The future of business is digital.” Yet, to build a digital business, you must build digital products. Digital products like e-books, online courses, audio products, downloadable templates, software, etc., are increasingly attractive because of their low creation costs (your primary investment being your time and expertise) and inherently scalable nature.
How Do Digital Leaders Build Great Digital Products?
One of the keys to unlocking digital product greatness is to shift from product-oriented to customer-value-oriented thinking. Digital leaders conceive and design new digital products to continuously improve the value customers derive from engaging with your products. Sounds simple! But the reality is that it’s not that easy to do.
For many, the principle challenge is in the word “continuously.”
Unfortunately, too many company executives assume digital products are produced just like traditional products. That is, they have a design-and-build phase, they’re launched, they turn into cash cows, and eventually they’re updated.
But digital products are never finished. Without continuous updates, digital products deliver decreasing customer value. Digital leaders use agile plus DevOps to continuously evolve their products around changing customer needs, wants, and desires.
Steps To Launching Profitable Digital Product
Digital products have been the platform by which countless successful entrepreneurs have made a name for themselves. Like any business of true value, you will not achieve overnight success. You’ll have to put in the hard work first. Here are my eight steps to launching profitable digital products;
- Validate Your Digital Product Idea
There are thousands of self-published books on Amazon that have only sold a few copies, usually to the author’s friends and family, because they’re on an obscure topic that no sizable audience is interested in learning about.
Always research your market before you begin to create any digital content. Start with Google Trends and search for topics of interest around which you could viably produce digital content. Once you enter a specific keyword phrase, Google Trends will show you the popularity of that phrase over a defined period of time.
The next tool is, one which really helps validate the potential success of a digital product, is the Google Keyword Planner, part of Google AdWords. This allows you to analyze the monthly search volume and projected competition on specific keyword phrases.
- Start Building Your Audience With Free Content
Once you have a landing page on your site ready to collect email addresses, you need to begin by giving reasons for people to go to that page and sign up.
Start with creating some high quality blog content for your site and building a targeted list of potential companies, brands, and influencers who may be interested in sharing your content with their audiences. The people on that list you create will also be great prospects for publishing guest posts that you know their audience is already primed for. Guest posting has been by far the best driver of new traffic and waiting list signups to my digital content. Since you determined your niche in the first step of this process while validating your idea, now it’s time to hunt out other, more successful, blogs that cover the same niche.
- Create Your Digital Product
Once you have a sizable social community (shoot for at least a few hundred to a thousand people), you should have a trickle of regular traffic to your website, which will warrant spending more time building your digital products and getting early feedback from your community.
The idea at this point is that you start shifting your emphasis away from guest posting and gradually move back towards improving the quality and frequency of posts on your website. You now have enough readers to justify writing more frequent posts, so focus on ranking for your target keyword phrases, bring visitors over to your waiting lists, and even pre-sell your online course.
Whether you feel ready or not, it’s time to start building. To many, this is the hardest part of the entire process–actually creating the digital product–simply because it’s a very new experience at first. The important point to remember, though, is that once the material is created it can be reused over and over again.
You may find that your audience responds well to online courses. if you’re an expert on a topic. If you can teach people a skill they value, they’re happy to pay for it. Consider trying paid webinars, group coaching sessions, and gated sections of your website with more detailed blog content as relatively easily implemented monetization options.
- Set Up a Waiting List
People love anticipation. Setting up a waiting list is also one of the best ways to validate your digital product idea, as you’ll very quickly see how many people express interest by driving targeted traffic to your signup page.
It doesn’t matter how good your product is if no one knows about it. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets, thus it’s in your best interest to build up your list with potential customers.
Beginning by creating a simple landing page on your website before you build anything related to your upcoming digital product idea. This will give you a way to test the waters with this product concept, start getting indexed by search engines, and prime your existing audience. Here’s an example of a very simple landing page I used to test the validity of an online course on starting a business while working full-time.
- Install the Right Monetization Tools on Your Website
Once you get to the point where you can monetize your website, you’re going to want your site to run as smoothly as possible. This means that you will need to add some tools.
If you operate a WordPress site, there are some essential plug-ins that’ll make your life a lot easier. Here are a few;
- OptimizePress is my favorite WordPress template. It’s great for creating high quality landing pages, implementing new functionalities, and publishing blog content.
- Zippy Courses is a basic WordPress theme that’ll power any online course and serves as a member site for your users. You’ll physically host your course content in this gated community.
- Selz for WordPress is an awesome embeddable widget that allows you to sell digital products and process transactions directly on your own site.
- SumoMe, among other things, captures email addresses and helps you welcome these people into your community.
Once your digital products are released into the wild, you’ll start to see which channels are driving in more new customers for you. You could find that guest posting more often than publishing on your own site is a better utilization of time.
