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If you haven’t seen the post before this, I highly recommend heading to this episode where I review week one of building a digital course in just 30 days. It goes over why I’m building it in 30 days, what I’m building, and the background details that are important to know about this journey.
This week, I’ve been working on the next two parts of my process. Last week I mentioned that when it comes to creating a successful digital products, like a course or membership, I have a four part process:
The offer, the product, the sales system, and long term success.
Last week I worked on my offer, I tested it out, and I’ve gained really great insight from that process. This week I’ve been working on the product and my sales system.
Determine your product
The product is how you package your offer — and remember, the offer is the result that you are selling — the product is how you are packaging up that result so that you can get your students that result once they join your course or membership.
The product can be packaged as a course or as a membership. It includes exactly what you’re going to teach to get your students the results of your offer, the length of your program, and the type of support that you are going to offer to your students.
I’ve been thinking through all of these things over the past week, and I’ve also been starting to work on our sales system, which is the funnel (or the steps) that we are going to take a potential customer through to convert them into a sale. This is really important, because absolutely no one is going to buy your digital course or membership the first time they land on a sales page!
Create a sales system that is profitable
As much as we all wish that we could create an amazing product, put it out on the internet and then have the sales come flooding in — that just isn’t how it works.
This is why we have to create a sales system — also known as a sales funnel or even a sales pipeline — we have to get people to go from learning about what you offer, then nurturing them to get them excited about purchasing, and then converting them into a purchase.
The sales system you choose will determine whether or not your product sells and if it is profitable. If you remember from a previous episode, profit is what you actually get to keep, and then what you get to spend yourself. Profit is how much goes into your bank account after all of your expenses are paid. The reality for a lot of digital course and membership creators is either making no sales, because you have a super small audience and you’re only trying to sell to your warm audience, like your followers and your email subscribers. Or you’re spending a ton of money, you’re getting sales, but your product and your business are not profitable.
In 2020, we did almost the exact same sales in revenue as 2019 for our business, but we almost tripled our profitability. So that’s why I don’t care at all about the big giant sales numbers, and people who take screenshots of their stripe account, because that is not the entire story.
That’s why what I teach in Powered by Passive Academy is so different; part of what I was working on, was pricing your product for profitability. A lot of times, we choose a number because it feels good, or we see other people in the industry pricing their similar offer at this price. So we think, ‘Well, they seem successful, so this price must work!’
But that’s not always the case — you can’t see behind the scenes for that business and it may not be profitable at all. That’s why in Powered by Passive Academy, I’m going to teach you how to price your product for profitability; we want a minimum 50% profit from our programs.
I think this is so important to know because so many people get wrapped up in these big sales numbers. Instead, you need to be focusing on how much you actually make in profit.
Finalize details and start working on content
Over the last week, I’ve been finalizing the details of my brand new product, the Powered by Passive Academy course, and what’s going to go into it — like how long it’s going to be, what we’re going to include for the content, outlining the content as well as creating it at the same time, the type of support that we’re going to offer to our students — I’ve been figuring out and finalizing all of that.
I’ve also been working on the content of the program. I don’t recommend doing this until you’ve actually sold your product, but for me, we already have pre-sold this to some people. I’m also going on maternity leave pretty soon and I want to have all this content ready so it’s available to our students immediately when they join. I’ve been working on that content and other details like how to price your product for profitability (because that’s what matters!), whether or not to offer a money back guarantee, the payment structure, what to do about failed payments, and what our goals are for our first launch.
I’ve also started working on the content for my sales system and working through our email and sales page copy. For all of our other programs I have written the majority of our copy. I think writing copy is what sometimes stops people from completing their digital course or membership, because when you initially launch a new product, there is a lot of copy that you have to write; you have to build webinars or freebies, you have to write emails, and you have to build out a sales page…and a lot of that has to do with copy.
But the great thing is, once you write it once, if it works, then you never have to write it again. That’s the beauty of this thing and what’s so great about digital products: once you create it, once it sells, then all you have to do is tell more people about it, and then you’ll get more sales. It’s not much more work.
But you have to do the work upfront. You have to put in the time to write your emails and build your sales page. So over the past week, I’ve been working through all of that. For this specific product, we have brought in a copywriter to help me with the initial bones of our emails and sales page because we’re trying to do this in 30 days, so I’ve been reviewing what they put together.
What to expect from Powered by Passive Academy
In this 30 day experiment, I’m going through the exact process that I teach in the course, but I’m also creating the content for it at the same time. So it is a lot, but every time I create new content for it, I’m getting more and more excited to share this with you and the world.
I really do think that what we’re going to be teaching in Powered by Passive Academy is completely different from what other people are teaching. We are focused on making sure people actually want what you’re going to sell from the beginning — not just serving your 100 followers or 1000 email subscribers — and really understanding what the goals are for launching your product the first time, versus just having a goal of making tons of money.
And again, probably the biggest differentiator is I am all about profit and making decisions based on data.
I have my MBA, I went to business school, I am very much focused on running a very profitable business, and I want the same for you too. So that’s why I think this program is going to be so different, because we are focused on profitability and because I’m showing you how to launch and scale your digital product without having a big audience.
Next week we’re going to be meeting (because we made lots of changes based on the offer testing that I did last week), and really making sure that they’re seeing my voice and that they’re also following my process for creating email sequences, which again, I’ll be teaching inside Powered by Passive Academy.
This new course is going to answer so many of those questions that many of you have about creating a digital course or membership, and it’s also going to give you answers that are going to help you make more sales and be profitable doing it.
You can learn more about the Power by Passive Academy and what I’m working on creating here. If you have any questions about the process that I’m going through, or any questions about building your own digital course or membership, make sure to head on over to Instagram and send me a DM, or leave a comment on one of our videos. I love hearing from you!
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