5 Digital Products Nobody Buys Anymore | It’s Getting WORSE

In this video, I'm going to share with you 5 digital products that nobody buys anymore. If you're selling one or more of these digital products, you could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table. So if you want to stop wasting time, energy, and money and start creating digital products that people actually want to buy, this is the video for you. Now, the first digital product that people don't buy are broad self-paced courses with vague promises. The whole $997 all-in-one course era is over. These courses are too big and overwhelming, so people don't finish them. Studies show that only about 5 to 15 buyers complete online courses, which for me as a course creator sounds disheartening. But that doesn't mean that courses are obsolete. I still sell courses all the time. There's a really simple workaround, and it's this: buyers don't want a giant dump of information anymore. They want a transformation, something they can finish, use, and point to as a clear solution. Nobody wants to sift through 30 hours of content just to find an answer. And this is where most new course creators go wrong. They try to build a massive ultimate course right out of the gate, thinking that more content equals more value. Not only do these courses take months to create, they overwhelm your students and are exhausting to maintain. So what should you do instead? Design shorter à la carte style courses. These should take around 2 hours to complete and are hyper-specific. You can easily price these between $200 to $500. For example, instead of a giant course on mastering the entire game of golf, make one short course on how to fix your golf swing. That's exactly what my client Constance did with her course for getting more signings as a notary. Her lessons were short. They were about 1 to 3 minutes each, and she was hitting 80% course completion rates while earning $2,000 a month in semi-passive income right out of the gate with her course. Motivation is always the highest right when people buy your course. So if you give them quick wins with brief actionable lessons, ideally under 10 minutes, they'll actually finish and use your course. And if you want my exact system for creating digital products and turning them into passive income, I put together a free masterclass that you can watch right now. It's not some long drawn-out sales pitch. It is a full deep dive training that walks you through the entire process step by step. Click the first link in the description, grab a notepad, and dive in. Just remember, if you're building courses, that short, specific, and actionable online courses will always beat long, vague, and overwhelming ones. The next digital product that doesn't sell are ebooks that don't have a specific outcome. People buy digital products so they can solve a problem or fulfill a need. I mean, that's why people buy anything. If your toilet breaks and you can't fix it on your own, you hire a plumber. The same logic applies to ebooks and any other type of digital product. But what do most new creators do? They pick a generic template in Canva, copy and paste some AI-generated content, slap it behind a paywall, and wait for the money to start rolling in. And when the sales don't come in, they think, this doesn't work. They feel defeated, confused, and end up quitting. But the problem isn't ebooks. It's the lack of a clear outcome. Digital Digital products don't sell just because they simply exist, at least not anymore. They only sell when they solve a clear, painful problem for a specific person. So spend time digging into what your audience actually needs solved, not what's easy to create. Your ebook should feel like a clear solution to a burning problem, which is going to make me pull out my wallet and buy it. It doesn't matter if it's an ebook, a journal, an online course, or any other type of digital product. Those are just vehicles. The real value is in the problem that you're solving. You can easily find these problems by taking some time to sit down with your target audience in person or on a Zoom call and interview them on on what they want help with most. If you've done a lot of enrollment calls, coaching calls, or group sessions, you can always scrape from your notes or transcripts with a tool like ChatGPT and pull out what the best product ideas are from there. The thing that everybody really wants help with becomes your product. Take notes of what your audience is saying and use their exact words to shape not only your ebook content, but also your emails, your sales page, your social posts, and more. When you do that, your ebook stops becoming some random PDF and it becomes a real solution that your audience is excited to buy. The next digital product that does not sell are generic templates out context or training. Now, don't get me wrong, templates can be amazing digital products because they're highly actionable. You buy them, you plug them in, and then you start getting results right away. But just handing someone a template isn't enough. If they don't know how to use it properly, they're not going to use it at all, and they'll probably end up asking for their money back. And because tools like Canva make templates so easy to create, the market is completely flooded with them. That's why so many creators jump in thinking, I'll just make a quick set of templates and the money will roll in. But what people end up with is a pile of files without any guidance, and they're completely worthless. I once bought a $200 template for hosting one of my Kajabi courses. But the creator didn't just send me the files. They also included a short training on how to install, customize, and use it. Because of that training, I was able to quickly set it up, get it working properly, and my students got a much better user experience. What people pay for is the peace of mind that someone has already filtered through all of the noise and information online and handed them a tool that they can actually use to shortcut their learning curve. Templates by themselves are a commodity, but templates with context and training become a solution. The next digital product that doesn't sell is one of my biggest pet peeves. Have you ever bought a course and every lesson