February 22, 2023
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If you’ve built a brand on being an expert in a particular field, then your knowledge is something people want to pay for. But those in this field — consultants, authors, and speakers, for example — can often find it hard to scale their expertise.
A lot of your work might be with clients one-on-one, or offering services that require a physical presence. At the end of the day, you can only be in so many places at once. But why let that limit you?
‘How can I reach more people (and add more revenue) without bringing on more employees?’, we hear you ask. By building an online empire.
E-commerce platforms like Shopify make selling your products online simple — even if that product is your knowledge. And to make it even easier, we’ve rounded up some of the best Shopify apps to help experts who want (or need) to monetize their thought leadership.
This popular Shopify-developed app offers a simple way to get your non-physical (as well as tangible!) products onto your store. And you can add your digital attachments to a variant which means you’re able to utilize the reporting, too.
Customers get instant access to the items they purchased, and also get emailed the link to go back to. And, should you update the attached file, they’ll be automatically notified.
Another digital delivery app is SendOwl. With a range of features and some handy automations (think expiring links and auto-generated license keys), SendOwl proves popular with complex digital-goods businesses.
The app’s ease-of-use, wide-ranging language support and detailed analytical tools also make it a hot favourite.
FetchApp is another great app for managing your downloads and for keeping track of who has access to your paid content. The app allows you to control how many times a product can be downloaded, as well as the amount of time a download link works for.
The app gives you greater control over your files, allowing you to bundle products with multiple files together, or to split large files into multiple smaller files so that you can sell a single product in multiple parts. And it’s affordable; they charge based on your storage needs.
Your email list should be one of your biggest assets as a thought leader. If you want to get set up and sending quickly, we highly recommend Klaviyo. Sending regular ‘learning boosts’ to your email list is a great way to stay top of mind, and ensure that your learners don’t lose out on the benefits of your content as time goes by.
With the Klaviyo and Shopify integration, subscribers are automatically added to an address book, and you can set up automated email campaigns to encourage customer reviews, offer product recommendations, and continue delivering your awesome thought leadership content — straight to their inboxes.
Price: free - $1000+/month, sign up!
If you haven’t given your e-commerce site an SEO check lately, you should take a look at Plug in SEO. A useful app that helps ensure your product pages are optimized for search engines, and analyzes your site to find any problems or gaps in your SEO game.
Plug in SEO doesn’t just tell you what’s wrong. It also helps you prioritize which problems are the most important to fix, so you can be smart about spending your resources. Competition is fierce when it comes to selling online, so make sure you get those SEO basics right first-time.
Offering a subscription or membership service for your digital products is a great idea if you have lots of digital downloads, or if you offer multiple different online courses. It’s also handy in enabling you to project your revenue more easily (based on the number of active members and average membership length).
To power your subscriptions/memberships, look no further than ReCharge. This app works for merchants of all shapes and sizes, and offers plenty of options for your business. Think gift subscriptions, time-limited subscriptions, customisable subscription frequency, and renewals. Nice, huh?
With so much free content out there on the Internet, how do you get people to shell out their hard-earned dollars for your course? With social proof. Yotpo is a review app that allows your customers to review your products and even answer questions for other users.
And all of this user-generated content isn’t just great in showing off your social proof. It’s also good for your website’s SEO, which means more people will end up on your site in the first place.
This app’s perfect for if you have items that cross-sell well, like ebooks that go along with your courses, for example. Directed Edge can be configured to automatically show related products based on the app’s algorithms, or related products you handpick yourself. You can also configure it to show things like recently viewed products, or also-bought products.
There are tons of different recommendation types available, so you can configure the app to display products in a way that’s perfect for your store. That means you make more from every sale.
If you live in a country that requires you to collect VAT taxes for your digital products, you need a simple way to sort it. If you’re on Shopify Plus, look to Avalara. Using geolocation to map multiple rates and rules of each transaction, Avalara automates tax calculations and the filing process for you. No more getting bogged down!
Learn more: Avalara for Shopify Plus
If the only courses and digital products you’re selling are your own, skip this one. But, if you’re running an online marketplace that features multiple thought leaders, you’ll need a way to pay your third-party vendors!
To put it simply: Vendor Payout makes sure everybody gets paid. Once you get the percentages set up, everything is automatically calculated for you. Simple!
So, there you have it. When you set up your online courses, ebooks and other digital products on Shopify, connecting all the right apps, you’re on the road to capturing that market.
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