Monetizing your knowledge by creating and selling digital products is not as easy as the experts make it out to be. I want to share with you my own experiences and how I view setbacks as a painful but necessary step to find success in order to inspire you to continue your digital entrepreneurial journey as I am continuing mine.
Key Highlights
[02:28] My pre-launch survey
[03:42] How I Define Digital Entrepreneur
[05:03] The Social Media Marketing Buffet
[06:25] You Are What You Tweet
[07:44] What I've Learned In The Process of Launching Digital First
[08:08] Why You Need Data
[10:40] It's Not About the Follower Count
[12:51] Cohort-Based Learning
[16:30] Why I Like Taking Funnel Approach
[20:12] The Kind of Mindset I Want You to Have
Notable Quotes
Links Mentioned:
Learn More:
Monetizing your knowledge by creating and selling digital products is not as easy as the experts make it out to be. I want to share with you my own experiences and how I view setbacks as a painful but necessary step to find success in order to inspire you to continue your digital entrepreneurial journey as I am continuing mine.
Key Highlights
[02:28] My pre-launch survey
[03:42] How I Define Digital Entrepreneur
[05:03] The Social Media Marketing Buffet
[06:25] You Are What You Tweet
[07:44] What I've Learned In The Process of Launching Digital First
[08:08] Why You Need Data
[10:40] It's Not About the Follower Count
[12:51] Cohort-Based Learning
[16:30] Why I Like Taking Funnel Approach
[20:12] The Kind of Mindset I Want You to Have
Notable Quotes
Links Mentioned:
Learn More:
Do you need some help with your influencer marketing strategy? This is Neal Schaffer, your digital marketing coach, I am beyond excited to announce that I will be launching my first digital course this will be a cohort, a live course over the course of a week. To help you develop more, revise and improve your influencer marketing strategy. This is a pre launch announcement. You'll hear more about this in November, but in October, if this interests you at all, I do have a pre launch survey that if you complete and get added to the waiting list, you will get a 10% discount coupon from yours truly, you'll also get the opportunity to have a free 15 minute consultation with me. Now this URL is going to be a little bit long. So when you're back in the office or at home, put it in your chrome or whatever browser you use, but go to Neal schaffer.com That's ne al sch FF er, hopefully you know how to spell my name by now. It is my hope, Neal schaffer.com/maven Because that's the platform it's going to be on m a VM. And then I m one for influencer marketing the number one and then survey ser ve y. If you can't remember it, just hit me up on the socials, fill out the contact form on my website, Neal schaffer.com/contact, or email me at Neal at Neal schaffer.com and I will get you hooked up with the survey form URL. Now it's back to today's episode. If you are or want to become a digital entrepreneur, you need to learn to fail and you need to learn to fail fast. I'm going to share with you my own experiences in hopes of inspiring you to action on this next special episode of The your digital marketing coach podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, crew, there's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to my podcast. If you are relatively new here, the format of this podcast is half solo half guest interview. But every episode is, well, every episode I'm hoping to inspire you. Whether it is through education, through my experience, or through providing some advice that you find insightful that's going to help you carry forward your digital content influencer social media marketing. So as you know, and well, if you've been following me on the socials, or you have been listening to this advertisement that's been written into my podcast, I am for the first time creating a digital course. Now, it's funny because I started this podcast talking about digital entrepreneur. And what I define as a digital entrepreneur is offering leveraging one's IP, or experience, or knowledge, whatever you want to call it, to basically offer some sort of digital product or service. We have this boom in the, what we call the crater economy. This is going to be $100 billion this year, next year. And that's exactly what people are doing. Now part of that, obviously are collabs or influencer collaborations, but a lot of it are digital products and services. And I'll never forget I published maximising LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing back in 2011. And someone came up to me in 2012, and said, Hey, Neil, do you have any courses? Any digital courses I could take? And I'm like, Well, what are you talking about? See, my background is b2b Right? It's always been in selling to other corporations, not to people. So I never had a DTC or b2c model. In all honesty, I guess my books were sold to consumers. But I've always had a very corporate mindset and a corporate consulting mindset. That still guides me to today. But I also understand that there's a need to learn and I am going to refer back to Amy Woods who is going to be on this podcast very shortly. She is over at content 10x great podcast. And when she spoke the Content Marketing World she talked about all the different ways people like to consume content. It's like going to a buffet. This is the social media marketing buffet. We have appetizers, we have main dishes, we have desserts, we have drinks, everybody is going to consume things slightly differently. And I think when it comes to education, we've seen this democratization of things of choices that people have, if they want to learn, they can listen to podcasts, they can watch YouTube videos, they can buy courses, what have you. So the need for digital education is huge. I mean, LinkedIn learning bought out lynda.com, I think that really says it all. And it has taken me a while. And I really started my first digital product. With my digital first mastermind community, I launched this in April of 2021. Now you may be thinking, Neil, you got tons of followers. It's an easy sale. But here's the thing that I've learned. And I'm going to, I'm going to talk about my digital first mastermind, I'm also going to talk about this recent experiment with this cohort learning based course, which I haven't even launched yet. But I just want to share with you my initial feelings, like I said, it hopes to inspire you. Because