bother moving it over. It was not important.

Is it bad web practice? Sure it is. You got to prioritize your days, you guys. Now the other part of the site is the thank you pages and specifically when you sign up for my email newsletter, you get redirected back to the site and you get a page that says you've unlocked a code and there's a discount. It's a fast action discount right now that links to the Stay Booked Roadmap, but I'm going to switch that over to the Rev, your referral system. 

If you're not on my newsletter, you can go to read.lowenergyleads.com to get on it and you'll experience this loop and you'll see the new plug there for the Rev Your Referrals system.

Now, I'm not going to sweat the messaging that much here. I will say that the messaging is important, but I'm not going to bother with that until we get into our messaging episode right now. I'm just going to make sure that I'm promoting the correct product on that channel. So for my website, we've got the homepage, the shop page, those confirmation pages and blog posts as places where I can promote this product.

The next channel I want to talk about is my newsletter. There's lots of opportunity in the newsletter and I think this is probably one of my strongest channels that I should really be going for. I have seen my newsletter be really effective in so many ways for selling the majority of the things that I sell. 

The question really with the newsletter comes down to what am I promoting at what time? And I have competing interests here because I have the membership, I have my one-off consulting work, and then I have this podcast and events other things that I want people to know about. So in terms of the newsletter, we have a few different places where this can plug in.

One of the ways it's already plugged in is in the bottom of the newsletter I have a work with me block, right? It says something like Ready for Low Energy Leads, here's how to work with me. And in there I have a space that directs people to the shop. I'm going to make this more specifically about this product I want to sell. I'm going to do that for two reasons. One is that I think it's more compelling offer than a go to my store call to action. 

And two is that most of the people in my newsletter probably already have the Stay Booked Roadmap or maybe have even gone to my store and just assume they've seen it all. So I'm going to switch the placement there. I'm going to make that call to action specific to this product.

I also have a welcome email that people receive when they first join, and again, they've already unlocked that code. They get that confirmation page so I could plug this product in the welcome email right now I give them a freebie. It's kind of a reverse lead magnet. I'm not that interested in lead magnets as you can listen to on this show. I did an episode about that early on, but I do like to give people value, and I do find that my newsletter moves people forward as leads, and so I give them a free resource at this moment, but I could also plug the Rev Your Referrals System in that welcome email. 

I wouldn't normally do that, but I have seen such success from that you've unlocked the code page that it makes me think maybe I should plug it in the welcome email. People who are subscribing to your newsletter are coming in hot.

They're thinking about you in that moment. It is an opportunity. Not everyone is going to buy in that moment, but they're thinking about you. They're reading about you. If they open that email, you have 'em right there. I don't know. It could be something for me to test. And so it's something that again, if you subscribe to the newsletter, you can check and see if I put this in there. And then the last thing here is email automation. So this is also called sequences. I don't have that many sequences in my business. I used to have a lot of sequences and I found them kind of cumbersome to maintain an update. 

The Low Energy Leads Newsletter, which is my main newsletter, has no sequences. I have the welcome email and that's it. Growthtrackers has some sequences, but this product doesn't make sense in those sequences. So right now, I don't have an email automation where it would make sense for people to receive this upsell, but if I was to create an email automation sequence, I would definitely consider this a call to action that could go into that.

To recap for the newsletter, we've got the weekly email template, which has a call to action that goes to the shop. We've got the welcome email and we've got email automations, so there's some opportunity in there. We also didn't talk about campaigns, but I can always do a dedicated campaign for the Rev Your Referrals system. In my case, I think I'm going to wait until I have a little bit more adoption on this product and I feel really confident about it. 

When I say I feel confident about it. I mean I want people to use it. I want to get it into the hands of more people. I want to validate that it's providing utility for them before I try to sell it and blast it out to people. To that end, I emailed some of my early adopters, some of my pre-order purchasers shout out to you if you pre-ordered the Rev Your Referrals system, and I'm trying to get some early feedback. Once I have that, once I feel good about the state of the product and I have some confirmation that people are liking it, getting value out of it, then I'll feel better about doing a dedicated email campaign to sell the system to my wider list.

The third channel that I'm looking at is podcasts and live streaming. As you may know, if you listen to this show, I usually have calls to action on here and on my lives, and this is very meta because you're listening to an episode about this call to action and how it's all coming together, but there's an opportunity here at the beginning, middle, and end of the show to plug something that I'm doing. 

I usually use that opportunity to plug either the newsletter or my membership program Growthtrackers, but it's something to consider when can this fit into the show? When can it fit into my live streams?

I think of this as a call to action menu. I have a bunch of different things that I want people to do and I stack rank them as I'm recording the show. What's the most important one for this episode? What's the most important one for this time that this episode is getting released? And then in addition to the verbal calls to action in the show and in the lives, I obviously have the show notes, which are an opportunity to plug things. Though I find in general it's better to just get people on the newsletter and then again handle this selling over on the newsletter. Now, to backtrack for a second, I actually created this product because I was doing the five day referral challenge throughout the end of December. 

