How to build a successful digital product business: The 7 essential ingredients that will take you to $100K and beyond!

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Want to build a 6 figure digital product business? Want the secret sauce that will enable you to earn $100K+ from digital product sales? It really boils down to 7 essential ingredients. Here’s how to build a successful digital product business…

If you look around at 6 figure digital product business owners, you’ll often see super slick marketing, large teams, complex funnels, fancy webinars and an enormous ad budget.

It’s easy to conclude that without those things it’s impossible to build a successful digital product business.

But that’s simply not true.

And I am living proof.

I don’t have any of those things. And yet I have a 6 figure digital product business and over 3,000 happy students, members and customers (3219 to be exact!)

The truth is you don’t have to be a huge name, have a huge team or have a huge marketing budget to have a successful digital product business.

In fact, in my experience, success in the digital product space comes down to 7 key ingredients:

Listen to your audience
Solve a problem
Create truly great products
Build a product ladder
Double down on email marketing (The majority of your sales will come from your email list)
Get your pricing strategy right
Build an evergreen sales funnel

These are the key ingredients that got me to $100K and beyond.

And these ARE the key ingredients that can get you there too – without the need for a team, fancy webinars, or an enormous marketing budget!

Let’s look at those 7 ingredients in more detail…

Miniature trolley containing dollar bills, resting on a laptop.

How to build a successful digital product business: The 7 essential ingredients that will take you to $100K and beyond!

1. Listen to your audience

Way back in the mists of time, I studied Business and Management at university… and one of the first things I learned was the difference between successful businesses and unsuccessful businesses:

An unsuccessful business will create a product and then go out and try and find some people to buy it.

A successful business will find out what the people actually want and then make that!

And the same logic should be applied to creating a profitable digital product. Find out what digital product your people want – or better NEED – and then create that.

Which means the first step to building a successful digital product business is MARKET RESEARCH.

You will always be facing an uphill battle if you don’t do this crucial first step.

2. Solve a problem

People don’t buy digital products because they want a digital product. People buy digital products because they want to solve a problem. Or to put it another way, people don’t buy products, they buy RESULTS.

Here’s an example I give in my membership, Digital Product Success Academy

Shattered new parents do not want a course on sleep, they want a baby who sleeps through the night!
Wannabe runners don’t want a course on running, they want to finish their first 5K race!
Novice bakers don’t want a course on decorating cakes, they want to be able to wow their friends and family with their amazing bakes!

It’s a subtle, but important mindset shift.

3. Create truly great products

Once you know what your audience truly need you need to create a product that delivers what they need.

You need to create a product that solves your customer’s problem – a product that gives your customer the transformation or the result that they were hoping for when they bought your product.

And you need to create a product that delivers a great customer experience.

The better the product, the more you’ll build a positive buzz around your product, the more you’ll benefit from word-of-mouth sales, affiliate sales, positive reviews and testimonials… and the more likely those customers will be to buy your higher priced products in the future.

Which brings me neatly onto…

4. Build a product ladder

It’s very hard to build a successful digital product business if you only sell one product.

If you only sell one low-cost product, like an ebook, you need A LOT of sales every single month to make a decent income – which means you need a huge number new visitors to your website every single month.

But if you only sell one high ticket product, like a signature program, though you need far fewer sales to make a decent income, it’s really hard to sell ANY AT ALL because people just don’t trust you enough to part with that much money.

The solution? You need a product ladder!

A product ladder will square this circle.

You attract people initially with a low ticket product – designed to get them over the biggest hurdle, which is going from non-customer to customer.

Once someone has bought from you once, and assuming your product more than meets their expectations and gives them a significant ‘win’, they will be much more likely to trust you with a larger amount of money, and so go on to buy your higher priced products in the future.

READ MORE >>> Why you need a product ladder

5. Double down on email marketing

People rarely buy anything cold from an advert, from social media or from a link on your blog. Most digital product creators find that the vast majority of their sales come from their email list.

If you have tried to sell a digital product in the past and been unsuccessful, then most likely the problem was that you did not use email marketing effectively to sell your product.

Trying to sell a product via your website and/or social media alone is extremely unlikely to be successful.

The most successful way to sell a digital product is by first building a strong email list, then nurturing that list, then helping those on your list see they have a need for your product and then – finally – pitching your product.

That means, the more email subscribers you have on your email list and the better you nurture and warm up that list, the more digital product sales you will make.

So building a strong email list should be a HUGE priority if you want to sell lots of digital products and hit that $100K target.

