Selling digital products is very lucrative these days. With the rise of the creator economy, almost anyone can start an online business and sell stuff online.
From online courses, ebooks, and even digital art—the path to earning a livelihood is no longer confined to a 9-5 job corporate job. With hard work, a winning product, the internet and a computer (or smartphone!), anyone can make a living online.
The final component you would need is an audience to sell your digital products to.
This is where Facebook Groups come in.
Having your own Facebook Group means that you have a community that shares the same passions as you do. When you gather a group of people and build a community, it makes it easier for you to push products and services.
There’s no shame in using your Facebook Group as an asset to earn money. At Convosight, we advocate for community entrepreneurship. We believe that every community leader deserves to be compensated for their hard work and dedication that they give to their community.
In this blog post, I’ll walk you through exactly how you can get started with selling digital products on your Facebook Group.
The strategies that I will be sharing here come from my own experience—growing a Facebook Group to 14,000 members and earning 6-figure USD total from selling online courses there.
Starting Your Own Facebook Group
If you decide to start selling digital products such as online courses and ebooks, you would need a way to market them.
For starters, you can post about it on your Facebook profile, or share it to your friends and immediate network.
But in order to achieve scale and sell more, you would need to have a consistent lead generation strategy. You need a healthy source of new leads so that you can convert them into customers.
A great way to get this started is by starting your own Facebook Group. If you already have a Facebook Group, then that’s perfect. If you don’t and you don’t know how to create one, you can read here to learn how to start your own Facebook Group in 5 minutes.
Having your own Facebook Group means that you have complete control over your content distribution and promotions. If you want to promote something to your community, you can do that without any consequences because you own the group.
However—it’s important to take note that creating a Facebook Group just so you can promote 24/7 is a bad practice. You need to provide value to your community before you should even think about promoting anything.
Getting started with a Facebook Group means that you are committing to nurturing and growing your community. It’s not something you do just because you want to make a quick sale. If that was the goal, then running Facebook Ads is a better solution.
If you want to build something that will truly last and will be able to support your business in the long run, then investing in building your Facebook Group community will pay off in the long run.
As for me, I created the Social Media All Stars Facebook Group, which indirectly, became the #1 source for my online course sales.
Now that you have a Facebook Group, it’s time to create value.
Creating Value For Your Facebook Group Members
If you want your Facebook Group members to be eventual buyers of your products/services—you would need to give them value upfront.
Value can come in many ways.
For my group, I focused on creating posts that had actionable tips and strategies about social media marketing. I taught people how to create social media posts, how to run a social media audit, and even how to run their first Facebook Ad.
I posted on a near-daily basis inside my community. Every post aimed to teach the members something new!
Here’s an example:
In the post above, I was teaching people about the importance of Facebook Page Likes—since a lot of marketers and brands put so much emphasis on this topic, I wanted to shed some light and teach my members how to approach it properly.
Posts like this get hundreds of likes and a few dozen comments.
When people engage with my content, this tells me two things…
#1 – People want more of this type of content
#2 – The content is valuable enough that people would take the time to comment and engage with it
By knowing this, it’s now easier for me to determine what kind of product or service I can offer to my members.
It all starts with giving value.
If you still don’t have an idea what kind of product to sell, whether it’s a course, ebook, workshop, or even online coaching—the best way to figure it out is to ask your community.
This leads me to my next point.
Ask Before You Create And Sell Your Digital Product
Before you invest so much time and resources into creating a digital product, you need to know if there is some demand for it.
The best way to do this is to ASK your members.
Use your Facebook Group to do some market research and learn about what your members are interested in.
You can simply run a poll or ask your members what they would like to learn about.
It’s very simple, but doing this can save you so many hours. Instead of wasting your time building a digital product that no one would buy—you can instead get a better understanding of what your members would be interested in so you can create that solution for them.
The worst thing you can do is to assume that your community would be interested in what you created.
Ask them and see if there’s a demand. Only once you know that your community would be interested in something do you start creating it.
At this point, you can even presell your digital product.
Pre-Selling Your Digital Product Before You Create It
One thing that I did when I started my online course was that I sold it before I even started creating it.
Sounds crazy, but it definitely worked.
I didn’t want to create something that no one would buy.
While asking my community if they would be interested in what I was selling was helpful; people who say YES doesn’t necessarily mean they would be interested in actually PAYING for the product.
I needed to know for sure if I could get some paying customers.
The worst thing I can do is to spend weeks creating something and pouring my heart out, only to find out that no one was actually interested in paying for it.
This concept is called Pre-selling, and it is quite popular in the digital product space.
Here’s what you should do:
- Announce to your community that you are creating a course/ebook/workshop (or whatever digital product you want to create) and that you are launching on X date. Insert a date 2 weeks to 1 month into the future.
- Mention that you are accepting early bird enrollees or buyers and that if they buy now they will get access to the digital product for a huge discount. Whether you give a 20% or 50% discount, it’s up to you.
- Alternatively, you can also include bonuses to make the pre-selling even sweeter. A bonus can be an extra lesson, a freebie, or even a coaching session.
- Once you get your first paying customer, immediately start creating your digital product. You now have proof of concept so it’s time to execute.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You now have a digital product and a paying customer.
If you follow this process, there’s a higher likelihood that you can make a solid income selling digital products inside your Facebook Group.
At that point, you can choose whether you want to scale it up and create other programs for your members, or alternatively, you can become an affiliate and promote other relevant digital products that can complement yours.
In my next article, I will go deeper into this strategy and share the exact steps that I took to scale my online course from 0 to $100K USD, using mostly my Facebook Group as the marketing channel.
For now, I hope this quick guide can help get you started in the right direction!
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Leads digital marketing and content at Convosight. I’m passionate about all things marketing and growth, e-learning, and community building. If you’re awesome and made it all the way here, could you do me a favor and share/tweet this post too? Forever grateful!