If you missed that, you find it wherever you're listening to this episode. It was five podcast episodes about how to drive more referrals in your business, and as I was recording that, I was like, Lex, you don't have an offer for this. Why are you recording this? It's just free value, no offense, but you always really need to have an offer in mind. And so I was like, I should create a product that goes with this series, and that's where this actually originated.

What happened was I recorded the five day get more referrals challenge. I put up a pre-order and enough people bought it that I said, okay, now I'm making this product. So those five episodes actually are in some ways like an audio sales page for the Rev Review referral system. I could do another episode about referrals, or if I continue to do episodes on that theme, I now have an offer that can go with those episodes. So that's something for me to keep in mind. I do talk about referrals a lot. 

Next, let's talk about product marketplaces. This is going to differ depending on where you host your product and also who your audience is. There are marketplaces that are specific to designer tools like Creative Market as an example. In my case, this product is hosted on Gumroad and they have their own recommendation engine. So when people are searching for tools on there, you can actually boost your visibility by increasing the fee that you give.

If you have this enabled, you have to give Gumroad 30%. You can disable this and not give them this fee. You'll show up in their directory regardless. But if you want to boost your visibility, meaning you want to get up higher in the results, then you're going to want to give them a higher fee. Now for me, this is an early stage product. I don't have a lot of sales. 

I could use some sales, I could use some reviews, I could use some feedback, and it's also not a huge money maker, like I'm not taking a big loss by losing the fee that I'm going to give Gumroad in exchange for this promotion. I am also outsourcing my labor to them in some ways, right? I'm letting them and their team do the work of selling this for me. I'm going to boost this from 30% to 50%. I'm going to give Gumroad 50% of my fee temporarily if they sell products out of their recommendations.

Now, they won't take this cut if they don't send you the lead, so this is only for sales that come through the Discover Network. So for me, it's not a big risk. For those of you that are using Gumroad, you have an opportunity to choose your category and to choose some tags that help people find you. 

In this case, I'm categorizing this under business and then under marketing and sales, and I'm tagging it with Notion Template referral and referral marketing. I think that's pretty well categorized, but you can play with those and this is an area where you could test if you're using Gumroad. Now, there's some other page optimizations to be made on my Gumroad store.

As I spoke about in the last episode, I clearly need to show some social proof that's really going to boost my sales based on the evidence I have from the Stay Booked Roadmap, and I'm paying close attention to the name. And one of the things I'm thinking about is how to rename that so that it's more obvious what it is, and this is something we're going to dive into in the next episode in this series. The fifth channel that I'm looking at is really not quite a channel, but it's this idea of verbal calls to action. 

How many times are you asked? Do you have something to promote? What are you promoting? What's your call to action? And you don't know what to say. For me, this happens every week in our Atlanta Solopreneurs meeting and hilariously, it's my fault because at the end of the meeting I say, who has an ask? And what's your takeaway from the meeting? And I'm the worst about what this ask is, but it's an opportunity for me to plug this product anytime I'm in a networking group, anytime I'm giving a talk, if I'm giving a webinar, if I'm interviewing on a podcast, even if I'm just in a community, I can give this call to action, let people know about this, increase the possibility that someone will even see this product. I'm constantly talking about referrals and everywhere I show up, so it makes sense for me to plug this more verbal. 

CTAs are obviously not passive, and it requires some thought to think about that call to action stack. My automatic Go-to has been my newsletter for a long time and then Growth Trackers, but I think I'm going to put in my phone in the Notes app that numbers my calls to action and reminds me that I need to be promoting this as a verbal call to action. I usually also have in there my little networking blurb that I can copy and paste into meetings, and it's a perfect opportunity to remind myself to continue to plug this product because this product is pretty obvious what it does. And also because it's low cost, it is a pretty easy on-ramp, and it doesn't require a lot of trust for people to purchase it. So it can be a good entry, CTA in addition to my newsletter, I'll always keep my newsletter in there because of the stay in touch factor. 

I'm going to have a wider opportunity if I plug the newsletter first, but to the extent that I have time, I'll also think about throwing this in last but not least, and in fact, this is probably my biggest opportunity, and yours, I know I say it all the time, affiliates, I've already seen great success with affiliates in my business, particularly on the growth tracker side.

On the digital product side, I actually pay 20% to my affiliates, which is really high, at least I think that's high. And it's because my affiliates usually send volume, so they're worth it. And I have only let my affiliates know one time about this product, so it's brand new. Many of them have probably missed it. I have also missed an opportunity to seek out new affiliates who are a better fit for this product. When I'm seeking out affiliates, I'm usually thinking about Growthtrackers, which is a specific type of referral partner that I'm looking for. 

