Like it or not, service providers have their own glass ceilings. There’s only so much time in the day to do spend offering your services to your clients. Eventually you’ll reach a revenue limit–there’s no more time in the day and it’s not possible to raise your prices more.
This glass ceiling is one of the big reasons why service providers choose to scale their businesses with digital products. It opens up more possibilities for creativity and revenue (and time freedom, if done right!).
On this episode of The Content Experiment Podcast, I’m chatting with Dr. Destini Copp, a business and marketing expert who helps business owners scale with digital products. We talk about where to start with digital products and her recommendations for how to offer a product that turns your customers into 1:1 clients.
Of course, the episode wouldn’t be complete without some discussion on where to get the digital traffic needed to make a product venture successful.
Tune in!
Mentioned in This Episode
About Destini Copp
Dr. Destini Copp is a business and marketing expert who helps entrepreneurs scale their digital product revenue with automated sales funnels and reduce their reliance on services or freelance work.
She is a college marketing professor turned online entrepreneur and a wanna-be, Serena Williams-like, tennis player. She is the host of The Course Creator’s MBA Podcast and the Creator of The OneClick MBA membership.
You can connect with Destini on her website, as well as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Transcription
Abby Herman 0:08
Hey there and welcome to Episode 143 of The Content Experiment Podcast, a podcast that supports the idea that content and marketing are ever moving targets in any business. And it’s okay if you don’t feel like you’re doing it All right all of the time. You have permission to experiment with little tweaks and changes in your content, to find what works for you, what increases value for your audience, and what grows, your business, and most importantly, what feels good for you.
Abby Herman 0:38
I’m Abby Herman, content strategist and coach for online business owners who are ready to make a bigger impact online. I firmly believe that success isn’t about what big marketing brands and so called gurus think is the right thing. It’s about you and your business, your lifestyle, and frankly, your values and belief systems. you get to do business in a way that works for you. If you are a one to one service provider, there will come a point where you run out of time, but you don’t really want to stop growing your business. So what do you do if you don’t want to limit the growth of your business or your income, but you’re strapped for time, you find a way to scale, which is exactly what we’re talking about today on the podcast scaling with digital products.
Abby Herman 1:28
But before we dive in, welcome to the podcast. I work really hard to make sure that this podcast is full of no nonsense support, to help inspire you to get your message out there and give you the actionable steps you need to make it happen. So you can get on with business your way. If you like what you hear, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss another episode. And if you love what you hear, it would mean so much to me if you would leave a rating and review also.
Abby Herman 1:59
Now today’s episode features Destini Copp, and we talk about how to scale your business with digital products. We chat about what kind of digital products might work for your stage and business, whether an alive or evergreen product is best, and how to build awareness of that digital product So it will actually sell. and how do you know what the topic of your digital product should be? We talked a bit about that too. about using a digital product to get your perspective, one to one to one customers ready to work with you.
Abby Herman 2:33
And another way to determine what your digital product should be is to ask your audience what they need and want. Create a survey to find out what they need. And then use those survey answers as you prepare to help market your products because you have the words directly from your audience’s mouth… or fingertips, I guess. Not sure how to create a survey? Let me help you.
Abby Herman 2:59
On September 27, I’ll be hosting the Ask Your Audience Challenge live. It’s five days of training, walking you through how to determine who to survey, what to ask, how to collect the results and so much more. Join me for free by going to thecontentexperiment.com/ask to sign up. The live trainings will be at 8am Pacific each morning. And you will have some homework to do each day with no more than about an hour of time to invest total each day, and that includes the training itself. And if you join live, you’re also going to get personal feedback from me which is huge, such a huge benefit to this live training.
Abby Herman 3:43
Again, go to thecontentexperiment.com/ask to sign up. We get started September 27. And if you’re listening after September 27 you can still head there and you’ll be able to find an evergreen version of the challenge.
Abby Herman 3:59
Okay, back to our guest. I am chatting with Dr. Destini Copp, a business and marketing expert who helps entrepreneurs scale their digital product revenue with automated sales funnels and helps them to reduce their reliance on services or freelance work. She is a college marketing Professor turned online entrepreneur and want to be Serena Williams like tennis player. She’s the host of the course creators NBA podcast, and the creator of the one click MBA membership. Are you ready to learn more about scaling using digital products? Let’s listen in.
