How to Create a Sure-Fire Strategy before You Get Started
One thing to really take to heart is that everything you do is for your audience. If you aren’t studying your audience before you develop a product, you’re doing it wrong. It’s much easier to study the audience, give them what they want, and put it in front of them where they hang out, rather than to create a product and then try to find the audience. If you start with the audience, you’re going to be more successful.
Validate and Test Your Idea
The first step must be whether your idea is good for your audience or not. You can test this out by asking them. Develop a sales page for the product even though you have not created it first. Perfect the sales page, adding everything you want to include in this product based on your research into your audience and their pain points and problems.
In the sales page, describe how this digital product solves their problems. Remember to focus on benefits over features. This can be confusing, but think about describing how a feature benefits them instead of just naming the feature.
Start a Waiting List for Interested Parties
Once you have the sales page done, you can start a waiting list of interested parties. Promote the sales page so that people can sign up to be notified when the product is launched. You can even charge people first if you plan to create the product live soon. You don’t want to collect money too far in advance, though, as people might get upset. You will know if you have a lot of interest because people will sign up for the wait list – which by the way, adds them to your email list.
Add Value and Build Your Audience with Free Content
Start adding free content to your blog that educates, informs, and engages those who would be interested in that digital product. Consider hosting free webinars to build your list and add on to the waiting list too. In many ways, this is promotion before you have the product, but it will work wonders.
Know-How You Plan to Create the Digital Product
Do you plan to create the digital product “live” as you go, such as by delivering educational information via webinars, or a recorded course that can be delivered via a platform like Teachable.com? Do you plan to create it first and then deliver it in full via a platform you like? Are you going outsource any of the creation?
Know-How You Plan to Promote Your Digital Product
The other component you need to include in your strategy is how you plan to promote the digital product. In this strategy plan, you’re partially promoting via the waiting list and via the free content, but you’re also going to want to promote the digital product in other ways such as via social media ads, Google Ads, and more.
Create a Preliminary Trial Product
The first time you create the product, you’ll want to consider this first draft a trial product – whether you deliver it live to compile as a digital product that can be sold again later, or whether you create it first and then deliver it to the waiting list. Yes, you’ll earn money from selling it, but you can improve it for future buyers to make it even more perfect.
Get Feedback and Tweak
Once you deliver the trial product to your wait list audience, set up a survey to send to them to gather feedback. Feedback is important here because you’re going to want to tweak the product to perfect it based on the feedback you receive. This is going to make your product much more desirable to new buyers.
Now You Can Finalize Your Product
Once you do that, you can finalize the product and start marketing it and selling it. You can even send the updated version to those who tested it first, thanking them for helping, and offering them a percent off coupon for your next digital product that you can name and describe on a sales page before you even create it.
Knowing what goes into creating the product, you can come up with your strategy. Are you going to outsource? Will you deliver the digital product live? Will you create it first and then deliver it? How will you deliver it? What is the price point? All that information will ensure that you create a digital product that is in demand.