is a 3-hour Zoom recording with 1 or 2 hidden nuggets somewhere inside? Please never do this. Look, I'm all for creating a minimum viable product for your course to get something out there quickly. It's foundational principle that I teach all of my students and I practice myself. But let's be real, nobody wants to sit through a 1 to 3-hour Zoom replay. It feels lazy, overwhelming, and unprofessional, like the creator couldn't have bothered to just package their knowledge properly. When you take your used Zoom recordings of coaching calls and that kind of stuff that are just bland recordings with no visuals and no clear outcome with each lesson, customers end up feeling tricked and then your brand gets weaker because they expected an actual training, not some messy sales webinar recording or some long drawn out coaching session. Now don't get me wrong, coaching sessions that are recorded in a group setting especially can be really insightful because someone's question could definitely be my question. But the problem here is just slapping those together behind a paywall and not having a very clear outcome with your course. So if I buy your course and it's just a bunch of long, drawn-out webinar recordings, that is not a great user experience for me. It's going to take me forever to go through all the content, and I'm not even sure if this is actually going to solve my problem. That's when I start asking for my money back. So what should you do instead? Well, if you have a ton of webinar content or long coaching sessions, take your time and go through that content and repurpose it the right way. Chop it up into short, focused lessons, add worksheets, and record a quick intro to really set the stage. Package it so it feels like a training designed for the student to help them quickly solve a problem rather than just some leftover recordings that you're trying to profit off of. Again, people don't pay for hours of raw content. They pay for clarity and transformation. If you want to reuse a webinar, respect your audience's time, polish it, shorten it, give them something that they can actually implement. Otherwise, you're not really delivering value. You're just making their life harder. And that's not good business. More content does not equal a better program. And 3 hours our Zoom replays aren't trainings. But if you're going to do it, take your time and make it quickly solve their problem. Any digital product that you create needs to do that. Now, the next digital product are digital downloads that anybody can Google in 30 seconds. If the information is already freely available online, then why would somebody pay you for it? So many course creators want shortcuts, so they'll Google some ideas or use AI to build a generic PDF or digital product that is filled with fluff. Customers feel ripped off when they realize they bought something that they could have found totally free with a quick Google search. And when you Not only that, it doesn't position you as an authority. It just makes you look like a lazy amateur. People don't buy digital products for the information alone. They buy them to have curated steps to get a specific outcome. If you're selling coaching, one of the biggest differences from your free and paid content is that your free content is broad while your paid content is focused. Free content is like a flashlight. You're talking about one topic and then another topic, and it's not very curated, while your paid programs are like a laser beam. You want this specific outcome. This program, whether it's working with me or taking my course, whatever it is, is the clear-cut solution to get that. It's like taking all of the best content that you have from your free content and putting it into a systematic process to get a specific outcome. And the more specific and tailored this content can be to your audience, the more it feels like it was actually made for them and their unique situation. It's true that you can Google just about anything and get any information that you want in seconds from AI tools like ChatGPT. But the packaging is the key. When you have a proven system with your personal process and way of thinking, that is what makes it a product. For example, instead of just throwing together 10 keto recipes that you copied from the internet, create a 7-day keto meal plan. You can still get inspiration from what's online if you need to, but make sure that you're including things like grocery lists, prep tips, or meal substitutions. Even though a lot of this information is out there on the internet and people could totally spend the time to go through it, what makes your course enticing and make me want to buy it is the fact that you have done all of that research for me. One of the most valuable things in my private coaching that I hear all the time is, James, you just saved me so much time. And that's what makes something valuable. It's saving you time, energy, and money. If I've already spent months or years curating all this perfect content and sifting through all the blog posts for you and just handed it to you on a silver platter, you'd be like, oh, this is awesome. I'd happily pay you for that. The internet is overflowing with free content. What makes your digital product valuable is how you're positioning it, structuring it, and helping people apply it to get results. People connect with people. ChatGPT doesn't have your unique story, your style, or your way of thinking, and that's what makes your content and products different and what people will pay for. When you stop throwing out lazy, vague products and start solving real specific problems, that's when you can start selling digital products while you sleep. Now, one of the biggest things stopping you from selling your digital products is your sales page. Lucky for you, I've dissected over 200 sales pages and found that there's only 3 key things that stop 90% of creators from making sales. So watch this video next and I'll show you exactly what those are. You see what I just did there? I've gone through all these different sales pages and pulled out the top 3 things, and now you get to watch them. That's what's going to make your product different and sell. Take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. See you in the next one.