Many freelancers dream of ultimately diversifying their revenue to include sales from products of their own.
Here you’ll learn how to bootstrap your own products while running your consulting business. We’ll also cover how you can productize your consulting, allowing you to sell and market your services like a product.
Whether through 4+ years of in-depth articles, premium courses, the conferences and events I host, or my podcast, my #1 goal is to help you become a more successful freelancer.
Last week, I described how a basic 5 day email course fueled by a Facebook ad campaign is my total marketing effort for selling my latest product, WordPress Conversion Funnel.
However, I realized I didn’t go too in-depth into how I’m actually structuring and writing email courses, or about the role they play in my business.
An email course is just an autoresponder, which is a series of emails that are sent out over a period of time.
It’s very, very, very hard to sell anything to someone who doesn’t know and trust you. Let’s say you write an ebook and you buy some cheap PPC ads that drive traffic to your sales page. Unless you have some sort of unicorn product, your conversion rate will be low — and you’re probably going to lose money. People who show up on your website:
When you see someone with thousands of newsletter subscribers, Twitter followers, or whatever other statistic often equates with success, it’s easy to get discouraged and give up on starting or launching a new product to help augment (or even replace) your freelancing income.
Why would anyone buy that book you’ve been writing if no one knows you?
How will you get any customers when you have no traffic?
You’re no expert or authority, why would anyone take your advice?
Today I want to talk about how just the other week I took a raw idea, built a product, and sold it to a handful of customers in less than 3 days.
I applied everything I’ve learned in selling hundreds of thousands of dollars in products over the last few years to build and market my new product — but in a way I was starting from scratch. I had to sell this product to a brand new audience that I had zero relationship with.
Disclaimer: Today’s post is all about how to build your first product. If you’re struggling to find clients or are barely managing to stay in business, I’d recommend working on that first. Here are a few good places to start:
…But if you’re ready to build that first product, read ahead. I’m not going to try to get you to build some sexy startup that will give you a one in a million shot of getting rich, but rather we’ll identify a few concrete steps you can take to build your first product or two, which you’ll treat as an annuity rather than a primary source of income.
This week, I launched my latest book: The Blueprint. And unlike my first book, I’m actually selling three versions of the product, at very different price points and each for a specific type of customer.
I first (consciously) came across this technique when Nathan Barry released his first book, The App Design Handbook. At first, I didn’t realize what a brilliant move providing tiered offerings was — both for the seller and the buyer — but I thought I’d share a bit about why I’m now completely sold on packaging ebooks.
