Hands up who wants a recurring passive income in your business?⁠

Um…yes please!!⁠

Straight off the bat I interviewed Steph Taylor to walk us through How To Create A Digital Product.⁠

Steph is a launch strategist and host of the Socialette podcast. She helps entrepreneurs launch and relaunch to reach more people, grow their audience and become the go-to in their industry through her signature Firecracker Framework that makes launching simple and fun.

In this episode, Steph walks us through How To Create a Digital Product, and exactly how powerful it can be to building a leveraged and profitable empire. If you’re looking to ditch the client work, and seriously up your leverage this episode is a MUST listen!⁠

Cheeky note: I got my team to listen to this episode before it went live and now they’re ALL launching online courses! Steph totally inspired them, and breaks it down into some super easy steps.

 

Here’s what we cover:

• The power of leveraging yourself into online products
• How to approach creating your online product to keep you out of overwhelm
• Why results are more powerful than information
• The power of preselling

 

Links and resources:

• To find out more about Steph head to her website here
• Be sure that you’re subscribed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don’t miss an episode!
• If you’re keen for more head over to my other podcast One Wild Ride for a listen
• Ready to launch & leverage your own gig? Download my free guide to starting and scaling your business over at theownerscollective.com/startandscale

 

Enjoy this episode?

Be sure to be subscribed on Apple Podcasts or if you’re an Android user you can follow on Spotify. While you’re there, I’d LOVE you to drop me a rating and review, as is helps get this podcast into the ears of more fine folks like you.

Watch it here:

 

Full Transcript

Steph Taylor describes herself as an ex corporate square peg, launch strategist and host of the Socialette podcast – which has a whopping 500k downloads!

She’s well known for helping entrepreneurs launch and relaunch to reach more people, grow their audience and become the go-to in their industry, which she does through your signature Firecracker Framework.

I’ve been passionate about digital products for forever, and mostly because of the freedom of lifestyle that it gives me, not to mention the agility and flexibility, the scalability and exponential earning income, and the relatively low fixed costs.

For me, I made the decision to move into online products when I was hustling one-on-one business coaching work, coaching up to 25 clients at a time, and seeing them all face-to-face it was SO full on, and I knew that I could help more people and in a much more cohesive way by leveraging myself online.

So, knowing the power of online products to transform a business, I called in Steph to talk us through just HOW to create an online product.

 

Pru: Why did you make the move to online products?

Steph: Yeah. I guess it’s pretty similar to you, Pru. I was working one on one with a lot of clients and I was loving some of the clients. I was loving the really good clients, but then some of them weren’t… I wasn’t feeling that great about them. One of the things I was doing quite a lot was Facebook ads management for these clients. But at the same time, I was getting a lot of people reaching out to me saying, “Hey, can you manage my Facebook ads but my budget’s only $100 a month for ad spend.” I would say to them, “Well, that’s great, but you’re going to be paying, like upwards of 700 a month just for me to manage your 100 a month. You need to learn how to do them yourself. You can’t afford to outsource at $100 a month budget.”

That was where the idea of, “Oh, maybe if I created an online course for these business owners to learn how to run Facebook ads, then that opens up this whole world of them being able to DIY their Facebook ads.” It was never going to be like, “This is everything you need to know about Facebook ads.” It was purely just for this one little group of business owners to learn enough to be able to run successful Facebook ads with their $20 a day or whatever their budgets were. I did that.

I launched that and it was a very successful launch for my first launch and I loved it and I was like, “Oh, okay. People want to learn how to DIY their marketing.” That’s where the podcast was born and that was aimed at the group of people who couldn’t afford somebody else to do their marketing for them.

 

Pru: Give us the lay of the land, what are digital products and why should business owners be paying attention to them? 

Steph: There are so many definitions of what a digital product actually is and there’s so many different types of them. I guess how I define it is more… It’s like an online product that creates some sort of leveraged income in your business. You can leverage that product to make more money for basically the same amount of work. You can sell 100 courses for the same amount of work as 10 courses with the exception of customer service and all of that.

It’s something that’s really highly scalable. This could be an online course. It can be a membership. In some cases, like group programs, eBooks, templates, I guess software like SaaS products, those subscription software products. They’re, in a way, a digital product, but I don’t really look at those. They’re a more technical thing. I’m thinking more like service-based business owners who are productizing their knowledge in some way.

