You know, we use ad-blockers as well. We gotta keep those servers running though. Did you know that we publish useful books and run friendly conferences — crafted for pros like yourself? At the end of , I was talking with a good friend of mine who runs a small custom woodworking company. We were discussing business over the last year and a few things we learned. While his business did about double the revenue that mine did in , I made considerably more profit.

That actually could have been much higher, except that I spent some money on equipment I needed that inch display and hiring freelancers. And the product can be sold an unlimited number of times. Compare that to the custom woodworking company, which has to bear not only the material cost for each new project, but also the time, because everything is custom. From the section in which Tim talks about different kinds of businesses to create, one quote really stuck with me:.

Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate. It took a few years, but that quote is a big part of why I got into selling design and marketing books and courses online.

I create the product once, then sell it over and over again to people all around the world. Because there is nothing to manufacture or ship, my day-to-day involvement can be quite limited. This business model works not only with books and training, but with tools, themes, plugins, software and so much more! If you work in any kind of creative field, then you have byproducts. As you focus on creating products or running your business, you create other tools or resources that help in the process.

A great way to start selling digital products is to look at your workflow and see what tools or skills you use every day. The byproduct of writing those books on design is that I became quite good at writing, packaging and launching ebooks. I took that knowledge on how to write a profitable book and released it as Authority , my latest book on marketing. Kyle Webster 5 is a fantastic designer and illustrator who has created many tools to improve his own workflow.

Instead of just keeping those tools to himself, he decided to sell some of his custom Photoshop brush sets.

Those brush sets are the byproduct of design work that Kyle was already doing for clients. Now he has an entirely new stream of revenue in addition to what his clients pay him from selling digital products.

For my first few products, I had no idea how to get customers, which became obvious from the sales figures. Sales ranged from nothing for three or four different products to a few hundred dollars for WordPress themes — not even close to enough money to quit my job. After all, practically every college teaches marketing, and the Internet is filled with articles on how to market products.

It turns out marketing is very hard — at least it was for me. From my college marketing classes, I learned that I should brainstorm ideas, share them with a focus group, build brand loyalty, synergize with other sellers and… I have no idea. Here is a list, in order of launch date:.

Because the time scale is different for each product, it can be hard to see exactly, but there is a point in my product marketing education when I learned a valuable lesson. This lesson was repeated to me dozens of times over the years, but I never really learned it until I started the launch strategy for my first book, The App Design Handbook.

Like any good story, it happened a long time ago. Marco Polo was a Venetian explorer who lived from to and became famous for being the first to explore the Silk Road to China.

There is only one small problem. Like all good Venetians of the time, he was a merchant. Plenty of people had explored the roads to the East long before Marco Polo. So, why does Marco get all the credit? Why is he the one we remember? Marco learned the same lesson that I did. But good ideas span centuries, so let me introduce you to someone who is still alive today. Back in , Chris Coyier launched a website named CSS-Tricks 8 , dedicated to teaching people how to code websites.

This continued for a while as he kept putting out new tutorials. Years later, Chris ran a Kickstarter campaign to redesign his website. Those who contributed would get behind-the-scenes access to additional tutorials and content related to the redesign.

He and I started at the same point, and our skills progressed at about the same rate. The difference was that he taught and shared, whereas I kept what I was learning to myself. That made the difference between being able to make tens of thousands of dollars on a new project and sharing with no one.

Teaching is what Marco Polo and Chris Coyier have in common. Instead of keeping knowledge to themselves, they shared it eagerly with anyone who would listen.

Because of that, they built trust and credibility. They built an audience. Quite the opposite with chefs. They write down their secrets in a way that is easy to follow, which we know as recipes.

The trade secrets of your business, your competitive advantage, made available to the entire world! They go a step further and get cameras to record every step of the process, while they narrate, providing every detail that you might have missed from reading their recipe.

By teaching, these chefs build credibility and an audience. Think of every chef you know by name. My guess is that most who come to mind have cookbooks and TV shows through which they give out every secret recipe. In doing so, their restaurants get booked up months in advance. The reputation they build helps to sell their product even more. That inflection point you saw in my product revenue is the moment when I learned to teach. Jason Fried and others had been preaching this message for years, but it took far too long for it to sink in with me.

