how to create your very first digital product
in just five easy steps, we're going to walk through how to create your very first digital product and list it for sale!!
how to create your very first digital product in 5 easy steps
determine who your audience is
this is a CRITICAL step in creating your digital products.
the very first thing you ALWAYS need to do before creating any digital products is figure out exactly who your audience is.
the fundamentals of marketing teach you that if your audience is everyone, then your audience is no one, and this rings to be very true. this is a fundamental you need to live by to be successful with your digital products business.
that said, your audience can be whoever you want it to be but you need to specifically define and outline who that is.
and that doesn't mean that people who don't meet your audience criteria can't become your customers, because they're more than likely will be people outside your target audience that find you, are interested in your products, and will purchase from you. but in terms of your marketing efforts to find and convert more customers, you need to define your audience and speak directly to them!!
so how do you define your audience?
first, you'll start with some demographic information – how old are they, what genders are they, where do they live?
then, you'll figure out more qualitative information about them – what do they like to do, what are they interested in, what type of jobs do they have, where do they consume content, what are their main challenges or problems?
from here, you can add as much information as you want in other areas but this is a good starting.
now that you have this information, turn that into specific customer personas.
👉 give them a name, give them a photo, give them specifics from the demographic and qualitative information.
at a minimum you should create 2-3 personas, but many people will create 5 or more
now that your audience is defined let's move on to the next step...
figure out a problem that your audience has
while you were defining your audience, you outlined some of the main challenges or problems that they face.
let's dive deeper into that to uncover something specific that you can use to create a digital product for, that solves one of their main challenges or problems.
hopefully you wrote out a few bullet points of challenges or problems that your audience faces. pick one of these and let's go into the weeds with it. really dig down into what that problem is and what are the factors that cause this problem in the first place, or continue to cause this problem to happen repeatedly. be specific!!
as you start to dig deeper and deeper, you should start to come up with ideas of things that could potentially solve that problem. now let's move on to the next step.
determine what digital item you can create to solve your audience's one main challenge or problem
as you've started to truly uncover the causes behind a specific challenge or problem your audience faces, you've likely thought about different ways to solve that issue.
start by writing all those ideas down, because you could create all of them at some point.
however let's just start with one, because we want to create a sustainable business and not overwhelm ourselves by trying to do too many things too fast. this will lead you to fail quickly, and if you do see success, it will likely take way more time than it should.
we are going to take one specific idea of how to solve our audience's problem and turn that into a digital product that our audience is willing to pay for.
with one specific challenge in mind, you are going to figure out one specific way - such as an ebook, a guide, printables, etc. - that you can solve your audience's problem. it needs to make sense for your audience and what they are trying to do.
create the digital product
now that you have a specific digital product in mind, you are going to work on creating it.
digital products come in MANY formats and can be created with many different tools.
it's very common in the digital products space for digital products to be created in Canva, but you have additional options that don't require any graphic design skills such as spreadsheets, word documents, and so much more.
don't overcomplicate what it is you were creating. if it's complicated for you, it's probably also complicated for your customers. your goal with your digital product is to make your customers lives easier in some way, shape, or form.
list your digital product for sale
lastly now that you have a digital product created, you need to list it for sale so that your audience can find you and your online store, and purchase your digital products.
👉 if you're already selling digital products, simply add it to your online store
👉 if you're not yet selling digital products, here are some specific tools to check out to see if they could be right for your online store - Pensight, Stan Store, Shopify, Etsy, High Level, just to name a few. my personal favorites are Pensight (for a link in bio tool) and High Level (to create your own ecommerce website).
