12 Months To 1 Million In Digital Products

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What's up good looking people? Ryan Daniel Moran here. Ryan Danger Moran here with another episode of Freedom Fast Lane. And today we're going to be going through the 12 month plan to building a million dollar brand that sells digital products or consulting or something around a personal brand. In other words, intang stuff. This is not necessarily digital products, although it could be. There's an easy application to that. This isn't necessarily info products, although it'll certainly apply to that too. This formula will apply really to any intangible business. In fact, you could even argue that this is the model that Facebook followed when they launched. It became a multi billion dollar brand. And you'll see how that comes together throughout this, this episode. Now the question was brought up actually on, on a previous blog post over@freedomfastlane.com why now? You know, I've taught this formula. We have, we've kind of come to this topic in the context of talking about education courses and talking about launching your first digital product and testing it to the audience, building your audience and monetizing your audience. And somebody asked a question on a freedomfastlane.com blog, they said why are you teaching this now and not a couple years ago, Isn't this market completely saturated? Like hasn't this been done before? And the answer is well, I guess it's been done before. But the reason for why now is very simple. And I've talked about this before on Freedom Fast Lane. Business opportunity seekers tend to spend a lot of money on training and they tend to move markets. Business opportunities want to be. Entrepreneurs tend to move markets in the direction that they as a herd are going. So in the last three years we have seen a monumental shift of business. Opportunity seekers move into physical products and sell on Amazon.com and about every three years there is a swing between two very distinct business models between selling physical products and selling digital products. Right now the physical products business specifically on Amazon.com is consolidating which means a lot of would be opportunity seekers are getting consolidated out of the marketplace due to increased competition due to people thinking it's not as easy as it once was. Two people getting frustrated and quitting after realizing that taking, you know, building a business take actually takes some work. Good God, it actually takes work. So as a result you will see and you're starting to see a consolidation and an exit of those opportunity seekers from physical products. And they have to move somewhere and if history repeats itself as it tends to do, it will swing towards digital products. So I do this now for a Couple reasons. One, because the market is fairly open right now due to previous consolidations in the digital products world and because a lot of people have left the marketplace due to the hype and buzz around physical products.

The opportunity seekers have left the digital products world and gone over to the physical products world, which creates new opportunities in the digital products world. This is not a knock on physical products or on Amazon. I make quite a bit of money on Amazon, although I continue to be frustrated with Amazon's inability to prevent and deal with fraud that happens in their marketplace. But that is kind of the nature of dealing with a channel like, like Amazon that controls all of the buyers. You're gonna have black hatters and fraudulent people come in and gum up the place. But due to the fact that many opportunity seekers have swung over to selling physical products and it is consolidating, there are wide open west opportunities for selling a different type of product, selling digital or intangible or education products.

So you have this window of opportunity right now where things are kind of wide open. But the time is coming where those opportunity seekers will swing back over to digital products and guess what will happen then? You'll have new channels three years from now and new opportunities for selling physical products. Now this is all meaningless unless we get one point really dialed in, and that is, this is not me arguing for digital products for physical products. I believe in business and entrepreneurship. Channels serve as a great leverage point to reach your target audience. But business is less about what you sell or even how you sell it, and much more about who you sell to. I was watching a clip from Shark Tank earlier today in which Kevin o' Leary takes equity in a company and he negotiates a better deal based on the fact that he can get that company into Costco. Costco is a channel. Costco has the buyers. Costco has the eyeballs. Costco has the brand authority. But they're just a channel. That company that's getting into.

Costco still has to be the one providing the customer with a certain product and identifying who and how they're going to serve that person. There are channels all over the place. They change every three to five years, especially on the Internet. So this is not me arguing to you what or how you should sell your products. I'm just proposing that there are new ways or that there are better ways or certain opportunities that exist in marketplaces for you to sell to the people that you want to target or that you are already targeting. Now, within that context, there are certain opportunities that exist right now because again, Business is about who you sell to, who you are targeting, and the rest is how you connect with them, what you're offering them, and so on. And the opportunities that exist now are due to the fact that audiences and responsive audiences exist at really high rates. I would even argue that there are higher rates than ever. But product sales are down and ready for an opportunity. What I mean by this is that there's been a very interesting swing in opportunities as the business and entrepreneurship crowd has sprinted towards physical products. Amazon and even some other physical product channels like Kickstarter and tech stuff. There's been a big movement away from the digital. But at the same time, there has been a large increase in the number of people who consume YouTube videos, who consume podcasts, who provide really high quality content.

