Bite-sized lessons in building an online business that feels good.
The Digital Product Kickstart Kit: Your guide to creating and launching a digital product that sells.
I help online entrepreneurs (like YOU!) launch and relaunch digital products and podcasts to reach more people, grow their audience and become the go-to geniuses in their industry
That is how you proactively get in front of other people, in front of more people rather than hoping that if you just keep putting content into social media, one day, Instagram's going to show your stuff to people.
Today I have one jam-packed blog for you because you all ask me questions in the survey that I recently sent out and I am answering them today. Well, I'm answering about 20 of them today, and I will do a few other Q and A sessions in the next couple of weeks, because I have hundreds of questions from all of you.
Let's jump into the questions and start with quite a nice, simple one.
I love this question. So I don't have super structured weeks. My Monday mornings are probably the most structured that I have. And every Monday morning I do payroll. I pay any invoices that need to be paid and I have a meeting with my ops manager, Jay.
That's my Monday mornings. The only other real structure that I have for my week is usually I have one or two Launch Magic calls per week, depending on whether we are in the teaching phase of Launch Magic, or if we are in between a Launch Magic semester, whatever you want to call them.
I also do three podcast episodes a week and three email newsletters a week. Usually the podcast episodes, I try to get recorded ahead of time. And the emails, I write them and send them a little bit more on the fly.
And then the actual work that I'm dealing with day to day depends on what kind of season we are in at the moment. So at the moment, right now, we are in a Launch Magic teaching season. So I'm a little bit quieter. I'm spending a bit more time on creating content and getting ahead of content. I'm about to head off to Europe for a month.
Then when I come back, we go back into a Launch Magic launch. So when we're in a launch, that's usually when I'm a little bit busier getting on top of some launch-specific content, focusing a bit more on audience growth, focusing a bit more on showing up.
But generally, my focus in the business is on content creation and marketing. So creating podcast episodes, writing, and sending emails. If I feel like it's showing up on social media, but I don't really do that much.
This is a great question. So how you do it is going to be specific on how you run your business in my business.
I will send two to three emails per week. I know that sounds like quite a lot and it's more than we have sent in the past, but I'm seeing the biggest ROI from email and I love sending emails. So I'm sending two to three emails per week to keep my audience engaged in between launches. I do podcasts three times a week.
I sometimes post on Instagram when I feel like it. I did have a copywriter writing Instagram captions, and they work consistently three times a week. But I just wasn't loving the whole flow of it and I actually wasn't noticing a great impact on engagement. I've actually found that my audience tends to be more engaged on Instagram when it's me writing.
And when it's less often, but higher quality when I do show up and the other thing that I found really helpful with keeping my audience engaged in between launches is surveying.
So sending out a survey to my list, which is where I got all of these questions I'm answering today, but it's also where I get a whole bunch of content ideas. So I can figure out what to share between those launches, and what content to share between those launches.
Well, the best way to reach people is to figure out where they are and how can we naturally get in front of them. Now, this is such a simple formula, right?
Find these people and get in front of them consistently. When I say, get in front of them, it needs to be proactive. It cannot be posting to social media and hoping that the algorithms will put you in front of the right people. That is a broken, outdated strategy.
So we need to be proactive and that means pitching podcasts that the right people listened to. It means trying to get media publicity. It means writing guest posts. It means teaching other people's courses and memberships.
That is how you proactively get in front of other people in front of more people rather than hoping that if you just keep putting content into social media, one day, Instagram's going to show your stuff to people. TikTok might be a bit of an exception with the way that the algorithm still works on TikTok but Instagram, that's outdated.
And this is why I created Boost Your Brand Superfans, which is my course to help you reach more of the right people and fill your audience with them. So that when you are launching or when you are selling your services or your products, you have the right people there to sell to.
Boost Your Brand Superfans is about how to grow that audience without just being at the whim of algorithms.
So now that Launch Magic is built, I spend maybe one to two hours per week teaching the course. So the course content is now all recorded and I have Jay, my ops manager who runs the Facebook group.
