We’re going to talk about creating fitness info products (or digital products) today. But, first… a story.
I was sitting in the grocery store parking lot this past weekend waiting to pick up my ClickList order when I realized something. If you don’t know what ClickList is, basically we can order our groceries online. A Kroger employee will grab everything inside and then someone brings it to our car in the parking lot.
We pay $4.95. That’s four dollars and ninety-five cents in order for all of this magic to happen so I can be spoiled and just sit in my car instead. Anyways I was sitting there waiting for the groceries to be brought out and I realized, hey even big retailers want to make passive income. Even though it isn’t exactly passive because an employee is still having to walk around the store and grab my groceries.
That’s very active. It’s the exact opposite of passive. But even if it’s not exactly passive income it’s a great example of meeting a customer’s needs and helping them and also you get a little bit extra money that you weren’t making before. I have no real reason to order my groceries. I don’t have crazy Saturday schedules. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a ton of social events.
But for moms out there or people who have busy Saturdays or maybe even older people who may not get around the stores easily, this is a really great service. So with all that in mind today we’re talking about how health and wellness professionals can make some passive income and create info-products.
So there are four main stages of info product development we’re going to cover today: research, marketing, development and launch.
It does sound very technical but I’m going to break them down and I also have a resource to share with you at the end of the podcast that will make this a million times easier.
So first we have research. This is where you need to talk to your audience and your clients. What’s something that would make their life easier?
When thinking about info products for your audience: do they need a monthly meal plan, a macro calculator, a spreadsheet of some sort, a six week workout guide? You could hop on a Zoom or a Skype call with these people. You could also create a quick online survey. You could do both of those things. The benefit of doing an online survey is that it’s less time on your part and it’s easy to distribute on social media into your email list. (I have another post for you, if you need help building an audience first!)
You want a variety of specific and broad questions. Really broad like what’s your biggest fitness or health struggle? And then you want something really specific like how much time do you have to workout every day? Once you come up with your idea you want to verify that it’s really what people want because sometimes you think you know based on all the research but you just want to go back and double-check.
So talk to those same people again and tell them the name of your product and what it would include. Give them the outline. Then ask them for feedback. Now to be honest a lot of people will say, oh yeah I would totally buy this because they don’t want to hurt your feelings and the don’t want to say no. It’s not even that they may think no in that moment. They just think, yeah of course I would.
Basically, I’m saying asking would you actually buy is pointless because everyone’s going to say yes. Unless people say I would definitely not buy this. It’s not what I need because that would give you something to work with and you’d probably have to start over.
Once you’ve finished the research phase and have finalized the name of your info product, it’s time to move to phase two which is marketing.
To be honest, info product marketing and development should be happening at the same time. You need to start promoting the product now to build up the anticipation. You need to warm up your audience and get them intrigued because just spontaneously announcing it like Beyonce with no buildup is not going to work and you’re not really going to get the sales that you want.
You want to talk about your info product on social media a few times a week and get those people on your email list. You also want to talk about it to your existing email subscribers as well. The key here with the existing and the new subscribers is to segment them separately from the rest of your list because you’ll want to do a full launch email sequence to build up anticipation for this product.
And can still do and should do an announcement email the day of your launch to your entire list, not just the segment. So even if those who didn’t show explicit interest in the beginning still know about it because it may pique their interest now. It’s also during this time that you want to find some affiliate partners. So talk to your business friends and your past clients to share about your product.
But if you are a personal trainer it may be hard to find other personal trainers to share your info product because then they’re just sending their clients to you. So it may be hard to find people who do the same thing you do to actually share your product but you could look to colleagues who are in similar fields. So if you are a personal trainer talk to a health coach or a dietician or vice versa. Some may be willing to talk about your product during the buildup phase and some may only be able to share the day of the launch.
You want to make this process as easy as possible for them though. Write up some social media captions for them and email. They can copy and paste and send you their email list. Create some graphics they can share on Instagram, Instagram stories, Facebook er cetera. Now for the actual affiliate part you do have some options.
First you could just have them share as a favor. I’ve done this plenty of times. I don’t get any kind of payout of any sort. I’m just doing it to help a friend. Or you could use a service like Gumroad to sell your product, which we’ll talk about platforms in a little bit. But they have a super simple way to set up affiliates. You just enter the person’s email and the percentage of the payout that you want that person to get if someone buys through their link.