Who are on Periscope, who tweet. In other words, there's all this content and all these audiences floating around right now. It's easier. And there is more opportunity to build an audience, to connect with an audience than ever before. And yet the opportunities to monetize them have kind of gone down simply because there has been a bit of an exit from digital products or a swing away from digital products. I have reason to believe that that is temporary and, and that is going to change. So if you're listening to this in the future and you are one of those business opportunity seekers and you're looking for the next wave, and I believe that there is a big wave coming and it has already begun. Consider this a guide towards building a million dollar business along with these new opportunities that are suddenly open now. Let me give you a little bit more of a practical example. It seems right now that there is.

A everybody and their sister has a podcast. It's kind of annoying sometimes. It bumps me down in the itunes charts. I don't like it very much. And there is more consumption of podcasts than ever before because everybody has a podcast. So the adoption rate of podcasts is going way up, and it's continuing to go up in every market because there are authorities and celebrities using podcasts as a way to build and connect with their audiences. There's a higher adoption rate that's happening, and as more people enter the marketplace, the higher the adoption rate becomes. But the number one way that people are monetizing their podcasts is through advertising. When you see that happen in a marketplace, when you see advertising as the primary way, and when I mean advertising, I mean someone else advertising. When you see that as a primary way of monetization, you know that a shift is coming What I mean by this is when you have something like a podcast that only makes its money through getting sponsors, that means that somebody is making more money on the other end by selling a product to that audience that is fairly unsustainable. And it's unsustainable simply by pricing signals. Let me dumb this down a little bit. If a podcast has 100,000 listeners and they the best way that they're monetizing that audience is by letting another company run ads to that audience of 100,000, and that company is making money from that advertisement, there's a bit of a mismatch. Why is there a mismatch? Because there's more value and easier value if the audience maker, if the leader of the podcast were to simply have his own products or her own products that he or she sold directly to the audience. This is how entrepreneurship works. You build an audience, you sell things to those audiences. Now, I'm of the opinion that advertising is rarely the best way to monetize your audience. And I've told the story before that one time in the Philippines, I got in a friendly conversation with John Lee Dumas about if podcasters were real entrepreneurs. And I argued that they were not because most of them are just selling advertising. They're not selling their own products and services. However, there are instances in which I've been proven wrong on this. I've said before, Glenn Beck runs TheBlaze.com and he made $60 million last year just with advertising. So there are exceptions, I suppose, to this rule. But in the world of personal entrepreneurship, it tends to go that you make your money building an audience and then selling things to those audiences. Right now, the way that's working is people are building audiences and they're letting other people sell things to those audiences. That is a great indication of a wide open west in a marketplace. That indicates that there is a lack of product producers reaching these audiences. That is why timing is perfect. Even on places like YouTube. There are more people now on YouTube getting millions and millions and millions of views and only making their money by running advertising.

The opposite of this is like an acquaintance of mine, so saw him at the gym the other day, Mike chang. He runs six pack shortcuts. He's got over a billion views on YouTube. He spends money to build that audience. Why? Because on his channel, he's gonna sell you some stuff. That is the model that is primed and ripe and ready right now for there to be an audience and then for you to sell stuff to that audience. That is a perfect Example, and he's been doing that for years, since before it was cool, during when it was really cool. And now that it's not cool anymore, and he'll probably still be doing it when it's cool again to follow that model. This is starting to change because this is unsustainable to have these large audiences without a lot of things to sell. And there will be a day when collectively.