I'm spending this time doing the live Q and A sessions, which are one to two hours per week. The first couple of times that I taught Launch Magic, it did take a little bit longer the first time because I was creating the slides and I was teaching it live. So we had two, one-and-a-half-hour calls per week. So it was about three hours per week there plus the time to actually create the content.
Now the second time I taught it, it was a little bit easier because the slides were mostly done. I just needed to tweak it and again, it was just showing up for those live calls.
The third time it took the longest because I was prerecording all of the lessons. So after I had taught it live twice, I thought, okay, great. I'm confident enough in this course content. It's been helping people to get amazing results. Now I'm happy to record it and set it in stone.
So that one took a bit longer because I had to record each video, but notice how I didn't recall the videos until after I had taught it live twice. I knew people wanted it. I knew people would pay money for it. I knew people were getting results from the framework I was teaching.
Only then did I feel confident enough to go and invest time into recording it. So now that it's built one to two hours per week, it might be a bit more of a time investment upfront, but in the long term, it pays off.
I wish I had known that partnerships, collaborations, and media are really effective ways to grow your business, grow your brand, grow your authority very quickly.
I also wish I had known that it is so much easier to sell something that solves a very specific problem or delivers a very specific transformation and that if you can't articulate what problem you're solving or what transformation you are delivering, then your customers, or your ideal customers, aren't going to be able to join the dots either.
And this took me a lot longer to figure out than it should have and it's one of the very first things I like to teach my students is to articulate what problem we are solving because then you can tell your ideal customers about it and you can sell that. So yes, I wish I'd known that a lot earlier.
This comes back to what did they need from you. Do they need knowledge and are they happy just to take that information and go and work through it on their own? Or do they maybe need a bit more support and accountability along the way?
For example, Launch Magic, because it is 12 weeks, and because it is a launch, it is quite a major project in your business. I would never make that self-paced because you need that support from me. You need somebody to answer your questions and you need that accountability from each other in the Facebook group.
So having that set start and end time makes a lot of sense for Launch Magic, especially because all of my students tend to launch around the same time or they all have that date to work towards and that support of the group that's going through the same kind of mindset struggles, that makes a huge difference.
Whereas the podcast launch plan is another product of mine. That one is self-paced because I've found that some people want to launch their podcasts like yesterday and then all the people are like, oh, this is just something I'm going to chip away at over six months.
So giving them that flexibility to work through it at their own pace and also because fewer mindset struggles come up, they tend to be a bit more self-motivated to get their podcasts out there versus when you are launching a digital product, you can come up against a lot of things that feel really challenging.
I would say if I had limited time, completely limited time to run my business. I would start by focusing on my email list. I would spend my time building my email list. So setting up a lead magnet, which is an upfront time investment, but over the long run, it will save you time.
Setting up that lead magnet and connecting the dots with a nurture sequence, you can use a tool like HubSpot for that and then create evergreen content to promote that lead magnet.
Once I've built that email list, then I would focus on making offers to that email list consistently. We often build an email list and focus on sharing so much value. So you do need to sell to your email list at the same time, I also do share my content to my email list consistently.
That doesn't mean every single day. You don't have to share stuff every single day. That's not what consistency means. If you can only commit to one blog post every week or one podcast episode per week, as long as you stick to that cadence consistently, that's fine.
The second part of your question. How do you know what is a profit-moving activity when there aren't any profits yet? This is the risk to the business, right? And nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Unfortunately, if we were certain that certain activities would create profit, we'd all be doing them right. So, how do we determine that? Well, in my own business, we determine that based on past results. But if you don't have those past results, it's going to be an estimate or guesstimate at best.
And you're going to have to test and commit to a month or six weeks or 12 weeks, depending on the activity and testing and measuring and, and then coming back and say, okay, did that move the needle or did that not?
It needs to be something that you can commit to. You need to commit a decent chunk of time and how long you commit will depend on the activity, but you can't just do something for a week and say, oh, that didn't work because it's not what happens once. It's what happens consistently over time. It takes that time to build that momentum.
