Q&A: How to come up with digital product ideas, creating content that sells and pre-selling your offers

Recently, I put a call out on Instagram, asking my audience to share their questions about launching and selling their online offers and I got some great questions in response! In today's episode, I'm sharing the answers to some of these questions about digital product ideas, creating content and pre-selling your offers.

– How answering some simple questions will help you to decide whether a high-ticket or low-ticket offer may best support your audience.
– Why understanding where your audience needs to be to buy your offer will help you to generate what content you need to share with them to bridge the Magician's Gap in the meantime.
– When paying guests to teach in your online program, it's important to be clear about what they're teaching and how long it's available for.
– The hidden realities behind launching a low-cost membership (and what low-cost / high-volume sales may mean for your business).
– How selling your course before you create it gives you the opportunity to take both imperfect action while still giving yourself a deadline if you decide to pursue it.
– Why directing your marketing to those who are making the buying decision is so important (especially if those completing the course (e.g. children) aren't the same people who are buying it).

 

 
Today I'm answering questions about how to come up with ideas for your digital product, where to start with a lower-ticket course or a higher-ticket service. Figuring out what somebody needs to know before they buy your offer so that you can share content around that and move them to the point where they're ready to buy, whether to be upfront about the pricing for higher ticket offers, how to pay guests to teach inside your courses and programs, launching a low-cost membership and pre-selling your offers when you are maybe not so inclined to create something on a tight deadline. 

So those are some of the questions that I'm going to be diving into today and let's kick it off with number one. 

 

Question #1: How can I come up with ideas for a digital product? I'm struggling to do so with my niche.

So regardless of what niche your business is in, here are a couple of questions that'll help you come up with ideas for a course, program or membership that you can add to diversify your income streams and start creating a little bit more freedom away from just delivering services.

So question number one, what problems can you solve for somebody? Number two, what frustrations can you ease for your ideal client? Number three, how can you improve someone's life? Even just a tiny little bit. Number four, what are your strengths? Number five, what comes easily to you but doesn't come easily to other people.

I think often we overlook just how these things come so easily to us, other people might not be able to do them quite as easily, but we assume that everybody else can. And then lastly, what is one small win that you could help somebody to achieve? These are all questions that will probably change. 

The answers to these will change over time. And a great question to check in with yourself regularly is what does my audience need right now? And what are my strengths right now? And this answer is going to change based on what's going on in their external world, as well as what's going on in their lives.

 

Question #2: Where do I start? Lower ticket costs or higher ticket service?

So when you're deciding what to sell next in your business, what offers to create next in your business always check in what is your priority right now and what is your vision for the longer term in your business. Because creating a lower ticket cost right now, that's not going to create a lot of cash flow. 

But once it is done, now you have the time you can focus on delivering your higher ticket service, for example, on the other hand, creating a higher ticket service, that will give you a good cashflow right now, but then you need to deliver that service, which is quite a time intensive and that might mean that you don't have as much time to spend actually building out this course, which I assume is in that longer-term vision for your business.

Also, think about what does your audience need first? So for example, let's say that they have a problem that needs solving before they'll be ready to work with you in that higher ticket service and maybe that lower ticket course solves that problem for them so that then when they finish it, the next obvious step for them is to come and work with you.

 

Question #3: What does someone need to know before they buy my offer or anyone's offer? 

So the big thing that somebody needs to know before they'll buy your offer is that it's possible for somebody like them, in their particular situation, to achieve the outcome that your offer promises to solve that problem that they are experiencing. And often this is going to be people who have tried other solutions. They've tried to solve this problem before and they have failed. So they're a little bit skeptical. They're doubtful. They're questioning whether it's possible for them. They might even be blaming themselves or just in the state where they think it's not actually possible for somebody like me to have this outcome. 

 

Question #4: With a big ticket offer, for example, a 12-week course, are you always upfront about the pricing?

Usually, yes. Usually, I will put the pricing on the sales page for my courses. If it is a higher ticket offer where they're going to be probably working with me in quite a close capacity, then the offer is usually going to be by application only. 

And in that case, I'll put a question around the budget, or I'll say, you know, this is an investment of X amount, is that in your budget? Yes or no. And that way I'm not wasting their time. They're not having to fill out this big long form or jump on a call before they know whether it's something they can actually afford.

And I'm not wasting my time by jumping on calls or reading applications from people who don't have the budget to sign up either. 