I realized that a lot of you listened to this podcast for digital marketing and advice. But you also, some of you are entrepreneurs, and you're thinking about various digital products or services. And if you want to promote these digital products or services, you need to first build a community. But as I say, on my presentations, you are what you tweet. And I just wonder of having provided so much free stuff for the last 10 years, or I should say, 14 years because I started my journey on Twitter back in 2008. If we go back to LinkedIn, I was there 2000 for almost two decades, is that because I've never really had paid offerings. And I've never promoted paid offerings. I have built a community where people expect stuff for free, versus people who just started, but early on promote things. And therefore it's understood that if you want to get greater access, it comes at a fee, but it might be worth it. So this is obviously my own thinking whether this is true or not. I don't know. I'll never know. But what I will say is that you are what you tweet. So you know I started off LinkedIn, maximize your social, all about social media, marketing strategy, Age of influence all about influencer marketing. Recently, I've dabbled in a lot of SEO, a lot of email marketing. So I've led you all on various paths. Now I consider myself sort of the Doctor of digital, like whatever pain whatever suffering whatever illness you have, let me find the digital marketing cure whether it's, you know, digital, social content, influence what have you. But it also means that I have a large but very broad following. Some people follow me for LinkedIn, some for influencer marketing, some for something else. And what I've learned in the process is that when I launch Digital First, as we all do, we have this mindset like, Oh, if I get so many people at such a price, I'm going to generate six figures, seven figures, and I did the math as well, right? But here's the thing, you need to do it to learn it. No matter how much you visualize things or create plans, it's going to come down to the data. Now, I have recently recorded an episode that I want you to go back and listen to, if possible. That episode is another solo episode I did episode 270. June night that was content isn't King marketing data is. And it's really having the data. From a marketing perspective, we all know the how powerful that can be. But from an entrepreneurial perspective, you need the data as well. You test something, and no matter how many, you know, surveys, you do what have you. And I know that you know, when it fly the famous book by Pat Flynn, we always want to get as much survey data as possible, understand our audience as best as we can, because then we can deliver the product or service that we think are going to fit them. But there's also other things like timing, you know, someone that joined my list five years ago might be in a totally different area right now, I booked someone for a fractional cmo call two weeks ago. And yesterday when we talked, they said, Well, we didn't even get the talk. They didn't show up. And they said, Oh, you know, situations changed. It reminds my b2b sales days when we were going to close this very big deal in Japan, and then a typhoon hit. And they delayed the deal, and we never got the deal. So you sort of need to strike when the iron is hot. This is one of the things I want to tell you. But you know, I did looking back get a reasonable number of people that had interest in digital first mastermind, and a number of people that joined and a number of people that dropped off. And what I realized is if you're going to do something, you need to be in it for the long haul. But if you're going to cut it short, you cut it short. I really wanted to get to know it's almost like a post survey data, the people that are in the community that have invested in me, what do they need, what can I provide them that they will want to continue? Joining me on this journey and there for overtime, I tweaked that it's an Agile process. So one learning is, even if you think you fail, because you set yourself up for failure by thinking that you are going to get these big numbers based on a big following. The numbers of followers don't really count, obviously, yes, they give you a platform. But you can convert 10% of a 100 person community, or convert 1% of a 100% community. And the results are going to be very different. You could convert 1% of a 1000 person community and convert 10% of a 100 person community, and you get the same results. So another message for you is, and now I know it's easy for me to say, because I've amassed a large following, because I've been at it for like 20 years, right. So it's not the follower count. It's the relationships that you have with the people that at the end is going to propel your business. So the mastermind community, fast forward, I decided that I was going to add additional things, I took away some things. And I added other things. And one of the things I did was, as we got more members, I realized that you know what I want to maintain quality control. It's not about getting the seven figures, or six figures or whatever the number ASAP. It's about longevity. And it's about deepening the relationship with my biggest fans. And those are the ones investing in me, right. So therefore, I decided I'm going to max it out, there's going to be capacity, it's going to be 15 people. And if we're at 15, you're gonna have to join the waiting list, I don't want your money I can't have you in because it's going to negatively impact the 15 people that are already in the group. And that has turned into be a very, very powerful feature. That's a feature scarcity, basically. But now I have the biggest waiting list that I've ever had to join this community. And because of the scarcity, I'm also able to raise prices. So it definitely works in my favor. Now I I figure out how to better serve this community. And therefore when new people come in, my hope is that they stay longer. And I'm able to help them more deeply and learn from them. They generate new energy in the community, and we all grow. And if we all grow, every community continues, right. And maybe at some point, I create a second community. