Can You Sell Digital Products With a Faceless Brand? How To Grow Your Audience Online? Q&A

Hi, everyone. This is Shatih and today's video is all about answering your top questions. There are some really, really good questions in here. So make sure to watch all the way to the end. And with that, let's dive in. Why do people buy digital products? How do you wear audience? How do you make sales? Which niche to pick, et cetera, et cetera. There's so many great questions that I am going to be answering in this video. Make sure to watch all the way to the end and let's dive in. So question number one, and if I'm looking down, it's because I'm looking at my phone, is why do people buy digital products? Now, this question is actually very easy to answer because this is the same reason why people buy any products. People buy products because they solve a problem. So if I am someone who is, let's say, you know, training a new puppy and I'm looking for a workbook on how I can train, you know, my puppy more effectively, I'm going to go and get that workbook and that's going to be a digital product because I can buy it online. I can consume it online and I can fill it out online. Now, simply put the digital products up the same as any other products because they aim to solve a problem or offer a solution to a particular pain point. Now, this can be something, you know, like what I shared, which is helping a new puppy get trained. This can be something like creating social media templates for a new nail salon owner. This could be something like creating an ebook for someone who is just getting started on Etsy. There can be a wide range of products that you use to create in order to help your particular audience or your particular customer. So keep in mind, it's not just about why would someone buy it. It's the same thing as about why would someone not buy it, right? And to be honest, when I first started in this industry, I also was at the same opinion who even buys ebooks anymore or who even buys audio books anymore, who even buys templates, right? That's until I figured out the market size of all of the biggest platforms that are selling digital assets, whether that is Etsy, whether that is creative market, whether it is Envato Elements that sells web design and web elements. These are all companies that are making hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars selling digital assets. So the fact is people are out there looking for products that are helpful, that solve a problem and add value to their life. The question isn't why people are buying digital products. It is how can I actually create value and sell digital products that are going to be effective and also make a difference in someone's life? Okay, the next question is how much do I need to invest to sell my product on Pinterest, Etsy and Shopify? Now, here's the cold hard truth and that is you can get started with zero dollars if you are creative and resourceful. Now, the reason why I say zero dollars is because there's literally nothing keeping you from showing up on Pinterest, creating an account or showing up on Etsy, creating an account or just selling your products anywhere. We have so many free resources for you to get started that I don't think that you need to invest a large amount in order to get started. Now, generally speaking, digital products are going to have some element of design in them, whether it is about creating the cover of your ebook or it is about creating a template or designing a planner, etc. No matter what you create, you will need some basic design skills and if you don't have them, then yes, you can absolutely invest in products such as PLR templates or even software tools like Canva Pro so that you have access to better templates and better elements that you can use in your digital products. Now, keep in mind, there are different licenses for using different types of templates and products even within Canva, so you have to be really careful of how you are purchasing that product and using that for resale. This is why we have created Digital PLR Hub for this exact reason that even if you have absolutely zero design skills, you can grab some of our products, customize them and then rebrand and sell them as your own. Now, with that said, you do need to have some skills. If not, you can work on developing them. Canva is something I talked to myself as well. Over the years, I wasn't born an expert in Canva, like none of us were. So, you can absolutely teach yourself, you can take courses, you can absolutely advance your skills, but any investment that you make in your business is an optional thing. If you choose to invest in a software, in a tool, in a coach, in a course, in a book, whatever it is that you invest in, that is an optional investment. But because this side hustle can be started with literally zero dollars, using just Canva and Chad GPD, there's really nothing that should be holding you back from at least trying the side hustle. Whereas other side hustles like, you know, physical product drop shipping requires a lot of money for inventory. Same thing goes for Amazon, FBA, where you have to, you know, have a lot of money to invest in inventory before you can sell it. Affiliate marketing requires a ginormous audience in order to earn commissions. So, digital products in that comparison is a very, very low cost way to get started and anyone can get started for under $50 if you are resourceful and creative. The next question is, I open two Etsy shops, each of them was suspended by Etsy, where else can I sell? So, inside my program digital product academy, I share how you can create and sell digital products with Etsy, but my preferred method is always going to be to host your products on your own website, whether it is on your blog, whether it is on Shopify, whether it is on a stand store or, you know, your link in bio. The reason being that you control how your product is showed up, you control your margins, you control your transaction costs, and not only this, you don't have to rely on Etsy to, you know, allow you to be present because Etsy can ban your shop or suspend it for ridiculous reasons and you have no control over it most of the time. I would recommend is to look at either stand if you're selling through social media because it's a very social media friendly store or you can look at Shopify if you plan to have your own brand and