Those audience leaders realize that they can sell more stuff to their audiences and serve their market better, address the needs and wants of their market better by releasing their own products, be it physical products or digital products. It will just probably be digital products. And if you understand this model, you understand the profit margins of digital products, you'll be in a prime position to profit from this. Plus, you can take this knowledge and license it by going to the people who have an audience and being the department that builds their physical products. If you get this, you can go to anyone in the world who has an audience and make gobs of money running their products for them and leveraging their audience. I have a buddy of mine, I'd love to do a product with him. He called up some people that he loved on YouTube who had hundreds of thousands of subscribers and followers on YouTube, offered to help them build a digital course. They were like, oh yeah, sounds like a few extra bucks, six figure business as soon as it launched. I mean, hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. They're beside themselves. He only had to do part of the work, he didn't have to do any of the content. He just basically advised them and wrote the sales letter. And now he's got a multi six figure income a year by just helping this group of audience leaders monetize their audience in a way that they should have been from day one. So just like previous podcasts, previous episodes that have been popular, I'm gonna go through the three stages of building a million dollar business in this way. But I'm going to assume something. I'm going to assume that you know how to get leads. I'm going to assume that you know how to get an audience. And at this point, if you don't, then you can do two things. You can either run advertising to start building up an audience, which is pretty easy to do. You can look that up on YouTube or Google running ads from a variety of different channels to build up a small audience, or you can partner with people who have audiences in order to start running this process. That's stage zero and getting the leads or building the audience. That's what we're assuming at this point, before you move on to stage one. Stage one is the grind. This means you've got leads, you've got audience members, but you don't have a proof of concept for a product. You might not even have a product or an idea for a product at all. What you do in this stage is your entire purpose of the grind is to get your proof of concept. Does your audience want what you have to offer and if not, identify what it is that they do want? You can figure this out in a variety of ways. You can ask them by running a survey, or you can simply put up offers and see who shows up. Great quote by my buddy Scott Volker on a previous podcast. He said, I let my audience vote with their wallet. It's easy for them to say, yes, I will buy, but when it came to actually buy, that's the real test, to see if the audience wants what you have. We've covered in previous podcasts about testing that offer. But the point of this period and most people are not willing to do this grind, to launch the product to a small group of people to get money flowing in, no matter how small it is, and to gather case studies from the students who go through your training. I don't care what it is that you are helping people do. Become more fit, fall in love, have a better relationship, play better golf, make more money, invest their money. Whatever it is. It's to launch, to get your core group of people into a class so that you get paid to keep doing what it is that you want to do and to gather case studies, AKA proof of what it is that you're going to be doing. Further, because there is a snowball effect. There is when you first launch, there is a BS meter that you probably will have a hard time overcoming until you have proof of concept. That's why you do discounts or that's why you do special offers to get those early adopters. A good way to put this is I'm going to totally botch this, but it'll be worth a Google for you. I had a professor in college who had a really well known presentation called Diffusion Theory. And diffusion theory was basically an analysis of how products got distributed into the marketplace. And he argued that there were early adopters and then whatever the other end of it was, late adopters and then there's the bulk of people right in the middle. And I'm reading a book right now by Peter Diamandis called Bold, where he talks about exponential growth and they kind of go hand in hand, this diffusion theory and exponential growth where at the beginning stages of any product, be it a physical product, a digital product, I don't care. Be it you building an audience, be it the Freedom Fast Lane podcast, follow this trend. At the beginning, there is a very slow adoption rate and even if it is doubling, it looks insignificant. There's 2 sales, 4 sales, 8 sales, 16 sales. But as you move through those early adopters, all of a sudden things start to get really exciting and sexy because when you start doubling to 2004-008001-60030, 200, 6000, 413,000. Oh my goodness, now we're actually doing something really special. And it looks like we came out of nowhere. But what happens with most people is they're in stage one of the grind. They launch to an audience, they hear crickets and they stop.

Or there's the reverse. And I have experienced this firsthand. There is an expectation and this came out of the those who were in the last wave of digital products, they would do a launch, they'd get all their buddies to promote a launch, close the launch, make a whole bunch of money, and then they had to start all over again. So they made money in spurts. They never really built a business.

Following. These three stages will help you get a business, not just a random income stream. So stage one, stage zero, really assuming you have having leads and an audience. Stage one, the grind. Releasing that first piece for proof of concept, gathering testimonials, giving everything you have to that pilot group and getting that feedback so you can use it and as proof of concept. Stage two is the growth. So stage one, we got paid to make a product. Stage one, we have some testimonials. Stage one, we've started to practice the muscle of monetizing our audience. Stage two is the growth, which is basically repeat with new forms of traffic and channels. Now, we have a bit of a choose your own adventure adventure at hand right here. And it's that if the if in the grind, the class or the consulting or the training or the event was a total bomb, you don't have to do it again. But if it went really well and it's something you want to repeat, then you'll repeat it in stage two or with new forms of traffic and channels. Now, what the heck does that mean? Well, there are channels for training products, there are channels for traffic. And if the product or the course that you are putting on right now is something that you want to repeat, you can leverage those channels to sell your product. For example, if you're selling an ebook or you're selling a video series. I think now they're even doing physical products. You would go over to someplace like clickbank.com or jvzoo.com or a place where there is a large amount of new traffic, new channels for you to focus on. And affiliates are a wonderful channel for you to take advantage of. It may even be just if we were to make this super simple. You. If you took your first launch and you took your proof of concept and you went over to affiliates and said, this went spectacularly well, now I am releasing it to affiliates to promote.

