Why Websites Don’t Sell Digital Products, funnels like Systeme.io do
A smooth-looking website is not the first step to building a successful business, despite how much advice there is online suggesting it is. Selling digital products shows us just how little money a website can actually bring you. Most online sellers make over $31,000 a month. A website contributes less than 0.5% to that number. Websites are not fully utilized for online sales, and that is a huge gap.
Many websites that promote building a website are affiliated with the companies that sell the website building software, templates, and hosting. They promote building a website because they personally profit, not because they are helping you grow your business. A website isn’t going to start generating traffic just because it is published online. They are brought traffic through ads and other redirects, and a website that isn’t doing anything will not make any sales.
Think of the basic framework of websites – each has a home page, an about page, a contact page, and social media links. These pages are all static and they do not offer any guidance to visitors that could help them make a decision to buy. There is no clear path to a conversion. This is where the digital product sales funnel methodology comes in. It is designed to carve a definitive path that guides a buyer from the process of discovery to checkout.
Many new business owners are in a rush to build things like logos and set up a website, thinking that having all these elements establishes them as an official business. However, none of these elements drive traffic to the site, build an audience, or set up a system to convert strangers to recurring customers. These things are what I like to call “egometrics” – they are things that are nice to build, and may make you feel good, but in the end are irrelevant to the bottom line of the business. Everyone else that has a business should be focusing their efforts on the most important thing – sales.
Funnel System for Digital Products
A sales funnel for digital products is actually quite different from a website. A website is just a set of static pages that provide information whereas a funnel is a set of strategically created pages and processes that move a buyer step by step from discovering your business all the way to making a purchase.
Here’s how a sales funnel works step by step:
- A prospect first sees you on a traffic source, like YouTube.
- You give them a freebie. This can be a PDF, video, customized GPT bot, or workshop.
- They put their name and email to access the freebie.
- They get added to your email list.
- They get a series of automated welcome emails with free educational content.
- They get automated emails that promote your membership or digital product.
- Around 5% of people who visit your funnel end up on the checkout page and buy the product.
The system works because it is structured and efficient. You are not waiting for sales to magically happen; you are actively guiding serious potential customers with sales strategies at each step of the buying process.
This method is a proven one. In a Q&A with about 50 students, not one said they ever went to the main website. This also corroborates the finding that 98% of sales came from the funnel, from YouTube to a freebie, then to the email list, checkout page, and finally the purchase. This illustrates that digital product sales funnels are a lot more effective than traditional websites.
Using YouTube as Your Main Traffic Source and Email List Building
YouTube, after extensive research, is the most impactful traffic source for developing a sustainable business. From Facebook and Instagram all the way to Periscope, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Clubhouse, YouTube is the most powerful platform for successful and scalable sales generation.
The business model is extremely simple. You need to upload two videos every week on YouTube and provide educational information. Encourage your viewers to give you their email address at least 2 or 3 times throughout the video so that you can send them your freebie.
Why YouTube? Because email is 40 times more effective as a sales channel than social media, and even more so than social media and YouTube combined. Email is an extremely effective channel in sales communication, and the ownership is solely in the hands of the YouTube video creator.
Higher sales conversion potential with email is because the leads that are included are already warm and have watched one of your videos, so the likely odds are in your favor of them buying a product after viewing a video that fully details a product.
The advice is to begin with one social media platform as opposed to using numerous platforms at once. Focusing on developing YouTube before incorporating other platforms has a more considerable and positive impact than trying to build upon several areas at once.
Automating Sales With Welcome Series and Checkout Pages
When someone subscribes to your email list, automation takes care of the more passive income methods for you. Your teaching story should be broken down into 5 emails.
As an example, you could email tell the story of your very first digital product launch? What happened? What did you learn? Who did you become? And how did that shift your business? Turn that one story into a five email series. In the first three emails, ask them to “Look for tomorrow’s email.” In the final two emails, take them to your checkout page.
With that simple system, you could earn your first six-figures. You only have to create the content once. You’ll vault that content over and over again.