Abby Herman 4:40
Hi, destiny. How are you? I’m so excited to talk to you today.
Destini Copp 4:45
Abby, thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here and chat with you today.
Abby Herman 4:50
Yeah, before we dig in to our topic for today, can you share with listeners what you do and who you do it for?
Destini Copp 4:59
Absolutely. Literally, so we help entrepreneurs scale their digital product revenue, meaning like online courses and memberships. We focus on automated sales funnels, that’s very important to us. And this allows them to reduce the reliance on freelance work or any service type work that we’re doing.
Abby Herman 5:20
And what do you mean by that? Like, what do you mean by avoiding or not being reliant on that freelance work? And can you talk about that a little bit more?
Destini Copp 5:28
Yeah, so a lot of the people that we work with, they’re, you know, doing one on one work, they’re a service provider, or maybe they even call themselves a freelancer. And they basically day in and day out, they are serving clients, one on one work, they’re meeting with them via zoom calls kind of what we’re doing now, they’re, you know, going back to their computer and doing some type of work for them, whether it’s building out a website, forum, or a sales funnel, or, you know, just doing different type of work for them.
Destini Copp 6:00
And you know, quite frankly, there’s only so much time in a day, in doing and I’ve, I’ve been a freelancer, you know, in the past myself, specifically a Facebook ad consultant. And I know that doing that day in and day out can lead to burnout. So what a lot of people want to do for a variety of reasons, which we can go into today, they’d like to add additional revenue streams, so they can kind of reduce the reliance on that one on one work that they’re doing, but still keep up the revenue in their business.
Abby Herman 6:31
Yes, and I can totally speak from experience as well. Being a former Freelancer and just sitting at my computer for 40, 50, 60 hours a week, just doing the client work, and pretty much not doing anything I hear you. Can you share a little bit about how you work with clients? So what does that work look like with clients? And then how does that help you to live the lifestyle that you want?
Destini Copp 7:02
So I have definitely pivoted in my business quite a few times. So I’ll just go back just a little bit. So I used to be a Facebook ads consultant. So I’m sure a lot of people out there know basically what that is. So I was helping clients load their Facebook, if we really just create them from scratch. So maybe I’ve been to the images or the Facebook ad copy, I helped him with our sales funnels with whatever they were doing. Maybe they were launching a webinar or lead magnet. So really helping them with all of that, because you really can’t do Facebook ads without making sure that everything else is working.
Destini Copp 7:40
So you know, that’s what I was doing at that point in time. And I realized at that point, I had a lot of people who were coming to me who weren’t quite ready for my services. And I really felt, you know, I couldn’t. I just felt that the goal at that point in time took them out because they just weren’t ready. Right? So and that’s when I kind of got into the in, really went full in with my online courses because I wanted to get those people ready.
Destini Copp 8:09
So I launched some Facebook ad type courses just to get them ready so they could get their coat toes into Facebook ads. But here recently going back to your question and how I work with people now, I have completely switched my business over to basically a membership and also have a suite of online courses. So it is strictly you know, digital product, passive income revenue. But you know, as we know, it’s not all passive, right? There’s a lot of work that I do.
Destini Copp 8:41
Now in my membership, my membership is a little bit, it’s really hands on, I would say I do a lot of coaching and my membership. So we do text based coaching, we have office hours, three times a week where we can help our clients because a lot of people just, you know, questions pop up all the time. And then we have our you know, our zoom calls, we get on zoom calls with folks too and really do that can holding if you were to help them with their business.
Abby Herman 9:08
I love it. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of value that you’re offering. So I love it. So you help business owners to scale with digital products to you know, potentially step away a little bit from the one to one client work and maybe increase revenue. Can you talk a little bit about the benefit of digital products and what it looks like to get started with them?
Destini Copp 9:33
Yeah, so I’ll give you some examples of some folks I’ve worked with. So one is a website designer. So specifically, they helped people build squares, they built Squarespace websites for clients. And you know, over time they started out like kind of a freelancer but then they kind of turned it into a serious business if you would, and they had built up their client base. So they were in, At that point in time, they were, you know, charging, you know, fairly good money for their websites, you know, anywhere from 2500 to 5000.
