This blog post was written by Amanda Northcutt, CEO LevelUp Creators.

The most successful content creators in the world think like business owners – they are playing chess while everyone else fumbles through checkers. Most people are limiting themselves to only red and black game pieces. Yet, there are an almost limitless number of moves that can be made. I’m going to teach you a pro chess move that is well known in the business world. This move will enable you to easily sell your digital products as a creator.

Successful businesses know exactly what they want someone to do from the moment they’re first exposed to the brand. This is seen all the way through to becoming a customer and even customer evangelist. This entire process is what we refer to as the customer journey.

What is the customer journey and why is it important to sell digital products as a creator?

The customer journey is the experience someone has with your brand before, during and after becoming a customer. It’s that simple. In order to maximize your income as a creator with the least amount of ongoing work, you need one.

The customer journey you design for your followers is the path you ultimately want them to follow. This journey is where there is an ongoing, mutual value exchange. This means you continue to offer free value through your social media channels, blog, and/or email newsletter. Over time, you have a plan in place that leads those followers to also purchase the amazing products & services you offer to them. A customer journey allows you to do this in the right way, at the right time.

Customer Journey Examples

A simple and abbreviated example of a customer journey that we’re all familiar with is that of Amazon.com. Front and center on their homepage are product recommendations just for you, based on your past purchases and search history. When you search for a product, Amazon makes it easy for you to purchase exactly what you want and have it at your door the next day. They are masterful at capturing expansion revenue by suggesting products to purchase alongside what you came to buy today. This suggestion is possible because similar customers have made the same purchase. They’re using social proof, or peer pressure of sorts, to get you to buy more than you originally planned.

Amazon’s goal is to get you exactly what you want, as quickly as possible. It’s also to sell you every tangentially related product under the sun. This short customer journey has been designed by psychologists, data scientists, marketers, and software engineers. It’s constantly being refined based on your specific behavior on their website to maximize your spend on Amazon. This optimization is not just for that one day, but they’re training you to come back for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

Start to increase your awareness of thoughtfully designed customer journeys. This is visible even if you walk into a Target or your local grocery store. How are those stores designed to get you to do specific behaviors and buy specific, high-margin products. What are they doing to maximize the amount of money you spend not just once, but every time you visit?

How the customer journey will help you sell digital products as a creator

The customer journey that you design for your business will become a well worn path for your customers. That well worn path will produce predictable income for you and value for them. When you begin to automate steps along that well worn digital path with technology, through a system called marketing automation, you have laid the proper foundation from which to scale your business. From this system, you start to sell digital products as a creator, on autopilot.

This is the dream outcome for most creators. You set up a smart system and sales are made on autopilot, ongoing. Marketing automation systems can handle 10 people or 10,000 people all at once. We break down what marketing automation is and how to apply it on episode 9 of season 1 of the Level Up Creators Podcast. Make sure you give that a listen if your curiosity is piqued.

No one scales successfully to 7, much less 8 figures, without mapping out the intentional journey they want their customers to take.

To move toward that level of income selling digital products you simply write down your customer journey. Describe, step-by-step, what you want to happen from the time a prospective customer is first introduced to you.

The most common journey to sell digital products as a creator:

1. A new person follows you on social
   
2. The creator nurtures their relationship through posting consistent, valuable content
   
3. The creator periodically makes a must-have, free offer, called a lead magnet. This motivates the follower to become an email list subscriber. Example lead magnets are: webinars, email newsletters, challenges, mini-courses, guides, ebooks, etc. This entices followers to trade their email address for that lead magnet.
   
4. The creator now nurtures that email list subscriber through regular email interactions and through social media, a potent one-two punch.
   
5. At the right time, and in the right way, the creator offers something irresistible to their followers and email subscribers for purchase. The creator makes it easy to purchase, access, and get value from it immediately.
   
   Not sure what to offer? Here’s my top digital product list for creators like you:
   • Online courses
   • Masterclasses
   • Workshops
   • Challenges
   • Workbooks
   • Guides
   • ebooks
   • Print books
   • Physical products
   • Templates
   • Printables
   • One-on-one or group coaching or consulting
   • Memberships
   • Paid newsletter
   • Collaborations
   • Bundles
     
6. The creator continues nurturing the relationship with their followers and paying customers via social and email. When the time is right, the creator makes the offer for the next amazing for-purchase digital product.
   
