Why You Should Build Your Own Digital Products
Some freelancers thrive, but the vast majority merely survive.
Which group would you like to belong to?
If you’d like to enjoy financial freedom, you should consider building your own digital products.
Building digital products is highly lucrative and can be scaled exponentially. Consider, for example, that you can sell the same product an infinite number of times!
With the learning revolution that is going on in the world today, online course creation is one of the most attractive online businesses.
It’s unlike other ways of making money online, which require trading your time for an income. Digital products enable you to literally make money in your sleep. It may seem like a stretch, but it’s not, because you’ll be using automation to multiply your efforts.
Want to break through the 7 Myths that are stopping you from creating your first product? Download my free guide "Product Creation Myths." Click here to get the guide.
Most people get started online selling time for money. And you can make good money doing this. But most get stuck at this phase because of certain myths, such as the notion that you need a lot of funds and a huge list of connections to make money as a product creator.
Their wrong beliefs limit them when, in truth, they can easily learn about building and selling digital products and start generating substantial income regularly.
That’s what I’d like for you.
By the time you’ve read the eight benefits of selling digital products below, you’ll forget about all the myths that are often associated with product creation. It’s not a walk in the park, but it’s not rocket science either.
I’ll be your guide.
In this article, I’ll start with examples of digital products you could sell, and then we’ll check out the key benefits of building and selling your own digital products, how you can easily build these products, and the tools to accelerate product creation, marketing, and monetization.
Common Digital Products You Can Sell
There are a plethora of digital products you can build and sell:
- Online courses
- Photographs
- Design and graphic elements
- Themes
- Plugins
- Apps
- Software
- Websites
- Music
- Letterforms and fonts
- Videos
- PDF guides
- eBooks
- Book cover templates
- Games
Eight Benefits of Selling Digital Products
The benefits of building your own digital products include:
- Earn Passive Income
- Low Barrier to Entry
- Full Creative Control
- Access a Global Market
- Easy Business Model
- High Margins
- Unlimited Stock
- Sell the Business
I’ll explore each one in some detail.
1. Earn Passive Income
Your time is limited. You need to make the best use of it. No matter how hardworking you are, everybody needs to take breaks, sleep, and do other things. It’s good to work hard, but you’d reap greater returns if you always worked smart, too.
Building and selling your own digital products is a great example of working smart. This is because selling digital products allows you to decouple your time from the marketing and sales of your products.
Imagine that you decided to focus on online course creation. After developing the course, whether you did it yourself or outsourced its creation, the sales, marketing, and product delivery can be automated. At that point, even while you’re chilling with friends and family or helping to build an orphanage in Peru, you’re still making money, without your physical involvement.
You could have products that users pay for once, or better still, you could have a recurring payment model where you get paid monthly.
Whichever you opt for, the key is to structure the business so that you’re earning passive income.
This is the path to real wealth because you can have multiple products selling at the same time.
2. Low Barrier to Entry
You don’t need a certification, years of training, or a lot of money to start building digital products. It’s a business model you can easily learn from the comfort of your home or office. A good online course will give you a great foundation. And you can take advanced courses as soon as you start making money.
Most people have life experiences or some vocational or professional experience they can leverage into building a digital product. Alternatively, you can identify bestselling niches, do your research, interview experts in those niches, and develop great products.
3. Full Creative Control
Let’s be honest. Freedom, not just money, is what attracted us to this path. We want to be masters of our fate. If you’re working for a client as a freelancer, you’re under the client’s control. If you’re an affiliate, you’re subject to the product creator’s control.
If you’ve been invited to speak to an organization, the management decides what you can talk about. They call the shots.
Building and selling digital products, on the other hand, grants you full creative control to decide what the content is going to be and how you’re going to structure and sell it. You call the shots.
4. Access a Global Market
Your digital product business is an international business. This is because you’re doing virtually every facet of it online. You can reach customers from different parts of the globe. Anyone who has an Internet-connected device can be a customer.
If you like, you can sell all your products only in the English language. If you want to explode your revenue, you can have your products, landing, and sales pages translated and use payment processors that can collect funds in multiple countries and languages.
5. Easy Business Model
Compared to other models such as blogging, copywriting, freelance writing, or selling physical products, building and selling digital products is relatively easier. Some other models require constant maintenance.
Digital products require you to work very hard for a period, and then you can largely automate most of the processes required. When you’ve conducted in-depth research, through outsourcing and automation, you can work less.
6. High Margins
If you have a laptop, a smartphone, or a tablet and a small amount of money (and I meant small) you already have what you need to start your business. In fact, for some products, all you need is a smartphone. You can decide to bootstrap and invest that small fund or even do it without spending a dime.