Destini Copp 10:07
And there were people that were coming to them that wanted to hire them, and they just couldn’t afford them right there. But they needed a website just to get up and running. And they didn’t want to turn them away, they wanted to see what they could do to help them. So at some point in the future, they might be able to hire them, you know, for their $5,000 website. So basically what they did, they added a starter type course, you know how to get up and running with your basic, basic Squarespace website just to kind of help those people who are coming to them. And just to get them started. So that is one example.
Destini Copp 10:48
Another example is a social media consultant. So somebody who’s basically, you know, posting for their clients on social media. Now, their rates have gotten a little bit higher too and a lot of those people couldn’t afford to work with them anymore. But they just wanted to help them get started. Plus, they had a lot of knowledge, quite frankly, in working with all these clients on their social media services, that they knew that they could help other business owners out there. Because there’s a lot of people out there that you know, maybe even want to learn how to do it themselves if they don’t want to invest $2,000 a month in hiring somebody else to do it, that’s just something that they, you know, are interested in learning.
Destini Copp 11:30
So in that particular case, they developed a membership. Because social media changes all the time, it made more sense for that to develop a membership instead of an online course. So those are just some examples in both of the examples. They still offer their one on one services, but they got to be a little bit more picky, quite frankly, in terms of the clients that they took on. So that was a huge benefit for them, too.
Abby Herman 11:56
Yes. Oh, yeah. I love that. And that kind of segues into my next question, which was about, like, you know, I mean, you pretty much answered it. So one to one service providers, you can use the course or membership as a supplement to that one to one word. And what I heard in your examples is that you can take a, you can create a course, or an offering that prepares your audience to actually like, move into the one to one work.
Abby Herman 12:30
So it’s almost like a step in their journey with you is, you know, doing this, taking a course or joining a membership to kind of gain some of that knowledge and maybe grow the business a little bit before they end up working with you one on one. Can you talk a little bit about that, and how, like, maybe I gave a personal example, do other examples of how that how that works?
Destini Copp 12:55
Actually, I do have a personal example from my own business. So going back to when I was working with people, as a Facebook ad consultant, like I mentioned, there’s people that were coming to me, and they weren’t able to hire me. But there were a variety of reasons at that point in time, some of them their sales funnels, just weren’t ready yet. Some of them, they just didn’t have the budget, you know, they only had, you know, a few $100 a month to spend on Facebook ads, and between the Facebook ads and the mifi, they just didn’t have the money to work with me. So for them, it made sense to give them or you know, to have an online course that was for them, just to get them started.
Destini Copp 13:34
So one of the courses I had was basically an ad starter kit, and it walked him through the initial steps to set up their first list building app. So everything that they needed to do set up a very basic, you know, I’ll go dynamic creative list building ad. And you know, it really just allowed them to kind of dip their toes in, start testing their audiences and start figuring out what was working and just seasoning their facebook pixel too. So that was just one example of something that, you know, once they got up and running there, they might be able to hire me in the future. So that was, you know, one of the things that did happen, you know, in for some of those clients, I did actually end up hiring me.
Abby Herman 14:18
I love that. Yes, yes. So and I’ve actually experienced something similar with people who have either taken a course for me or have joined my membership, and then they’ve gone on to become one to one clients, which I really love because I like that longer term relationship that I get to have with people and I think it helps to like you know, I’ve gotten to know their businesses a little bit ahead of time ahead of you know, them becoming a one to one client and that really helps. I mean, I think it helps with the transition, it helps you know, the one to want make the one to one work even easier, because you already have that relationship established. So I love that.
Abby Herman 15:02
Let’s talk about like expectations, because I think that a lot of people have been creating courses, creating programs, creating memberships that they are putting out there. But they don’t always sell like they want them to, can you talk a little bit about what it might look like to develop a course or program? What are some things that we should be thinking about before we finish the whole thing and push it out there to the world?