 

Pru: Why is now the time for people to be paying attention to online products?

Steph: The best products solve a problem for someone. Right? Right now, people are experiencing completely new problems that they’ve never ever experienced before, which opens up so many opportunities for people who have the skills to solve those problems.

It might not be the problem that they’ve been solving for their audience all along, but they can pivot. They can adapt their skills to be able to solve that problem. For example, my mom’s yoga studio. They suddenly had to move their entire business on to Zoom. Now, if they had no idea how to move their business from in-studio to on Zoom, there’s such an opportunity for somebody like me who would know how to do that to say, “Well hey, let’s do a three hour workshop teaching all of the yoga studio owners in the country how to move on to Zoom.”

 

Pru: What’s the potential if we get it right?

Steph: You can scale your income like nothing else. I’ll use the example of one of my products that has just been a complete game changer for me. I’m very lucky because I created and launched this product at the end of last year. Since then, I’ve put it on an automated funnel. Even though all of my client work, my one on one client work’s dried up in the last month or so, I actually still have this product bringing in income. Basically now, I’ve been able to scale it to the point where I’ve reached my entire 2020 calendar year revenue goal in one month.

 

Pru: What’s at stake if we don’t?

Steph: People do refer to it as a hamster wheel and we’ve all heard that and it is because the only way to really earn more is to put your prices up or work more hours and then you get to a cap with either of those. You can ultimately put your prices up a lot, but you only have so many hours you can work. Right? It really allows you to earn more money and it really allows you to help those people who couldn’t afford to otherwise work with you or who you wouldn’t have the time to impact.

 

Steph’s Top Tips on How to Create a Digital Product.

1. Know exactly who your customer is.

Pick just one ideal customer and identify what their problem is that you can help them with. Now, it’s really tricky because we all just want to help everyone, but when you try to help everyone, you actually end up helping no one. Even just by helping one group of people, you can make such a big difference. Once you’ve helped them, then you can move on to helping the next group, but just start with one.

 

2. Pick just one idea to focus on first.

I’m really guilty of being like, “Oh, I want to launch this and this and this,” all at the same time. I found in the past when I do that, I actually… I’ll get like 25% of the way through three things and I feel like I’ve made no progress at all because I’m nowhere near finishing any of them. If you focus on one idea, see it through to completion, then focus on the next one. It’s a much easier way to do it.

 

3. Know what the outcome that you want to deliver is before you start creating a product.

When I say outcome, it’s not, “I want to teach them everything about Facebook ads.” No, it’s not that. It’s like, “Okay. I want to show them how to turn their $20 a day budget into $40 or something.” You know what the outcome you’re trying to deliver for them is and anything that doesn’t bring them closer to that outcome, like any piece of content you’re trying to include that they don’t actually need to know to achieve that result, then that’s actually slowing it down. It’s making it harder for them to achieve the goal so it shouldn’t be included. I guess also as part of this tip, have a strong outline before you start creating it. Otherwise, you’ll just end up going down like all of these rabbit holes and you’ll never get it done because you’ll start outlining and then you’ll be like, “Oh, I can teach them this. Oh, but I also know this and I know that.” No, you’ll never finish it.

 

4. Don’t be afraid to presell

If you have an idea and you’re not really sure if people are going to buy it or maybe a few people in your audience has said, “Oh, yeah. That’s a good idea,” but you’re still feeling like, “Oh, this could be a little bit risky,” sell it before you make it, or even sell it halfway through making it because then you’ve actually got people who’ve put their money where their mouths are and you know that you have customers whereas like it’s very easy for somebody to say, “Yeah. That’s a great idea,” but then when you actually go and ask them for the sale, they don’t want to pay for it.

 

5. Don’t forget to actually tell people about your product when you’re launching it.

I don’t know why, but there’s this idea that if I put it on my website, people will buy it. That doesn’t happen unless you have a lot of website traffic, which most of us don’t have that kind of website traffic where we can just put a product on our site and it’s going to sell itself. No, you need to actually make a big deal about it. Build up your email list beforehand, start to engage your social media followers, start to get them talking about this product, start to get them interested in it, and then actually really dial it up when you’re about to launch it.

 

Pru: How can people get in touch?

Steph: You can find me over at stephtaylor.co on my website. You can find me on Instagram, @stephtaylor.co and you can find my podcast. It’s called Socialette in all of the major podcast apps.