Ep 107 My Experiences of Creating and Selling Digital Products as Low Cost Offers

I still remember sitting at my kitchen table in the early hours before work, trying to figure out whether building an online business was genuinely possible for someone like me.

An NHS dietitian. A mum. Someone squeezing business dreams into the cracks of family life, clinic notes and school runs.

Back then, I didn’t have a huge audience. I didn’t have fancy funnels. I definitely didn’t have a polished strategy. (Or decent branding, for that matter.)

But what I did have was curiosity. And a growing feeling that there had to be another way to use my expertise beyond one-to-one appointments and trading time for money forever.

And honestly? One tiny £9.99 digital product changed everything.

Not overnight in a “millionaire by Tuesday” kind of way. We’re not doing that nonsense here.

But slowly. Sustainably. In a way that eventually gave me more income, more freedom and more breathing space around my family life.

So today, I want to share my real experiences of creating and selling digital products as low cost offers. The good bits. The flops. The lessons I learned the hard way while sitting in pyjamas Googling SEO at 5am with a cup of tea going cold beside me.

Because if you’re a dietitian, nutritionist or healthcare professional wondering whether digital products could work for you too… I want you to know they absolutely can.

 

The Digital Product That Changed My Business

Back in 2017, I was building an audience online in the baby weaning space.

Every Wednesday I hosted live Q&As where parents could ask me questions about feeding their babies. And week after week, one question kept appearing over and over again:

“Has my baby eaten enough?”

Not casually either.

These mums were genuinely anxious. Lying awake worrying. Second guessing themselves constantly even after reassurance from health visitors or doctors.

So I did something very simple.

I created a baby portion size guide.

Nothing fancy. Just a straightforward resource based on my clinical expertise and experience, with plenty of nuance around responsive feeding and individual differences.

Initially, I released it as a free lead magnet.

And within six weeks, it had been downloaded almost 5,000 times.

That was my first huge lightbulb moment in business.

People don’t buy what you think they need.

They buy solutions to the problems already taking up space in their head at 2am.

That lesson has shaped every offer I’ve created since.

 

The Product That Completely Flopped

Around the same time, I also created a weaning recipe ebook.

Honestly? It was lovely.

Beautiful recipes. Gorgeous photos. Helpful structure. Tons of value.

I promoted it everywhere:

• Instagram
• Facebook groups
• My email list
• Website banners
• Blogs

Same audience.
Same price point.
Same effort.

And in six weeks… I sold six copies.

Six. 😅

At the time, I remember feeling so confused because logically it should have worked.

But when I stepped back, the reason became painfully obvious.

The recipe ebook wasn’t solving an urgent problem.

Parents already had:

• Recipe books
• BBC Good Food
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Annabel Karmel recipes

Recipes were nice to have.

The portion guide, however, solved an emotional problem they were actively worrying about daily.

And that difference matters enormously when creating digital products for dietitians or healthcare professionals.

 

The Difference Between “Nice To Have” and “Need To Have”

This is where so many people get stuck.

They create offers based on what they enjoy making rather than what their audience urgently wants solved.

And I completely understand why.

As healthcare professionals, we’re trained to educate. To share information. To provide comprehensive support.

But the reality is this:

The internet already has endless information.

Your audience is not sitting there thinking:
“I wish I had more information.”

They’re thinking:
“Please help me solve this specific thing that’s stressing me out.”

That’s where low cost digital offers work brilliantly.

Especially when they provide:

• A quick win
• A specific outcome
• Relief from a pressing problem
• Simplicity
• Clarity

Not overwhelm.

Because most of your ideal clients are already drowning in a sea of tabs open on their laptop while simultaneously replying to WhatsApps, writing clinic notes and trying to remember whether they moved the washing into the tumble dryer.

They don’t need more noise.

They need help making life feel easier.

 

Sometimes The Product Isn’t Wrong. The Positioning Is.

Now here’s the interesting part.

I didn’t actually scrap the recipe ebook.

Instead, I repositioned it.

I added it as an optional add-on when parents purchased my weaning course.

And suddenly?
It sold brilliantly.

Around 70% of course buyers added it to their order.

Same product.
Completely different context.

And honestly, this is why having support in business matters so much.

Because when something isn’t selling, it’s very easy to spiral into:
“My offer is rubbish.”
“Nobody wants this.”
“I’m terrible at business.”

(Usually while stress-eating biscuits in your dressing gown after the kids have gone to bed.)

But often, the product itself is absolutely fine.

It just needs:

• Better positioning
• Better messaging
• Better timing
• A stronger buyer journey

Sometimes you’re much closer than you realise.

