06/28/2022

How To Create a Digital Course Product from Scratch

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Digital products can be created while you sleep. You might be curious about how it works.

What can you do to make your digital products stand out?

We’ll look at the reason digital products are worth investigating and how they can be used to follow up on our online business ideas.

What is a digital product?

A digital product is any product that customers can purchase and use online. 

Digital products are entertainment, such as storybooks, ebooks, or music, or educational (such as courses or ebooks).

Many people claim that digital products no longer sell online. It is not enough to upload ebooks to your site to make them sales.

There are however many businesses that sell only digital products in the Digital Commerce sector. These businesses can be a multi-million dollar.

Why create digital products?

Selling a product or service online is an excellent option.

Scalability

The first benefit of digital products is that you can reach more people with less effort.

If you are interested in teaching cooking classes, you can do so if people want to learn how to make healthier meals. Your service area will not be the only one that you can serve.

If you want to grow your business, you will need to hire more chefs and purchase more equipment.

Digital products can also be made. This will allow you to reach unlimited people and also means that your output won’t be limited. This is one of the best ways to make money in freelance writing.

Passive income

Digital products can also be launched quickly and help you make a living online.

Your hours are what you earn. 

You can buy digital products at any hour of the day and they do not need to be replenished. 

Starting costs are low

Last but certainly not least, there are startup costs and overhead that can quickly put people in debt. Most people want to learn about digital products.

It is possible to purchase products ahead of time if you have an ecommerce website. 

Service businesses often have ongoing costs. Personal trainers may need to rent gym space, which could lower their profits.

Only pay for the digital product and marketing costs. These costs are similar to what you would pay if your ecommerce business was a service or product company.

These are some digital products that can make you money

What type of digital product would you like to sell?

Many digital products can be used as entertainment or to teach people. 

These are the most viewed

  • Podcast (Joe Rogan) – $30 Million before the Spotify deal
  • Ebook (Carol Tice $45,000)
  • Online Course $1 billion
  • Newsletter (The Hustle – $27 Million)
  • Subscription Content. (Bloomberg, New York Times).
  • Premium Video (Netflix, $30 Billion)

This content is free, but some people will pay extra for exclusive or premium content

While many newsletters are free, many people will have to pay a premium.

How to create digital products in 5 simple steps     

Perhaps you are curious about making digital products using content ideas.

It’s a great way for small or large businesses to get started online. There are minimal risks and investments.

A business cannot be started passively. It is not possible to learn from freelance writers just by reading about them.

I’ve seen thousands of people create profitable online businesses using products and services. Five key areas are what you need to focus on before you start.

These are their attributes.

Step 1: Create an email list using an autoresponder

It’s not surprising. Kobe Digital has been talking about email marketing for a while. This is the primary way to connect with your audience and share what you have to offer.

I have used an email Autoresponder since the beginning.

Why? This is a great way to get the attention of anyone interested and make them a part of your audience.

You must do a great job with your autoresponder. You don’t have to create a perfect message from the start.

  • A member of your audience can solve a small problem they are worried about.
  • Explain to the audience why you’re doing what you do
  • Tell the audience why your solution solves their problem about your topic

Every autoresponder message can do one or more of the following

I love creating intriguing, strong “teaser messages” in emails. To read the whole article, click on the link.

You should have an email autoresponder in place by now. This is, despite the cliché business analogy. The first step towards creating digital products.

Step 2: Create your cornerstone content

I like to have an autoresponder in place before I create a website.

From where does the audience’s attention go? Not just your blog posts, but the cornerstone content that you create for the website.

Cornerstone content answers the most pressing questions:

  • These questions will be asked of you about your topic every day.
  • and all the questions you would like to be asked about your topic

They should be good, but not perfect. As they get more important, you’ll keep improving your cornerstone posts.

Step 3: Expand your network

Solid content can be a great way to attract people that could help you. These people could even be great partners in business partnerships.

Don’t wait for people to notice you. Expand your network now to maximize your chances of success with your project.

Guest posting is still a great way for you to expand your reach and grow your professional network.

Social media platforms can help you find other content producers. However, they won’t be bombarded with “Do me a favor?” You should be useful and helpful. You should ensure that they can refer back to the solid content.

Step 4: Seek market intelligence

Digital products can be used in the same way as any other product. You must first understand the needs of your customers before you can spend money and time creating them.

We have the privilege of having excellent platforms to listen in on the market and make informed decisions.

Start by using social media. 

  • What problems are people facing in your area?
  • Why do they feel frustrated by the existing solutions?
  • What objections do they have to move forward?

You don’t need to listen to all of your social media listening on your website or page. 

If you have an audience, it is possible to add to your listening via social media. 