But with the Rev Your Referrals, it actually plugs really well into a creator revenue stream. And so I need to seek out more creators who are targeting creatives, get it creators, targeting creatives who are looking for referrals. So people who are building their client base. And I happen to know a lot of designers who are targeting freelancers and early agency owners who could be plugging the Rev Your Referrals system. It wouldn't compete with their offers. So affiliates is a huge area of opportunity, and I'm actually going to do a whole episode on this in this series because it's so important to me to get this right. It is a major untapped resource in my business. I guarantee you it's an untapped resource in yours. I haven't personally seen a lot of materials about how to run a really great affiliate program for someone like me, right? 

I am aware of those when it comes to tech companies, but I've never seen it done well for the kind of business that I have.

For a lot of us, it feels like it requires a lot of thought, a lot of creating from the ground up, but I don't think it has to. In my case, it really just requires some focus. I think a little bit of communication, a little bit of conversation can go a long way here, and that's what I'm planning to do.

This comes back to the central thesis for this series, which is coming to the question of, do you need a large audience to make selling low cost products worth your time and at what size? Does that make sense? In my case, my audience is a combined list of maybe five to 7,000. If we go across all my channels, which is small, and the revenue numbers that I shared in the last episode, roughly 2,700 from one of my digital products came from even a smaller audience. 

It's hard to say. Is that good? Is that not good? The main reason I think it's not good is that it doesn't necessarily pay me back for the amount of labor that those products take to make. My hourly rate is generally two 50 and added two 50 hourly rate.

That means that that Stay Booked Roadmap, creation, and promotion should have taken 11 hours, but it didn't. And I know it took way more than that. And I think the only way that these products become passive, so to speak, is if you already have a big content engine. So you're already creating a lot of promotion, and then you have people going through your links into a fully functioning marketing system where they're getting sold these products.

In my case, that's happening a little bit, but I don't have that big content engine. I'm not pushing a volume of people through my channels every week, and this is why I keep coming back to affiliates, because I do know people who are doing that, who support my business, and to the extent that I don't want to be doing that, it can make total sense to leverage them. 

They want to be more of a content creator than I am. They love doing that audience building. They do it better than I do it, and I can plug into that and then pay them for their labor in the form of affiliate commissions. To me, this makes so much sense, and I dunno why I've been putting so much pressure on myself to be that content creator when I could lean on content creators, we could co-promote.

To recap our channels, where am I going to sell this digital product? I've got some strategic places on the website. I've got some spots in my newsletter. I'm thinking about this as a call to action on this podcast and in my lives. I'm telling Gumroad to boost this product in the product marketplace, and I'm keeping an eye on that to see if there's an optimization that I can do there. 

I'm making sure that I consider this product when I give a verbal call to action on a podcast in a networking group when I'm giving a talk, and I'm planning to leverage affiliates in a bigger way for this product because I think that it has wider appeal than the other things that I've been selling, and I think it's more self-explanatory than a lot of my offers. To recap those channels, again, website, newsletter, podcast, and live streams, product marketplace, verbal calls to action and affiliates. You might have other surface areas in your business where you can plug your digital product, and I would encourage you to create a whiteboard map. I like to use Canva and whiteboard out all the different areas of your business where people are learning about you, where they're learning what you offer, and consider your call to action stack in what order should those appear and then slot them in. 

Just sort of put little boxes there and say, okay, primary call to action, secondary call to action, tertiary call to action, what should go where, what gets top billing and what goes a little bit lower down, but where can this thing fit in, especially considering the audience and the price point and the level of trust that you've built in one of these channels? So for me, with the newsletter, a low cost product is perfect for that crowd because they tend to be newer to my business versus my LinkedIn audience. I'm not even going to bother plugging this there because my LinkedIn audience is mainly clients, past colleagues. Those people are a direct line to growth trackers, but this is really going to depend on your business. It's going to depend on the channels you're showing up in, and it's going to depend on what data you're seeing when you promote different things on your different channels. 

Always work off the evidence from your own business rather than copying someone else's playbook. If you liked this episode, I would encourage you to get on the Low Energy Leads newsletter. I'm writing more about how this is going down. I'm sharing more of these tests in the newsletter. Get on that list. Read low energy leads.com, find the link in the show notes. I'm also doing live streams on Fridays. I should talk more about these episodes and this process of selling digital products.

So if you're interested, tune in or find the calendar in the show notes and click to be a guest on the show. I would love to have you, if you like this episode, check out the episode I did about my perfect sales system and what I do differently now. I walk through how I would create my sales system from scratch using Mailerlite, HoneyBook, Calendly, and Zoom.

Stay tuned for more episodes in this series. I got a couple more coming. We're going to talk more about messaging and creating an affiliate program, and I'm leaving some space to get inspired by some of the live streams and some of the feedback I'm getting from you to determine the last couple episodes.

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