 

How That Tiny Product Led To Passive Income

That £9.99 guide became the first domino in my business.

It gave me confidence.

It showed me that people would pay for my expertise online.

And from there, things gradually expanded into:

• Courses
• Memberships
• Subscription offers
• Coaching
• Digital resources

Eventually, my online business generated over £124,000 in a year.

More than double my NHS salary at the time.

And that was the moment I realised I could finally leave.

Not because I hated dietetics.

But because I wanted more freedom.
More flexibility.
More ownership over my time and energy.

I wanted to walk the dog in the middle of the day.
Be present with my children.
Stop spending Sundays dreading Monday morning.

And digital products played a massive role in making that possible.

 

Passive Income For Healthcare Professionals Is Possible (But Let’s Be Realistic)

I know “passive income” can sound a bit cringe online sometimes.

Usually attached to someone shouting beside a rented Lamborghini.

But passive income for healthcare professionals absolutely is possible when approached ethically and realistically.

And no, it doesn’t mean making money while doing absolutely nothing.

Digital products still require:

• Strategy
• Audience building
• Marketing
• Systems
• Testing
• Refining

But unlike clinic hours, they can continue generating income without you being physically present for every single sale.

That changes everything.

Especially for health professionals feeling trapped by the limits of one-to-one work.

 

How I Use AI In My Digital Products Today

Things have evolved massively since those early days.

One of the biggest shifts for me recently has been using AI tools within my business.

And before anyone panics… no, I don’t believe AI replaces clinicians.

Not even remotely.

But I do believe it can support both business owners and clients beautifully when used properly.

I now use AI to:

• Speed up content creation
• Support marketing
• Generate ideas
• Improve workflows
• Build educational tools
• Create scalable support systems

I’ve even created my own custom AI tool called Sarah AI, trained on my frameworks, strategies and business methodologies specifically for regulated healthcare professionals.

Because the reality is generic business advice often doesn’t work well for our industries.

We need ethical marketing.
Evidence-informed messaging.
Strategies that actually fit UK healthcare audiences.

And AI can absolutely help deliver that support faster and more efficiently.

 

What I’d Recommend If You’re Starting Today

If you’re thinking about creating your first digital product, please don’t overcomplicate it.

You do not need:

• A huge audience
• Fancy branding
• Expensive tech
• A 97-module course
• Cinematic videography (unless you fancy it, of course)

You just need to solve one specific problem well.

Start by asking yourself:

“What question do I answer over and over again?”

The question clients ask in clinic.
The one sliding into your DMs.
The thing people ask at dinner parties once they find out what you do.

That question is often where your best digital product idea lives.

And honestly? There has never been a better time to create digital products for dietitians and healthcare professionals.

The tools are easier.
AI can speed things up dramatically.
And people genuinely want support that feels accessible, affordable and actionable.

You don’t have to build a giant empire overnight.

You just need to start with one small solution that genuinely helps someone.

That’s exactly how I started too.

 

Ready To Build Your Own Scalable Health Business?

If you’re ready to create more freedom, more income and more ease in your business, you can join the waitlist for my coaching programme here:

Inside the programme, I help regulated healthcare professionals build ethical, profitable online businesses with strategy, support and systems that actually fit around real life. No hustle culture. No bro marketing. No dancing reels required. (Unless that’s your thing.)

The Master Plan:

Helping you build the business of your dreams. Get your 22 point step-by step workbook here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

 

 

Connect with me:

Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

 

Episode transcription:

Welcome along. Today I want to tell you about two digital products that I created in my nutrition business. Now they were both targeted at the same audience. They were both the same price points. I put the same amount of effort into promoting both of them, except one of them was downloaded 5,000 times in six weeks and the other only sold six copies. Quite the difference, right?

Now, what I learned from this really did change everything I thought I knew about selling online. And I want to share that insight with you today. So strap yourself in because there's a lot of value in this episode. I'm going to be sharing insight on how a £9.99 guide became the foundation of a £124,000 a year in my nutrition business. Why I still create digital products today and how I use AI to do it.

And last but not least, I'm going to be explaining the one thing that determines whether a product sells daily or just collects digital dust. So if you're listening to this and you have a one-to-one practice, you're great at what you do clinically and you know there must be a way to earn more that doesn't depend entirely on how many hours you work, then you are absolutely right and you're definitely in the right place.

And towards the end of today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you some exciting details about how you can work with me in the summer, as well as your chance to win a thousand pounds cash bonus. So make sure you stay tuned until the end. OK, let me take you back to 2017, almost 10 years ago, isn't it? I was fairly new to the online space at that point. My niche was in baby weaning. I'd been writing books for Annabel Carmel.