This is more than just a way to find out what your market wants. Just a few questions can help you assess how knowledgeable you are and identify areas that need improvement.

Step 5: Craft your Minimum Viable Product

This is the outcome of all your research on digital products.

Our favorite approach is the Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). This is what many technology and software companies use. It can be used to create any type of product or service.

How do you decide what your first MVP should look like? Answer this question.

What’s the smallest product/service that I can create that will be of value to my audience?

Each MVP is not a product

Many small online businesses offer free products before you decide on a paid product.

MVPs allow you to focus your efforts on one product idea, launch it in your target market and see what happens.

  • Are your customers satisfied with this product?
  • What do they find most impressive?
  • What’s not working for your customers or you?

After you identify a popular MVP, optimize it. Focusing on what works and reducing the amount of stuff that doesn’t.

It is possible to launch an MVP that fails — market intelligence is very valuable. This experiment is to see who the winners are.

Best practices for creating digital products

These are the key steps to creating digital products. These are the best practices that will help you create and sell your product.

Ideation

Start by thinking about what content you want to market.

It’s generally easier to market educational or informational content than entertainment content (such as music). Entertainment quality is subjective and more difficult to measure than informational.

You should brainstorm your ideas before learning how to create digital products 

These are just some examples that you might like to note:

  • Learn Spanish
  • My personal experience in weight loss
  • Editing videos, podcast
  • Shopify Stores – What do you know about? 
  • SEO
  • Cook healthy meals regularly
  • Fashion styling

Each of these skills can be easily converted into digital products

It might surprise you at the amount of work you can do on weekends even if you don’t think you have any skills. Skills that are related to your hobby, such as chess or swing dancing, should not be discounted.

Customer research

Customer research is the most important part of the entire process. Without knowing your customer, it will be hard to sell your product.

Create an avatar of your customer. This buyer persona represents the title/position and personal struggles of your client.

This will enable you to create more targeted marketing strategies for your products and customize them to customer’s needs 

It is possible to create a video course about weight loss. It will not sell well.

This exercise could reveal that your target audience is women who had babies six weeks ago. They may be struggling to change their lifestyle.

This niche has a higher conversion rate and is likely to attract women who fit the description.

Keep these things in mind when you create your buyer persona.

  • Typical gender/age/title/income level of your target
  • Your product addresses an immediate pain point in the lives of your customers.
  • Other solutions were tried before they found yours.
  • What they search online before finding the solution
  • They have intangible desires that your product (indirectly) will address.

This will allow you to see how your product solves a particular problem (e.g. This will help you understand how your product will solve a specific problem (e.g. losing weight). It will also show you how it will impact their lives (she’ll be the perfect mom span>

Talking to potential customers is more important than guessing. Not only will you miss out on key issues, but it could also lead to missing out on the underlying struggles.

Pricing for digital products

Pricing is important. A $5 ebook is less work than a $300 monthly subscription or a $3,000 course.

An SEO course might not be affordable for some niches. It may still be worth $1000 to learn how to swing dance.

Start by researching your competitors. What’s the product’s price?

Prices can vary depending on:

  1. The content’s value
  2. How to present your product
  3. Additional bonuses (community, Q&A, etc. )

You don’t have to charge $100 for a Udemy SEO course. However, you shouldn’t be able to charge $2,000 for a similar course. People will pay more for higher-priced products if they believe they offer greater value.

Make sure you can find courses within your niche at a fair price.

It is important to note that higher-priced courses are not often listed on course websites. You might need to search the internet or use Quora for information about the best courses in your area.

Validation can be a key tip for creating digital products.

This is a common mistake in digital product creation.

There should be plenty of competition in your market (fitness, SEO, etc. ). If there’s a lot of competition, you will be able to tap into this market.

You must have something unique to make people choose your course over others.

Take the courses and then check for reviews. What was the most popular thing about the content?

While this process is a little more difficult to do with newsletters or ebooks, you can ask people on social media or in Slack groups for newsletters/ebooks/podcasts in your niche that they have paid for and what they liked/didn’t like about them.

Once you have a few ideas about your unique selling points, you can outline your course or your unique value proposition (if you’re doing a podcast, newsletter, etc.). ). Once you have some ideas about unique selling points, you can outline the course or your unique value statement (if you are doing a podcast, newsletter, etc.). This will allow people to sign up for the waitlist and/or sell it (with an estimate of when it will arrive). 

Once you receive money for your product, you can begin building it 

Validate your idea if you intend to take any step of the process!

Your friends are the best place for you to validate your idea. You can’t just ask friends if your idea is good.

You might consider creating a landing page with an Instapage tool if you’re in a B2B niche and have few followers or friends. Then you can post your offer and run Twitter or Facebook ads.      

Ask your email list for interest in purchasing the product at reduced rates.

