In this video, I'm going to share with you five digital product mistakes to avoid. And let me tell you, I wish I had this list when I first started selling digital products because I had to learn these five mistakes the hard way. So, in order to avoid losing money to these mistakes or getting sued or having your customers mad at you, watch this video in full because, like I said, I really wish I had this video before I started.
So, let's dive in. All right. The first digital product mistake to avoid is don't do lifetime pricing.
Oo, I wish I knew this. I wish I knew this when I first started. So, first of all, what is lifetime pricing?
Well, when I first started selling digital products in 2014, lifetime pricing was huge. Most of the people on the scene were selling courses for a one-off price or a payment plan somewhere around $9. 97 or $1,997.
And once you paid that, or even if you did a payment plan, once you had it paid, they said that you got, you know, XYZ and you had lifetime access to this course or program. Well, I was seeing everyone else do this, so I thought this must be the way to do it. So every single course, program, everything I made, I was like, I'm going to give people lifetime access.
But actually, after closing that business, after six years to move on to teach what I teach now, I learned this lesson the hard way. When you go to retire a program or close a business or whatever it is, people do not like that you said that they got lifetime access and now they are no longer getting that because it really comes down to what the heck is lifetime access? Is it their lifetime?
Is it that they get access until they die? Or they get access until I die? What does lifetime mean?
Well, for me, I always thought lifetime access meant you have access for the lifetime of the program. But when I went to retire a couple products, people were super super mad about it. And I even put the entire product in a zip folder and sent it to all the purchasers and people were still mad about it because there were things included in that program like coaching calls or a group or something like that which are no longer going to be running once the product is retired.
So this is advice that I wish that I would have received a long time ago before I started. Do not do lifetime access for your digital products. Now, one way you can get around this, which I'm going to share a second way that I would recommend more, but the first way that I would recommend getting around this is don't call it lifetime.
Call it something else like unlimited access. And be really, really clear in your sales page, your checkout page, like everywhere that you talk about the product that they are going to have access while the product is active. And you can decide, you know, when to retire that product, right?
The other thing is that if you want to do like a one-off price, make it something that they can download instantly to their own computer. Don't include like Q&A calls or a community or something like that for a oneoff price. For example, if you're going to sell a course or an ebook or a workshop, you can make it a one-off price if you want to, say $97 or $1.
97 or $9. 97 or whatever it is, but make it so that they can download it to their computer so they can have access for life, right? Make it so that they buy the thing, they download it, that's the thing that they get, right?
So again, you're not including ongoing Q&A calls or an ongoing community or something like that. What you want to do is reserve that kind of stuff for a membership. A membership has recurring pricing.
And this is by far my favorite model. My entire business is around recurring income and memberships. Now, I think it's great to start out by selling a workshop for a one-off price or an ebook for a one-off price.
That's super easy because people pay for it, they download it, done, right? But once you've done that and you've made sales, if you want to go to a bigger program, I would recommend a membership for this exact reason. People are paying monthly and yearly.
And they get access to said thing until they decide to cancel or until we decide to retire the program. And it's super easy because it's like they pay for the month, they get access for a month, they pay for the year, they get access for the year, right? It's all very black and white and there isn't room for people to sort of think what lifetime is at their own discrepancy.
Right? Okay. The next digital product mistake that I see a lot is pricing too high.
Now, when you first go to launch a digital product, I actually recommend you start the price out pretty low. Now, how to price is going to depend on the result you're getting them from the digital product. And I go into way more detail into how to figure this out in my membership.
But let's just say you're going to sell an ebook. Now, I don't know what it is you're teaching or what the result is, but let's just say that in your head you're like, "This is worth like $197, right? That's great.
But then start it out at like 47 and then once you get, you know, x amount of sales, tell yourself, I don't know, once you get 20 sales, then you can raise the price. Once you get another 50 sales, you can raise the price. " This is going to help you to ensure that it's going to sell.
Because if you put the price too high and you get a few buyers and then you have to lower it, those buyers are not going to be happy. So, it's a lot smarter to start something lower and raise it over time. Kind of like my membership freedom creator club.
