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We’re going to talk about making money with digital products. Now what are digital products? That’s your eBooks. That’s your audio books. That’s your online courses. That’s your videos. It’s a whole lot of stuff.
I’m going to explain some stuff to you guys that is going to be really, really different. People want to know how can I get a digital product. How can I put out an eBook? A lot of people want that information, but it’s not really the stuff you need.
Let’s start at the beginning about how to get into digital products. Let’s take my first digital product which was an eBook. It was a PDF. Now when I did that, I knew something that many of you just don’t know or don’t want to appreciate. I knew that I had to get traffic. This is the key to selling all digital products. You need to get traffic.
It’s not about the eBook. It’s not about the course. It’s about the traffic. That’s what you need to get to sell digital products online.
Let’s really talk about how I got traffic. YouTube is how I get traffic. I have to do things to keep you watching. If I get enough traffic, I’m going to get sales. Traffic and sales are proportional. There is a correlation.
Part of the science of getting traffic is understanding what your targeted audience wants. Let’s talk about my book, Making Money A to Z with Self Storage Unit Auctions which is still on Amazon today. I knew once I got enough traffic that people would buy this book. I didn’t know all of those storage auction TV shows were about to come out.
I wondered if I should put the book in a traffic stream that was already developed. There are certain niches that never go away such as How to Lose Weight, How to Make Money, How to Get a Boyfriend. They never go away because people always have these problems. Those niches already have traffic built in, but you have to tap into it with the right type of copy and products. That traffic exists. It’s already there.
What I did was I created my market and I created my traffic. At the time, I didn’t really understand that what I was doing was pretty hard. I was so excited about writing my book. I just put my head down and went to work. There was a lot of stuff I did that did not work. I just kept going. I was woefully ignorant about traffic and what it took to develop traffic.
Let me tell you something I learned from a blog, Into the Gloss. It’s about makeup. Emily West created this blog. She got it up to 400,000, 500,000, 600,000 unique hits per month. She built this blog from scratch. Eventually, she got it up to 1.2 million hits and then she went to this venture capitalist. This lady wrote her a check for a million dollars.
I’m telling you that, because if you can get enough traffic before you have a product, people will buy in. Getting traffic like that is hard. If your blog is popping 250,000 unique hits per month, you can make about $80K to $150K per year. That’s just with a blog.
Now if you’re getting 500,000 hits a month with a direct sales channel, you could literally make $2 or $3 million per month. If you can do that, you’re printing money.
Before you create any digital product, you need to get traffic. You need to know who is going to be interested in this product and why would they buy it. How much would they pay for it? Once you know the answers to these questions, then you can get ready.
What happens is you have these people with stars in their eyes and they’re going into the wilderness of the internet. I rarely participate in online course developer groups because they all miss this point. If you’ve got enough traffic, you can sell toilet paper. If you have enough traffic, you can sell marbles.
So many people spend so much time and effort developing these wonderful courses. Then they put them up and nobody buys. It’s because they haven’t developed their traffic sources.
I’ve beat you over the head with this for a reason. Whatever you want to sell, you need to develop traffic.
Essentially, it doesn’t matter what your product is if you can get traffic. That’s what many folks don’t tell you. You’ll see people sweating out details of a book or a course. It doesn’t really matter. I know from experience. I made $62K in 11 months from my first book and it was a shitty product. It had typos and all kinds of stuff.
Why? Because I got traffic. I probably would have done much better if I had gotten more traffic. If I had used an editor, I probably would have made $120K. The point is, you need to work on the traffic first.
Let’s talk about Into the Gloss again. She took two or three years to build her traffic. Now, I want you to think about that. She created a product after her traffic was built. I want you to understand me, I built my traffic and my product concurrently. I can tell you that creating a product before you create the traffic is always going to leave you somewhat disappointed.
Let’s get into the whole digital product thing. It’s about trust. Trust is a rare commodity online and anywhere.
A lot of people just want to slap a product up and then buy traffic. Here’s another thing about paid traffic. All the paid traffic in the world is not going to make a lousy offer convert.
What’s your offer? It’s your presentation. It’s your cover. It’s your opening lines. It’s so many things. You have to be real. You have to be transparent. You have to continue to put out content on the subject.
In many ways, paid traffic is better than organic traffic. Paid traffic forces you to get your stuff together. It forces you to make certain decisions. I anticipate that in 10 years, everybody is going to have to pay for traffic. That’s just my opinion, but I think that is where we’re heading.
A lot of people don’t want to spend time creating traffic first. But you need to, because it’s going to take you a while to get your footing. This is “hands down” the most important lesson you need to learn about making money online. If you can get traffic, whether you have a product or not, you can get paid.
That’s why people go to eBay and Amazon. It’s because the traffic is already there for certain products. It’s not there for all products. But if you develop that traffic on a product that doesn’t have any traffic, that’s all yours. I’m here to tell you, that could be life-changing money.
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