I joined loads of mummy focused Facebook groups and I started posting on Instagram. I started to build an audience online fairly quickly. Every Wednesday, I ran something called Weaning Weddings Day, a Q &A where I would answer people's questions live. And I soon started to notice something week after week after week. I was being asked the same question. And that question was,

has my baby eaten enough? I got it over and over and over again. Now the mums, weren't just curious about this, they were full of anxiety. They were genuinely really worried because they'd often tell me that they'd been reassured by their health visitors that their baby was thriving and gaining weight, but they still didn't feel 100 % confident in what they were telling them.

So I did my research and I actually realized that there weren't any portion size guides out there for babies. And so I created my own, but it was based on my own clinical judgment, based on my own research. And I was very clear with the fact that every baby is different and it was only to be used as a guide, really as a guide in terms of how much food to create and offer and always to feed your baby responsively.

And initially I released it for free. I thought it'd be an amazing lead magnet. So I shared it on my website, I put it on my social media, in all the groups that I was part of. And it was downloaded just under 5,000 times in about six weeks. It was absolutely a hit. And that was the first lesson right there. Always create based on what your audience is actually worried about and not what you think that they need. But I did get quite a bit of backlash.

from what I created, and it was actually from other pediatric nutrition professionals. They pushed back on it. They were saying that babies don't need portion sizes, that parents shouldn't be focusing on quantities. And to be honest, I did agree with parts of what they were saying, which was exactly why I built in that caveat from day one. But I also held my ground because while the guide was evidence-based and the clinical reasoning was 100 % sound,

Most importantly, it was helping parents. And so here comes that next learning lesson for you. Not everyone will agree with what you say or what you do. And you know what? That's OK. You just always need to stay grounded in your expertise and in your ethics. OK, fast forward to 2018. I realised that this portion of the size guide was so valuable that I might as well make some money from it.

And so I started charging just 9.99 for it. And just to give you some context here, it was a really, really simple five page guide and that included the front and back covers. wasn't anything fancy, did not take me very long to create and it's still selling for me actually to this day. It usually brings in somewhere between 400 pounds and 800 pounds a month, depending on how much I talk about it. But trust me, you do not need to go big or fancy with this kind of thing.

My portion size guides worked not because they were long or complex or beautifully designed. They worked because they answered the question that was being asked that mums were lying in bed awake, fretting about at 2 a.m. So before you create your first or your next digital product, the question to ask yourself is what is my ideal client lying awake, worrying about at 2 a.m.? That.

is the topic that you need to create it on. Now, I created another product around the same time, and this was a weaning recipe ebook. It was aimed at exactly the same audience. That big audience, it was very large, it was engaged, was full of these mums who were interacting with my content. It was the same price as my portion size guide. I put exactly the same amount of effort into promoting it.

As the portion size guide, it probably took a little bit longer to create it because I photographed all my own recipes and it was genuinely good. It had loads of recipes. It was structured really well. I had foods for all the different stages of weaning. It was genuinely super useful and I promoted it everywhere on my social media, in my blogs, banners on the website homepage, other people's Facebook communities, on my email list, which at the time was over 10,000 people.

And in six weeks, I sold a grand total of six copies. Yep. Just six. And I remember thinking, well, how does this make any sense? Because everything looked right on paper. had the audience. I was selling at exactly the same price point that I sold so well before. It seemed like the logical next step after the portion size guides I had a solid promotional plan. But when I step back,

And I looked at why this digital product flopped so much. The answer was crystal clear. Those mums weren't sitting there thinking, I need more recipes. They had BBC Good Food for that. They had free content on Instagram. They had Annabel Carmel's recipe books. They had endless options already in front of them. So for them, the recipes weren't the problem. They didn't need ideas.

These were just a nice extra, but the portion size guide solved something that they were actively worrying about. And there's a huge difference between these two things. There's a big difference between a nice to have and a need to have product. But this is not to say that the product itself was a failure. It was actually a failure of understanding what the audience was urgently trying to solve at that moment in time.

Which leads me on nicely to what I did next. So you might assume that I just scrapped that weaning recipe ebook, but actually I didn't scrap it. I just changed where it sat. I added it as a small add-on to the weaning course I was actually selling. And guess what? It started to sell really well. Around 70 % of the course buyers then purchased it at the point of checkout. Why? How? Well, because the context was completely different.

