Hey, this is Jenn from PlanningAddicts.com ,

There were more great questions and subscriber troubles that you shared with me after the email about Thrivecart vs Gumroad (read it here). So, I'll take a few minutes to answer those questions and share more of my thoughts.

Q: I'm on the cusp of starting a digital product business but struggling with focusing on a niche as I have lots of ideas for digital products but they are in very diverse niches."

First of all, get the Pick A Niche Workbook to work through some of this.

Everyone tells you to niche down. You can do this and create more than one place to buy your products if you want to sell all-the-things and they are in different niches.

Or, you can offer them all under the same umbrella, but consider doing something that keeps a thread of similarity throughout all the products. Let me see if I can explain...

Maybe offer digital planners for all the niches you want to target. Maybe the digital planner thing is what makes you unique.

Or maybe it's that you provide a specific type of kit for everything you sell. IE your kid's products have the same types of products as your adult products?

Hopefully, this conveys my thoughts.

But, if it's just a matter of getting started and you can't force yourself to choose, let a coin choose for you. Choose 2 niches to start with, flip a coin to make the choice for you. Then, dig in, put your head down, and put everything you've got into that niche. Do it for a set amount of time, like 3 or 6 months.

After that, analyze what works or doesn't, then either continue, switch, or mix your niche and do the same all over again.

Q: You can't sell PLR on Gumroad

I wrote to Gumroad to get clarity on this rule a long time ago. Their response was that if I am the original creator of the PLR product, I can sell it via a Gumroad store. If I purchase a product with a private label right, then I'd have to change it enough to make it mostly unrecognizable as the original.

Not sure how to change those products? There's some great training at USEPLR.com.

Q: Is gumroad better than Substack to use as a paywall?

I can't answer this because I've not used Substack. But, from what I can tell, Substack isn't a shopping cart, It's meant to sell a subscription to a newsletter.

That can be done via Gumroad also, and for free, but Gumroad offers so many other options too, that I'd still go for it over Substack.

Q: " I learned so much in this email about Thrive Cart/Gumroad. I am still very confused on what both if these software are and how to implement and use them."

They are both ways to sell your products. As I shared in the previous email, one has a way to create a storefront where customers can shop all your products at once (example), and the other is designed to make your customer focus on one product at a time. But, it's more complicated than that too.

Gumroad - you can create the storefront and share the link to your store that is hosted right on Gumroad. In this case, customers can add as many of your products as they want to their checkout.

Example

But, you can also just share one product at a time, and they won't see your store. And.. you can embed or link to one product onto your website or blog.

Example

I can't possibly begin to share all the ways it can work in this email. There are great tutorials on gumroad if you want to dig in.

Thrivecart - it does not have the add-to-cart option. There is no "storefront" where customers can see all that you sell.

This software is designed to take your customers on a trip from seeing one product or offer, to showing another offer called an upsell, after they purchase the first offer. There's also a thing called a "bump" offer which can be added to the main offer's checkout page in which the customer can add the bump offer to their final checkout.

This is all possible in Gumroad too. So, Gumroad is much more versatile in the ways it can be used to sell your products.

They both offer a way to sell single products, subscriptions, courses, and non-digital products like t-shirts. Gumroad has a marketplace sort of like Etsy. You can choose to have your products displayed in the marketplace as well, if it meets some simple prerequisites.

Q: "I am also wondering what are email list subscriber services, how to use them and what their functions are. Also which one would you say would be best for a Newbie like me to use."

Hmm. this is a broad question, but I'll try...

An email list or subscriber list often gets called the same thing. But...

An email list or buyer list is this: Someone buys your offer, they get added to an autoresponder and start getting emails from you that you've already written. They are delivered automatically by the software.

Plus, you can send email blasts which are usually a one-time email that you can send to your whole list or a segment of your whole list.

A subscriber list - this usually means people who signed up for a newsletter or blog post updates but haven't necessarily bought anything from you. However, you can add them to an autoresponder or send email blasts to them as well.

Which one is best for a newbie? This depends on a lot of things.

Which one can be hooked into your shopping cart so that your buyers are auto-added to a list (and get that autoresponder email sequence!)?

For instance, I used mailerlite with Thrivecart, because they were built to hook to together. Thrivecart has a few email platforms that are built to be hooked together. But, you will have to do the tech part of it to hook them together. Plus, in this case, you'll be paying for the mailing list account, on top of having to pay for your Thrivecart account.

If you don't want the hassle of hooking it into your shopping cart, then using something like Gumroad is best because it's built-in and super easy to create autoresponders and email blasts from right inside your Gumroad account.

The other thing about all this is, how much can you spend or do you want to spend to get started?

Every platform comes with a price of some kind. It may be a monetary price or it may be in limiting how many products or customers you can serve.

For instance,

Thrivecart is about $500 one-time, plus an option to add on some extra functionality. When I got mine back in the day, it was all included in one price. I made more than that over the years. At the time, it was totally worth the one-time price.

Gumroad charges a percentage of your sales. It works out to be about 10%. That's not too bad if you sell $100, but when your sales go up from there, that fee seems pretty big.

Mailerlite used to be free for up to 1000 subscribers, and then it would cost $10 or $15 per month after that. It increased in price with the more people that were added to your list. They changed their pricing and tiers a while back so I'm not sure what it is now.

There are other platforms (both selling and mailing) out there that charge a flat fee per month. This is great when you sell thousands of dollars and it only costs you that same small flat fee. But, when you start out and have to pay $29 per month with little or no sales coming in, it kinda sucks.

So, pricing is very much a matter of what personally works for you.

Alrighty, that's a lot! Hopefully, this helps answer those questions. If you have more questions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

I'm working on a way to help all of you that mentioned accountability and focus, so keep an eye out for that.

The Survey

I'd love to hear what you need right now in your business. I'm hearing, seeing, experiencing, stagnation everywhere, and I don't know if it's just me, the world at large, or the printable industry in particular.

If you could take a minute to tell me what you feel like you need - or even what is dragging you down in business right now, maybe I can find us all some help.

In exchange for your help, I'll gift you a couple of new items. The first one is 50 product mockups, and the second is a client welcome template. Both are Canva editable.

You can find them on the "thank you" page after you fill out the short form here: https://forms.gle/oVu2ep736nhmULxE9

Partner Offers

BC STACK - Over 80 products for just $49.

My included Offer: I've added the Stress Management Start Up template from my business, templatesbiz.com.

My Bonus: I'll add a matching Course sales page and 30 product mockups (canva editable). They are added to the delivery area inside the I'll add a matching Course sales page and 30 product mockups (canva editable)? Take a look at the screenshots...

They are added to the delivery area inside the BC Stack site. site.

Jenn, the planning addict

PlanningAddicts.com

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