That is a perfect integration into Stage two. I have had many, many, many people come to me over the years and say, hey, I got this awesome thing that I'm launching on whatever date. Will you promote it? And I've said in the past, well, show me your numbers in your case studies. Oh, well, we don't have any of those yet. We're, you know, this is our first launch. Well, then why the hell are we having this conversation? You have no proof of concept. You don't know what your numbers are. You don't know if people liked this stuff. Why would I send my customers that I have spent years developing or over to your crappy thing that you don't even know if it has legs? In the marketplace, we solve that by having the internal grind first. We get our mistakes out of the way. We launch with proof of concept. We get our numbers, we see if the marketplace takes it, we get customer feedback. We do that in stage one so that we can go to affiliates in stage two so that we can put proof of concept on our Facebook pages, on our YouTube videos, we can interview our successful students on our podcast. We can talk about our success stories in our marketing, in our emails. We can show that in our next launch video. But going into that blind is kind of a waste of time.

It really makes no sense to have the product that you're selling on a channel, be it ClickBank or selling to affiliates or JVZoo or even sending any traffic to it. If you have no proof of concept from people who used it in stage one. So your entire purpose of Stage two is to repeat the process, but go to where there is new blood, new forms of traffic and new channels that you did not tap in Stage one. Stage three is the gold. This is really where money flows in. This is really where we become authorities in the marketplace. Because in Stage two, we relaunch or we reopen on a regular basis. And, and I should clarify, in Stage Two, our purpose is to establish a sales machine that works so we have proof of concept in stage one. Stage two, we are going to re release it and we're leveraging a sales channel, sales opportunities, be a sales video, a webinar, or whatever it is. That's the purpose of stage two. And since we have proof of concept, we can go to different traffic channels and we can go to affiliates that have other audience members to put people into different sales channels so we can identify which one is going to maximize our exposure in the marketplace. For some people, that means just doing launch after launch after launch after launch. That is a sales strategy. I don't recommend it, but it is a sales strategy. I personally would much prefer a sales strategy to be open so that customers can come in all the time. Not everybody has that same belief. So if some people want to do launch after launch or launch, God bless them. I have a hard time with that one. But your goal in stage two is to repeat this process with different forms of traffic so that you can identify what sales medium brings in the maximum amount of exposure for your thing into the marketplace. Stage three is the gold. And this is where we can really bring in a whole lot of profit and establish ourselves as really the expert and the leader in our field. You have two assignments in stage three. Number one, build up recurring traffic channels, and number two, brainstorm and release subsequent products. Now, this stage one and stage two may take six months, and that's fine because at this point, you'll be ahead of almost everybody else who just tries to go straight for stage three. See, what most people do is they try to skip to stage three. They're like, I'm gonna write a sales page and I'm going to drive Facebook ads to my thing. And then when it doesn't work, they give up. So instead we build a foundation by gathering proof of concept and repeating with that proof of concept and our proof. Stage three, we've got proof of concept. We have new channels bringing in new customers for us.

