This is the seventh in a series of 10 podcast episodes/blog posts all about digital products. Check out the other posts in this series below.
1. How to Create Digital Products That People Actually Want
2. 8 Digital Product Ideas for Your Service-Based Business
3. When is the Right Time to Create Digital Products?
4. How to Find the Time to Create Digital Products
5. 5 Ways to Validate Your Idea for Your Digital Product
6. 5 Limiting Beliefs Keeping You From Creating Your Digital Product
7. The Tools You Need to Sell Digital Products
8. Digital Products vs Courses – Which Should You Create?
9. Your Digital Product Launch Questions Answered
10. Digital Products Not Selling? Here’s What to do
Courses…. Do you feel the pressure to create one? I know that it seems like everyone in the online business world is creating courses so you should too right? Wrong!
Courses are not the only digital product that you can create yet somehow we seem to fall into the trap of thinking that they are.
In today’s episode, I’m going to be helping you decide whether to create a digital product or a course for your first main digital product.
The reason I say main digital product is that if you’ve listened to other episodes, you’ll know that I talk about creating a simple, low-cost product as your first digital offering.
Now usually when I mention digital products as a term, I do actually include courses as part of that as you’ll hear if you’ve listened to episode 19 where I shared 8 digital product ideas for your business however for this particular episode, I’m going to be speaking about courses as a separate entity from digital products.
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Let’s take a look at what I mean when I say digital products for the purpose of this episode. I’m talking about products such as templates, ebooks, workbooks, swipe files, systems, spreadsheets. The options for digital products are huge! As you see courses are not the only way to build digital products into your service-based business model and courses definitely aren’t going to be the best option for everyone, especially if you are earlier on in your digital product journey.
1. Time
The first factor to consider when deciding whether to create a digital product or a course is the amount of time it takes. More often than not, you are able to create digital products from the resources that you already have and use in your own business. This means that you are able to sell your digital product quicker than if you were to spend the time creating a course which is going to be a much more time-intensive process.
Depending on the length of your course, you could be working on it for months. Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and there are ways to make sure that the time you spend creating your course isn’t wasted (listen to episode 22 for more on that), creating a digital product from something you already have is a great way to get started.
2. Revenue
Revenue is another factor in deciding what digital product you should be creating whether that be a digital product in the term that I’m referring to in this episode or a course.
Typically courses do have a higher price point attached to them however this isn’t necessarily always the case. Let’s take my website templates as an example, the lowest investment you need to make to buy a Showit template from my shop, Made by Fleurir is $647. If you decide to bundle them all together, you’re looking at $1247. Now for something that I have created once and can sell over and over again, that’s a pretty decent revenue earner. I can sell just 10 templates a month and I’m able to make 10k on average just from my template shop. Now, this is more than doable!
However, some digital products do have a lower price point associated with them depending on what that product is. If you have a product that is priced at $97, in order to make 10k, you’re going to need to sell 104 of them to hit your 10k goal. This means that you are going to need a much bigger audience than if you were to sell a higher-priced digital product.
This reason alone plays a huge part in why people choose to create courses over other digital products.
Courses can vary in price points but typically the price range for courses is between $500 to $2000 dollars. So if you have a course at the top end of that range, you only need to sell 5 to make the same $10k.
3. How engaged is your audience
Something else to take into consideration when choosing what digital product to create is how engaged you audience is.
If you don’t yet have an audience or your audience isn’t yet as engaged as you’d like them to be, a smaller, low-cost digital product would be the best route to go round. This means that you can use this digital product to build trust with your audience quicker and then lead them into a digital product that is at a higher investment.
4. Launching vs Evergreen
The thing I love about digital products and I say this to all of my clients is that you can launch them and get them out into the world quickly. Digital products are typically always available to purchase so you can choose whether to focus on simply getting the product created and out there into the world or you can choose to do a bigger launch if you so wish.
I sat on my Showit template shop idea for over a year before finally getting round to launching it and then when I did, I focused on product creation and simply getting it out there with a smaller launch instead of trying to create the products and warm up my audience for a bigger launch. Having it out there after just sitting on the idea for over 12 months felt so good to me and I could then focus on driving traffic to my shop and building out funnels to sell my products automatically.
Courses sometimes only have a short window that the ‘doors’ are open so to speak so there is more pressure to do a big launch and get as many people in as possible. Now of course this isn’t necessarily always the case as there are more and more courses that are becoming readily available to purchase at any time but you get my drift.
5. Customer Results
The final thing to consider is the results that you want your customers to have. Digital products typically offer immediate results that a customer can implement into their business without really needing to know how it’s done. For example, you might be a copywriter selling swipe files to help your customers create a sales page or email welcome sequence. They can open up the document that they have purchased and use the prompts to get their copy created quickly.
Whereas, if you want to focus more on educating your customers and teaching them how to do something that they then go away and do themselves, a course might be a better option.
I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode and seeing the pros and cons of creating a digital product such as a template or workbook compared to creating something like a course or program.
Inside of this program, you will build long-term, sustainable marketing strategies that will grow your audience as well as create and launch your first (or next) digital product.
Be sure to check out the other posts in this series. Here’s a reminder of them again.
1. How to Create Digital Products That People Actually Want
2. 8 Digital Product Ideas for Your Service-Based Business
3. When is the Right Time to Create Digital Products?
4. How to Find the Time to Create Digital Products
5. 5 Ways to Validate Your Idea for Your Digital Product
6. 5 Limiting Beliefs Keeping You From Creating Your Digital Product
7. The Tools You Need to Sell Digital Products
8. Digital Products vs Courses – Which Should You Create?
9. Your Digital Product Launch Questions Answered
10. Digital Products Not Selling? Here’s What to do
If you’re looking for support, accountability and guidance in building digital products into your business, be sure to check out Expand Your Brand, my 12-month high-touch group program for online service providers who want to grow their audience, launch their digital product and make consistent sales.