When I first launched it, it was $49 a month and now it's $59 a month and I have plans next year to raise it significantly. So, if you aren't in yet, check it out and join because it's never going to be this low again. But that's the best way to do it.
And also, when it comes to memberships, it's really great to raise your price over time because then the people that have locked in lower rates are more incentivized to stick and stay at those lower rates because they know that if they cancel and rejoin, they're going to have to pay the higher rate. And if you want to find your exact digital product that you should create that will actually sell and how to price it and how to actually sell it for consistent passive income, then I would love to invite you to snag your seat to my free ondemand workshop. It is the first link in the description below this video and in the pinned comment as well.
Okay, the third digital product mistake and honestly I think this is the biggest one out of all of them. Like if you take just one thing away from this video, please let it be this. Okay, most people they make a huge mistake where they decide to create their digital product before they've sold it.
Okay, now hear me out. Think of this like a Kickstarter campaign, right? business has an idea for, let's just say, a mug that keeps itself warm, right?
But they're not going to go and make thousands of these mugs. They don't even know how many to make until they know how many people are interested. So, a lot of people will do a Kickstarter campaign where people will pay for the thing even though they know they're not going to get it for like a month or two months or six months or whatever that is.
And then the company can go, "Oh, we sold this many. Now we know how much product to order. " So, it's the same thing with digital products, only you don't need to pay for product or overseas shipping, taxes, tariffs, none of that, which is why I love digital products so much.
But, it's still smart to do this. So, what you want to do, let's say you're new, you've never sold digital products before. I would highly recommend that you sell a workshop.
So, what you're going to do is create a checkup page, put the title of the workshop, what's going to be included, and the price of the workshop, and the date and time that the workshop is taking place. So those who can attend live can attend live, but whether they can attend live or not, they're still going to get the recording of the workshop as well. And then once you're done, you can continue to sell the recording.
But the cool thing is you're going to get paid upfront. Like let's just say it is, I don't know, June 1st, okay? And you are going to pre-sell tickets to this workshop starting on June 10th.
You can give people June 1, 2, and three to buy the tickets. And then you can say, "And this workshop is happening on June 10th at this time. " Right?
That way you are pre-elling. You haven't even made the workshop yet, which the workshop's going to be live. And this is when I get a lot of people like, "You can't sell something that doesn't exist yet.
" Uh, yes, you can. How many workshops have you taken? Like for me, for example, with pottery, they haven't already done the teaching before I show up for the class.
That literally doesn't even make any sense. So, you know, get off your high freaking horse and come down to reality. This is just the same as a workshop in person.
It's just online. But the cool thing is that you're selling the tickets ahead of time. So, you're going to validate and not only know that people might pay for this, but that they for sure would because they're actually paying with real money and then getting the workshop at the time that you have specified.
Now, worst case scenario, you sell no tickets and you are out nothing because you didn't waste a bunch of time creating your digital product first. Best case scenario, a bunch of people buy ahead of time and you get paid ahead of time to deliver the workshop, which is really going to motivate you also, you can't really back out because you just got paid to host this workshop, which I feel like is perfect, especially if you're a procrastinator. So, this is the absolute best way to do it.
Please, please, please don't waste a month or 10 months or a year building out this perfect digital product that you don't even have solid paying proof that people are going to buy yet. Because how disappointed would you be if you spent a month or 6 months or a year building out a digital product, then nobody bought it. Okay, please take my advice on this and pre-ell your digital product before you create it.
Okay, the next one kind of goes with the one I just talked about, but okay, don't do this one either. And this one is overbuilding the first version of your digital product. So for example, let's say you want to sell a course or a workshop or a membership.
I see too many people invest in like hiring a cameraman or like writing out these perfect scripts or like paying to have a professional camera crew record them or making sure that their product is like perfect before they ever release it. Okay, now let's take my membership freedom creator club for example. The first time I launched this, I had just made some click- by-click tutorials in Loom, threw them up in the membership, made a community.
I do offer weekly Q&A calls in there as well. So, I had like other things going, right? And then I built out the membership better and better over time.