7. The creator then encourages happy customers to provide testimonials and positive reviews. This helps spread the word about the creator’s digital products. That social proof is strategically placed back into the creator’s marketing efforts, helping propel the creator’s marketing flywheel and drive digital product sales.
   

Optimizing the customer journey

The goal of any customer journey is to maximize the number of total customers, and money each spends with the business.

Over time, your job is to optimize your business’s customer journey. You do this by adding value, reducing friction, and adding more products. Each customer then has the opportunity to spend more and more with you.

Once you know what you want people to do, your next job is to leverage technology to automate this journey. Doing this in a way that serves your audience exactly how they want to be served is key. As I mentioned before, this is called marketing automation.

Marketing automation tools to sell digital products as a creator

Below you’ll find a list of my top tools to sell digital products as a creator. These tools make selling your digital products easy for you, and is frictionless for your customers. But remember, these tools are here to support and scale a customer journey to help you maximize sales. They won’t map one out for you. It’s imperative that you know what you want each customer to do, and then pick a tech stack to support that effort, not the other way around.

Social media sales:

1. Stanstore: This is far more than a link-in-bio tool. It’s the go-to tool to make sales directly from social media.

Email marketing:

1. ConvertKit: this is for creators by creators. Complete with a landing page builder, easy-to-build email sequences, loads of helpful email templates, paid newsletter capabilities, and the Creator Network.
2. ActiveCampaign: if you have someone like my firm, Level Up Creators, running your email marketing software, ActiveCampaign is the most capable tool for creators. There’s nothing within email marketing it can’t do.
3. Substack: if your jam is newsletters (paid and/or free), and that’s all you’re looking to do in terms of digital products, Substack is for you. It’s extraordinarily user-friendly. The downside is that you can’t really build email sequences with it or use it for true, full-stack, marketing automation.

Website hosting:

1. WordPress: an oldie but a goodie and is still the ruler of the roost believe it or not.
2. Wix.com: a bit finicky but with some tutorials you can learn their low-code page builder without too much fuss.
3. Shopify: this is best if you’re selling physical products, but works okay for digital.
4. Podia.com: Podia is the simplest course builder I’ve ever used. It’s intuitive and incredibly user friendly. If selling courses and digital downloads is your primary business, you can house it all on Podia. Podia includes some lite email marketing capabilities, and a landing page builder.

Memberships:

1. MemberUp: this is my top overall pick. They’re relatively new, but the platform is robust with new features rolling out frequently. MemberUp is as easy as it gets in terms of setting up and running a thriving membership community.
2. Memberful: Recently acquired by Patreon, Memberful has been in the membership space almost as long as online memberships have been a thing. But they’re not complacent! Memberful is a full-stack platform with endless options for customizing a membership community to your exact specifications. It does require tech skills to build.
3. MightyNetworks: This is a platform you should consider if you’re launching a membership, but I find it a bit finicky at times. I wish creators had more control to customize their memberships.

Misc:

1. Transistor.fm: this is the only place I’d host a podcast right now.
2. Riverside.fm: we’re recording all of our long form content including our video podcast, webinars, and course videos. They have some up-and-coming AI enhancements (like most tools now) that make video editing and creating video clips as easy as it can be.
3. Canva.com: for all things design. Their Pro subscription is well worth the small monthly fee.
4. Capcut: Byte Dance’s video editor. Easy and intuitive to use.
5. Stripe: for payment processing

You hold so much power and influence with your audience. But, in order to transform your influence into income (ethically, with no “ick” factor), map out a simple customer journey that will help them receive as much value from you as possible through your free and paid content.

Start bringing your customer journey to life with the tools I listed above. Once those tools are helping sell digital products as a creator, automate each step in the journey as it makes sense. Get my full on-demand webinar on building your own customer journey HERE, a free (for now) course of all the ways content creators can make money online HERE, and our free (for now) course on how to create & run a professional membership community HERE. You can also follow me on Instagram & Linkedin. 

This blog post was written by Amanda Northcutt, CEO LevelUp Creators.