Now, how do I determine how much time to spend on what activities? So I tend to be biased toward spending more time on things that will provide long-term results. For example, I will spend more time building an online course than on recording Instagram reels. I will spend more time creating a podcast episode that I know is going to be relevant content for a very long time.
Then I would create an Instagram caption, for example. I would spend more time building and preparing for future launches than I would on trying to get clients right now.
So being more biased towards things that will pay off in the long term, I think has been one of the biggest reasons or one of the biggest drivers behind my own business's successes and that's where I would be focusing my time and energy if I were starting out again.
Obviously, you do need to spend some time on short-term activities because you do need to bring in some profit and some income straight away, but if you can make sure that most of your time is on long-term activities, I think you'd be setting yourself up for some really solid growth.
Great question. So for most of our businesses, we're not going to attract people at the stage where they are ready to buy, we are not a supermarket. It's going to take some time for them to know you, like you, and trust you enough to buy from you and this is something that I really dive into inside Boost your brand superfans.
How to share that content that grows your audience and nurtures them to be ready to buy from you because they're not going to be ready to buy from you the first time they land on what you do. There's going to be a fair bit of nurturing that has to happen first and we need to know what are these things that they need to understand before they will be ready to buy from us.
So looking at what they need to know to be ready to buy and what hesitations do I need to address? What do I need to answer for them? What questions do they currently have? What's holding them back from buying? These are all things that once you've attracted the right audience, this is what will get them to be ready to buy.
I do have a very small team, we're a little bite-sized team and honestly, we don't really do a lot. We are not a huge business. We're pretty streamlined and I'm really proud of this small team that I've built with very small overheads.
So to give you an idea of my team. So it's me, I work probably 30 to 40 hours a week. I don't do a huge number of hours. I've built a lifestyle business. Working every single hour of every single day then I have J, my ops manager who is a part-timer, and then I have a VA who is a contractor, and various other contractors.
And I invested my time into the long-term results. I invested time into creating a lead magnet. I invested time into setting up the systems and the technology and I bought the right software.
And I think because we've set it up right, It feels pretty streamlined. But at the same time, there's so much more we could be doing. There's always going to be more that we could be doing. But I think for me, the biggest mindset shift was, Hey, you don't have to do all of it and that's okay.
So I started marketing and growing my audience as a priority. That's like one of the very first things that I started doing in my business and while the results were really slow at the start, it has paid massive dividends now.
It's taken me four years to figure out where the best place to spend my time is. The best use of my time is these podcast episodes. It's writing emails to my subscribers and it's doing those two launches per year.
And in terms of offers, now nearly three years ago, I retired all of the courses that I had created, and I recreated everything from scratch. I created new offers and I'm still building that out. I don't think I have all of the offers I'm ever going to sell in this business.
But that also doesn't mean that it's going to take you four years to do this. That is why I have this podcast to help you to shortcut a lot of those things. That is why Launch Magic exists to help you shortcut the stress and the pain and all of the stuff that can come up when you're launching.
Very common question. Now, some people will tell you to give away your best content for free and I think that's often misinterpreted where people think it means to give your audience everything that they need for free. Give them snippets of your paid products. Give them your time for free.
But instead, how I think we need to be giving them what they need to know to be ready to buy from us, not what they need to know to solve the problem or achieve the transformation that you are delivering in your paid products or your paid services. So they are currently believing a bunch of myths that are currently making mistakes.
They currently have misconceptions about whatever the problem that you solve is, or whatever that transformation you deliver is so the content that you will be sharing with them for free is actually helping them to overcome those myths, those mistakes and those misconceptions, rather than helping them to achieve the transformation because as long as they believe those myths, those misconceptions and they're making those mistakes, they're not going to achieve those transformations or solve that problem.
So that's why I think myths, mistakes, and misconceptions are a great place to start with free content.
When you are working with somebody one-on-one or in a small group, I'm guessing you're probably taking them through some kind of step-by-step process to help them to solve the problem you're solving for them or achieve the transformation that they are achieving through that small group or that one-on-one with you.
Can you take that process and build some kind of framework around it? Obviously, you can't say, well, every single client is going to have the same problem. No. But what is the framework that's going to cover off on like 90% of the people who are going through what is going to help 90% of those people?
