112 Common Mistakes That Kill Digital Product Sales - Part 1

Have you ever created a digital product that you were convinced would sell… only to hear nothing but crickets?

I've been there too.

In this episode, I'm sharing four of the biggest mistakes I see health professionals make before they've even started selling their digital products. These are mistakes I've made myself while building my nutrition business, and they cost me time, energy and sales.

You'll learn why validating your idea matters so much, how pricing can influence perceived value, why discounting often makes sales harder instead of easier, and why people buy outcomes rather than information.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Today we're focusing on the foundations that need to be in place before you launch. Next week, we'll look at the mistakes people make during the sales process itself.

In this episode, you'll learn:

•  Why validating your digital product idea should always come before creating it. 
•  The three questions you need to answer before investing time in building a product. 
•  How I spent 18 months selling just 24 copies of a course because I created what I wanted to teach instead of what my audience wanted to buy. 
•  Why giving away too much value in a low-cost offer can reduce the perceived value of your expertise. 
•  The difference between strategic discounting and panic discounting. 
•  Why lowering your price rarely fixes slow sales. 
•  How to create digital products that focus on transformation instead of information. 
•  A simple exercise to help you assess whether your own digital product is positioned to sell. 

Resources mentioned

• Create & Sell Digital Goods: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/digital-goods

Enjoyed this episode?

If Beyond The Clinic is helping you build a business that gives you more freedom, impact and income, I'd be so grateful if you'd follow the show and leave a review. It helps more dietitians, nutritionists and other health professionals discover the podcast.

And if you're planning to create your first digital product (or improve one that's already sitting on your website), this episode will give you the foundations you need before you start selling.

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Website:  https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/
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Transcript

Sarah Bushell (00:00)
Have you ever created a low cost digital product that you genuinely believed in, genuinely thought would help people and genuinely thought had the potential to sell really, really well, only for it to be a massive flop? I know just how deflating that feeling is because I have very much been there as well. Maybe you've created a digital product that on paper makes perfect sense for your audience. It solves a real problem.

Maybe you've added it to your website and posted about it quite a bit on social media, but it's just not selling the way you expect it to. And you've got no blooming idea why. There's actually a handful of really common mistakes that kill digital product sales before the selling has even properly started. And I'm going to share four key mistakes with you today. Now, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that this has never happened to me. That would be a big fat lie.

Every single mistake that I'm going to share with you today, I've actually made myself in the early days of building my nutrition business. Some of them multiple times, actually. I wanted to record this episode because I genuinely wish someone had sat me down years ago and explained these things to me earlier. It would have saved me so much time and energy creating things that looked great, felt useful and made complete sense in my head, but just did not translate.

into actual sales when I put them out into the world. Now this episode is actually part one of two parts. Today we're focusing on the foundational mistakes, so the things you want to get right before you start selling your offer. And then next week we'll talk about the mistakes in your sales process. So basically the things you're doing or not doing when it comes to actually selling your digital offer. That can stop people from buying

even when the offer itself is brilliant. Okay, mistake number one is creating something without validating. And I'm going to explain what that means exactly. So let's say you've got a really great idea for a digital product, something you think your audience would find super useful. So you go straight into creating it, you get the content together for it, you write it all up, you design it, you price it,

You make it look and feel really professional and it's all ready to start selling. But before you did all of that, you didn't validate your idea first. That means you've got no concrete evidence that people will actually want this enough to pay for it or that it's something they're already actively looking for help with. I always tell my clients that before you create anything in your business, there are three simple things that you need to understand.

The first is you need to know, is there actually a demand for this? So in other words, are people already talking about this problem? Are they asking questions about it? Are they searching for solutions? There's lots of different ways you can find this information. For instance, you could go into Facebook groups or forums where your ideal clients are hanging out already and see what they're repeatedly asking and what conversations keep coming up over and over and over again.

Secondly, you need to know, there enough volume in that audience? Because you can absolutely have a niche where people are actively looking for help to solve their problem. But if there's only a very small number of them, going to very quickly hit a ceiling.