So, I started with just like one module, then I added a second, a third, a fourth, then I had it all built out, but I thought this could be a lot better. So then this year I actually went back in and redid all the modules with professional camera setting like this with professional editing with written out scripts with a lot of surveys and feedback from the students. But a I couldn't do that from the beginning because I didn't have all the feedback and surveys from the students and I wasn't this good at recording back then.
But also I'm really glad I did it this way because I didn't waste a bunch of time up front trying to be perfect from day one. I would have never got my membership off the ground in the first place. And also, I would have ended up changing the membership anyways because as you get more students, you see what they struggle with, what they don't understand, and you might want to go in and tweak your product.
But if you spend a bunch of money and make it perfect from day one, you're not going to want to go in and do that. So, please, please, please don't overbuild and overthink and try to make this perfect day one product. It's just not going to happen.
Like, every single product out there starts with a 1. 0 iteration. So just get that done and you can make your product better and better over time.
Okay, this is another really really big one. Like apparently I have a lot of these. So if you want me to make another video like this, let me know.
But this digital product mistake is focusing on selling the features and not the outcome of the digital product. So I see this all the time where people are like, "No, you guys don't understand how cool this course is. It comes with like a gamified software, blah blah blah, and it comes with a weekly Q&A call.
And it comes with five downloadable worksheets and 30 hours of content. Dude, it's so cool. Like, first of all, nobody wants 30 hours of content.
Nobody wants 10 worksheets. Nobody wants those things. Okay, what do they want?
They want the result. They want the result. So, I actually recently saw this course that was teaching YouTube and they were like, "You get 30 hours of content.
" And I'm like, "Dude, they don't want 30 hours of content. They want a successful YouTube channel. " So, you need to sell them the future of what they're actually going to achieve with your digital product and not the actual features.
Like, sure, those can be listed out in your check out page or on your sales page, but go take a look at my sales page, freedomcreator. co/club. Okay?
Nowhere on there does it say like 30 hours of educational materials, 17 downloads, 13 scripts. Like nowhere on there does it say that. Instead, it says the Freedom Creator Club program so you can achieve XYZ.
And then it says weekly Q&A calls so you can get your questions answered. You know, a community of like-minded students so you have people to network with and blah blah blah blah blah. Like yes, I'm talking about certain things it comes with, but I'm not talking about like the hours of education or the actual like tangible software things.
I'm talking about the outcomes of what they're going to get like the Freedom Creator Club program so that you can create consistent passive income. That is so much better than the Freedom Creator Club program so you have 30 hours of content. Like nobody wants to watch 30 hours of content.
They want to get the result. In fact, let me know in the comments. comment 30 hours or result.
Which one would you rather get? Not only that, but it sounds like a lot of work. Like I don't have 30 hours to watch 30 hours of content.
And by the way, the more content does not mean that it's going to sell better. People want to get the result in as little time as possible. So you want to really highlight that and not how much work this is going to be for the person.
Highlight how simple and easy it is and the result that they're going to get. Does that make sense? Good.
Now that you've learned all of these mistakes to avoid, which is really, really important, you might be wanting to know exactly what to do step by step to create and sell your own digital product. But how do you do that? Well, I have my very own membership called freedomcreator club.
You can check it out at freedomcreator. co/club. That's freedomcreator.
co/club. You can get started for just $59 a month. This is a membership which inside is a program that is going to take you step by step to help you build your own YouTube following.
Find what digital product that you should create and sell. How you can use your YouTube audience to make sales with your digital product for consistent passive income. It also comes with a community of like-minded students who are very active.
We have over 85% activity in our school group. We also use school to host our community, not Facebook. And it also comes with a weekly Q&A call with myself and team Freedom Creator to get all of your questions answered.
So go ahead, check that out now. We would love to have you in Freedom Creator Club with us. And now that you know these mistakes to avoid, you are already ahead of me when I first started.
So give yourself a round of applause. And hey, I've made all these mistakes and I've still built $2 million plus digital products business. So don't worry, making mistakes is just part of the game.
But hopefully I can save you some time and money by avoiding these mistakes. And if you want to avoid more mistakes, you might be wanting to know what five digital products don't sell anymore. But how can you do that?
Well, it all starts with watching this video next here. Because when you pair what you just learned with what's in this video, it's going to be way more powerful. See you in the next video.
