6 min read · Written by Grant Rayner on 23 Nov 2023
Share by emailIn the previous two articles, I’ve focused on books as a product that you can integrate into your suite of products and services.
Another approach to writing and publishing is to produce templates.
If you’re able to create a template that’s useful and provides value to customers, you have an opportunity to add another revenue stream to your business.
The basic premise of a template is that you’re providing an organisation with a useful tool they can readily use at a price that’s less expensive than they could produce it themselves. Even better, you may be able to provide a tool that an organisation lacks the necessary knowledge and experience to produce themselves. In fact, if you’re an expert in your chosen speciality, you should be able to produce a product that is superior to anything that your clients could produce themselves.
In comparison to writing, editing and publishing a book, you should be able to produce a template relatively quickly. In fact, I bet if you searched through your file system right now, you probably already have several documents sitting around that you could clean up and sell and sell as templates.
Templates enable you to support less sophisticated organisations, particularly those that don’t have their own in-house security or crisis management teams. Many of these organisations may not have the budget to hire you for other projects, but they can still benefit from your knowledge and experience by purchasing your templates.
As your templates will be electronic files, you can sell them directly from your website. As with books, templates provide an opportunity to scale your revenue. You’ll be able to sell multiple copies of a template to multiple customers. As I’ll discuss shortly, you also have the option to expand your range of templates, encouraging existing customers to buy multiple templates over time, further increasing your revenue.
You can also use your templates to cross-sell other products. For example, your templates could link to your books or training, helping you to build a sustainable ecosystem. A customer who finds benefit from your templates may also be more inclined to hire you to deliver services.
A key takeaway is that you’ll need to be selective about the types of templates you develop. First, you need to focus on your speciality. Second, when you’re working on a template, you need to ensure it solves a specific customer problem. Importantly, because you’re producing something you want many customers to purchase, that problem needs to be widely shared amongst different organisations.
An example of solving a problem is to build checklists or evaluation tools. Evaluation tools can take a lot of time to compile, and many organisations will be happy to purchase an evaluation tool from someone they know has done the work to make the tool as robust as possible.
Once you build a template, how should you go about applying a price?
The first step when pricing a template is to consider the time it took to develop the template. Let’s say the template took you 5 days to develop, and your day rate is $1,500 a day. If you were to provide that template to a single client as part of a project, you would price the template at $7,500. Of course, you won’t be able to sell the template for that price on your website, but at least you know what it cost to build.
Next, think about how many templates you think you can sell. Let’s say you think you can sell 20. To break even at that volume, your price would need to be $375. That may be an acceptable price if the template provides a lot of value, but it’s still just a breakeven price. If you’re able to sell more than 20, then each sale will be 100% profit (not considering the time you spend marketing the template, of course).
As an alternative, you could mark up the price of your template to $500, making a profit of $125 per template. You’ll break even after selling 15 templates and, if you sell 20 templates, your profit will be $2,500. Not terrible, but hardly a strong and sustainable revenue stream. Particularly if you’re concerned about ongoing demand. Unless your template provides considerable value, $500 is also quite a high price. You may find that by increasing the price, you lower demand.
An important lesson here is to minimise the costs related to developing the template. If you were to develop a tool as part of a client project, then spend a day modifying that document so it’s a template that you can sell it to others, you’re in a far better position.
Overall, the key to pricing your template is to align your price with the value your template provides. Value in this context refers to the time and effort it will save a customer. If you were to develop a template for a full crisis management plan, perhaps you could charge $1,000 for the template. After all, it would take the customer at least a week to write their own plan, assuming they have the necessary knowledge and experience to do so. Purchasing your template for $1,000 would be a bargain in this context. However, if you develop a five page facility security checklist, then perhaps you couldn’t justify a price higher than $9.95.
As with all of your products, you’ll need carefully consider how you can increase the sales of your templates in order to grow your revenue. How do you do that?
There are several options available to you to boost sales and drive revenue growth:
Lowering the price may not necessarily increase demand. In fact, setting a low price may reduce the perceived value of your product. Going back to the earlier point, always consider the value your template provides to your customers.
The biggest challenge you’ll face is the fact that the number of organisations that are likely to want to purchase your template is finite. Realistically, the number may be well below 100. For this reason, focusing on B2C templates is a good option if that aligns with your chosen speciality. There are far more people out there than companies.
Let’s shift away from pricing and sales to focus on other key aspects, including licensing limitations, marketing, the process of developing templates, how to package templates, and how to protect your intellectual property.
Another challenge you’ll face is that, unlike books, it will be difficult to sell templates in bulk to organisations. If an organisation buys a template from you, they’ll be doing so with the expectation that they now own the template and can use it across their organisation without additional costs.
One option you could consider is to build templates for different sizes of organisation, and price those templates accordingly. As an example, you could build a B2C template and sell that for $9.95 while you have a more comprehensive version of the same template available for $295 for corporate clients. The core theme might be the same, but the complexity of the templates would be different. An individual would not benefit from the B2C template and an organisation would not benefit from the corporate template.
To drive sales, you’ll need to build awareness that your templates exist amongst your target customers. Many of the approaches I discussed relating to marketing books also apply here. For example, you can build awareness through your newsletter and through articles. LinkedIn is also a great venue for promoting your templates. While you could also use an affiliate network, you may find that this approach is better suited to books than templates.
As with writing books, your template development can be considered a ‘side project’. You can work on them when you have capacity. If you develop a great framework as part of a consulting assignment, there’s nothing wrong with removing client content from that framework and then offering it to other customers as a template. If it has benefited one customer, chances are it can benefit more.
Once you have one template available for sale, there’s no harm in developing others. It would make sense to offer a suite of related templates. You could also offer related templates for sale as bundles.
As an example, I’ve written several books on travel security. Recently I developed several ‘quick reference guides’ that are effectively checklist templates. These templates are designed to complement the books, and are offered for sale alongside the books. Many people who purchased the books have since also purchased the templates.
If you have unique intellectual property, such as consulting frameworks, you may not want to release these as templates. If you do so, you may be giving away your competitive advantage to others. As an example, I have spend a decade developing and refining a unique crisis management performance evaluation tool. I would not offer this tool as a template. I might, however, offer a simplified version of this evaluation tool as a template.
If you are worried about your competitors buying your templates, a simple solution is to offer them for sale at a relatively high price. A higher price will provide some level of deterrent against your competitors buying the product.
Another approach, which I’ve used many times, is to make the purchasing process manual. You can include details of the template on your website but not provide an integrated payment and order fulfilment process. Instead, the customer will contact you to purchase the template and you will send them a payment link. Once the customer pays, you can then send them the template.
Templates may not be enormously profitable, but they still provide a great demonstration of your capabilities to current and potential customers. Templates can be another element within your integrated suite of products and services that help to diversify your revenue stream. You should certainly consider adding templates to your business, being careful not to compromise your IP in the process.