Creation and development of digital products

If you’re able to follow the steps above, it’s simple to create a product. 

A book might be outlined and then a writer hired to complete the bulk of it.

Record videos for an online course, and then send them to Upwork to be edited. This is where the hardest part of your project lies.

These guides can help you get started with different content types.

  • Podcasting How to Start a Podcast
  • How To Create An eBook
  • Online courses How to create an online course
  • Curated News Create a Curated news

Quickly build an audience

It is important to build your audience as you develop your product.

Building an audience takes time. This is something that you don’t have.

It is recommended that you allocate 20% to the creation of your course and 80% to building your community for the course launch.

Get on podcasts

Podcast tours can be a great way for you to quickly build a following. Tell people about your experience and the results you achieved.

Tell them your story, and give them a unique value proposition to appeal to their audience.

Run paid promotion

Paying for a paid ad campaign on Facebook or Twitter can be a great way of driving traffic to your website. In return for an email address, you can announce your launch and give away a snippet of your digital product.

It’s possible to build relationships with your audience and launch with a very small audience if you keep growing your email list. You might also consider offering to presell the digital product to them.

Get involved with influencers

Partnering up with an influencer is a great way to get your first traction.

You must make your influencer partnership a success by making sure that your digital product is well-received by the audience.

Including influencers in your product is an excellent way to interact with them. You could also include their quotes in an eBook.

They should not have to do anything but include it in their product.

Eric Jorgenson’s Almanac of Naval Ravikant (he calls this the Navalmanack), is an excellent example of this. It had an almost identical effect.

Eric didn’t ask the Naval for anything, and the Naval was open to promoting it which allowed it to be a huge success. 

Consider creative ways to get influencers involved. 

Launching digital products

Once you’ve done all the work above, you can launch your website. Have a list of all your social media channels and email addresses that you need to reach on launch day.

Check for glitches even if everything has been pre-scheduled. Get in touch with influencers, if they are involved on launch day.

You likely have some followers, so it might be worth going live on Facebook to host a Q&A about the product.

It’s important that your launch day runs smoothly and that people can download or access your content.

Marketing strategies for the long-term

Once you launch, you will likely close the offer again and cycle your next launches. You need to keep building your online presence after you launch.

This will make your digital product more visible.

A long-term, successful marketing strategy will include a few key elements.

  • SEO
  • Content marketing
  • Social media

Each channel takes time to build so they might not be top priorities in the initial phase. They are vital to your long-term success.

SEO

SEO allows you to rank keywords like “best diet program” and “how to lose weight” via Google. 

Our guide to SEO is available for you. These are the main components you need to focus on:

  • Solid technical foundation
  • Mobile friendly
  • Great user experience
  • Logical architecture
  • Keyword optimized

Content marketing

SEO is a great option for beginners. However, it is not the only route. Optimized websites rank higher for keywords than you.

SEO is important to rank high in search engine results. Content Marketing is key to digital products.

To properly execute a Content Marketing strategy, you must take into account the search terms that your customers use to find your product.

A woman may search Google for fitness classes for mothers-to-be.

“How to take a baby back to the gym”

Motivation tips for new moms to exercise

Moms looking to buy might want this:

“Best fitness program to help new mothers”

How to make a blog post with tips and information.

Do a Google search before you start writing. You may find other people who have written about this topic.

They are hard to beat.

Better content will help you rank higher than your competitors. Google’s goal to provide searchers with the most relevant information is

These tips will help you create more content:

  • Provide more comprehensive information
  • Keep the reader’s attention with original stories and case studies.
  • The information can be presented in a more organized manner (headers, contents, table, etc. ).
  • Add visual illustrations to

Email

Building a strong email list is key to your business’ success. Customers want to feel that they are getting personalized content.

Email Marketing is a great way of establishing this type of relationship.

Ramit Setti, for instance, has sold almost all of his courses via email, and seen launches reach as high as $5 million within weeks.

To build a strong email list, you should be sending emails regularly. Emails should be written in a personal tone and include a story-selling tone.

Digital products to solve problems

It’s easy to create digital products. Finding the right audience is the most difficult part.

These tips can make your next digital product a hit, even if it’s not something you’ve done before.

Your idea can be turned into a multimillion-dollar digital product by taking it seriously and being well-versed in digital marketing.

This competence has been reduced to three core areas, which we teach at Digital Copywriter. This is what I refer to as the Trifecta of Core Skills.

These skills are crucial to the success of a business owner. These skills help companies grow faster.

Do you want to learn these core skills?

About the author

Kobe Digital is a unified team of performance marketing, design, and video production experts. Our mastery of these disciplines is what makes us effective. Our ability to integrate them seamlessly is what makes us unique.