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Make sure to check out week one and week two of my journey as I build a brand new digital course in just 30 days!
Since my last update, I’ve been working on putting together the content for my new digital course, Powered by Passive Academy.
I don’t recommend creating the content for your digital product before you sell it, but I’m doing this now because we’ve already pre-sold this product (and because I’m about to have a baby)! Creating the content for Powered by Passive Academy has made me realize that there are a lot of tiny little things that can make or break the success of a digital course or membership — and those things can determine whether or not your digital product ever takes off.
Those little things are everything from offering a payment plan, including a satisfaction guarantee, the length of your program, and the type of support that you will give your students.
These decisions shouldn’t be based on how you feel about them because these decisions can significantly impact your sales.
I’ve been thinking about all these little things and putting together the content for Powered by Passive Academy so that you know what you should do for your own digital product.
Everything that I’m going to be teaching in Powered by Passive Academy (and what I’m following to create my own product), is based on data.
I’ve tested whether or not having a satisfaction guarantee affects your sales; I’ve tested different program links to see what works and what doesn’t; I’ve tested different payment options to figure out what converts better — all of my recommendations inside Powered By passive Academy are based on real data. I’ve done all of the testing for you so you can avoid the mistakes that I’ve made in the past and get more sales and better results from your product from the very beginning.
Avoid these common mistakes
As I’ve been working on the Powered by Passive Academy launch, I’ve been thinking a lot about why most digital courses or memberships ‘fail’.
The first time I launched a product every mistake possible. I spent months coming up with the idea, perfecting the idea, creating all the content for the course; creating a free five-day challenge to get people excited about the program, writing all my sales emails, creating my sales pages; I spent months doing all of these things. I even invested over $2,000 in Facebook and Instagram ads for my first launch.
Guess how many people bought my course?
Two.
Two people. All that work, all those months thinking I was going to make thousands of dollars, I had two people buy my product.
But here’s the thing: if I had known what I know now about digital courses and memberships, that actually wasn’t a total failure.
When I first launched my signature course, Advisori Insiders Pro, I only had five people purchase. But at that point, I understood the data behind digital courses which made me realize that it wasn’t a failure at all. In fact, one of the reasons why I think most digital courses and memberships fail is because we don’t have the right mindset around what we should expect when we first launch our digital product. When you first launch a digital course or membership, it should not be about making money. That shouldn’t be your primary goal for your first launch.
What to focus on for your first launch
When you first launch your digital course or membership, there are four things you should be focused on:
1. Validating your offer: The only way to actually validate that people want what you’re selling and are willing to pay for it is by actually selling it. You don’t validate your offer by you surveying your Instagram followers; you validate your offer by getting people to buy it. The number one goal of your first launch is just to validate that people will pay for your product and they want what you are selling them.
2. Creating your content: After you’ve validated your offer, then you can start creating content. You need to know people are willing to pay for your product before you spend all the time and energy needed to put everything together.
3. Getting results for your students: After my very first launch when only two people joined, I was so embarrassed that I just refunded their money and stopped doing anything on that program.
But when I launched Advisori insiders Pro, I knew better. I understood the data behind digital courses and memberships. I had five people join but I was determined to get those five people amazing results. Getting those five people amazing results, not only validated my offer but also gave me testimonials to use for the future.
4. Gathering data: Now this is how you really create a six or seven-figure product.
You can start gathering the data you need from your very first launch. This data will identify areas that you can improve and it will also show you how to price your digital course or membership for profitability. Most digital course and membership creators aren’t looking at the data; they may appear successful, but we can’t see what’s actually happening behind the scenes. For example, if they’re making a profit, they might be selling a program that’s $500, but it’s costing them $450 to sell that $500 product.
That’s what’s really different about Powered by Passive Academy — it’s all based on data and making sure that your digital product is scalable and profitable.
Why you shouldn’t just launch to your current followers or subscribers
The number one goal when you launch a digital course or membership is to validate your offer — to make sure people actually want and need to buy what you’re selling.
But what happens when you launch a product and no one buys your offer?
If you’re not getting sales, it’s not necessarily because people don’t want what you’re selling — it’s because you’re not offering your digital course or membership to enough people.
A digital product has a lead-to-sale conversion rate of 1-3%. That means that only 1-3% of people who opt-in to your lead magnet (your free guide, free webinar, free challenge, etc.), only 1- 3% of those people will actually buy your product.
Most of us don’t have hundreds of thousands of followers and email subscribers to launch to — but we’re told to launch to our warm audience because those are the people who like, know, and trust us the most.
But here’s the problem: if you’re only putting your product in front of your Instagram followers, Facebook followers, Facebook group members, or your email list, you simply won’t have a big enough audience to make your digital course or membership successful.
On average, when you launch to your organic audience, you typically get about 2-5% of your followers to actually opt-in to your freebie. This number could be a lot higher if you have a highly engaged audience, or it could be a lot lower if the audience for your digital product is different than your current audience.
But even if your audience is the right audience for your digital product, you’re still only going to get about 2-5% to opt-in. For example, let’s say you have 1000 people in your warm audience (this would include your total number of followers, Facebook group members, email list subscribers, etc.). If only 2-5% of your audience signs up for your free offer, that means only 20-50 people are going to sign up. Then out of those 20-50 people, only 1-3% are actually going to buy. If you get 50 people to sign up, and you have a 3% conversion rate, the maximum number of sales you’re going to get is 1.5.
This is the problem: we’re taught to just launch to our existing audience. If we do that and hear crickets, it’s not because people don’t want what we have, it’s just that we don’t have a big enough audience to sell to.
Even if you do launch a product and you are able to sell it, the long-term problem is that when you go to sell again, your audience will not change very much. Your audience isn’t going to grow by thousands of people each month just by posting on Instagram. You don’t go from 1000 Instagram followers to 10,000 Instagram followers in 90 days. If you keep trying to sell to the same audience, you’re going to get fewer and fewer sales each time you launch your digital product.
Then the bigger problem, is that a lot of times what you create a digital product, it actually might not be for the audience you currently have.
I had this problem when I launched my now signature program, Advisori Insiders Pro, which is all about building a digital marketing business. At the time, I was selling Facebook and Instagram ad services to small and local businesses — which is a completely different audience from those who would benefit from purchasing my program. If I had tried to sell Advisori Insiders Pro to that audience, they would have been super confused and it wouldn’t have sold.
What to expect next week as we prepare for launch
As I’ve been working on our own launch for Powered by Passive Academy I’ve been thinking a lot about why courses and membership often fail; it really just comes down to not having the right goals going into launching a digital product and not having what is needed in order to be successful.
This past week I’ve been creating the content I’ll be teaching in Powered by Passive Academy, brain dumping ideas, and putting in all of the things that we’ve tested and done for our own programs (and my own clients) so that you can be successful with your own digital course or membership.
The next big thing that I’m starting to work on is our webinar and sales funnel. I’ll be sharing more about that in my next update! If you want to learn how to build your own successful digital course or membership, make sure you sign up for the waitlist so you can learn more about Powered by Passive Academy that is launching very soon!
If you have any questions or comments if you’d like to share with me, send me a message on Instagram or comment on one of my posts!
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