And is there a step-by-step process that you could take them through and package it up as a course? Or maybe if it's an ongoing thing, maybe it's a membership and then think about what else they need from me to achieve the best result? Is it more information in which case you might go a bit deeper into the content you're delivering them?
Is it support in which case maybe you do monthly calls with them or weekly calls with them in a group format or is it accountability? Maybe, in that case, there's a Facebook group where they can keep each other accountable. So figuring out the process that you're taking people through and then helping to package it up in a way that helps them to still get the best result possible.
Obviously, it's never going to be the same result that they could achieve if they were working with you one-on-one or even in a small group. Because the accountability that comes with that one-on-one is unrivaled. And, you know, I'm assuming that if they're working with you, one-on-one, it's going to be a fairly significant investment, which means that they have more skin in the game.
They are more motivated to achieve results but if we take into account the fact that they don't have that one-on-one accountability. We want to still be able to help them to get the best result possible.
Some pros of paid advertising, for me personally, it's been a great way to grow my business faster.
Also in kind of a lazy way in that I just switched the ads on and it grows my email list. I don't have to be showing up on social media. I don't really have to be doing much now. So that works really well and I can see the correlation directly between paid ads and an increase in followers, subscribers, and sales. So that is a huge pro.
In terms of cons, you are at the whim of Facebook or whatever platform you're using to run those paid ads. For me and my business, it took one product from ridiculously profitable to not even worth running ads for anymore.
And we also don't know what the future is going to hold for platforms like Facebook ads that rely so heavily on that third-party data. So we don't really want to rely on paid ads to build a business. We want to make sure that the business is still sustainable without paid ads and then paid ads are just like the cherry on top that makes everything.
If you can use those ads to build your email list, then that will protect you somewhat from any changes that we might see, or we are very likely to see. But if you are investing money into Facebook ads and you are on a very tight budget, then you run the risk. Unfortunately, investing in ads and launching something that people don't want.
So launch it to your existing audience first, if you can, and use ads more in that Launch to build your audience in the lead-up rather than to sell using those ads to build your list, your email list. Do that rather than running any kind of brand awareness ads and also spend some time learning how to run ads, learn about the different types of ads, learn how to set up the pixel, learn all of that stuff because that is the knowledge that will stand you in very good stand.
Even if you don't know or don't think you need ads right now, it's a good skill to have in your back pocket so that when you've got that extra marketing budget, you can start to invest in it.
It doesn't really matter what platform you are using to schedule your socials as long as it works with how you function, and how your brain works. We use Planoly, but to be honest, I don't really schedule anything in advance. I post on social media when I feel like posting and social isn't really a priority in my business anymore.
So we use Click-up, which is awesome. It's very reasonably priced. I think there's even a free tier. We use that in the team and it's awesome and then I work off my calendar. I have tried every planner. I have tried every single app.
The one thing that I keep coming back to is just my Google calendar. So that one's magic. Start using them from the start because the earlier you can get these systems into place, then the easier it becomes when you start growing your team and bringing other people on board.
This question came up quite a lot. So the earlier you get support to do the low-level tasks or the admin tasks or the stuff that you're not good at the faster, you will be able to grow because suddenly now you have so much more time to spend doing the stuff that is in your zone of genius.
You are the expert in whatever it is that you do. You're probably not an admin expert. That's great. So you can stop that early. You can get a VA just for a couple of hours a week. It's a low commitment. They're a contractor. They're not an employee. You're not locked into any number of hours.
And that can get you into the practice of starting to systemise things in your business and starting to delegate things early on because the longer you do things yourself, the harder it becomes to delegate them, take this from me.
It has been a process for me to start getting things off my plate and I know there have been times when my team has been frustrated because I'm holding on to tasks simply because I am the only one who has ever done them and it's just so hard for me to explain to somebody else how to do it. So the earlier you can bring somebody else in, the better.
In my team, nobody's full-time. I'm barely even full-time and I have one part-time employee and then contractors.
