How To Create Digital Products That Sell Like Hotcakes

Welcome back to the list building lifestyle with your host Igor Kheifets. Before we get started with this episode, I wanted to give you a quick heads up that this intro was recorded using an artificial intelligence voice that was programmed to sound just like me. Why is that? Well, just because we like to keep things interesting around here. Don’t worry, though, the rest of the episode will be in my real voice. And I will be chatting with you about a crucial topic to every affiliate marketer at a certain stage in their business, which is switching from selling affiliate products to creating and selling your own products. Now, I know that for some of you, the thought of creating and selling your own products might seem a little daunting. After all, it’s a whole different ball game compared to just promoting other people’s products as an affiliate. But I promise it’s a game worth playing. Not only does owning your own products give you more control over your income, and the direction of your business, but it also allows you to create your own customer base and bond with them more and eventually be able to add value to your audience in a way that promoting other people’s products just can’t allow you to do. Plus, with the right strategy, you can create offers that practically sell themselves, freeing you up to focus on other areas of your business. So if you’re ready to take the leap and start creating your own digital products, this episode is for you. Let’s dive in.

01:13

I’m Igor Kheifets and this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process. This podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my bestselling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

01:58

Today, I want to chat with you guys about creating digital products or basically making money in the digital world. Now what I mean by that is a lot of you want to make money. But many of you, while you’ve been buying lots of products, haven’t been able to actually create them. So one of the things that is really, really critical is that none of you are thinking about creating your own products. And you’ve probably heard me speak about it quite a few times to stop selling other people’s products. Other people’s products are great, but you only get a portion of the money and you only get access to the cash do part of the cash but you never get access to the buyer, which is the big no for building a thriving business, you never get access to the buyer. And you’re also very limited because you don’t get any recurring income. Even if that income is coming from a recurring affiliate program. That’s still not really the real recurring income that we’re talking about. You see, the purpose of any sales funnel or any lead generation campaign is to get a customer. I mean, you make a sale shirt, but you’re really doing it to get a customer because it is 10 times harder to generate a new customer compared to selling something to an existing customer, it will be 10 times harder for me to go and make 10 sales with a list of people who don’t know me and never done business with me than it would be if I announced anything to you guys. Like I said, Hey, I got this thing that I’m selling for 97 bucks, and it’s going to help you solve this problem. I would probably have within this audience an easy 10 takers easy. I mean, that would be like on a very bad day with a very bad product. Because you guys know me, you guys like me, you trust me, there’s a relationship here. I know what makes you tick. So there’s something happening between us that makes us bond and you can do it with affiliate marketing. Now moving forward. The next level of this is to recognize that most people who are great at affiliate marketing are not the ones driving cold traffic. Now with a few exceptions. For example, my buddy Robbie Blanchard, he’s launched this program that’s out there right now called commission hero, right or John Crestani. Right, these guys, they’re able to make money driving cold traffic. But the thing is, they have to start over every day. Now for me, I was able to make well over $300,000 in last year promoting affiliate products, you know, sometimes promotions going all the way up to $200,000 in commissions over the course of the year because I’ve got a buyer list, and I’m able to create consistent cash flow as a result, but it wouldn’t be possible unless I had a tribe of people who want to do business with me. And that is really hard to create unless you have products of your own which is why I believed everybody regardless of whether you want to be an affiliate marketer or not everybody should create their own products eventually. Now how do you come up with enough good products a year to sell to your tribe? Well this is where it’s a double edged sword on one hand, you really don’t need all that too many products you’d be surprised but you are only one product away from making at least six figures with your business. Now the other thing is that even though you may want to have several products, okay, the important part is that you don’t need too many. For example, I launched what is known as the solo tycoon coaching program. This is a program where I’ve had three products. The first product was a $9.99 report on solo ads about how to make money selling solo ads. And then on the back end of that, I offered an extensive 12 month coaching program for $5,000, where I taught people how to do it where I would, you know, get intimate with them, I would help them and share my templates with them, show them how to write, copy how to create info products of their own to build a funnel with and so on, and so forth. So that program ended up making me $1.3 million in 13 months. And it was only made off this initial front end product for 999, that $5,000 coaching program. And I had one like super premium version for $15,000, which is all three units off where I would go on and I would build a funnel and a list for the client, which I regretted starting because it was just too much like doing that and doing the coaching and doing my solo business at the same time became very, very difficult as well as, of course, you