you want to use ads and really have different products in your store. So any of these two platforms can be used to start selling digital products in very, very short amount of time as well. The next question is, can we earn by selling digital products but not having an Instagram page for the same? Now, this is something that really goes back into figuring out how are you going to be generating traffic for your products. Now, Instagram, the reason why you need to be present there could be that you want to attract visitors to your website or to your store and then convert them into, you know, purchases. Now, Instagram is not the only platform in the world that you can use for driving traffic. You can use Pinterest, you can use Google, you can use YouTube, you can use a podcast. There's really so many ways for us to drive traffic, including long form content such as blogging and podcast and YouTube, as well as short form content such as Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. All you have to do is to pick one traffic source, double down on it and make sure that you actually learn how to make that work before you jump from one place to another. So yes, it is possible to have success without being on Instagram, but it is not possible to have success with no traffic. So you're going to have to figure out an alternate traffic source if you don't want to leverage Instagram for traffic. Okay, the next question is how to decide between digital products or digital services. Now, products versus services is again an age old debate and the way I look at it and the reason why I started out with digital products first is because of the type of lifestyle that I wanted to have. I wanted to be able to work on my own schedule. I wanted to be able to work from anywhere that I want and I wanted to not have too many calls and deadlines that were client dependent. Fact of the matter is that when you have a service based business, you are logged down by time because depending on whatever it is that you're offering, whether it is web design or copywriting, you have a deliverable that is determined by your client and you need to deliver that by that certain timeline, which means this is the same thing as when you have a boss who's telling you to do a toss and you know, you have to do it by a certain timeline. In other words, in my opinion, digital services, even though they are a very, very effective business model, are not the best fit for people who do not want to be trading their time for money because the only way to scale a service based business model is going to be by hiring a bigger team so that your team can do more work for you and you can outsource that work and so on and so forth. Not everyone wants to manage a large team or have an agency type model and this is why I feel digital product businesses are more suited to those who want to be a little bit more independent, who want to own their time, who don't want to be, you know, rushing through deadlines and have to depend on a lot of client work, but instead can take things at their own pace and you know, create things one step at a time. Now, the disadvantage here is that when you're creating a product based business, you don't generally see money come in as quickly as when you have a digital service business because with services, you know, it's very clear what you're offering and there's a timeline attached to it. So when you say I'm going to create a web page in three days, you can demand a money, you know, upfront for it. Whereas when it comes to digital products, even though you are creating a product of value, you still have to figure out how many people are going to be able to view that product and then convert them into customers. So figuring out how to build traffic and make sales is actually what is the most time-consuming part of creating a digital product business. So you do have to have that grit involved in order to generate that traffic and make the sales. Now, this again is something that you totally have to decide for yourself based on your personality, your goals. My goal at the beginning of my journey was that I wanted to create a business that would allow me a lot of freedom and currently I work about one to two hours per day and I have a seven-figure business. So I think that is going to be very, very difficult to achieve with a service-based business without having a large team that is doing the work on your behalf and my team right now is less than five people and all of them are part-time. So as you can imagine, these are two completely different business models. So you do have to look into what is more effective for you and your long-term goals and then get started with that. The next question is what product did you start selling first? That is an amazing question and I get this a lot. So the first ever digital product that I created was actually a Europe trip planner. So it was basically a PDF of about 100 or 120 pages with itineraries around Europe, how you could save money on traveling to Europe and so on. This is because I have a background in blogging and I was running a travel blog from 2017 up until 2019 and it's still active right now but I'm not super invested in running this blog and the funny thing is that this digital product is still up on my website and still makes passive sales to this day. I launched this back in 2019 when I saw that I had a lot of repetitive questions being asked about my blog over and over again and I kind of wanted to answer them in this e-book. So that's how I kind of got my first taste of selling digital products and that's how I got started. The next question is do people really like printing out pages to fill out instead of having a standard journal? Now I think again this goes back to the question of why do people really care about digital products and the main reason here is that they are looking for a solution to their problem. So let's say that I am planning to go on a keto diet and I want a specific planner that is aligned to my diet which I can print out and modify based on where I am in my journey. When you compare that to a standard journal that you can buy from your bookshop it's likely that it's not going to be specific to your journey, it's likely that it's going to be a generic page where you just have generic to-do lists or generic calendars and it's not suited for your specific goals. So when we are talking about