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“I’ve sold several thousand dollars worth of my digital product and have the next one ready to launch.”
James Laurain, the Conversational Tech Copywriter
If you’ve been on LinkedIn within the past two years, you might have come across James Laurain. He posts anywhere from 2 to 4 posts a day and each one of them is loaded with so much information about technology but written in a way that your grandma can understand it.
I’ve been following James since the very beginning. Instantly connected with his posts. And I’ve enjoyed interacting with him online. Then one day I started to notice he was talking a lot about how you can improve your cold emails to get clients.
I decided to reach out to him in the DMs and told him that he should definitely create an evergreen product based on his email post. I told him he could turn his post into a series and sell it as a digital product.
Turns out, he didn’t know a thing about creating or selling evergreen products.
And he’s a writer and tech savvy!
“ First, I had never launched a “digital product”, so I was intimidated. (Would it be good enough? Would anyone actually buy this? Does it actually have “value”? How formatted does it really need to be?). I’m really cheap, so I assume that everyone else is too.” – James Laurin
Deep into the DM conversation, I came to find out that he wanted to do most of the work himself, which was really interesting.
I told him he should have ThriveCart to sell the product. It's a great tool that you can just link to download a Google Doc or PDF you’ve written (ThriveCart is a great tool for other things as well… but that’s a different story for a different day).
I explained to him the steps that he had to go through. Hint: I explain the same exact steps in one of my blog posts on how to create an online product.
“The biggest hurdle was that everything was new. “ – James
For him, the first step was to write the actual email sequence that he wanted to teach folks about. I told him about the structure he should follow to make it appealing for people who purchase it, though to be fair, he knew most of it already.
After the product was finished, it was time to purchase ThriveCart. I walked him through the benefits of using such a platform:
✔ One-time fee (as opposed to most others charging you a fee per-purchase, forever).
✔ You can create a custom domain name for your checkout page's URL.
✔ You can accept multiple payment options.
✔ You can customize monthly split pay schedules and amounts.
✔ You can add a sales tax option.
“It just seemed like a whole tangled web of softwares that had to align for someone to purchase a product and have the billing and emails done separately, etc.” - James on the confusion of which platform to use
And now that fun part began - we set up the product inside ThriveCart. The product he was going to use was a downloadable PDF. He defined the delivery URL, and then we got to setting up the checkout page.
The checkout page needed several steps (if you need a walkthrough of ThriveCart, there is a link at the end of this post):
1. He needed to pick the layout of the checkout page.
2. He needed to write the copy.
3. He needed to integrate his payment services.
I didn’t need to help him with the copy, he’s a phenomenal copywriter. But I did help him integrate the payment service and pick a design (it was minimal yet effective).
For payment, I asked him how he wanted to get paid. Stripe? PayPal? Once he picked I would DM him a Loom video on how to do this.
By the way, we never once got on a call.
This entire process was through LinkedIn’s DM channel.
“I needed support and encouragement and the guiding hand of someone who knew what they were doing.”
We were in different time zones. So when I'd wake up in the morning, I'd see what questions James had. I'd shoot him a quick clip. Then when he got up in the morning, he would watch the clip, and ask for some feedback. We sort of did this back and forth. And then in the evening again, if there was anything that still needed to be done, we would keep going, step by step.
It was really interesting because my idea was to train him to be able to do this over and over again on his own. I didn't want him to have to rely on me every time.
And the funny thing about working with James is that every step we were working on, he finished it way ahead of schedule.
Because he realized it was actually easier than he had thought it was going to be.
Once the product was loaded up. I recommend that he nurture the product with an email sequence.
And so then we set up an ActiveCampaign account and that's really easy to set up too.
He had no list. So there was no migration and very little initial setup.
We created a new account with a click of a button - a basic light account.
I walked him through how to create that initial automation - what he had to do, what emails he wanted to send out, which was basically a confirmation email. Once he had that email sequence set up, all we had to do was link it in ThriveCart.
Another Loom video, and done.
He was now ready to sell it.
Marketing The Product
I knew James wasn’t going to run ads, whether it would be FB ads, Google Ads, or even YouTube ads. He was going to rely on his organic channel, which, at the time, had 20,000 plus followers.
It was important that we set goals.
The first goal was to get at least 5 people to purchase the product.
So, he wrote a post to launch his first digital product.
And he crushed his first goal. The numbers were rolling in much quicker than we had anticipated.
I upped the ante on him and told him I wanted more sales!
(He was shy about selling himself)
First step to selling more was to post, in the comments, every time he posted, the link to purchase the product.
The second step, because the feedback he was getting was amazing, was to cycle them back into the landing page to add social proof.
After that… he made back what he purchased for ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign within a week!
The rest was going to be pure profit for him, for the life of the product.
He soon realized how valuable the product was and increased the price. People still purchased the product even after the price increase.
“I’ve sold several thousand dollars worth of my digital product and have the next one ready to launch.I was able to build the second product (mostly) all by myself without even feeling like it was overwhelming. I also recommended you to others to help them get started launching their products and they’ve reported similar results.More importantly, it changed my thinking about producing revenue. I have more channels available than I ever realized.”
If you’re interested in ThriveCart to launch your business, I recommend you to check out the following links:
Why creating evergreen products is important to scale up
Complete guide to selling your online product
If you have any questions, you can reach me here.
