Why selling info products is getting harder

A few years ago, you could have something important to say, serve your audience, and your info products would sell themselves.

That’s just not the case anymore:

• Now everyone has a list, funnels, courses, even podcast.
• Old tactics don’t work the way they used to.
• The more content you make, the less (organic) traffic you get.

And while data-driven anything, new marketing tech, and growth hacks often “work,” the results often comes at hard-to-measure costs of eroding trust, annoying people, and creating distance between you and your users. 

As your number of subscribers grows, those people become numbers.

Responses and comments that you used to think of as conversations becomes “data.”

And it works. You “grow.” But ultimately the faster the growth, the more negative the effect on long term profits: less repeat purchases and word of mouth, more churn and unsubscribes.

Cheap growth takes you off-mission.

It’s getting pretty bad out there. People are protecting themselves from ads and marketing efforts en masse, turning off notifications, and silencing their phones. Overall brand trust is way down.

More than ever, your audience wants meaningful interactions, to feel supported in their journey, and the confidence that you’ll help get them where they want to go. 

You have a reason for doing what you do. And maybe some unique selling proposition. But the ability to meaningfully engage, listen closely, and get your users where they want to go is your value proposition.

Here are some symptoms that you might be on the wrong path:

• If your users aren’t taking the courses they buy from you and you don’t know why.
• If your content isn’t performing the way that it used to.
• If your site’s content is unwieldly and hard to navigate.
• If you missed the mark on a new product launch and sold significantly less than you expected.
• If you’re checking your recent sales before you’re reading/responding to the recent replies and comments on your last few emails to your list.
• If conversions are not taking care of themselves and you think the problem is that you need to “optimize for conversions.”
• If shiny new “martech” or a new type of optin popup animation seems like the solution to your problems.

“Growth hacks” are very tempting. Can you think of any others?