6. Get your pricing strategy right

One of the most important decisions you will make when it comes to launching your digital products is THE PRICE!

Price your products too cheaply and your prospective buyers might assume it’s poor quality and not worth bothering with… But charge too much and nobody will buy it!

But pricing strategy is so much more than the price… Will you have a launch price? Will your product be available on evergreen? Or will you employ a cart open / cart closed strategy? And then there’s taxes, currencies, upsells, downsells, discount coupons and more!

Small black bag with red 'sale' tag, surrounded by red balloons with % symbols on them

7. Build an evergreen sales funnel

The final piece of the jigsaw is building an evergreen sales funnel. A sales funnel is a step-by-step process whereby you take a potential customer (or ‘lead’) through a series of steps from being unaware/unsure of you and your product to a point where they not only know about you and your product, but they also like and trust you… and realise they really need your product… and so buy it!

An evergreen sales funnel is a type of sales funnel that is automated and can be entered at any time. In other words, no matter when a person arrives in your sales funnel, they will be presented with the exact same offer and have the exact same amount of time to take advantage of the offer. Once the deadline has passed and the countdown timer hits zero, they will no longer be able to access the discount and they will only have the option to pay full price for your digital product. It’s like each new subscriber entering your sales funnel has their own personalized flash sale!

Want a shortcut?

Truth be told, there’s a lot that goes into building a successful digital product business and scaling to $100K and beyond… And the biggest reason why most bloggers and online business owners DON’T create and sell digital products is it just feels way too daunting, time-consuming and complicated.

But that simple fact – that most bloggers DON’T sell digital products gives those who DO a massive competitive advantage.

Right now the SEO+Ads model of blogging is getting more and more competitive… making it harder and harder to earn money that way. (And that’s before we even consider the effect of AI, crazy Google updates etc.) But far fewer people are selling digital products, making it much easier to succeed.

And it gets better, because the RPMs from digital products are MUCH HIGHER than the RPMs from ads… meaning you need MUCH LESS TRAFFIC to be successful!

If you want to take advantage of this opportunity (and be finally free from worrying about Google, AI etc.), but you’re feeling daunted by everything that goes into building a successful digital product business, then I have the perfect solution for you…

The Digital Product Success Academy!

DPSA will take you step-by-step along the entire journey of building a strong email list, market research, building truly great products, creating a product ladder, building evergreen sales funnels and getting your pricing strategy right.

The Digital Product Success Academy will also help you with all the other things you need to do to build a thriving digital product based business, such as:

Building high converting sales pages
Launching your products properly
Doing digital product specific SEO
Growing your own personal authority
Harnessing the power of customer advocacy
Attracting the right kind of traffic into the top of your funnels
Converting your traffic into red hot leads with high converting lead magnets and new subscriber nurture sequences

Basically, I’ve done all the hard work for you and come up with the perfect step-by-step plan to follow, so you can just follow my roadmap and focus on one thing at a time.

Plus, the DPSA has huge amounts of support, motivation and accountability BAKED IN and a supportive community of likeminded online business owners.

If this resonates with you and you’re ready to take your online business to the next level, click here to find out more!

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Personally, I would caution against that approach for 4 reasons:

1) The biggest issue is that you’re essentially building someone else’s platform rather than your own. Any traffic, engagement, or subscribers you get there primarily benefit Medium or Substack – not your blog. It’s much better in the long term to focus on driving traffic directly to your own website, where you have full control, can grow your email list and can monetize your content however you choose. I actually wrote a whole email about Substack recently that goes into this topic in more detail: https://productive-blogging.kit.com/posts/should-you-start-a-substack-my-honest-thoughts

2) On that subject of full control, it also worth pointing out that Medium and Substack are both third party tools – and therefore you are at the mercy of their whims and decisions – if they suddenly change direction, move the goalposts in some way or hike up their prices you have no control over that. That’s something I cover more in this blog post: https://climb-logic.live/never-build-your-business-on-rented-land/%3C/a%3E

3) There’s also the issue of duplicate content. If you post the same article on both your blog and another site, Google may struggle to determine which version to prioritise in search results. Even if you use canonical tags or slightly tweak the content, you may still find that your Substack or Medium post ranks, not your own website – not great if your long-term strategy it to drive traffic to your own website!

4) Finally, it can become a time drain. Maintaining multiple platforms means more formatting, more promotion and more audience management – time that could be better spent creating new content for your blog, improving SEO, building your email list or creating your own products.

Hope that helps!