know, having a family. But the moment I launched that coaching program, of course, my income skyrocketed. I went from making as little as 20k per month having my solo ad agency and some info products all the way to making 60 and 80. And some months, I think January 2013, I made $119,000 in profit. That was a really good month, it was exhausting because I was doing everything on my own. But it was a really good month as far as money. And that was one of the reasons why I was able to buy my parents and apartment on their own. So they don’t have to worry about bills anymore, which was a huge concern for them growing older and older and not being able to consistently make money, which I know many of you can refer to. So again, that’s why you really need to pay attention to the creation and marketing of info products. So when I’m telling you that you need your own products so you can get more with less time and effort. My goal is to set you up with a foundation that allows you to either make money with your own products or affiliate products. But where are you actually making money? Most people actually create a product first based on desire, whim or passion, right? So they don’t necessarily look at the market. They don’t look at the demand. They don’t look at where the money is going and what the people are wanting. They’re just saying, Okay, so I’m going to build this and they will come but that is one of the worst philosophies anyone can follow. You build it and they will come No, they won’t, they will not come it simply will not happen not in this market anyway. And not in not in this day and age. You see, you’re operating now in a very fragmented marketplace with fragmented attention with fragmented everything. And people mostly no longer take interest in general interest areas, they just want to know and focus on the things that they want. So we have to choose a niche market. And by doing so we eliminate the need for convincing. So one of the things that comes up a lot in the applications for the list building lifestyle club is people saying that they love the idea of helping other people, but they hate the idea of trying to convince or having to convince anyone to buy from them. Right. So you already understand what it feels like you’re trying to convince someone to buy a product which you either feel or know they need, but they neither feel nor know that they need. Therefore every attempt to sell it to them is very, very difficult. And so it becomes this fun idea of wanting to help other people and get paid for it. It takes it from that to a very not so fun idea of you having to become this manipulator, right trying to manipulate people into buying shit that you know, you know, they want but they don’t necessarily want to do both. So how do you actually do it? Now remember, we’re now talking about niche selection. However, a lot of what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be checking out information product sites, because this is the kind of information that will be available to us very, very quickly and will help us gauge everything else as well. Because if we can find out whether there is a quote unquote information publishing niche for that particular topic, we will also automatically be able to assume that there will be a service or a physical product niche for that market. So when I created my first product, I launched it on the Warrior Forum, it was called How To Get A Six Figure mindset in 30 days, and I sold two copies of that for 27 bucks. I was devastated. I worked for two months creating that product, which of course was a stupid idea because I never did any market research. So by the time I put it out there nobody wanted to buy it because Well nobody’s looking for it. But I wrote it by hand. It was an 80 page book and I put my heart and soul into it. I was crushed. So the second attempt, I tried to launch a Twitter course which was a PLR Private Label Rights product someone else created and I decided to launch it in the wave forum as a W so warrior special offer. I sold it for seven bucks with a partner whose name was Hitesh, and we didn’t sell a single copy. And the next attempt worked. What I’ve done is I watched this recording of a seminar by Ryan Deiss from Digital Marketer and Ryan Deiss was sharing a strategy about building his list and he was like literally showing a sales funnel on how to do it with gold coins. A different landing page example and stuff like that. And I took that information and I repurposed it as my own information. I gave credit to Ryan Deiss and to Avon pagan as well. And I just basically wrote a 13 page report, summing up what I learned. And then I just wrote a sales page, according to Dan Kennedy’s 12 Step sales letter formula, and I sold, I couldn’t believe it, I was selling for seven bucks. And anytime when there was wrong traffic, I was actually making sales. The next step for me was to raise my price, because I was figuring Oh, well, so they’re buying it at seven, maybe they will buy it at nine, and I did. I raise it to 997. And it kept on selling now. PLR stands for private label rights. This means someone else creates a product. And then they say, you can get the rights to sell this product. If you pay me like 10 bucks or 15 bucks or 50 bucks. So you just do it. And that’s it. You have full rights to the product, you can edit the product, you can call it anything you like, and you can just sell it. So if you don’t want to create that product yourself and you don’t want to hire a ghostwriter or stuff like that, you can just get a ready-made product for whatever niche that you want to sell into. So it’s only the third time that I created my product that has worked because I built it accidentally around the topic that people were willing to pay money for, which is the purpose of this entire market research exercise is to figure out where people are actually spending money rather than trying to basically create a product and then go figure out a way to sell. Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with lists building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files and traffic booklets. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.