Hi friend,

My 10 year old niece Maddie wanted to start a savings account. She texted me to talk through how she could start a "company" to earn some money. She loves drawing dragons and like a skilled corporate raider, saw an unserved market of people who craved custom dragon artwork.

We quickly built her a landing page in AWeber using the simple ecommerce tool and launched on a Thursday night. By the next day, after just sharing on social media and in group chats with friends, she had 16 orders. My role in Maddie’s small business is to let her know when an order’s been placed. Here’s one I picked from the backlog and asked if she could do it.

"I can make any dragon" is my new mantra in the face of a creative problem. The utter disbelief that any dragon might be unmakeable was inspiring.

If you’ve been thinking of selling a digital product online but keep coming up with excuses not to launch, I think it should be your mantra too.

Because if a 10 year old can do it, I know you can too.

Let’s talk about how to get from never selling a digital product to your first sale – you’ll see it’s easier than you might think.

Identify Your Product

This is the one that is easiest to get hung up on, because it can seem like everything worth selling is already being sold.

I’ve got a simple trick that helps me find new digital products to sell.

Ask yourself what spreadsheet, checklist, graphic pack, meal plan, reference sheet, or other resource you’ve made saves you the most time or helps you earn the most money.

That’s your first product. Take that thing that you know provides you value and sell it.

Set a Price

This one is pretty easy, because if you set a price that doesn’t work to start, you can just adjust it and try again. Don’t get stuck trying to find the perfect price before you launch. It’s a waste of time.

Instead do a little competitive research by checking how similar products are being priced in marketplaces like Gumroad and Etsy and use them to benchmark your product.

Then, attempt to sell the product to a small test group of folks (AWeber has tools to let you split test your forms and emails to find out what messaging and positioning works best).

If people visit your sales page but no one buys, try lowering your price a bit and see if it impacts sales.

If people are buying at a nice clip, consider if you’re charging enough and maybe raise your price a bit and see if people keep buying.

Set Up a Sales Page

This is another step where you could get stuck trying to make the perfect page, but most of the time any page is better than no page at all - so just get something out there. To remove any excuse here, we have tons of landing page templates that do most of the work for you.

I love using the ecommerce element in AWeber landing pages because it’s so easy to set up. It literally took me 15 minutes to go from no page, to launching Maddie’s dragon landing page. It’s also great because since it’s built right into AWeber it’s incredibly easy to automatically follow up with your customers and potential customers.

Check out Maddie’s landing page. It doesn’t need to be perfect to get sales.

If you’d rather list your product on Etsy, there’s a great integration with AWeber you can use to keep in touch with your customers. AWeber integrates with dozens of ecommerce platforms - so if you’re selling online odds are we integrate with your store.

Fearlessly Share

I’m not talking about “marketing” here. If your product ends up finding a fit, you’ll eventually want to start using things like paid ads to find more customers.

Right now I’m just talking about getting your first couple of sales to figure out if your product and price are appropriately set.

For me, this is the scariest step, and where I often fail. I think it comes down to not wanting to be embarrassed because no one likes the thing I’ve made.

I wish I could tell you (and myself) not to have this worry. But the rough truth is folks might not like what I made. That’s ok. What’s important is that I find that out quickly, so I can adjust my product or price, or move on to the next thing.

Where to share:

• On your social media profiles.
• In your newsletter. I did this with Maddie’s dragon site.
• In group chats with your friends. This might sound like “cheating” but it’s absolutely not. Very few people see success in business without friends to gas them up. Share your product with your friends – I’ll bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the people who want to support you.

Bonus: Ask for Referrals

Referrals are the secret that power many successful online sellers because there’s nothing more powerful than a personal recommendation.

This is one of the reasons why it’s so important you’re building an email list of your happy customers. So when it comes time to scale your sales effort you have a group of advocates ready and waiting to help you promote your product.

Four steps. That’s it.

Each step has innumerable opportunities to find reasons to stop. Recognize that you’re probably going to make some mistakes in your initial launch, and that getting something out there quickly will ultimately help your product because every touchpoint with a potential customer is an opportunity to learn and improve.

Now It’s Your Turn to Sell Online

Have you been avoiding putting your first digital product up for sale because you don’t have time, are intimidated by the technology, or just aren’t feeling confident that you have something worth selling?

That’s exactly why we built our ecommerce tool:

• It’s super simple so anyone can sell, regardless of technical savvy.
• It’s lightweight so it won’t take much time out of your busy day to get up and running.
• It’s built right into landing pages, so you can easily add ecommerce products to your existing pages.

The last part, knowing that what you have to offer has value, is all on you. But know that we have your back and trust that if you’re trying to sell something that helps you in your life it’ll likely be worth something to others.

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