As you know, you have to sell something to make money online. But most people limit themselves to offering one-on-one services, which quickly max out your time, income and impact.

Product development is the best way to scale your business and leverage your time so you can help more people and make more money.

Instead of thinking about a single product or service, I recommend doing some long-range planning to think through your entire product suite or sales funnel. This allows you to connect your offerings and lead your clients through a natural progression in your business.

While having one information product is surely a major accomplishment, having a whole product suite can skyrocket your business. Products amplify your capability to help by allowing you – your ideas, your system, your framework – to transform the lives of people you’ve never even met. And having a product suite allows you to serve on an on-going basis, while expanding your reach and creating passive revenue streams.

When I plan my sales funnel, I begin with the question, “What’s Next?”:

• What’s next for me? What am I really jazzed about right now? What do I want to make?

AND

• What’s next for my clients? What are they asking for? What do they need to move forward? Where did my last product stop?

The truth is, your clients will ask you this question whether you’ve thought it through or not, so you mind as well be prepared to answer it.

Your sales funnel is the path people take through your business. It usually starts with a free gift, then moves on to a low-cost, low commitment product ($97 or less) before scaling upward incrementally until it reaches your high-end program or service – which could be a couple thousand dollars or even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the value and results you can deliver.

Your sales funnel gives your clients somewhere to go within your business, so they’re never left wondering “What’s Next?.” As you deepen your level of trust with them, they let them know how they can deepen their commitment and continue their journey with you.

If you run the numbers on each program in your funnel, you’ll quickly see the power of productizing your knowledge.

For example, if you sell 10 copies of a $97 product each month, that gives you an extra $970/month or $11,640/year. That’s life-changing.

Now if you add to your product line a $497 offering and sell just 50 during the year, that’s an extra $24,850. Even if you sell this product through a launch and offer a 50% commission, that’s another $12,425. Plus you now have 50 new prospects to market a higher end program or service to – for example a $997, a $2997, $4997 or $9997.

You can see how quickly your income can compound into a 6 or even 7-figure business by building out your sales funnel. It’s always easier to sell more to existing customers than to get new customers.

But before you commit to extending your product suite and sales funnel, I recommend that you do market research to find out what your clients want and to see what else is out there. You don’t want to spend weeks or months or even years creating something only to find out that no one wants it or worse yet it already exits.

Stay tuned. My next post will cover the process of using market research when planning out your product suite and sales funnel.