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. So that was my experience with digital first. And I could have said you know what, this isn't going what a plan, I'm just going to cut loose. But like I said, I've always had this thing where whenever I speak, whether it's one person in the room, or 100 people or 1000 people, I'm there to serve. And if 999 people didn't care about one did I want to serve that one person. So why would any digital course that I do be any different, so long as I have the time and other income sources to maintain that obviously, there is a dose of reality here. So this cohort based learning is very interesting. Now, if I was to create a course, you know, Jeff Walker's launch, and there's all these, there's all these systems, and you've might have been part of launches before and you have JP part, JV partnerships and webinars and you know, countdown timers on emails and all that, you know, the course can actually eat up a lot of time in the preparation. And I think, you know, for every few course creators that seem to be doing this really well and making a lot of money, there are probably 10 times more people that have failed, or haven't made nearly enough money, or maybe only had a few people join or buy and then they called it quits. So my approach to all this and I want you to have the same approach. As a digital entrepreneur, we know that entrepreneurs fail way more times than they succeed, you have to fail, right? But you're not just blindly failing, you're learning from your failure. So the mastermind community could have done things differently at the beginning. Yes, I probably for those that accepted that they were going to join the community, I probably could have done a better job of onboarding them really understanding your needs, and maybe saying, You know what, this isn't the right community for you, because 95% of the people want to go this direction. And I don't know if you're going to learn a lot going this direction, because everybody's in a different state, for instance. So I've never thought about doing a digital course, until I found out about this maven.com platform that I very soon you will see my course launch there. Next week, you will be hearing this podcast, hopefully October 27. About Halloween November 1, you should if you go to maven.com. Or if you're on my mailing list, you will get a notification that my course is now available for sale. And I decided to do this course I've always been interested in Maven. I've always been interested in the fact that I can invest, you know, a short period of time and go on a journey. But rather than my mastermind community being open to any and every question, this is more focused. And because I recently taught this influencer marketing course at UCLA, it made sense to repurpose that content into this course. Now here's the thing. So I have a survey and That's the advertisement you've probably heard. I'd love if you could fill it out. If you have any interests at all I am doing if you hear it in short enough time, I am doing 15 minute consults, really, I want you to look on my landing page to get feedback on what the course looks like. But I also want to know how I can best serve you visa vie your interest in influencer marketing. But despite my numbers of followers and my email less than the number of times I've put it out there, I got a surprisingly low number of applicants. So this goes back to digital first what I learned there, first of all, not everybody wants to join a group coaching community. Some people want to consume content differently. And that's fine. And I think the same goes for a cohort based course. Now this is a unique course and that it is bound by time, it's going to be the last week of November 1 week of December. So maybe you're going to be on vacation. Maybe you need to figure out your influencer marketing strategy before then maybe you don't have the budget right now. You know, there's so many read, maybe you already read the age of influence you got what you needed. And all the blog posts in the podcast episodes give you the hand holding that you need. Right, maybe, you know, and I can see how many clicks I got to the survey, and very few converted into actually filling out the survey that I asked too many questions. The price is indicated at the top of the survey, maybe I should have not mentioned the price, but I prefer to so that there's no, you know, you know, what you're getting into if you're showing interest. So there's a lot of different things. And this is why I like to take this funnel approach, not sort of like the you know, the awareness, interest decision, what have you this traditional marketing funnel, but just the funnel of actions, that if people want to get here, what are the things they need to do to get there? How am I leading them there? What's the messaging? What's the expectation? What's the timing? There are so many things. And this is something that why entrepreneurs fail nine at a time before they hit the big one. It comes with experience. We don't know. We don't know until we do it. It's very similar to my my influencer marketing students asked me, Neil, how much how do we know how much to pay an influencer, you don't know. Until you start actually working with influencers and understanding their needs and understanding what they will do for how much over a wide variety of people of ages of social networks of content formats, there's just so many factors. But with each iteration, we get better, so long as we're looking back and actually analyzing what we did. And trying to figure out how we can do it better. You know, with YouTube and looking at thumbnail click throughs. With, you know, SEO, there's other sorts of digital marketing things that we can analyze. And we have lots of data for. And we can come to a conclusion maybe a little bit easier, this is a little bit harder, because it deals with so many different parts. But you know what I'm in it for the long run. And digital entrepreneurship is something that I want to continue to pursue. It is the way that I can serve as many people as possible wherever you are in the world. And I have ideas for lots of courses, and I want to deliver them in this cohort based basis, where it is limited by time and we go through it together, we go into it together means I can actually tweak it as we go through it as I get your feedback. And as I realized the makeup of the class may want to be more b2b and b2c, for instance. And that's what really appeals to me. So in my mind, I have a few more courses that I like, I'd like to be able to do this regularly. And that's the