Next, we are going to are going to build our recurring traffic channels. This would be where we start running advertising straight to our offer, where we're not leveraging audiences anymore. We're now building up recurring traffic channels by running Facebook ads or Google Ads or YouTube ads, or going on other people's podcasts or shows, or running TV ads or print ads or whatever it is. You're now building up fresh blood into your sales process that you have identified and clarified in stage two. The purpose for this is to keep fresh blood coming in to keep people buying your thing. And then the second piece of this is to brainstorm your next products. And the way that you answer this question is, what do the people who have bought product number one want more of? Do they want coaching? Do they want consulting? Do they want a mastermind? Do they want another product? Do they want to come to an event? What do they want? Do they want something done for them? How do you dive deeper into the experience of what it is that you are offering? What do the people that you're targeting demand more of? My recommendation would be for the next thing to be more expensive than, than the previous thing that you were selling as a way of diving deeper into the content and the concept that it is that you are offering. You already will have customers lined up who want that thing. In fact, I would take whatever it is that you're thinking about charging and double it and then take a shot and double it again. When you do that, you'll probably be appropriately priced in the marketplace to go to the customers who have already bought product number one from you and giving them a different opportunity to get something else or a deeper experience with you. So let me recap a bit and then I'll go into some examples. Stage one is the grind. We launch to get proof of concept, to gather testimonials, and to start getting money coming in. It will be imperfect, it will be done wrong, it might even be embarrassing, but you will get feedback. Stage two, you repeat that process with your proof of concept. Improving your sales process to new traffic and channels by leveraging other affiliates, by putting our product on an existing channel, by going to other people with the audience. Heck, you could even take your product from stage one to your audience. And then in stage two, go to people who have a different audience and run the exact same process to their list or to their audience, to your. To your thing. And then in stage three, we're building up regular traffic channels so that we have regular customers coming to us, so that we're not doing this whole churn and burn launch process. We have a regular sales process now that we've perfected and, and now we're brainstorming our next products. What is the experience that our customers want to have beyond the product that we have sold to them? Now, there's lots and lots of examples that we could go to back this up. I have a buddy, Garrett White, who runs a seminar called Wake Up Warrior. It's something that I've attended. And he ran through this process indirectly. I mean, he didn't have this podcast didn't exist before he launched his business, but he launched his proof of concept with a couple of guys doing. He does a 10 or $20,000 week event, week long event to entrepreneurs who want to increase their business, have a better marriage, to make more money, be in shape, and experience more out of life. So he launched this event to the audience that he had had. A few guys, got them to be his ambassadors because they loved the program. And he got so much proof that the next one was an even bigger success, and then the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one. And now he sells out events six months in advance at 10 or $20,000 a pop. It's a huge movement now. And he ran through this exact process. The way that he gets his recurring traffic is through Facebook and by buying some traffic to his funnel, which he figured out in stage two. So in stage one, he released the process, got his bruises and bumps along the way, got proof of concept in stage two, repeated it to the next group of guys, shared that proof of concept, had leads coming in all the time into his sales funnel, which he then tested and tweaked and perfected. And now he uses Facebook ads and he uses his podcast as a new form of traffic to keep new people flooding the sales process with new customers. And then he started releasing other ways for people to go deeper into the experience. So he has a mastermind and his. He has some other ways to go deeper into the experience as well. The good folks at Amazing Selling Machine, most of you are very familiar with that program that teaches people how to start businesses. On Amazon.com and amazing selling Machine followed this process. They had stage one, the grind. They did a test to their audience, they got proof of concept, then they came to people like me, their affiliates, and they did another kind of test test that was a smaller launch. It was still a great launch, but their first launch was small comparatively to.

Their later ones. And then they took that proof of concept and they launched again. And they took that proof of concept and they launched again. My suspicion is that they will probably roll out regular traffic channels and stop doing the launch process over and over again pretty soon here. And they have lots of other products now that you can buy, including trips and events and other products. They followed this process, although indirectly. P90X, you remember P90X, P90X has followed this exact model. They had a test group where they launched it to the existing audience, the existing customers of Beachbody products. And when it did well, they figured out they're really good at infomercials. So infomercials in stage two was the way that they started developing new customers from existing channels through infomercials. They got case study after case study after case study, proof after proof after proof, and used that for the next infomercial and the next infomercial. And then what did they do? They built up additional new forms of traffic through Internet marketing. And then they started doing shakes and post workout drinks and other DVDs. And they released P90X2 and P90X3 and all these other programs as their stage three. And they already had all the customers, they already had all of the eyeballs. So in stage three, there was pure gold. It's important to note in stage one and two, you might be reinvesting the majority of the sales that are coming in into new eyeballs, into new audience members. In order to perfect the sales channels that you're developing in stage two, first you get the feedback to a small group of people. Then you automate and figure out your best sales channel. Then you turn up the traffic and you release new products. Facebook I teased this at the beginning of the podcast, but Facebook followed this model. Facebook's story is their grind was figuring out how to launch to the Harvard students. Then they repeated that into all of the other colleges in America. Then they opened it up to everybody once they had all their bruises, all of their hiccups out of the way and they released all kinds of new products like, well, they bought Instagram, but they own everything now. They follow the exact same model, although a little bit differently, because it's a different type of product. That is how you build a million dollar business in an intangible market. So not a physical product, but anything else. Consulting, events, coaching, digital products, education. That's how you do it. I plan to do a course on this at some point. Right now It's October of 2015. I plan to release it sometime in 2016. But in the meantime, I would highly recommend the training provided by my buddy Danny Enie, who is just recently on the show. And we are doing a free training class fair very soon in the next couple of days, depending on when you're listening to this. And you can register for that class@freedomfastlane.com pilot and if you're listening to this after the training class instead, it'll redirect you to some other trainings or some other ideas or podcasts for you to dive deeper into this topic. But that's it. Freedomfastlane.com pilot kind of like your first pilot launch. That's the stage one. That's what we're going to do together is help you get through stage one so that you can gather testimonials and get proof of concept to then automate this process and build a real sustainable business. So head over to freedomfastlane.com pilot and you'll either see the sign up for the class with Danny or you'll see some other trainings that'll allow you to dive deeper into this process. I'd love your feedback on this. Head over to freedomfastlane.com let me know your thoughts on today's episode, and I look forward to serving you further in the future. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you on the next show.