Once I took teaching to heart and made it a core part of my business, sales skyrocketed.

The Smashing Book #1 – Smashing Shop

Instead of scratching and clawing to find a few people who would listen to my sales pitch, I had an audience coming to me, eager to learn more and buy products. As your posts get shared around the web, some visitors will start to come to your website. At first, each visitor will be incredibly valuable. Unfortunately, most of those visitors will read your articles, forget about you and never come back. Early in my blogging career I made the mistake of focusing on traffic.

Each day, I would check my Google Analytics statistics from the previous day before they were real-time. After blogging for a few months, I wrote a post that I knew would be popular: Sure enough, the post climbed to the top spot on Hacker News and was featured on Reddit and a bunch of other websites.

In a single day, that post received more visitors than my entire blog had received up to that point. I felt like my few months of writing a post every week had finally paid off. I started planning my career as a successful blogger. If you hid November in that chart, you would never be able to tell that there was a meaningful spike in traffic.

To stay in touch with your readers and keep them coming back , you need a way to push content to them, rather than wait for them to remember who you are and come back to see whether you have anything new to say. RSS is common to all blogs, and Twitter and Facebook are supposedly the future of online publishing. So, the answer has to be one of those, right? The short version is that, comparing click-through and conversion rates between Twitter and email, an email subscriber is worth at least 15 times as much as a Twitter follower!

I was having a conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about this very topic. When you ask someone to follow you on Twitter, the call to action is usually pretty lame: But with email, you can actually incentivize the subscription by offering valuable content.

My friends at Think Traffic offer their Traffic Toolbox for free to everyone who subscribes to their email newsletter. Think through what valuable content you can offer. One idea is to take some of your best posts on a particular topic and edit them into a single guide.

How much is a book worth? The most common way to answer that question is by comparison. Well, the ebooks at that price are by professional authors at major publishing houses.

Luckily, my mom is a professional proofreader. Whether you are selling books or any other product, comparison pricing like this is a great way to be a poor starving creator. A designer or developer at a software company could earn thousands of dollars in value from the ideas in my book Designing Web Applications Just implementing the ideas on designing first-run experiences could radically improve their trial retention rates and generate a lot more revenue.

If your product is focused on business customers, you could — and should — charge far more than you think.

Because my business is teaching and training, I reason that I can charge premium rates if I am teaching a skill that makes money for people who have money. I teach design to professional designers and developers. They use those skills to make their products easier to use and more profitable. But you should still probably increase your price to focus on the higher end of the market. More likely you are in the early stages of your online business empire and are working on those first or even followers.

Pricing is flexible and hard to get right. But if your goal is to maximize revenue, think about increasing your price. Implementing it does take some time, but not nearly as much as creating the rest of your product. You know when you subscribe to a web application and it asks which plan you would like? The vendor is segmenting their customers to allow those with larger budgets to pay more and get more value from the product.

I do it with books. For my book Authority which is precisely about how to write and profit from your own technical ebook , I used the package method mentioned above. According to the sales count i. Were the other packages worth offering, then? Raising prices almost always increases revenue.

Because every time we raise the price, we exclude some people from buying. Low-paying customers have higher support costs in general. So, in that case, getting more revenue from fewer higher-quality customers is a good thing.

But I still want my books and training to be accessible. You get all of the benefits of selling a high-priced product the top package to customers who have money i. Well, that concludes part 1. Check back next week for part 2! There is plenty more to learn about email marketing while you are waiting though.

Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit , an email marketing application, as well as the author of The App Design Handbook and Designing Web Applications. His latest book, Authority , teaches authors how to profit from self-publishing.

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experience. The whole article was easy to read and it full of valuable advices. In fact, you inspired me to start my own project. Really looking forward for part 2! Seem like perfect timing for this fantastic article. Very well written and the information was invaluable!

Definitely helped me to stay motivated to produce my own digital products. Although hosting fees might not be an expense worth mentioning, the time you have put in to create your books and tutorials really should count. It is an expense, and a very serious one — you could be spending your time with the family and friends or doing whatever. Artists have to create their work just once too, but they get paid every time someone uses it.

Online or off-line, my mom still gets paid for the stage productions she did decades ago. But they get nothing unless they put a considerable amount of effort into their products and are successful at being and convincing others that they are — better than all of their competition.