Destini Copp 15:33
So I think you’re bringing up a very good point. And I think it’s, you know, incumbent upon us to set expectations. So what a lot of people think things that might happen, or from what they’ve been told out in the marketplace, they’re going to create this course, they’re going to put it out on their website, or post it on social media with all the pretty images, and they’re gonna get 500 people sign up, most likely, that’s not going to happen. Even with a really good sales funnel, even with really good copy sales page copy on, you know, for your course, you know, it will take time to build up the traffic into your sales funnel. Now traffic meaning, you know, traffic that you’re getting from your content marketing, like what to help people with you, whether they’re blogging, or podcasting or posting their content on social media, it takes time to build that up. And quite frankly, for people to get to know you and, you know, what you have to offer them.
Destini Copp 16:34
So, you know, I think it’s important for us to set expectations that, you know, it might take time to do that. Now, another thing I do want to point out is, for a lot of service providers, generally what I recommend is what we call an evergreen or automated sales funnel, to sell your course. And the reason for that is because we’re we’re service providers, and I’ll put my you know, as a form of service provider or freelance for myself, you just don’t have a lot of time to mess around with live launches live launch, meaning you know, you’re going to do a live webinar or a virtual summon, I know you done virtual summit, I have a virtual summit coming up, and I spent, I’m going to be, you know, by the time it launches, I will have spent two months getting ready for it.
Destini Copp 17:21
So it’s a lot of work to do these live launches. But for service providers, I love for them to have an automated slash evergreen sales funnel setup where somebody comes to your website, and you have some type of mini course or recorded webinars, something there that they can watch you they get on your email list, and then you can promote your course through that sales funnel that I have found is one of the best ways for service providers to sell their online courses.
Abby Herman 17:51
And so how do you get people into the funnel to begin with? So how do you even like, create that awareness around it so that they sign up for it?
Destini Copp 18:02
So I recommend a lot of different strategies. I’m a huge fan of content marketing and SEO. So in that if you can speak to this a lot more than I can, Abby, but you know, I think a large part, every business owner out there needs to be placing a major emphasis on their own website. So SEO pit, you know, I use Pinterest too, which has helped me a lot. It’s helped me get my ranking up on Google, my ranking up on Google for my website is high now. You know, I’m starting to rank higher for certain keywords. But I’m a huge fan of content marketing. Some other strategies that I use, which have been working for me and my business is PR. So guest podcasting, which is kind of what we’re doing now. It works very, very well. Also affiliate marketing.
Destini Copp 19:00
So the virtual summit that I’m hosting in September, which is Scale Your Business Summit, which I know Abby, you’re going to be a speaker at we have a lot of speakers, a lot of speakers that are coming in for that summit. And the hope is that all of them are going to be promoting that summit to their audience. So we can all benefit from that. So affiliate marketing definitely helps, too. So there’s a lot of different strategies. You know, I will be running Facebook and Instagram ads for that summit to increase event registration. So that’s a little bit more higher level strategy than most people will be working with. But Facebook and Instagram ads do work. I know a lot of people also use Google Ads which work for them, but there’s a lot of different ways you can drive traffic into your business. So those are just some that have worked for me.
Abby Herman 19:48
I love that and the check is in the mail for mentioning content marketing. Just kidding, just kidding.
Destini Copp 19:56
And you didn’t tell me to do that. It’s true! It’s helped tremendously in my business.
Abby Herman 20:01
It is so true that Yeah, like you have to, you have to be creating your own original content for your own website. And that could be blogs, it could be. It could be YouTube videos that you embed on your, you know, well, YouTube is searchable on Google. So it could be that and it could be a podcast of your own, that, you know, creates your own original content.
Abby Herman 20:24
But the other things that you mentioned too, probably are things that people are doing already. And we just don’t think about those as I see, I view those as content marketing also, aside from the ads, but doing the PR doing you know, guesting being on other people’s summit to leveraging other people’s audiences, because as a summit speaker, or as a speaker at a conference, you have the benefit of getting in front of other people’s audiences, the other speakers, speakers, audiences, too, which I think is really cool and so valuable, I will, I do want to add one thing to, you know, one thing to the list that you mentioned, and its relationships.