why would someone be interested in printing out a digital product the reason is because it's solving a problem for them. The same thing goes for for example when you have an online shop and you want a planner where you can analyze the sales, the inventory, track your windows and all of that even though you may be able to find this on your bookstore or an Amazon, chances are it's not going to be as specific to a situation as it could be when you created your own unique journal by printing it out and figuring out which are the pages you need the most and which are the pages you don't. So essentially what these printable planners or journals do is that they give you flexibility and customization which you don't have with a standard journal and that is why people pay for them. The next question is how do I start a brand like this should be a LR hub. So this is exactly what I teach inside of digital product academy. I walk you step-by-step through market research, product creation, building your store, marketing and selling and all of those things. So if you're interested make sure to check out our course digital product academy. I'm going to drop a link below this video so you can have a look. The next question is does this work if you don't want to show your face? Yes, it does work even if you don't want to show your face. This is kind of the hypothesis that I had when I was starting out with a digital PLR hub and that was can I build a website which has no mention of me. It doesn't show my face anywhere and just use social media to drive traffic to it and this month we are going to be crossing I believe $8,000 in revenue. So I've been proven correct and I can tell you with a lot of confidence that if you have products that are offering value, if you have your marketing dialed down, yes you can absolutely build a faceless brand. The reason why we see a lot of people who are building personal brands is because it tends to be easier to connect to humans as fellow humans rather than to connect to faceless entities. We inherently trust people more who we can connect to on a human level because that is just how psychology works but that doesn't mean that you can't build a brand which is just based on the value. So when you're thinking of creating a faceless brand in the realm of digital products you always want to be thinking about how can I create the tools and shortcuts that would allow people to see the value of my product without my face having to be behind it. Now for example if you were to build a brand like mine which is a personal brand and you were selling information products like e-books or guides or courses it would definitely be a lot harder for you to build a faceless brand because like I said it's hard for people to buy information from someone they don't trust but if you're building a brand where you are creating let's say budget trackers or excel sheets or even planners those can be things that people will buy because of the utility and the value that they have from getting that tool instead of you know the value that they feel is being offered by the person behind it. So if you're thinking of creating a faceless brand really think about what are the tools hacks shortcuts that I can offer to build that brand because that is going to be able to be much easier for you to sell through social media without a face rather than trying to sell information based products. Okay so the next question is how did your days look like in the first few weeks of starting this online business. So to be honest I think my days looked very very strange because I was kind of navigating a lot of personal things as well I was trying to figure out if I could live in Germany as a self-employed person which if you speak to any other foreigner who has been through this journey will tell you that it is an absolute nightmare. It was really one of the most difficult things that I went through and that's because I was at the verge of being deported because you know I was laid off and kind of didn't really have an option to change my work visa in time. So I had to create a business plan, I had to figure out how to set up a company everything I had to do was had to be done in German and even though my German is quite good conversationally things like legal German are like a whole different you know thing. So that was really really difficult for me but I had a lot of support, I found a really good lawyer who was able to help me figure out my plan to apply for my self-employment visa and I was able to get a tax advisor who was able to help me figure out what structure I should go with and how I should go about things and yes it did cost me a lot and I had no idea whether or not I would make money with this business so I did invest a lot when I started out and so that's what was really really scary for me but on the other hand what I feel is because I had nothing to lose I was 100% in you know how it is when somebody just lights a fire under your button and you just have to go out and do those things that was me when I was first starting out my business so there was no option of me taking one year to figure out how to make money because I had to figure it out ASAP or I would have to leave Germany and you know set up this whole thing all over somewhere else which is not something that I wanted to do at the time because I was with my partner at the time and I very much wanted to still be in Germany and you know kind of see where that relationship went so I'm really thankful that everything went you know really well even though it took a very long time for me to figure it out while I was starting this business it was also the start of you know the famous pandemic so that was also very very difficult because I was kind of stuck in India for about six months not being able to proceed on my paperwork not being really able to do much from you know where I was so I have to say the first year of business full time it was quite challenging not just because of all of the visa and the paperwork and all of that going on but also because it was the start of the pandemic so there was a lot of emotional you know stress as well and so I have to say that even though it wasn't as you know amazing as I would have expected it to be I think that's pretty normal for when you're starting out a new business specifically if you have never done that before so even though I do come from you