Everything has a price. Thanks for the comment! It really is a huge amount of work! I wrote 1, words a day since writing is my main craft for over days in a row. Hopefully that conveys just how much work it takes! Imagine … all that work, and not having the success sales.

But am sure a lot of developers can relate to it. I liked the part where you talk about by products of your main line of work. Inspirational Article Nathan, and I have read it right on the verge of launching my new website — so very timely!!!

Now on a mission to identify my by-products and start a proper marketing effort. Key objective is gaining credibility as an authority in an overcrowded market. If I get a sale, then… BOOM!! I wish I had realize how successful this was way earlier. The sidebar is not distractive at all to me the way you state it.

Been selling a php script for years. Recently spent months rewriting and updating it. Customers seem quite happy with it.

The biggest issue I continue to face is getting it out there. Outside of that, I have no other marketing avenues, and I limit my sales severely.

I vaguely remember this article and specifically the part about Chris Coyer and his Kickstarter project , have you posted it elsewhere or here sometime in the past? Nathan, this is a really inspiring post with resources and real examples that really light up my passion.

Your story is inspiring. Thanks for sharing it all with everyone. Your advice is really good. What I think about is the fact that now there are so many books on productivity and business, as well as people who write these books. And advice are oftentimes the same, just put in different words. It is so hard to crate content of unique value and not to repeat what is aleady there.

A fantastic read, and plenty of information to think about moving forward. Moving on to Part 2 ASAP! This article definitely taught me a lesson on economics. When it comes to a firm or a business, you need three main components. Those of which are land labor and capital.

However with the new era today, technology and digital media are transforming the way the market works. In cases like digital products, the manufacturing process gets cut out, meaning that in the long run the percentage of profit is much higher and the capital spent on inputs is virtually zero. Virtual products are basically unlimited to distribute. Virtual online products such as e-text books or site access are products with almost no capital input returning mostly profit.

However I realized that the real challenge here is in promoting a virtual product. This is where the marketing lecture kicks in. Hi there, I really enjoyed both part 1 and part 2, really looking forward to learning more! Is your free course still available?

I tried to sign up a few hours ago, but still not received an email? Thanks for sharing your experience. Subscribe to our email newsletter for useful tips and valuable resources, sent out every second Tuesday. Gorgeous hardcover with pages. The eBook is included.

Get your book now! Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book Inclusive Design Patterns , we explore how to craft flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort.

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Taking place on June With Brad Frost, Sara Soueidan, Umar Hansa, Yuko Shimizu, and others. Get your ticket now! With a commitment to quality content for the design community. Founded by Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz. Search on Smashing Magazine Search. Nathan Barry Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit , an email marketing application, as well as the author of The App Design Handbook and Designing Web Applications.

Marvin E July 14, 8: Dmitri July 10, 4: Just an awesome intro article about doing proper sales. Nathan Barry July 10, 6: Jeffrey July 11, 7: Vinay Raghu July 17, July 10, 4: Allie Whelan July 10, 5: CanadianCorner July 11, 4: Bob Dole July 11, 9: Hi, this is an indirect response, but I really encourage you to be published somewhere else.

Ralph July 16, 4: Matt Smith July 13, 4: I look forward to reading more on how to get the word out. Thanks for sharing, Nathan. Madara Uchiha July 13, 4: Terry Tsang July 14, 8: Jenny July 15, 1: Thanks for this fantastic article! Ali Yucel July 16, 2: Hey Nathan, Your story is inspiring. Jordan Harriger July 17, 6: Great article, a lot of valuable information is tucked away in here! Emily Beckett July 20, 8: Chris McQuillan July 29, Jorge September 5, 6: JenKs February 7, 1: I agree, the marketing aspect is the key element in any product you sale digital and physical.

Alex Su March 5, 5: Claire March 7, 7: Vy Le August 13, 2: Search on Smashing Magazine Search Become a sponsor! Please provide us with your email address: Smashing Job Board Senior UI Designer - IXL Learning - San Mateo, CA - FullTime IXL Learning, a leading edtech company with products used by 6 million students worldwide, is seeking an artistic, innovative, and passionate Senior User Int Freelance Web Designer - Practis - Remote - Freelance Based in Charlotte, NC, Practis is a digital marketing agency for the health industry.

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