Abby Herman 21:01
So you and I were connected through someone else, like just last week. And, the only reason the only way that we were able to connect is that, that, you know, we have these relationships, and we’re able to, you know, get our messages across to one another’s audiences through that. And that’s, that helps to build that brand awareness, which gets people to your stuff into your funnels, and ultimately can lead to sales. So, yeah, there’s so many different ways to do it.
Destini Copp 21:35
And I think you’re bringing up a good point. And I think that’s one of the things that has helped me get so many great speakers for the upcoming summit that we have, you know, I’ve done a lot of interviews, probably about 50 interviews this year, just so people coming on to my podcasts. So, you know, that’s, you know, I’ve got a ton of speakers, great speakers for that. So I think building those relationships on a daily basis helps skyrocket your business and you know, just basically it just expands your reach.
Abby Herman 22:08
Yes, absolutely. I don’t think that it is free. I mean, all it takes, all it takes for you to build relationships is a little bit of time, curiosity in you know, making an effort to getting to know people. And that’s about it. And I honestly feel like relationships are the probably the most powerful thing that you can do to grow your business to grow your email list to, you know, encourage people to go through that journey with you. So, yes, Love it. Love it.
Abby Herman 22:43
You mentioned the summit, which I’m honored to be a speaker on the summit, can you share a little bit about the summit and what people can expect to find, when they-
Destini Copp 22:55
Absolutely. The summit is taking place September 14 through the 16th. We have a bunch of cool things planned. And I haven’t even told everybody all of these. So I’ll go ahead and match them here. So in addition to the videos, we’re also going to have an audio feed because what I have learned by doing summits in the past, and people have told me is they can’t sit in front of a computer all day and watch the videos. So we’re gonna do an audio feed for folks so they can learn on the go, whether they’re walking their dog or working out or, you know, taking their kids to school, they can still participate in the summit.
Destini Copp 23:31
And we also have some really cool people coming in. We’re gonna have like a Pilates session and meditation session, just some things to reduce some stress. So we have a lot of cool things planned. But the summit to go back to your question is for entrepreneurs who want to scale their digital product revenues. So basically talking about what we’re talking about today. And they want to do that with the automated sales funnels. And this will allow them to, you know, like we said, kind of supplement some of that, you know, one on one work with digital products.
Abby Herman 24:02
I love that. And yeah, I haven’t really had time to sit at my desk enough all day, every day. And I love the idea of being able to listen as I am walking my dogs in the morning. So I love it. If listeners were to only be able to take away two actionable things from our conversation or two actionable things when it comes to using digital products in their business. What would you want them to take away?
Destini Copp 24:31
So I would say look at your business, kind of look at it and see are people coming to you and not able to work with you? And is there anything you can do to kind of help them move their business forward to grow their business so they will be able to work with you in the future. So that would be one of the things that I would look at to kind of come up with what I could do in terms of a digital product.
Destini Copp 24:57
The other thing I would say you know, and this Something that I teach for everybody who’s just getting started. And digital products, generally, what I recommend is you starting with a mini course. So something that gives your clients a quick wins something that’s, you know, only probably, you know, generally, you know, three to five lessons. you might have some workbooks and some bonuses in there. But it’s not this full blown Signature Course that’s going to take them weeks and weeks and weeks to get through No, just something just to get them to move a little bit.
Destini Copp 25:33
for just a mini course and what you can do with the mini course, there’s a lot of different ways you can repurpose it, you can use it as a tripwire from a lead magnet, right. So if you ever run Facebook, or Instagram ads in the past, or if you’re just you know, having a lead magnet on your website, on the thank you page, you can have, you can have your tripwire that basically says, Wait, before you go, I have this special offer you might be interested in. So that’s one way you can kind of repurpose it. If you’re you know, going back to the relationships and kind of what we’ve been talking about, if you’re a speaker at a summit, you know, there’s always opportunities for you to invite people into your mini course, you know, it’s kind of that high value type of product that you have. So there’s just a lot of different ways you can use a mini course.
Destini Copp 26:24
So that’s what I generally recommend people to start with. So something that you could create, quite frankly, even for a beginner in just a week or two.
