Are you a consultant or coach providing services to individuals or companies? Or maybe you’re a…
- Healthcare practitioner, such as a physician, chiropractor, massage therapist, yoga teacher, or dentist
- Computer training or repair provider
- Virtual assistant or other gig worker providing a service
- Financial services provider (bookkeeper, accountant, financial advisor, etc.)
- Plumber, electrician, or other repair or maintenance provider
Did you know that there are 4 reasons why you should complement your services with an online product or course?
We usually think of some businesses as service-based businesses and others as product-based businesses. Service-based businesses have clients. Product-based businesses have customers.
In this article, I’ll explain the 4 reasons why service-based businesses should create online products, including courses.
1) Get more clients who are ready to work with you
You’ve certainly experienced the fact that not everyone who comes to your website or hears you speak signs up for your services. But maybe that person will sign up for something that’s free (a freebie) or buy a low-priced course that solves an urgent problem or even just provides some valuable information.
Not everyone is ready to buy. Many people need more information before they can make a decision or they may be ready to buy in a few weeks or months.
Meanwhile, you can subscribe these people to your email list and send them a free report, guide, checklist, or white paper. From there, you can upsell them to an e-book or a short course. What’s the value of these free or low-priced products and courses?
In this process, you educate potential clients as a bridge to your services.
The people who sign up
- Become your subscribers so you can stay in touch with them and send them future offers
- Get a taste of what you have to offer and appreciate your knowledge and expertise, so they’re more likely to invest in your services
- Start to know, like, and trust you so they’ll feel comfortable making future investments with you
You get the opportunity to create a long-term relationship with them, staying top of mind. When they’re ready to buy, they’ll think of you.
On the other hand, they may discover that your services aren’t what they need and that’s OK, too.
2) Add a new stream of more passive income
Providing services involves your time, especially if you’re doing 1-on-1 consulting, coaching, or other assistance to people. Often, that’s a LOT of time.
But when you sell products, the income comes in without using up your time at the point of purchase or while people are consuming your content. Of course, you have to spend time creating products and there’s also some time involved to market them.
But you create products once and sell them many times over.
A lot of your marketing can be automated or outsourced.
For this reason, income from products is considered more passive than income from services. This means you can make more money in less time. How does that sound?
This additional income is in addition to your service-based income and — as I explained above — can increase your service sales.
3) Even out income ups and downs
Many service-based businesses experience cycles of high and low income. This is especially true for coaches and consultants. It’s hard to market while you’re busy with clients, so you help your clients and then experience a drop in income when you’re done helping them. So you turn to marketing to get new clients, but that creates a gap until the new clients come in.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an ongoing stream of income to even out the income ups and downs? That’s what products and courses provide.
4) Reach more people around the world
Most service-based businesses both market and deliver their services 1 to 1. For marketing, that might be networking, asking for referrals, etc. For delivery, that will be whatever service you provide — coaching, consulting, providing healthcare services, providing support/maintenance/repair services, etc.
With online products and courses, both marketing and delivery is 1 to many. You can market using a video, with ads, with partners, with webinars — the possibilities are endless. You can deliver by letting people download an e-book, a course, a worksheet, etc. The possibilities are endless for delivery, too!
When you don’t have to spend 1 on 1 time with people, you can actually help more people. And it’s easier to help people all around the world when time zone differences are not important. Your customers access your products and courses when convenient for them.
What’s the next step?
I have 3 resources that can help you with this process.
- Most months, I do a free webinar called Knowledge to Income Roadmap. You can click here to see the upcoming webinar and register for it.
- I have a self-study course, Create and Sell a Profitable Online Product that brings you through the steps to plan, build, and sell an information product or course. You can purchase it here.
- The first step in creating an online product or course is to outline it or create a table of contents. My Outline Your Knowledge guide will help you get this step done.
Please leave a comment to let me know what you think of this blog post or to ask a question. And please share with your friends and colleagues using the Social Media sharing buttons below.
Ellen Finkelstein
When you’re ready to get your knowledge out to the world with an online course, you have many decisions to make! An important one is which platform you’ll use. The platform houses your course content. The platform is sometimes called a Learning Management System (LMS), but in truth, you may not even need an LMS.
Nicole Dean is the co-owner of Coach Glue, along with Melissa Ingold. They develop and create done-for-you content, tools, forms, and training to help business coaches to make more money, run their businesses smoothly, and still have time to live the lifestyle they dream of. Another expression for “done-for-you” is Private Label Rights, meaning that when you buy the content, you can (and should) edit it, call it your own, and do almost anything with it — give it away as a freebie, sell it as a course, use it as part of a membership program, and so on.