It was a slow process and it will be a slow process if you're not good at delegating like I was, and that's okay. But over time you start to systemise these things and you start to trust your team more and it becomes so much easier to let go of control. Once you understand how somebody works, once you understand what kind of instructions to give them, it becomes a lot easier to let go of that control.
So with software, I think a lot of the time when it seems really complicated, it's probably not the right tech for our needs. We are very fortunate now compared with like five years ago, there's so much more. That is so user-friendly.
And often we don't like to spend money on software because it's not as worthy as all of the other things we could spend money on. But we also don't realise just how much of a difference the right software can have on your business.
And then, how do you feel more competent about marketing? So there's a big misconception that you feel competent and then you do it. Unfortunately, that's backward. And if I was still waiting to feel confident to start a podcast, to launch my first course, to put myself out there to do anything, I would still be waiting.
So you don't build confidence by just sitting there waiting you build that confidence by doing, and the more you do it, the more confident you become. Start by taking those baby steps and it's going to feel scary but over time it does become a lot easier.
I don't think I'm particularly consistent. To be honest, I have a lot of structure, so I know each week, I have to do three podcast episodes. That's structure. Each week, two or three emails to my list and connecting back to why I am doing it. I am helping people. When I'm putting content out there, it's not just so that I can grow my business, it's also so that I can help all the people.
So remembering that every time I put a piece of content out there, it's helping somebody, that's helping at least one person. So then suddenly it becomes a lot easier to remain consistent.
Am I glad I started a business? Absolutely. As I'm recording this, I'm about to go away to Europe for three and a half weeks, which wouldn't really have been possible if I was in a full-time job.
Whereas now I can go to Europe. I can work while I'm there. I can take a bit of time off. I have a two-week rural off-the-grid hike planned. So, yeah, it's given me all of the freedom that I wanted and so much more than I would have had if I stayed in my corporate job.
Yes, it is possible, but it's a lot more work and it requires a much bigger audience to make the same size profit than if you are selling higher priced products. The only exception is if you can really get that lifetime value up. So the amount of the lifetime value is the amount of money that one person spends on your business.
So if you have five $50 products and on average, everyone buys three of those products. Then your lifetime value is $150. So that is one way to build a profitable business with those inexpensive products and courses. You need to get them to come back and buy from you over and over again.
But generally, I recommend to people with smaller audiences that they go for fewer products at higher prices and with those fewer products, you generally will have fewer people buying them, which means you can focus on delivering the best experience possible. Whether that's a course, or a group program.
However, you want to structure that. It means you can give people more attention and help them to get better result. It's a much easier, much more streamlined, low-stress way to grow then have lots of inexpensive products.
It is possible to grow, but generally when you are offering a service, the main way to grow is going to be scaling with a team and I chose not to do this. I used to offer marketing services and I realised that I actually didn't want to spend my day managing a huge team.
The other way you can scale is to put your prices up and you start working with people who are paying a higher price. You can keep the same number of clients and bring in a higher revenue that way, but otherwise, your main way to grow is going to be scaling with a team.
I would say start as early as possible. But when you have some kind of lead magnet or system in place for building your email list so that you are capturing people not just driving traffic to a website or to an Instagram post and they like your post or they click on your website, but then they just drop off, we would rather capture people so that we can keep marketing to them over and over again, rather than just driving traffic once.
I think the best form of market research and I've talked about this a lot in previous episodes, is launching it before you build it.
In episode 502, I interviewed Kirsty Fanton and she talked a little bit about customer research, go and listen to that episode that will help you with the market research part.
But yeah, I'm a big proponent of launching it before you build it because you can conduct the best market research in the world, but until somebody goes and spends that dollar on your product or have much your product costs, but, you know, until they go and spend that first dollar on you, you don't know if it's actually something people will pay for.
It worked really well for lifts list-building and it was profitable in 2020, but then post iOS 14 update, it doesn't really work anymore because ads got really expensive. It worked well in 2020 when ads were cheap and that's when tiny offers were all the rage. But now it's a little bit of an outdated strategy because you're going to be spending more to acquire a customer than you'll be making from the offer.