thing, right? If you really want to become a digital entrepreneur, you want to become part of this creative economy. You need to find a way to make it work. I really realized this early on, this whole start of entrepreneurship began when I lost my job. This is literally when Barack Obama was elected president, November 4, I believe 2008. And that's when I decided I wanted to make something create something that no one can take away from me. That was my personal brand. And everything I've done since then, is not only to support my personal brand, but also to support my family. Because that short lived job that I had, from July to November 2008. Very short lived was because I pulled the plug on my previous job to support my family to support my wife, who is having a second child living away from her parents in a foreign country where she was not as fluent in English language as she would have liked to have been. So that's what drove me to do anything I could to maintain that lifestyle to be able to support my family, support my wife, be there for my kids as they grow up. And that is what's driven me more than anything. And that's what I have to make it work. And I want you to have that mentality. If you really want to do this. You have to make it work. You're going to fail nine times you're going to learn and when you succeed the 10 time it's going to be all for the better. And that's the beautiful thing, ladies and gentlemen. In the old days, you didn't have access to people. You didn't have access to communication channels. You could easily create cards intent that is of TV quality, or radio quality. We all have the ability to do that today. I want to encourage you and I know, I'm talking to the entrepreneur out there. But if you're in marketing, I want you to have the same mindset. If you're working for a company, I want you to have that crater economy, mindset, the creator mindset, the digital entrepreneur mindset of trying lots of things, and finding what works, finding what sucks for your audience, you may not get, you know, 3% engagement on Instagram post, but if you get 1% engagement, there's 1% of people out there that are engaging with you, how are you going to deepen the relationships with them? And I think, as we go into 2023, that is the question. You know, you can tap into a network, you can pay ads, you can build followers, what are you going to do with this community? Where are you going to direct them? How are you going to help them? How are you going to serve them. And it's more than just buying a product. And I tell people going, I had a call with someone in England today, there is no obligation to actually purchase this course. But by you providing me this feedback, I'm more than happy to give you free consultation, because you're giving me free consultation, you're giving me just invaluable feedback. You almost want to pay people, you almost want to pay your followers for an opportunity to give you feedback on your social media on your products. Right? Why did you follow this company? So I think this is a mindset that will really differentiate you, obviously, if you're an entrepreneur, but if you're a business owner, if you work in marketing and Corporation, I think the same mindset will serve you well. It's the creator mindset. It's the digital entrepreneur mindset. Either you embrace it, or you do something different, because I think this is something where either you're all in, or it's going to be very frustrating for you. And, you know, I am a follower of living a life of no regrets, even when there's failure. Success comes from that failure. Yes, I'm the complete optimist as a lot of people like to tell me, but I truly believe that. So I'm sharing this with you, making myself a little vulnerable, but confident as well, that maybe this first iteration will work, maybe I'll get zero people to sign up. But you know, what, I will have understood the process, I would have understood how to create this course, I'll understand how to promote it, and you better believe the next time I promote it, I'm going to do things differently. And I'm gonna be more successful. Maybe only one person signs up instead of zero. And I'm giving, I'm giving, you know, exaggerated numbers. But I don't know, I haven't launched it yet. Who knows, right? But preparing for the worst is okay, if you prepare for the worst, you could accept that as part of this learning process. So long as you have other revenue streams coming in, like I said, it's okay. We're going to do this, we're going to get there. I'm going to do this, I'm going to get there. And I know, hopefully you're nodding, maybe you're smiling. I'm staring at a wall. So I'm just trying to visualize at the wall what you're doing while you listen to this. But every once in a while, I want to toss in one of these episodes where it's about digital marketing, but it's also about the mindset. And even if you're not an entrepreneur, this type of mindset, I think will carry you far in a field where you have access to a lot of data. And how you apply your insights from the data can really make or break you not just for your SEO and your email marketing all that, but for your business, as well whether you sell traditional products or services, or you are a digital entrepreneur, in which I am trying to become more of. Alright, everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, I'd be honored by I mean, you could write a review on your favorite podcast app, you could click that five star and Spotify you can just reach out and say hey, Neil, love that episode or you know, Neil, do more of those or Neil do less of that. I'd love to get more data from you. I'll be completely honest, podcasting is one of the hardest things to get data from my listeners from other than just seeing the download numbers from episode to episode, which does give me some, some indication of what you prefer to this new one now, but anyway, I'm gonna stop there. I hope I was able to serve you through this episode. And as always, I want you to remember not just to keep your eye on the goal. As we are now almost halfway through q4. We want to end the year strong. Hit your revenue goals, hit your activity goals. Hit whatever goals you have in your business and your personal life, but always be an option show up as an option for your audience. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand, see you next time on your digital marketing coach.