Your investment is mainly of an intellectual nature. You don’t need to pay for an office or shipping and delivery; you don’t need to stock your products in a warehouse. Your overhead is low.
When you sell, you can be sure that you’ll be making about 80 percent margins! It could even be more for some digital products that are sold at high prices.
7. Unlimited Stock
Selling physical products is a much more demanding business model. One of the challenges is that there are times when you run out of stock. This is something that can never happen with digital products. You can actually sell the same product an infinite number of times.
8. Sell the Business
Apart from generating consistent income from your digital products business, if it’s properly structured from the get-go, you can reach a point where you can sell the business and make a lot of money.
How to Create Bestselling Digital Products
I have been creating digital products for years. By now, I have product creation down to a science. Click here to discover the four key elements you need to test to create products that sell.
The following are key steps to take if you want to create bestselling digital products:
- Validate the idea
- Test it before you launch it
- Create exceptional products and leverage effective marketing
1. Validate the idea
A key thing to remember before you start creating your digital products is that you need to assess the validity of your idea.
It’s not enough that you’re passionate about it. It’s not enough that it’s something you’ve been doing for a decade, and it’s not enough that your partner and friends think the idea is awesome. You need proof that the idea is good.
2. Test it before you launch it
You should test it on a small scale before you invest a lot of resources into it.
What kind of digital product would you like to create? This is a vital question you need to address before you bother with the how. Before you think of what type, focus on your target audience. They are the ones who would pay top dollar for your product. It’s about the proven, classic advice, “Find a need and fill it.”
You need to understand their hopes, fears, desires, and challenges. You can conduct research regularly to determine these. It could be by using surveys or by mining their comments on your blog.
It’s when you truly get them that you can develop digital products that speak to their concerns and fly off the shelves. This is the secret of creating bestsellers.
You may start with a minimum viable product, which you can use affordable ads and your email list to promote. Based on its performance, you can decide to expand.
3. Create exceptional products and leverage effective marketing
The next step is to create an exceptional product and ensure your marketing is top-notch, and soon you’ll be making money hand over fist.
Let’s say you’re trying to publish a book. You could write it yourself or outsource. You’ll need other professionals such as designers and editors to work with you.
It’s not difficult to access a team to help you create a great book. There are job boards you could place ads on, or you could ask successful authors you’ve been networking with to recommend astounding professionals.
You need a marketing plan, too. And don’t focus solely on sales. There are marketing strategies you could start employing even before your book is ready. These strategies would make it a lot easier for your book to sell very well. One of such strategies is leveraging landing pages to build a mailing list.
The “Write” Way
Let’s assume you’d like to create online courses. Most courses require some form of writing, even if it’s a video course. The ability to write well is a super skill for a product creator, and it can help ensure that you have a large online course real estate. The more you can write, the more you can expand this estate.
Don’t be intimidated by the kind of writing I am talking about. You don’t have to be J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. If you can speak, you can write. The simpler the writing, the better the end product. Trust me; you can do this even if you don’t like writing.
Want to break through the 7 Myths that are stopping you from creating your first product? Download my free guide "Product Creation Myths." Click here to get the guide.
You can dictate your content and have it transcribed. Or you can use speech-to-text software. You can even outsource the writing process.
You can outsource virtually every facet of the digital product creation process. All you have to do may be to write a page or two where you describe the concept in some detail. A good freelancer can run with this and craft something that’d astonish you and your target audience.
The key is to have an outline that’s based on in-depth research and aims at identifying helpful topics and resources.
Focus on Edutainment
You want to be focused on creating products that offer massive value. Products that address challenges your target audience are facing. But you need to be careful that you don’t come across as if you’re preaching or lecturing to them.
Yes, you’re educating them, but who says it has to be done in a boring, formal fashion? In fact, that’s the path to a product that’s most likely going to tank. Being boring is a cardinal sin, if you’re creating digital products.
Boring content repels, while entertaining content opens wallets.
Think “edutainment.” Think Sesame Street. Imagine the magnitude of knowledge we learned by watching Sesame Street. It was all framed as entertainment, and that was what made it interesting.
Top Online Stores
Once you’ve built a great course, the next thing is how to promote and sell your product. Fortunately, there are many platforms and resources you can use – these are the main ones:
Check out my article here to find out what mistakes you don’t want to make in your sales letters.
Conclusion
We have explored why you should build digital products, the type of products you should build, how you should go about it, and the platforms for selling your products.
Building and selling digital products is one of the most lucrative business models online. If you master it, you can build multiple streams of passive income that will be your ticket to financial freedom.
Want to break through the 7 Myths that are stopping you from creating your first product? Download my free guide "Product Creation Myths." Click here to get the guide.
