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Ready to add a few hundred dollars of income from digital products to your business in the easiest way possible? Today you're going to learn how a food blogger made that happen by setting up a tripwire using a digital product she had already made.
But the thing I love the most about this story is the fact that our guest today, Liz from the Clean Eating Couple, listens to the Rebel Boss Ladies Podcast. She reached out to me because she had heard about this strategy in a previous episode. I absolutely love it when listeners contact me to let me know that they implemented a strategy they learned from the podcast and actually got results.
So to start off, a big congratulations to Liz for her success. Today, I’m going to be talking to her about her tripwire success story, and she’s going to share some tips and tricks about setting up your own easy and successful tripwire.
Liz Falcigno: From Corporate Marketing to Super Successful Online Food Blogger and Business Owner
Liz is the founder of the Clean Eating Couple, a website that’s all about simple, easy-to-follow healthy recipes. She started it in 2013 as a way to chronicle her journey with health and wellness, but quickly realized the opportunities available in the food blogging space.
Realizing that food blogs were growing, Liz decided that it was a business opportunity that she wanted to pursue. She worked to build up her brand, grow her audience and refine her content.
At the time, Liz was working in marketing and doing advertising on consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands. She went to school for marketing and had a lot of experience in the industry, which she used to her advantage when transitioning to self-employment.
In January 2018, Liz quit her corporate marketing job to work for herself full time. It’s been almost two years since she started running her business full-time, and since then Liz hasn’t looked back.
Why Liz Decided to Create a Low-Cost Tripwire
Liz admits that she had never even heard of a tripwire before she listened to an episode of Rebel Boss Ladies. She had purchased tripwires before, and had seen them on other different websites, but had never known what they were or the strategy behind them before listening to that episode.
What is a tripwire?
It’s a low-cost digital product that is offered for a limited time only. Selling the product at a discounted price, plus adding the pressure of a deadline, can encourage your customers to buy. It’s an easy source of passive income for anyone selling digital products.
Liz realized that she had some perfect products that were just waiting to be sold as tripwires.
Chances are, YOU probably also have potential tripwire products laying around, too!
She has two e-books: a four-week clean eating guide and a paleo slow cooker recipe e-book, both of which performed fairly well. But Liz says that she didn’t have the time to promote them much, which means she wasn’t getting a lot of sales.
“I figured that it would probably be a good product to test as a tripwire because it's already created. I already invested into it and it's just sitting on my site. So if I could make a few more sales out of it, it doesn't really cost much to set up the track.”
There were two benefits to using this strategy. First, the products were already created, so Liz didn’t have to invest a lot of time or energy into developing something. Second, she knew the product performed well and got good feedback, so she figured that as a tripwire it would continue to perform well.
The ebook she decided to use for her tripwire was also very similar to a high-performing opt-in on her site. The transition from her opt-in to her tripwire had a pretty good flow because the two were related.
“I figured if all these people are signing up for my emails and they're really liking this guide… That it would do fairly well because they were so similar. And once I turned it on, it was pretty much instant that people started to convert.”
The Successful Elements of a Tripwire (and How Liz Started Getting Immediate Results!)
When Liz says instant, she means that pretty much the next day she started getting sales.
The guide, which she regularly prices for $43, was priced at $9.99 as her tripwire. This is one of the ways that tripwires can work really well – offering a product at an extremely discounted price, for a very limited time, can make your sales skyrocket.
Liz also makes sure to stress the fact that the product is extremely discounted on her sales page. A tripwire needs to be a true one-time offer, with a price that audiences can’t get any other time. Liz emphasized that her product couldn’t be bought at that price any other time, which pressured her audience to buy.
Another important point that Liz makes about creating a tripwire is that you should create something that you know works. She has a few different free opt-ins that she’s created, and through trial-and-error she’s learned which ones convert the best.
“That's information that I use to help build my digital products. I figured if they're liking this free version, they're going to also maybe be more apt to pay for that versus something that's totally out of left field and not related to any of the content that I might be sharing.”
Investment Versus Outcome: Why a Tripwire is a Great Investment
Tripwires don’t take too long to set up, usually for most people it takes a day or two. Liz herself decided to ask her web designer, Madison from Grace and Vine, to create it for her. She definitely recommends outsourcing where you need to, in order to make your business more effective.
It was definitely worth the investment – after 2 hours, Madison was able to get the tripwire up and running, and it’s been running smoothly ever since.
Liz says her sales numbers look pretty good. She’s getting 1 to 2 sales per day, out of about 50 people that come to that page after signing up for her email list. It’s about a 4% conversion rate, which is well within the industry standard of 1-7%.
Liz is happy with these numbers. If she makes $9.99 per sale, and she makes about 2 sales a day, that’s an extra $300 per month.
“I'm happy with it because it's a product that was otherwise just sitting on my site. So I'm happy with anything… over the months it adds up.”
Liz says that this is some of the most passive income that she’s had in a long time. Since she set it up, she hasn’t really had to do any work on it. With very little effort, she’s already made over $1000.
