How to Pre-Sell Your Digital Product

Have an idea, spend one year creating it, launch it, no sales.

Sound familiar?

That’s because that process is the one most infopreneurs follow, yet is exactly what the opposite of what they should be doing!

You shouldn’t create a product unless it has been validated first.

And that doesn’t mean asking your current audience if they want it. We’re surrounded by well-meaning, encouraging people.

You need to let people vote with their wallets, not their mouths!

Ask people to pay for your product before you create it, then get to work delivering.

This is known as pre-selling, and it is the only way you should be doing new digital product launches.

But how is it done exactly?

Here is a high-level overview:

1. Come up with your basic product idea. Book? Course?
2. Layout exactly what the product will look like when it’s done. What’s included? What do people get?
3. Brand it. Give it a name, etc.
4. Create three pages in your sales funnel: a sales page where you lay out what people get, an order form and order confirmation page. On the sales page, state that the product is in pre-sale mode and will be released at a future date. What date? This should be however much time you need to create the product plus a few weeks of initial selling. So if you’re launching a course that you know is going to take you one month to record, I’d say make the pre-sale period two months.
5. Give the product a “pre-sale” price: tell people it’s 50% (or similar) off during the pre-sale period, but once the product is finished and goes live, the price is going up permanently to its regular price.
6. Take your product to your audience. For the first few weeks, only focus on selling. These weeks are crucial. Listen to customer feedback. Tweak your product plan as necessary.
7. As people buy, send them a confirmation email confirming when/how they can access their purchase. If you’re doing a course, I give them immediate login information to the membership area, even if it’s empty. They can see the content in there as you begin to add it in the future, and this reduces buyers’ remorse.
8. After a few weeks of selling, assess your sales. Did you make any? Did you make enough to make it worth it to you to create your product? If not, refund those who already bought and go back to the drawing board. If so, continue selling while simultaneously creating your product in preparation for it to go live.

Now, this process above is all well and good if you already have an audience that you can sell to.

Many beginners just getting started don’t. Can they still pre-sell? Absolutely.

But in their case, I recommend something a little different.

Use a virtual summit to work with affiliate partners and grow your list first.

You could then simply follow the above process in a new launch once the summit is over, BUT why do that when you have all this fresh traffic going through your virtual summit funnel already?

Pre-sell your digital product in your virtual summit funnel as an UPSELL:

1. Add an upsell page to your virtual summit funnel where people can buy your coming-soon digital product with one click.
2. Price it at your pre-sale price.
3. Add a video to that upsell page telling people you have a new product that’s coming out, but it won’t be ready for a few more weeks. If they buy now, they can get it at the pre-sale price.
4. As the summit continues, assess your sales. If your upsell is doing well, get started on your product.

Remember also that in this upsell scenario, the only people who will have seen it are those that bought the All-Access Pass during your summit. You can still do a regular pre-sale launch to everyone else who didn’t see the upsell offer when the summit is over!