Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Hello, welcome. Back to SEO is not that hard. It's me, head Dawson, here, as usual, and today I'm going to talk about productizing yourself. Now, this episode is inspired by a chat I had with a listener called Rachel. Hi, rachel, if you're listening. She booked a one-on-one discovery call with me because I offer, as well as keywords people use and doing this podcast, I also offer uh consultancy services.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Um, if you want to, if you're ever interested in that, just you know, go to eddawsoncom, so that's eddawson d-a-w-s-o-n dot com, eddawsoncom, and there you can book a 30 minute call for me, free to a strategy session and see if there's, you know, an engagement worth having natural board. I'm not cheap, um, I, you know, but I do offer that service for um clients. Um, if there's, if it's a, if I can provide value, b, if, um, you know there's budget there to have an engagement like that. But anyway, rachel booked a strategy call, which is great. We had a great chat and we're going to follow up later afterwards. But what Rachel is looking to do and I'm not going to reveal what Rachel's niche that she works in is or anything like that, but essentially she runs a consultancy business and she's looking at how she can productize that business and this is a really key idea that I would. I would say that anybody who's um built their expertise and their knowledge to a level where they they can do this. It's one way to really scale your business and also make it um in many ways slightly, can be slightly more passive um, but more scalable is the key thing.

Speaker 2: 2:06

So, um, for example, I've done it with keywords people use because you know it's not really scalable for me to um go and help people with keyword research based on my philosophy that if you listen to this podcast enough, you know my philosophy is based around um researching people's questions and clients questions and building content around the questions people are asking you in your niche. Now I could have offered that as a service that I just do for people Come to me and I'll go through a manual process. I'll work it all out, provide you with a keyword report and some ideas on what to do, but it doesn't really scale well. But what does scale well is I've got keywords people use where people can go and self-serve so they can sign up for themselves, they can follow a process, they can do the research, they can do the clustering. Then, with a google search console work they're putting in, they can then optimize the content that they've produced. It's all done within a process and within a product that people can sign up to, and it can scale past anything that I could do, the amount of hours I have in a day. So it's great because it gets to be able to help more people. So I can serve more. So serve more people many more people than I could do if I was just doing it as one-on-one engagements. For those people they can get it at much lower cost than if there was a one-on-one engagement from me, and it also means that it becomes, yeah, more passive for me in the respect of I don't have to necessarily spend all my time every day doing one particular thing just to try and churn the work through, okay. So that is great for you, it's great for your clients and it's great for your scalability, basically.

Speaker 2: 3:44

So let's think about how we go about this. If you're, like I say, a knowledge-based or consultancy business or a freelancer, so you're offering specialized services and you want to productize, so what you want to do is you want to turn those high-touch services into more standardized, repeatable products that clients can easily purchase. So think again back to my example of how, rather than me providing keyword research based on my philosophy directly to people, you know we've now got an easy to purchase, repeatable product in keywords. People use that. People can self-serve, self-purchase on that. So this, we're trying to take it from what you do now into a product.

Speaker 2: 4:26

So first thing you need to do is think about how you can standardize your services into packages. So you need to think about what your core offerings are. So, for example, you might want to create a basic strategy session as your first building block. Okay, so this could be like a one-hour consulting call with a follow-up, like an action plan, so that people can get that first product purchase from you. Could be that one-hour strategy call and you can set a price on that and people can order and book online that use tools like Calendly and things like that and Stripe for taking payments, so people can make that upfront purchase straight away from you. And with these you want to be thinking about basing your packages on deliverables rather than just time. I know I mentioned the one hour call to start with, but that's always just your first step Anything after that.

Speaker 2: 5:15

You want to try and make it, so you're selling outcomes, such as, say, a marketing audit and strategy report or something like that. So they're buying a thing off you, not time off you. A thing off you, not time off you. You want to try and decouple your time from the product that people are paying for and that value should be in the outcome rather than in the hours, because bidding for hours, after a while people can become, you know, are you being nickel and dimed, as some people would say? You know so. Are you stretching? Client might think you're stretching out the time to bill higher and you might feel that there's a side that you know that your your value the time that it's that it takes to create something hasn't been properly recognized in um, some of a sort of a time billing situation. So you want to really look at outcomes and selling outcomes as value rather than time.

Speaker 2: 6:06

And you can do other things and so say we can turn your expertise into an easily repeated product, like a digital product, such as ebooks or guides, online courses or webinars and workshops. So these are things that some obviously obviously ebooks. You can sell them as one-offs or you can use them as a marketing tool. I tend to find that they're better as a marketing tool. I tend to find that they're better as a marketing tool rather than as one of purchases. Depends upon the size of your market. If you've got a very small marketplace, then it's probably not worth writing a book to sell it individually, probably going to get more value by giving it away to the people that are then going to come and buy more high value services off you rather than that. But it can work both ways. Yeah, courses, you know, build a course where you can teach people how to solve specific problems or develop a specific skill, and webinars and workshops. There again, these are more. It's obviously something where it's going to be more time-based, but obviously you can scale because of the webinar. You're not going to really do it one-on-one webinars. You will have, you know, many, many people there. And then also the webinars you can obviously, in the end of the day, you can automate them as well. Um, but people who specialize in webinars tend to say that always do them live to start with before you try and start to automate them.