know a background of having worked with startups I have an MBA I have you know studied business and economics intensively I still faced a lot of issues which I feel the only way for you to understand and learn is if you actually jump into the business there is no you know business school that's going to teach you how to file for a tax number in a different country like that just doesn't work so you need to kind of you know hit the ground running and really take action on your business and that's the only way to learn and then from year two onwards my focus was really more on making my skills get to the point where I was actually able to achieve the results that I wanted because despite having a background in business and economics I had absolutely no clue how digital marketing work how this whole industry worked how online businesses worked so I had to really quickly upskill myself and really learn from you know mentors coaches courses books etc so that I could really get to the point where I wanted to be so yes the first few days didn't look that great but I'm really thankful for those days because now I can appreciate so much more what I have having gone through that journey so the next question is how far into your business did you decide to start paying for ads or boosting content now I didn't use ads I think up until I was making seven or eight thousand dollars a month the reason being that I'm a big believer that ads really work like you know gasoline on fire like if you don't have a fire going no amount of gasoline that you throw on it is actually going to grow that it's the same thing with you know advertising as well if you don't have your product down if you don't have your audience down if you don't really know what you're doing and you have no idea how marketing works you can spend thousands of dollars waste that money and you won't get anything back or you won't be able to get all of it back so I think ads should really be looked at when you have reached a point where your products are selling on their own so when you have a good conversion rate which I would say would be at least 2% because ads generally tend to cut your conversion rate into half so you at least want to have a conversion rate of 2% or above on your products before you think of investing into ads because no matter how amazing you know your product is if it is not being sold actively through an organic medium such as Google or you know YouTube or Instagram it's not going to sell on ads either right people aren't just going to magically love your product if people in your own following don't love it so do answer your question it was about a year and a half after I started my business when I felt like I could actually be sustainable with you know investing in ads because when you invest in ads you have to invest not just you know in the actual money that you're paying day to day but also in ads export or a coach which is how I started out so I had to also take into account that I would have higher expenses and I would have to take a lower salary in order to make that investment the next question is how to draw traffic on social media without showing your face now this is again an art and a science both it is something that you really need to do very very specific for each platform now I have tons of videos on this channel about Pinterest I have a course Pintluencer Academy and I have a new course that I've launched Insta Sales Academy which teaches you how to do this with Instagram the course might not be open but you can check out the details of them or add yourself to the waitlist by using the link below like I said this is a whole process which is impossible to really just short down into a small video but in essence you need to learn how to attract the right audience so that they are aware of your presence and of your brand and then you have to nurture and convert them into becoming a customer so it's not just simply saying buy my product buy my product on TikTok or Instagram it's actually about having a step-by-step strategy for each of these three elements that I just mentioned okay the last and final question is any tips for people who are trying to grow their audience the most important thing that I can leave you with when it comes to growing your audience is to just commit to the process and keep showing up. I know this is going to sound like such a huge cliche because probably everyone out there is selling you to be consistent, to be consistent. But I just want to add my two cents to it and that is work smart and be consistent. So don't just work hard and create 10 posts a day with no strategy, no idea of who you want to reach and no thought process behind it. Make sure to actually create quality but also create the volume and the quantity that you need to grow on any platform. Now when you're starting out on a platform let's say for example on YouTube you're competing with thousands and thousands of content creators who've been here for decades right. They have so much more experience compared to you so it can be really overwhelming to get started but the only way you're going to match up to that level and actually get to the point where you're really good and you have your own audience is if you commit to the process and you keep creating even without the results. When I first started my YouTube channel I had like very very few subscribers and it grew very very slowly and that's okay because to be honest my content was not good enough for people to want to stick around and this is something I had to learn through feedback really understanding what my strengths and weaknesses were and working on those as well. So when it comes to growing your audience there's really no shortcut around doing the work. You have to do the work you have to upscale yourself yes you can take courses and you know have mentors who are going to help you fast track the process but they can't do the work for you. You're still going to have to show up on whichever platform you choose and create content in order to grow and you know convert your audience into customers. So I hope that this video was useful for you make sure to like and subscribe to this channel if you're hearing the audio version on podcast make sure to follow the podcast and share with anyone that you feel might benefit from this video as well. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you in the next one.