Introduction
Whether we like it or not, AI seems to be here to stay, and people are using it to create massive amounts of content online. This has a lot of course creators and other online entrepreneurs wondering if they might be soon out of a job, and you might be wondering this too. I mean, how can we sell online courses and other information products when there’s so much content available for free? Well, there is no denying that information marketing has changed a lot over the last year or so. The fact of the matter is that there are still plenty of digital entrepreneurs out there who are still earning millions and millions of dollars online, and what it really all comes down to is knowing what consumers currently want and need. I think you’ll agree with me that even with all that free content that’s out there, we still need help with some things.
In this Article, I’m going to show you how you can keep making great money online over the next several years, even as we’re competing with AI and all that free content that’s out there.
Tactic 1: Improve Your Marketing Skills
The first tactic we’re going to talk about is probably the least exciting. It’s the least innovative but the simplest thing that you can do right away without having to change to selling a different version of your product or a different product altogether.
In short, one of the problems that we are running into right now is simply competing with free content. So for example, why would someone want to pay for your online course about how to bake sourdough bread when there are thousands of Articles about exactly that? The short answer to this question is because those Articles only give a snapshot of the process, but there might be a lot more involved to go from where someone is right now to where they eventually want to be—the skill that they want to master or the problem they want to overcome.
So with your online course, you’re selling a complete system and a very comprehensive program for achieving that end outcome, whereas with free content, people are either just getting the condensed version or getting a random tactic. Another example would be in my business. I teach people how to build sales systems for their digital products. Well, there are plenty of free videos about how to build a sales funnel, for example, but people need to learn all the different steps of the process, from how to decide exactly what product to sell, to the tech aspects of how to put the funnel together, to messaging—that’s one of the most important parts—like how do you communicate, what should you communicate to sell your product effectively, and then how do you get leads to sell it.
That’s a really big process. It’s a process that I take weeks and weeks to teach my clients and to coach them through, and there’s just no way that can be covered comprehensively in free content. So this first tactic that we can use to keep successfully selling our digital products, even with all that free content, is simply to become better marketers and fully communicate the value that is being provided in our paid products. Because there are still plenty of people out there who want to buy your course if it is the complete system to get them where they want to go.
Tactic 2: Mastering Marketing to Stand Out in the Age of Free Content
Number two: we’re going to start to augment your digital product a little bit. We’re going to step outside the box of simple information marketing. So the simplest form of information marketing is where you’re selling an educational product. It could be a course, it could be a book, it could be an ebook, but you’re just teaching people what they need to do and how to do it. You’re just teaching them.
Well, that’s something that AI can do pretty effectively. It can create how-to content. It can even coach people, right? We can ask AI how to do something, and it can tell us how to do it. It has a lot of expert-level information in it, but what it can’t do is it can’t provide the human elements. So adding human elements into your course or digital product is a great way to differentiate yourself and increase the value of your product.
We can add community elements where people can get that inspiration and that support and that accountability. You can add coaching, whether that’s group coaching or one-on-one coaching. Now, at this point, we’re taking the information product and we’re kind of “servicizing” it. Sometimes people talk about productizing their service—so packaging their service up as a product, and that can make it easier to sell. But by adding service components into your digital product, it can really augment that value.
Now, one concern that I know people have sometimes about adding in human elements or adding coaching and that sort of thing is that it negates the passive income aspect of their digital product. Maybe the whole reason you want to sell digital products in the first place isn’t so much because you want to teach people or you want to help people, but it’s because you want a stream of passive income in your life. Well, I’m here to tell you that the income can still be passive even if you include these human elements in it because you don’t necessarily have to be the person to deliver those things. A community can be self-sustaining or set up to run on autopilot. You can schedule out the discussion prompts or the posts in the community group. But perhaps even better than that is simply to delegate, to hire people to work in your business serving your customers with these different human elements.
For example, I have a team of coaches who work in my business supporting my clients. And as a side benefit, you are creating jobs in the process.
Tactic 3: Add Done-For-You Services to Your Products
Now, we can even take this simple idea of adding services into our product a step further and not just give people accountability and coaching but actually do some of the work for them.
So for example, in my business, as I mentioned, I teach people how to build sales funnels. Well, I don’t have to just teach them how to do it themselves. I can have people who work for me build the funnels for them. At this point, I’d say we’re crossing that line. No longer is this strictly an information product or even necessarily a digital product, but now it’s more of a service. But this is a way we can evolve our businesses to keep up with the market and make sure that we are offering products that are things that customers—the current customers in the current market—actually want and need.
They might not, depending on your niche, need “how-to” type training on how to do something, but there will always be customers who want the work done for them, and this is a great and very reliable way that you can keep your business making money long into the future.
Tactic 4: Include Tools & Ready-Made Resources
We’re going to come back to the digital information product and we’re going to see a merge here between the “done-for-you” and the “do-it-yourself” because now we’re going to get really creative about how we can do some of the work for the clients but in a really productized way.
For example, with what I was talking about earlier, that might have been somebody on my team building the funnel for the client. But something that we’ve realized recently is that we can build template funnels, and we can just hand the templates over to the clients. Then they can just pop all of their copy—their sales copy, the words, the emails that they write, their sales page—all of that into the template that we gave them.
We’ve saved them a massive amount of time because now they don’t have to create all of the integrations, and they don’t have to connect the funnel in all these different ways. They don’t have to mastermind or strategize the whole thing either. We’ve done all of that for them, so they can just focus on creating those key pieces of content, communicating with their potential customers and their customers really well, and plugging those words into what we’ve already created for them.
So this is a pretty new kind of digital product where it’s not an information product, but it’s also obviously not a physical product. But it is a tool that you can take and sell to people. And this is where I am really seeing huge opportunity in the online business space right now because these tools can be created without knowledge of coding or with any advanced skill set at all. You know, what I was describing with that example with the sales funnels—that’s something a little bit more complex, but for a much simpler example, let’s say that you are a health coach, and maybe you have a course related to that.
Maybe your course guides people to adopt a healthier way of eating. Well, that course can be purely informational and educational, or you can add tools and resources into it. For example, done-for-you meal plans—this is something that people consistently buy—are ready-made meal plans complete with grocery shopping lists, right? So that’s something that, like I was saying, doesn’t require any sort of advanced skill set aside from your unique expertise on that topic or niche, which is what we’re typically selling with an information type of product anyway.
Tactic 5: Transitioning from Information Products to Selling Tools and Ready-Made Solutions
This leads me right into the last thing I wanted to talk about, which is to graduate from selling purely information or educational type of products and instead be selling tools or done-for-you resources.
So maybe you don’t need to sell the nutrition course at all. Maybe people just want to buy the meal plans and the shopping lists. In my case, maybe people don’t want to buy a course about how to build a sales funnel. Maybe they just want to either hire my team to build the funnel for them or to get the templates that they can use.
In fact, this is exactly what I plan to do in the coming months. I have courses that teach people how to build the sales systems for their online business. But in the future, I see this business of mine evolving to where instead of just selling those digital courses, I’m going to be selling some of the tools that I use to build those funnels for my clients. I’ll be selling those tools as pre-made templates, ready to be used by people who are just getting started.
And this is where I think a lot of opportunity is right now in the world of digital entrepreneurship because it can scale without needing to build a course every time or every new version of that course. You’re creating one product—whether that’s the tool, the template, or whatever—and it’s ready to be sold over and over again.