Her tripwire page is also still pretty new. She set it up about 3-4 months ago, so her plan is to collect information to tweak her offer, the sales page, and eventually improve her results.
Writing a Tripwire Sales Page that will Build Your Passive Income
Liz admits she hasn’t looked at her sales page in a while, which is the ideal. She made it, set it, and it’s been working well enough that she’s been able to forget about it.
Reflecting on writing the page, Liz says that she used the guide from her regular sales page because she loves how it was designed. She emphasizes that it’s important to make sure to include the details about your tripwire on your sales page, like the price, the contents, and more, as well as be able to answer any questions that a potential customer may have about your product.
Another thing that Liz likes to emphasize is how much her customer would be paying per day if they buy her product. For example, “I call out like all the time about the cost of it. So I call out that this only costs however many cents a day. I never offer it at this price. I have this line says: all for less than thirty five cents a day.”
She also makes sure to highlight the one-time nature of the sales price to put pressure on her audience and get them to buy her product. She uses the Deadline Funnel countdown, and says, “I use a lot of like, right now it's going away, the timing, really to incentivize people.”
Connecting Lead Magnets to a Tripwire: The Best Way to Link Your Offers
Liz connects all of her lead magnets to the one tripwire. This is partially because she only has this one up right now, but also because all of her lead magnets are relatively similar. They relate well to her tripwire, so it makes sense to have them all lead into the same place.
This also shows that her brand, products and messaging is all in alignment. If you have a lot of different lead magnets it can seem like you’re all over the place. Linking everything together and making sure there’s a good flow between all of them can keep it simple.
Using a Tripwire to Get More Full-Price Sales on a Product
Liz’s goal for the next year is to use her tripwire success to sell her products more at full-price. She’s been inspired to build more buzz and do more self-promotion.
Tripwires, however, can also be a great way to get your product out there. If your product doesn’t have a lot of sales, making it a tripwire can be a useful strategy because it means more people are purchasing it and can provide testimonials.
Liz plans to use what she learns through selling her tripwire to potentially relaunch it in the future. She’s also using these products to build her credibility and get her name out there. Because her niche is saturated with so much free content, Liz says it can be hard to make sales as a food blogger. She’s been marketing her products as more than just recipes to differentiate herself and build her credibility.
“I try to talk to like the fact that you're not just getting recipes of this, like the way that the guide is structured, it gives you instructions on how to minimize your time in the kitchen and the amount of food that you buy. So you're saving money by not wasting food. You're saving time by having the schedule planned out for you… I try to hit on that.”
Valuing Yourself and Your Products: Is the Discount Worth It?
Liz says that she knows the value of her product isn’t $9.99. But even though it’s worth a lot more, she’d rather have it in people’s hands and have them getting value out of it than just having it sit on her website. She’d rather have a bunch of people buy it at a discounted price than only one person pay full price for the product.
She emphasizes, “in the end you're probably going to wind up making more money even though you're selling it at a discounted price because it's going to be going out to more people.”
More importantly, if more people are willing to buy then they also may be interested in being a repeat customer in the future. By getting her product into people’s hands, Liz is building credibility and getting her name out there. If she can make one more person’s life easy, then they may be willing to come back in the future because her product was valuable to them.
Liz’s Tips for Creating a Successful Tripwire
Liz highly recommends setting up a tripwire for anyone looking to build their passive income. However, she says that you should make sure to follow through on a few other things first before you jump right into setting up a tripwire.
First, Liz says that you should have a strong email marketing strategy in place already before setting up a tripwire. She made great opt-ins and knew they’d be of interest for the people that came to her site.
“I think that part of the reason that my trip wire is so successful is that for basically an entire year before I did that, I really focused on my marketing.”
She emphasizes that you need to have people subscribing before people will buy your tripwire. This means having strong content and a strong place to lead people to your tripwire if you want to have success in this area. Without a strong lead magnet, no one will ever see the trip wire that you’ve spent time creating.
If you do have a strong email marketing strategy, with a good lead magnet and a lot of people signing up for your list, then you can start nurturing your audience more and using that relationship to your advantage.
Liz says that she offers the tripwire initially at the extremely discounted price, and then offers it again a little while later at a less discounted price after nurturing her audience. She says that people sometimes need the frequency of seeing something multiple times before they want to invest in it.
“It's the same product, but it's not that super discount… the longer that they wait to purchase the guide, the more money they ultimately wind up paying for it. But I continually show it to them.”
Ultimately, Liz recommends that anyone who has a digital product just sitting on your site or on your computer try setting up a tripwire. It can’t hurt for you to put it up, and it may lead to great results.
“The worst case is, alright, it didn't work, we can tweak it. Or alright, it didn't work and then take off for a little bit and come back to it another time.”
//LINKS IN THE SHOW//
Find Liz online at her website, the Clean Eating Couple – https://thecleaneatingcouple.com/
Email Liz at Liz@thecleaneatingcouple.com
Check out Madison from Grace and Vine at https://www.graceandvinestudios.com/