So the mums who were investing in the weaning course were primed. They were motivated. They were in buying mode. And so this recipe book felt like the next logical step. And that might have been the biggest lesson so far, actually. If a product isn't selling, don't just scrap it straight away. Just try to reposition it. The recipe book went from six sales in six weeks to a 70 % conversion rate. And it was exactly the same product.

but just put in a different context. And by the way, it's times like this when it's so useful to have a business mentor because when you're in it and things just are not working, it can feel like you're failing or your offer is rubbish. When actually sometimes you just need someone who can look at what you've created and see the bigger picture and go, you know what, the product is fine, but it's the placement that's wrong. That would have saved me weeks of confusion.

And that's exactly why I do what I do now to

help health professionals like you see what's actually going on in your business so you can make the right changes quickly and start seeing results.

Now it feels like a lifetime ago when I created that portion size guide, but it will always be something that sticks in my mind because that little guide was just the first domino. And that was the moment that I realized, you know what, Sarah, I can actually do this. And from there, things really did start to build. I created more courses and then memberships and then a subscription style platform. And by 2020, I'd made 124,000 pounds in a year, which was more than double.

what I was earning in the NHS and that was my cue to hand in my notice. Now I'm telling you this to remind you that my success in business started with something very, very small, something tiny, a simple low cost digital product that solved exactly the right problem. That's it. You do not have to start big, but you do have to solve the right problem. And yes,

I'm still creating digital products today because they are just a fantastic way to grow your income. But a fair bit has changed in the way that I do it now compared to back then. Big focus for me recently has been AI because AI now makes this kind of thing so much faster and easier to do. And I've actually built AI tools, multiple of them that I now sell.

and they've been really profitable for me. It's definitely something I'd recommend you trying out. You can train these tools on your methods and your frameworks and your clinical approaches. Now, of course, these tools are definitely not to be used as a replacement for you, but they can be really useful as that extra support in between client sessions and reminding your clients of strategies that you've already covered with them.

Now I've also created something called Sarah AI, which you may have heard me talk about before, which is essentially a custom trained AI tool built on my years of experience, my frameworks, my methods, actually everything inside my program and all of my approaches to business and marketing. It understands the regulated health professional world and it helps healthcare professionals in business to make better decisions.

and get answers to their questions anytime. And it's available 24 seven, of course, and it's just 49 pounds a month. I've also created.

And I've even done training all around how to create your own AI marketing assistant for your business. And so that is a low cost offer as well. So yes, digital products absolutely have evolved mainly thanks to AI tools, making it just faster and easier for us. But ultimately the idea is exactly the same. Your digital product still needs to solve a really specific and urgent problem.

and it still needs a really specific outcome or end results. And also it still needs to be a bit of a no-brainer price for people. I genuinely believe that every business should have at least one low-priced digital good, something really specific, something really simple and something very easy for people to say yes to. And not only because they're a great way to grow your income without trading your time for money, but also they're a really great entry point.

It lets people experience your work without a big commitment. When you give tons and tons of value in your low cost digital offers, people will be a lot more likely to then go and look at your other more expensive offers. So then you might have a middle level digital good. For me in this coaching business, that's things like my social media made simple course or my mindset for business success.

both of which are pre-recorded, so they don't require any extra work from me. And that's how you can start to build a business that's actually sustainable and doesn't rely on you to be on 24-7.

So let's quickly recap, and then I'm going to give you a small action step to help you get the ball rolling with your own digital product. So first of all, you need to find the very specific problem that your audience is losing sleep over, not the problem you assume they have. Second, a product that isn't selling isn't always a bad product or a failure. It might just be positioned in your business in the wrong place.

And then last but not least, leverage the tools that we have today. AI in particular. There has never been an easier time to create this kind of thing for your business. Now your action step. I want you to think about one question that you keep hearing all the time, the question that keeps getting asked either in clinic, in your DMs, even at dinner parties when someone finds out what you do, because that question

is probably your most profitable digital product. Now, really quickly before you go, I have got some exciting news. My business support program is currently closed. It's being rebuilt and refined behind the scenes and the doors are going to be open very, very soon. Now for this round only, I'm offering one person, £1,000 cash bonus.

if they're the first person to join during the short wait list window. This program is for you if you want more consistent clients, more predictable income and a business that feels easier to run day to day. I'll help you with everything, getting more clients, creating and selling digital offers, improving your marketing, increasing your yeses on discovery calls the lot.

Now is the time to get your name on the waitlist because when the waitlist doors open in the next few weeks, that £1000 bonus will be available for the first person, but only for a very short period. And it's only for people who are already on that list. And just to be clear, putting your name on the list doesn't

you to anything. It simply means that you're going to be the first to know when the waitlist doors open. I'm going to put the link to the waitlist in the show notes.

Bye for now.