So again, you just need to do a bit of simple digging. Look at things like how many people are in those Facebook groups that you're in, how active those groups actually are, how often new questions come up, how many people are engaging with the same type of content, or even how much content already exists around that topic. Because if you can't see a steady stream of new people entering that space or consistently talking about that problem,

It's usually a sign that the audience might be more limited than it first appears.

And then third, you need to know are people actually willing to pay for a solution? Now, this is where a lot of people get caught out because it's really easy to mistake interest for buying intent.

Just because people are engaging with your content, commenting on your social media, saving your posts and asking questions, it doesn't mean they'll actually buy from you. It can feel like demand and it can feel like people are ready to buy, but in reality, those people could just be looking for free information or reassurance or quick answers and not necessarily wanting a paid for solution. So when creating your digital product, we need to be asking ourselves questions like,

Are people already spending money in this space? Are there existing products or services similar to yours that are already selling? And are they selling well? You might be wondering how you can tell. And usually a digital product that sells well will have ads running to it or to a lead magnet on the same topic. And that's because, well, why wouldn't you want to make more money from it if you could? Essentially,

you need to know are people actively investing in solutions to this problem, not just talking about it. So let me give you a real example of a big mistake that I made in my nutrition business in the early days. So a few years ago now, almost 10 years ago actually, I created a course called Baby Nutrition. You might have heard this story before. It was based on my clinical experience, my years of working in pediatrics and something actually I was genuinely passionate about.

And on paper, made sense because I had a big audience, I had credibility, I was associated with Annabel Carmel, who at the time was the queen of baby food, and I had a really well-built product. But 18 months later, it had only sold 24 times. Now, the reason wasn't that the digital product itself was bad, it was that I built something that I wanted to teach and not something that my audience wanted to buy.

The people who were finding me were coming through really specific immediate problems, things like worries around weaning, like my baby is constipated since starting solids, my baby doesn't seem interested in food at all, or questions like, you know what, Sarah, is my baby actually eating enough? Or they've stopped drinking milk altogether since starting solids, should I be worried? All very concerning, all urgent questions.

And when I eventually created products that match that level of urgency, like the simple portion size guides, because you've heard me talk about those before, those were the things that actually took off because they met people exactly where they were. So the lesson is actually pretty simple. Don't just build something that you think people should want. Build something that they're already actively looking for help with. This is your evidence base.

And just like we practice evidence-based medicine, you also need to practice evidence-based business if you want it to work.

Okay, now mistake number two, and this one is really important to get right because it can actually influence how people perceive your entire business. And that is how much you end up giving away in your digital product for the price point you set. Now,

My 9.99 portion size guide is intentionally simple. It's so intentionally low priced. It doesn't include lots of my clinical expertise or deeper frameworks. It's a pretty simple offer. It's five pages, including the front and the back cover. It's just giving people helpful, clear stepping stone. But what I see a lot of people doing when they create a low price digital product,

is giving away lots of their clinical knowledge at a price point that just doesn't reflect that level of depth. And ironically, that's when a simple entry level office stops feeling simple at all. The reason why getting this right is important because if something is priced at seven pound or 10 pound and it contains a huge amount of your clinical expertise, it can actually start to dilute the perceived value of what you do, even if the content itself is brilliant.

And you can end up feeling resentful if you spent time and energy promoting a £7 offer and make 10 sales. That's just 70 quid. It doesn't seem like enough for the level of expertise and incredible value that you're giving. But if you priced it at £47 and made 10 sales, £470 feels so much more worthwhile. So essentially what I'm saying is, yes, create low priced offers.

And yes, make them a no brainer price, but don't accidentally shrink the value of your expertise in the process. Focus on keeping these low price digital offers super simple and focused with one clear, tangible win for people and price accordingly. And don't be tempted to squeeze in everything you know.

Okay. Mistake number three now, and this is the one a lot of people fall into without even realize they're doing it. And that's discounting your digital products at the first response when sales seem slow. If sales aren't quite where you want them to be, a lot of people's immediate instinct is right. Let's put on an offer. So you drop the price. Maybe you drop it by 20 % or 30 % or maybe even half price, just to really pump up the sales.

and it might work for a bit. You might get a little spike in sales and things might feel like they're picking up again, but then the offer ends and it goes back to being full price and sales slow down again. And so then you decide I'll run a discount again. And this is where the problem starts because without meaning to, you've now trained your audience to wait. So this is when they'll see a post or an email about something you're selling and they're not thinking, I need this right now.

