SendOwl Anytime Webinar: Which digital products are best for you right now?

Hello everyone! Welcome to our webinar today on deciding which digital products make the most sense for you right now. A quick word on who SendOwl is: we make it very easy to sell digital products online. We host them, we give you lots of ways to sell them, and we deliver them securely to your buyer. Now here's what we're going to work on today. With SendOwl, you actually can sell so many different types of digital products. And frankly, even if you're selling PDFs, those can be so many different types of digital products. And this can get so overwhelming, especially when you're first starting out as a digital seller. So in this session, we want to look at some ideas that'll help you focus down on your needs, your business, and what products are best for you at this stage. So a great question to start us off on is, are are you currently sharing some free content online? A free content stream is such a great starting point for your digital product journey because obviously you've already been sharing your expertise online and you've developed a following of people who respect you for those skills. And so you have this great opportunity to monetize that audience. If you're not currently sharing anything for free online, that's completely fine, although it's a great way to develop an audience that you can sell to. If you already have a free content stream and a following, the key thing here is to figure out this balance point, which is thinking about what kind of digital product would be simple for you to make but that also adds enough value that your audience is going to be interested to pay for it. So let's take one of those free content examples we looked at a minute ago. Let's say you make workout videos and you share them for free on YouTube. So you have an audience who knows you're a great workout instructor. How do you monetize that? Well, what you need to do is make it clear that you're adding value. Good digital product ideas in this case might be things that help your audience more deeply use your free content stream, like writing up a little post-workout recovery guide and making that into a PDF. Or you might take your free video library and make some PDF workout plans for viewers that have specific fitness goals that makes it easier for them to use use your free content stream. You could also get into a subscription program that gives subscribers a monthly bonus workout or two, or even set up a membership community where you share motivation products each month. All of these allow people to stick with your free stream but get that extra layer of value. And of course, you'll also be spending time thinking about how much time do you want to spend creating free content versus digital products? How much ongoing maintenance do you want to be committing? Everybody's time is finite. It's always a good idea if you're new to digital products to start with something simple, see how your audience responds, and then build in complexity from there. Another really interesting question is: are you selling the digital content itself, or is that content selling something else? So here's a classic example. Let's say that you're a seller of online courses. The courses themselves are the product, right? Now let's say instead you sell one-on-one coaching services. Maybe the digital product you make in that case is a freebie. It's a little email course that's designed to get people excited about booking one-on-one coaching sessions with you. The journey to design and make those digital products is pretty different. If you're going to sell the product itself, of course you need to spend a lot more time and energy because it needs to offer value for the price you're asking for it. Whereas if you're making a freebie that's designed to market something else, you're going to spend less time. It's going to be simpler. Its only job really is to demonstrate that skill or that thing that you want to sell. And incidentally, if you're selling digital products, if you're selling tangible products, if you're selling services, all of that can be done on SendOwl. We support products of all kinds. Let's talk subscriptions though. This is a big question as you're starting out as a merchant for digital products especially. If you already have a content stream that you share for free online, there's always this notion of subscribing, right? And so when we talk to new merchants who've been involved in free content for a while, a lot of times they want to go right to a subscription product because that's part of the same mindset. Subscriptions are great for a lot of reasons. I mean, who doesn't love recurring revenue? They're great for keeping you in the sightline of your customers. But you know, they come with a lot of responsibility. They come with a bit of extra work. It takes more effort to sell a recurring charge to your audience, and you're always going to be on the hook to create more content for the subscription. And people miss their payments, people need reminding, people cancel. Any subscription product comes with some customer service and billing issues that have to be maintained. So if you're considering a subscription as your first product, really think about these pros and cons, and I'm going to show you a great alternative in just a second here. So the next question is, are you selling ideas or processes? Digital products always fall in one of these two categories, and each of these categories lends itself to different kinds of products. If you're selling ideas, you're essentially selling, you know, advice or mentoring or coaching. You want your buyer to think about a particular idea, and that lends itself to things like ebooks and discussion videos, podcasts, newsletters. Whereas if you're selling a process, you want your buyers to do something. You want them to follow a series of steps to get to an outcome that you've designed. That could be things like patterns and project plans, but also online courses and workbooks where somebody has to write out answers to questions. Now, these aren't definitive lists. You could certainly make an online course to sell ideas or processes. Same thing with videos. But these two categories are just a really helpful way to start narrowing down the types of products that you're considering. Now here's an odd question, but it does lead to one of my favorite types of digital products. Is time an ingredient in what you're presenting? So when your buyer is going through your product, are they going to need a little time to process an idea or complete a step in your process before they move on to the next thing? If so, we want to use a type of product called a drip product where you're delivering pieces of your product one at a time on a schedule that you set. Let me jump over to my SendOwl account and I'll show you how to set one of these up. So over here in SendOwl I have a number of small-scale products and I want to combine some of these into a more complex drip product. So I want to make a drip series that's 4 Weeks to Healthy Cooking. I'm going to include my Vegan Meal Plans product in that and my 3 recipe collections. So let's go ahead and create a drip product, and we'll give it a title, and then we'll give it a price. So from here, I can start adding drip items. So immediately after purchase, we'll send the buyer the meal plans, and then one week later, we'll deliver that first recipe collection, and then two weeks later We'll deliver the next recipe collection, and then you guessed it, after 3 weeks we'll deliver the final recipe collection. So then whenever anyone purchases this product, they'll get these items in this order on this schedule. So to recap, we talked about some important questions that will help you narrow down on the types of digital products that are going to make sense for where you are in your business right now. To help you out, we also created a free worksheet for this webinar. You can grab your copy from the description below, and while you're doing that, you'll get a chance to see what a Sendowl download is like. Thanks so much for being with us today. Remember, our Help Center is at help.sendowl.com. It's a great place to get all your questions answered, and we'll see you in the next webinar.