Abby Herman 26:33
I love that, yes, I have actually taken a course that I no longer sell. And I repurpose that all the time, because the information is still valuable. It’s just not something that I really wanted to put a lot of energy into promoting. And so I offer it often as a freebie when or is like the all access pass bonus, or something like that, or I’ll give it away as like, you know, just if I’m feeling generous, and like, here’s a bonus that I’m offering this 300 $400 course for free, you know, because I know what needs to be updated. But it’s still really valuable.
Abby Herman 27:10
I have a question about the mini course, do you recommend- You mentioned evergreen, which means for those of you listening, and basically just means, you know, you have created something? And it lives somewhere where people can consume it anytime that they want. When you’re creating your very first digital product, do you recommend making it be something that is evergreen? Or would you recommend creating something that you can offer live? Do you recommend, You know, how do you recommend putting that together Originally?
Destini Copp 27:48
I really just think it depends on the person in the audience that you’re trying to serve. And what kind of course you’ve developed, right? I know that a lot of people out there will teach you know, before you put something on evergreen, make sure that you launch it with a live webinar. But I can tell you personally, I have launched a lot of what I call mini courses. So something that’s like $49, or maybe even a little bit higher than that. And I didn’t watch that through a webinar. I mean, that just didn’t make sense to launch that through a webinar. You know, if I was going to launch a $2,000 signature program, I would probably pick a different approach, maybe.
Destini Copp 28:33
But with a mini course, I don’t know, I generally probably wouldn’t recommend launching it with a live web, I just don’t think it’s going to be necessary. Um, you’re going to be able to kind of measure through your sales funnel in terms of whether it’s converting or not to figure out if you need to make tweaks or not. And generally, for something that’s lower priced like that, you don’t have to convince people as much right that you would for $1,000 or $15,100 course,
Abby Herman 29:02
Right. And because it’s a mini course, you haven’t spent 1000s of hours and 1000s of dollars putting it together. So you can always make changes and tweak it to you know, make it better fit your audience or maybe add on something later if you need to. So yeah, Love it. Love it.
Abby Herman 29:23
Destini, where can people find more information about you and find information about that summit?
Destini Copp 29:31
So the best place to go is just the front page of my website. The summit information will be up there. I’m assuming by the time that this will be going live. It’s not up there right this second because I think we’re recording a little bit early here. But just the front page of my website will be a great place to go. And I’m sure we’ll include the link for the summit too in the show notes.
Abby Herman 29:54
Fantastic. And where’s your favorite place to hang out online? What’s your favorite social media platform?
Destini Copp 29:59
Um, you know, I would say that my, well, where I have the most followers is LinkedIn. I’ve worked on, you know, been on LinkedIn for a while, but I will tell you, I’m having a lot of fun here recently with Instagram. I’ve just kind of started getting into it, and I’m really enjoying it. So I think I’m gonna be hanging out there quite a bit more.
Abby Herman 30:17
What’s your handle over there?
Destini Copp 30:19
Just my name at Destini Copp with the Destini with an I.
Abby Herman 30:23
Okay, fantastic. And we’ll include all of the links in the show notes. Destini. Thank you so much for joining me.
Destini Copp 30:29
Thank you Abby. I enjoyed our time here today.
Abby Herman 30:33
Okay, I promise that I did not pay her to talk about content marketing. It truly is so incredibly important. When it comes to gaining visibility for your digital products. You have to show up as an expert and your audience has to know that you have the solution to their problems. At Destini’s summit, The Scale Your Business Summit, which is September 14 through 16th. I’ll be talking about how to develop the content strategy you need to get the word out about your digital product. Go to thecontentexperiment.com/scale for more information about the summit and to sign up. I can’t wait to share more with you soon.
Abby Herman 31:15
If you found value in what you learned here today, be sure to share it on social media. Take a screenshot of the episode on your phone and share it over on Instagram stories. tag me @thecontentexperiment and tag Destini @destinicopp. It’s de s t i n i c o pp. And all the links that we mentioned in the episode today will be in the show notes on your favorite podcast app and on my website. The more you share, the more we can get the podcast into the hands of more business owners just like you who need to hear the message that they are not alone. Until next time, take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