They're thinking, you know what, I'm just going to wait for the next offer because there's always got a discount on this. Because if there's always a promotion or a discount around the corner, there's no urgency for anyone to buy when they need it, when it's at full price. So this is especially important when we're talking about digital products, because there's never really any issue of availability. It's not something that people can miss out on or you run out of. Now, to be clear, discounting itself isn't the issue here.

big difference between strategic discounting and panic discounting. If you have a 48-hour or 72-hour flash sale offer inside a launch sequence, it's a strategy. People on the outside can't see this. It's not public. A seasonal promotion like Black Friday, it's also a strategy. And this one is public and it's expected by people. The issue is when it becomes your default reaction.

every time sales feel slow because that's not strategic, it's just reactionary. If something isn't selling well, the answer almost never is make it cheaper. It's usually one of three things. Either the wrong people are seeing it, you've got an audience mismatch issue or the message isn't landing. You've got a communication issue or not enough people are seeing it in the first place. You've got a volume issue.

and none of these things are fixed by dropping the price.

Now, mistake number four is creating a digital product around information instead of creating it around a specific outcome. And this is another big mistake that I see healthcare professionals make when they're creating their digital offer all the time. Their goal is often to educate, to provide knowledge, to guide people through the overwhelming volume of information online. But guess what? People do not buy information.

They buy the outcome of implementing that information and what that gives them. So dietitians, they're often thinking about what topics to cover, how to cut through the online noise and what they should teach when actually you need to be asking yourself what specific result or outcome is this going to help someone achieve? Otherwise, what ends up happening is the offer becomes very feature heavy and information heavy, which your potential client reads like

Blah, blah, blah. You create something really solid and evidence-based and well thought out and genuinely useful because you're thinking like a clinician while you're creating it. You naturally structure it more like education than transformation. And what gets lost is the core promise of that offer, the actual end result that someone is desperately hoping that this will help them with. So let me give you a quick example so you can see the difference.

Instead of creating and positioning a low price offer around a 47 page evidence-based guide to IBS management covering the low FODMAP diet and the gut microbiome and stress management strategies, which is accurate, but very informational, you'd be much better creating and positioning it around something like three things to soothe an IBS flare up, even when you've got no idea what's triggered it. Can you see the difference?

One is centered around the information, the other is centered around the emotional outcome and the transformation that somebody actually wants. That outcome needs to be in the back of your mind, both when you're creating your offer and also when you're selling it.

So there you have it. Those are the four biggest mistakes I see health professionals making when they're creating digital products that have a huge impact on their sales. So remember, validate before you create. Make sure there's demand, volume, and that people are actually willing to pay for your offer and do this before you do anything. Number two, be mindful of how much you're giving away for the price point. Low cost digital products can be brilliant entry points to your business.

but when you start packing them with too much clinical depth and expertise for a seven to 10 pound price point, that can unintentionally dilute how your work is perceived. Number three, don't fall into the habit of constantly discounting. Strategic offers are one thing, but repeatedly dropping your prices trains people to wait instead of buy. And then number four, create your digital product around a clear outcome, not just information.

People will buy your product because what they believe it will help them do or feel or change in their life. Now here's a little action step for you. Go and look at your current digital product or the one that you're planning to create and just ask yourself honestly, have I validated this? Am I giving away the right amount for the price point? Am I relying on discounting or lowering my prices to try and get sales instead of moving the messaging and positioning?

And is this built around a clear outcome and not just information?

And if nobody ever taught you how to position and validate and price and sell your offers properly, you do not want to miss my live create and sell digital goods masterclass this Wednesday, 1st of July at 12 noon. You will learn exactly how to create a simple low cost offer that's actually based on demand, positioned properly and built to convert. And as it's live, you'll be able to ask questions and get direct feedback and guidance on your own digital product ideas.

specifically for your niche. Just DM me Masterclass on Instagram for the details or reserve your seat using the link in the show notes of this episode. And don't forget to join me next week where we're going to be unpacking more mistakes that people make in the sales part of selling their digital goods. Bye for now.