Speaker 2: 7:24

The the golden nugget that you really want to go for is some kind of subscription model. So if you can create a product where people subscribe with ongoing access, so, um, whether that's for a particular service that you offer, which might be a time-based service, like a monthly or quarterly consulting access to exclusive content or knowledge libraries, or group coaching sessions or masterminds, or a tool like a software as a service tool, like here's people use, you know that's a subscription-based service, then that's. That's another thing you wanted to be aiming for when you're doing this productization. Now, when you're thinking of this productization, you want to think in terms of a thing called a value ladder. So a value ladder is essentially people that come in to your sphere who have attracted by you or your service. Basically, you're going to take them up rungs of a ladder, um to you want to get them to the point where you get them the the product that's right for them.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Okay, now you'll find, to start with, you want to offer a very low value product, even a free product. So this is where we go with the ebook or the tip sheet or something, something small you can offer them to engage in the first part of the process, and that first part of engagement is usually to get an email address off them or somewhere where they, where you're going to initiate contact to one way or the other and that will bring the first people into the first rung of your ladder now. You then offer them the next service up, which will be possibly your first service, so like it might be a paid call, a discovery call, something like that and then after that you can offer them another service, and another service, and another service, and you'll find people will naturally reach a point where they get the right level of value that they need off you and they will stop. And that's fine, that's absolutely fine.

Speaker 2: 9:11

You know, not everybody is going to become, say, a fifty thousand dollar consulting long-term engagement. If that's what you're aiming for, um, but you start at small steps. It's like the old adage you know, the first time you meet someone, you don't ask them to marry you. You know you might say hello to start with. You might get a phone number, you might go for a date, you might go for another date and then you become more of a relationship and then you might move in together, then you might get engaged and you might get married. It doesn't happen overnight, okay, so it's the same.

Speaker 2: 9:40

With any kind of engagement like this, you, you start on the lower rungs and then you introduce people to different value ladders the further you go up. So this lets you filter people through. It, lets you get value, and people get value from you at the different levels of the ladder and people will go up that ladder as far as they get value and you can provide value. So, yeah, that's important to remember. So think about how you're going to bring people along the journey and how you can use products and productized services to bring people further and further up to greater and greater and greater value ones on that service. And you'll generally find that the lower down the ladder, the less input there is from yourself. And then, obviously, the further and further up that they get. That's where they're paying for access. That's where you know.

Speaker 2: 10:28

So, for example, you're might be writing something where you know you're going to have some clients that take you on for long-term engagements. You provide a lot of consultancy, they're your have some clients that take you on for long-term engagements. You provide a lot of consultancy, they're your gold standard and that. But you get other people that might just be on a course that you provide, or they might just be an e-book purchaser, and that's the level that they need to get to and that's the level of value they want. And then they do the rest of themselves. Or some people want to carry on with you further down that journey.

Speaker 2: 10:55

But the one final bit of advice I'll give on this productization journey that I encourage everybody to go down is basically don't sit there and work out everything in advance and build all our content in advance and get that. Get all your products completely lined up before you launch anything. No, what you should first do is start with the bottom of that value ladder. Like I said, do the very simplest product. You can straight away get it up, get it live, get it out there, promote it, because that's the start. Okay, you want to start picking people up at that level. You can add further levels on further down, but don't wait and produce everything all the way until you start from the very bottom. Just get going, see if we've been doing so.

Speaker 2: 11:33

We started this process myself really after we sold broadbandcouk. That's when. After that was when we decided right, I need to create keywords people use and start putting myself out there a bit more, because before we sold broadbandcouk I didn't really have a public profile. I didn't offer any kind of other services. We were just purely affiliate based and everything we did was affiliate.

Speaker 2: 11:55

And then, after selling broadband at credit uk, while we still do the affiliate stuff, it was a case of I want to do something different now I want to product our services that I could offer to people, because I didn't want to just go straight in to do consultancy um, because, again, coming from that sort of affiliate, automation, scalable background, just to do something that didn't scale, which consultancy by itself doesn't scale, and was the wrong thing to do. So that's why I just got going tries the fact I'm still creating new stuff now, still creating new content, still creating new products all the time and new levels on that value ladder. So, yeah, the key thing is get started with your first thing. Don't worry about a complete master plan and try to get it all done in one go, because you will never ever launch, because you'll never get there. Just get, kick on, get on with the first first step and then see where you go. Anyway, until next time, I'll see you later before I go.

Speaker 1: 12:51

I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 13:29

Seo is Not that Hard is brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom to get an instant hit of more seo tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5 on twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspupilusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO. Is Not that Hard.