 

Question #5: How do you pay guests to teach in your online course? 

This one really depends on the context. So if they are teaching something that will be recorded and sold indefinitely as part of the core content of your course, then that is a conversation that I would have with them about what feels fair for them.

And I would make sure that there's some kind of written contract or agreement in place around how you can and can't use their content and whether they can use their content. What like what is that agreement going to look like for you and what is that fair price for them? Because you are essentially selling their IP in this case, their intellectual property.

If it's something where it's like a bonus masterclass that they're teaching live, maybe the replay is available for a little while, it might be something that they've pitched to me in that case, and they have complete freedom over what they actually teach. 

If somebody's pitched it to me, typically I won't pay them for this because, for them, they are getting exposure to quite a large audience of their ideal clients. They have an opportunity to pitch to them. They have complete freedom over the content. So they're probably not creating the content that they're teaching from scratch. So in that case, I would probably not, or otherwise we would negotiate something around an hourly rate depending on what they are teaching.

 

Question #6: I'd love some tips on launching a low-cost membership. 

So a couple of things to keep in mind when you are doing a low-cost membership or low-ticket membership, that means that you need quite a lot of volume to make a lot of sales.

If you want to build a six-figure membership, you need close to a thousand members and with that kind of volume comes quite a lot of customer support challenges. There are going to be people who forgot their passwords, people who want to cancel people who forgot to cancel and want to refund people who are, you know, they don't know where to find certain things in the membership. So there's going to be a lot of extra customer support involved in maintaining that. Retention is another challenge that comes up with most memberships. So it's one thing to grow the membership, but if you are getting 10 members in a month and then losing 10 members, you're actually not growing the membership. 

So you also need to work on how you are retaining those people, which means having a strategy in place for how do we win people back if they're about to cancel, how can we ensure that they're staying engaged if they're dropping off? All of that. There's a lot more that goes into running a membership than I think most people realise. And you still have to sell it even if it's a lower price point, you still need to have some kind of sales process to bring people into the membership. 

 

Question #7: The idea of having to rush creation or be tied to a specific timeline or deadline when I'm creating something new just breaks my brain. Do you have advice on how to do this in a calm and manageable way? 

So with anything in business, there's no real supposed to. It's not like there's just one way to do it. And that's the way you have to do it. Yes, pre-selling something before you've created it is one way to do it. It's the way that I love to do it because in the past I have invested months into creating offers that nobody has really wanted because I hadn't tested whether people would pay money for it. 

And also because I really like having a deadline. My little ADHD brain will put things off forever until I have that deadline to get something done. Otherwise, I will prioritise all of the other bright, shiny, fun objects over that.

There are other ways that you can do it though. 

So you don't have to sell this entire thing before you go and create the content for it. You could start creating it at the same time that you are launching it. So let's say that you are allowing 12 weeks to share launch content and lead-up time, and then you could create it at the same time. 

So you've got that 12-week deadline to create your course and this is what a lot of my launch magic students do. It is a little bit of extra work doing the whole launch at the same time as creating the offer. So when I say doing the launch, you are showing up and sharing that content. You're creating a sales page, you're creating a cart open emails, you might be creating a webinar to sell it. 

So you're doing all of that simultaneously at the same time that you are creating that course content, but you still have that deadline now. So you can't just keep stretching it out into next year, the year after, and then it becomes this thing that never gets finished or alternatively, you create a couple of weeks worth of content and you launch it with the first few weeks done and then you create the rest week by week. So you're always a few weeks ahead, so you don't have a really, really tight, urgent deadline, but you still have a deadline in place there. 

It's not so much with this whole process. It's not so much about rushing the creation as it is about giving it an end date. 

 

Question #8: My course is for high school and college students. But the parents are the buyers. Do you have any tips for marketing it? 

In this case, you want to look at who is making the buying decision, and in your question, it's the parents. So your free content, your lead magnet, your webinar, I would be directing all of this at the parents, not at the students. 

So in this case, think about what the parents need to know about your course to be ready to buy it for their kids and this is something where you need to uncover that magician's gap as it relates to the parents. What do they need to know about the course? What do they need to know about their kids? They need to understand that it's possible for their kids to achieve this outcome that your course delivers. 

And I can't tell you exactly what these things will be because I don't know your course, I don't understand the context and I'm not the expert in what you do, but you need to go out and do some audience research, talking to the parents and finding out what they need to know to be ready to buy for their kids. 

 

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