Where to host and sell your online courses and digital products

Where do I put my online course, or my membership, or my ebook so that I can sell it? Where do I host it? What tech do I use? It's probably the number one question I get asked. Here I'm sharing with you where I host all of my digital products—it's simple, and it'll save you paying for ten different pieces of software (and then trying to duct tape them all together in the back end).

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Where should I host my online course?

I have just got back from a month living in a camper van with my dog, which was epic. We explored a lot of Australia and it was really fun to see parts of the country that I haven't seen even though I've lived here for nine years. It was really fun to see all of the things that I hadn't got around to seeing and doing.

This is a really big advantage of having a digital product-based business is that I can take chunks of time off and not have to worry if my business is going to bring in money because I know that it's going to because my digital products are still selling in the background. Yes, obviously the month that I was away wasn't a huge revenue month but it was still approximately a $30,000 month. I haven't actually checked that, but just based on what my daily sales were, I'd say it was about $30,000 a month, which isn't bad for a month where I wasn't working at all.

That really is the power of digital products. If you're on the fence about creating and launching a digital product, honestly, it's so, so worth it. It's a time investment upfront. I think we put off creating them because we think it's going to take a lot of time. There's no guarantee that people are going to buy it. All of those excuses. Once they're actually created, you don't have to do that much work to continue to sell them in the background.

 

Hosting your digital product

Today I want to let you know about the program I use to host my digital products: Kajabi. It's the tool that I use to host all of my digital products, Launch Magic was hosted on there. The Launch Magic community was hosted there because I don't use Facebook. This blog is not sponsored by Kajabi, but I am a referral partner, which means that if you sign up using my link, I get a small commission. Let me be very clear. I'm not promoting Kajabi purely because I get the commission. I would get a similar commission from promoting any of the other hosting products out there, so it's not like I've chosen Kajabi to promote because I get the bigger commission. That's not the case. I use and love Kajabi in my own business. I have seen my students use and love Kajabi, and I truly believe that it is the perfect all-in-one solution for anyone who is looking to start a digital product based business.

 

Why I use Kajabi over any other digital product hosting platform

Okay, so why am I such a fan of Kajabi? Personally, I think it's one of the only, or if not the only, all-in-one solution that doesn't suck. You can use it to build a website or you can use it alongside your existing website, which is what I do. My website is built on WordPress with Showit and Kajabi is there more to just host my product. However, if I were starting from scratch and I didn't have a website or anything, I would probably just build it all in Kajabi because you save on so many monthly subscriptions if you're just using the one platform. Kajabi literally gives you everything. It gives you your website. It gives you your product hosting. It gives you your checkout so you can collect payments, make money out of selling your products. It gives you the ability to build sales pages, opt-in pages, build your email list, send out emails to your email list. All of that stuff is in the one platform.

 

Customer support

I also think their customer support is very much unrivalled. A lot of the online software companies have really average customer support. Kajabi has live chat, so if you have a problem, they will sort it out for you pretty much instantly and they have really good tutorials. All of their clients and customers are people with digital product businesses, and they have created tutorial videos on basically everything you could need to do in Kajabi. It's a super clean, easy to use, robust, scalable platform. I think the fact that it's robust and scalable, that's really important.

 

Scalable all-in-one

I talk a lot about how when I first started my business, I chose a lot of the apps and software based on what was the cheapest because I was on such a tight budget. Then as my business started to scale, I had a bit of a like, “Oh, crap, I need to now look for software that's going to scale with my business.” If I just been using Kajabi from the start, then that would have been a lot more scalable than having to move things. A lot of the industry leaders in the online space, the digital product space, are starting to use Kajabi. You look at people like Amy Porterfield, James Wedmore, Brendan Burchard, Jim Forton, they all use Kajabi. They all have thousands and thousands of customers, so if it's scalable enough for them, it's scalable enough for me. It's probably scalable enough for you as well.

One of the biggest things is people do choose based on what is the cheapest option. I do get that budget is a consideration when you're starting out, but I really want you to consider am I setting my business up to scale? Because once you start to scale, it becomes really painful to migrate things across different platforms. You have to move your customers. You have to move your video recordings, your lessons, your sales pages, your checkouts. All of that leads to a lot of customer support issues, broken links, tech nightmares. If you have people who are on subscription payments, so payment plans or on a membership, migrating subscriptions is very painful. I know a lot of people who've migrated subscription-based businesses across platforms and they've had things like old customers being billed for subscriptions that they cancelled months ago, and new customers not being billed and all of that kind of stuff. If you want to avoid that kind of headache, I highly recommend you start as you intend to go on.

Having said all of this, okay, there are other platforms that provide a similar all-in-one solution that are all very similarly priced. The only one that I would not recommend is self-hosting on your own WordPress site. It's a lot more custom, which in theory sounds really good because you can make it look really fancy, but that also means that it's going to take a lot longer for you to set it up, design it, all of that stuff. The thing with WordPress is there is so much more potential for things to go wrong. It's not uncommon for WordPress sites to get hacked. It's not uncommon for updates to different plugins to break things and then your members, or your students, can't access anything. It's not uncommon for there to be issues with subscription payments and payment plans.

If you are hosting all of this on your existing website as well, it can slow your website down because when people are watching videos that are hosted on your website, that is chewing up your website bandwidth. It slows your website down and then a slow website is looked at unfavourably by Google, which means that your website ranks lower in a Google search, which means you get less organic traffic to your website. I wouldn't recommend doing that anyway.

 

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