I mean, that's very generalised onset. I know you might still have a profitable, tiny offer and what would make that profitable would be a really good copy, really good social proof at a really good offer and then making sure that it converts well.
And once you know that it converts driving as much traffic as you can to it and it's probably going to have to be paid traffic unless you have a massive audience or a steady flow of traffic from some other source.
But if you don't have that kind of traffic-generating content and you don't have a big audience, then it's probably going to need to be paid ads.
So the biggest con is probably that you have to spend longer educating people because they likely don't know as much about what you are doing yet.
The other cons are that you can't rely on insights from what your competitors are doing. You can't look and see what's working for them and what's not working for them, which in some ways is actually a good thing because it forces you to be in your own lane because there's literally nobody else in your lane.
And it might be a little bit harder for you to get in front of the right people, find them and get in front of them because if there's nobody writing about this if there are no big recording podcasts about it, then you don't have anybody you can get in front of there.
Some of the pros, though you have no competitors like that, is a very unique place to be and that makes it really easy for you to stand out and it makes it really easy for you to position yourself as the go-to only person, the first person who was there.
I would personally navigate it pretty much the same as any other business, except I would really leverage that go-to authority and I would incorporate that in your messaging. Maybe talk to the media about it, to get some content around that, get some media around that.
Yes. So I think the biggest thing that minimises my daily input is the team. I have my team on top of quite a lot of things, a lot of the ongoing stuff. For example, in Launch Magic, we have a Facebook group. I am so bad with Facebook groups, I would forget that Facebook even existed if not for my team. So I have a team that goes in there. They look at the questions if there's a question they can't answer, they ask me and I answer that.
Where I would look out for you though, is I would say, where are you spending all your time? And you might need to use some time tracking tool to find out what your time is going, and then look at each of those things and think, okay, can we replace this? And do we need to replace it with a person or with a system or with a particular piece of software?
I have spent a lot of time putting the software into place so that my business can run essentially without me. My email list builds itself. I write and create all of my content, but if I'm taking time off, I write and create the content ahead of time and then schedule it. My products pretty much sell themselves now except for Launch Magic, which I only run twice a year.
And because that's a higher price product, I launched that twice per year and that's great. I struck to when those launches are going to be around, what else do I want to do in that yet?
The only service I offer is VIP days and I did this intentionally because I didn't want to have that ongoing commitment. I wanted to be able to take a month off in between Launch Magic rounds.
And it might be for you that maybe you do need to look at how your offerings are structured, how your services are structured and thinking about how you can more intentionally restructure those two. Build in that flexibility that you want to.
I did take a pretty big financial hit at the start. There were many months in 2018 that I was like, oh, I'm not going to be able to make my mortgage payment this month but somehow made it happen. So I did take a big financial hit. I let go of my clients one by one.
I let go of one client which I said, okay, great. This frees up four hours of my time this month, how can I spend that four hours in a way that is going to help me to move this online business forward? And then as I started to replace that income. I had built the confidence to let go of the next client and on and on and on. So it was a gradual transition more than I fired everyone and then pivoted completely and started from day one.
We think of the huge launch as this massive push, this massive hype-building thing. But the actual strategy behind the Launch isn't in the hype, it's in the content, it's in the audience growth. It's in nurturing them to the point where they're going to be ready to buy from you and this is applicable to many courses as well as it is for big courses. And yes, you can absolutely Launch many courses without doing a big launch without doing the 60 to 90 days of content.
If you already have an audience, if you are consistently sharing content with them and if they already know what they need to know to be ready to buy from you otherwise you do need to have that launch strategy for the second and subsequent times that you launch it, that becomes easier because now you've got this audience that is used to consistently hearing from you.
The launch strategy is not just about having that webinar and having that perfect content and the hype and everything. It's about getting people to the right place that they need to be, to be ready to buy from you.
Heads up … Creating your winning digital product needn’t be a series of unfortunate events. Skip the stress and scoop up your FREE step-by-step framework for creating your next digital product.
Wait, before you go, don’t forget to scoop up …
I help online entrepreneurs (like you!) to build a profitable online business that keeps growing even when they're offline.