You could also use a service like Sendowl which is a bit more complicated to set up and does cost to use. Or if you are a Wordpress user there are dozens of affiliate plugins you could use like AffiliateWP, Affiliates Manager or Ultimate Affiliate Pro. Those are just a few. Now I want to say if you are doing a course of any sort instead of just an ebook or some kind of guide, Teachable and Thinkific are the two platform I recommend which do have free options and also affiliates.
Now the last component of the marketing your info product is your email sequence. You want to keep your product and brand top of mind over the next few weeks or months as you are preparing to launch. So as everyone is piling onto your email list to stay notified you want to send them a weekly email that is providing value. Let’s say for example you are releasing a workout guide. Your weekly email could be talking about the benefits of weekly exercises, maybe sending them bonus exercise to hold them over in the meantime.
Maybe you talk about the importance of stretching etc. You can automate this by creating an entire automation sequence that people are subscribed to when they join your list through a particular forum. So now you have some affiliates.
You’re getting the word out and it’s time to move into phase three which is info product development. If you struggle to organize your thoughts one of the easiest ways to get started is to just write everything out on a piece of paper.
My book editor Jodi taught me this trick when I was writing my book which came out earlier this year. Just write everything on a piece of paper in no particular order. It doesn’t even have to be actually a list. It could be sporadic. Then you want to grab some highlighters or markers, whatever. You just need something with different colors. Then circle things with one color that belong together. So this could be circling all of the warmup exercises in pink or all of the breakfast ideas in yellow.
It’s a semi-organized brain dump without getting too caught up in trying to think in an orderly fashion. If you are new to writing or you just want some assistance I would suggest the Hemingway app. It’s just a free website that you can copy and paste your text into and it will tell you how you should adjust your writing. Like break up these sentences. These are really long. Or change out these words, anything like that.
The other part that a lot of people get hung up on in the development phase, which is my favorite part, is designing the info product.
I use Adobe Creative Suite because I’m a professional and that’s the software we use in my industry but it’s pretty pricey and there is a steep learning curve. For all of you who are DIYing I always suggest using Canva. It’s free software using some premium options that you can pay for like if you want to upload your own font or save your brand colors, anything like that.
But they have tons of templates available and make it easy for you to create a cohesive, beautiful info product. If you hop over to my YouTube channel JessCreatives.video there is a playlist full of Canva tutorials. But the basically design rules I would tell you just for your information, only use two to three fonts and two to three colors. That will help it stay looking clean and professional. But I definitely recommend having someone look over your product before you launch it.
I always have some of my business friends look at my info products. And then I also let a special client or two get free access to it to give me feedback because I want to make sure it makes sense and it flows well. For you, you could also get that design feedback as well. So that leads us to phase four which is launching. Now in order to launch your digital product, there needs to be a way for people to buy it obviously.
A few ways you can sell this info product
If you don’t have a website then Gumroad is a great platform to sell info products, like I mentioned earlier. If you’re on Squarespace it’s super easy to create a digital product and make it available on your website. If you are a Wordpress user I recommend using the Easy Digital Downloads plugin, also super easy to set up and use. And again on my YouTube channel I have tutorials for both how to set up the Squarespace digital product and the Wordpress plugin that I just mentioned. (There are even more platform options here.)
Load up your info product on your website or selling platform of choice. Price your digital product accordingly and make sure you sent the link to your affiliates or ambassadors. Then you also want to post it on every social media account you have and notify your email list. Something that could also be very effective is having a launch price and then raising the price in three to four days. So you’re could launch on a Wednesday, tell everyone hey, it’s available. It’s $29 but after Friday it’s going up to $49 so make sure you grab it now. You could also make a tripwire!
And then another thing you could do to take this launch strategy even further is run Facebook ads to your email list that you’ve been emailing over the last few weeks. You can upload your list of subscribers on Facebook. Or if you have a Facebook pixel installed on your website you could also run Facebook ads to people who visit your sales page and don’t buy. This doesn’t take tons of money either as people think it does.
So let’s recap this entire info product process real quick. Research your topic with clients. Market your product to your clients on social media and email list and get affiliates and ambassadors on board to help you promote. Write and create your product, hopefully in Canva and then lastly list it online on your website and launch.
We didn’t even dive into what a tripwire is in this episode but that’s because I have a full episode dedicated to just tripwires from just a few weeks ago that goes into all that. So make sure you give a listen to that. But all of this is available for only $49. If you found this episode helpful please share on social media or leave me a review on iTunes. And if you have any questions, as always reach out to me on Instagram @jesscreatives and I will see you in the next episode.
