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Episode 13: How to Create the PERFECT Digital Product

Are you under the impression that no one will pay for your knowledge or product?

I hope not because that is so not true!

In this episode, I am teaching you how to decide on the perfect, profitable digital product that you can sell to your audience or your future audience.

By using your hobbies, professional skills or life experiences, you can create a digital product that falls into one or more digital product categories: e-books, templates, printables or courses.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

  • What a digital product is
  • The four categories digital products fit into
  • How to identify your sweet spot to identify what to share with others
  • Examples of hobbies, professional skills or life experiences that you can repurpose
  • What six profitable themes are
  • How passion, expertise, problems and solutions come together to create the perfect digital product
  • What a passion statement is and how to write one
  • Getting over mindset blocks

Once you’ve decided which category you’re most passionate about in terms of teaching others, you will want to make sure you’re choosing a theme that is profitable online. When you combine these two together, that’s when you will find your sweet spot for making money with a digital product online!

Remember, push your mindset blocks about selling digital products to the side because people absolutely will pay for your shortcuts!

I want to hear your passion statement! Let me know over on Instagram!

If you’ve been spinning your wheels creating free content that is leading you nowhere, the Digital Product Dash can help you. You will learn how to identify, validate and choose the perfect profitable digital product that you can sell over and over again, even without a current audience or email list.

Ready to take your business to the next level? Check out the Empowered Business Box, a flexible monthly membership with resources to enhance your digital products and sales funnels from top to bottom. 

Resources Mentioned:

Speaker1: [00:00:04] You are listening to the Empowered Business podcast, I’m your host, Monica Froese, a mom of two and your secret weapon to creating a six figure digital product business. I’m on a mission to help 1000 women make 100000 dollars a year. That’s right. One hundred million dollars towards financial independence for women. As an online business expert, I am teaching you everything I know right here week after week so you can join us on the journey to one hundred million dollars. Sound good? Then let’s jump in. 

 

Last week, I asked the question, is blogging dead? The answer is no. Content creation is not dead. However, only providing free content without a clear customer journey is not a sustainable business model. Free content is intended to educate your ideal customer and allow them to get to know you better. The real question that you need to be asking is how is my business going to make money and how can I produce free content to educate my potential new customers to buy from me? So today we’re going to talk about how to decide on the perfect, profitable digital product to sell to your audience or a future audience, because this can work even if you don’t have an audience to sell to yet. Once you have a way to make money, create all the free content you want as long as it’s serving a strategic purpose. In other words, that free content needs to lead to sales because remember, you don’t have a busines if you’re not making money. You have to be able to ask for money.

 

Speaker1: [00:01:48] So let’s set the stage for today. What exactly is a digital product? A digital product is an asset you create once that you can sell over and over again. It’s highly profitable because the majority of the work is done one time. Now, personally, I think that there are really just four main categories that digital products fit into. That includes e-books, digital templates such as spreadsheets printable in online digital courses. Now, before you can create the perfect digital product, you need to have an idea of what someone would buy from you, right? I mean, because you have to have something to sell. So you might be thinking, OK, great, but seriously, what in the world do you expect me to create and sell? No one is going to pay for my knowledge. Right. I bet you’re thinking that because that’s what I hear my students tell me all the time. And guess what? You’re wrong. And I get it because when I first started, I had no idea, like literally no idea why anyone would ever pay me money for anything. Now, if you want to hear more about the first product I ever sold in the journey of that, you can go back to Episode two, where I walk you through the very first digital product I created in twenty sixteen.

 

Speaker1: [00:03:06] And, you know, I didn’t have a lot of intention going into it because I didn’t know what people were going to buy. That is very, very common to feel that way. So I’m going to walk you through a way to identify what I like to call your sweet spot. And there are three overarching ways you can gain knowledge and skills to share with others. Now, these are pretty broad topics here, but everything pretty much boils down to this: hobbies, your professional skills that you learned in school or in your career and through life experience. Now, we all have life experience. Most of us have hobbies, and most of us have made it through school and have some sort of type of career. So once you’ve decided which category you’re most passionate about in terms of teaching others, then you want to make sure you’re choosing a theme that is profitable online. And when you combine these two together, that’s when you will find your sweet spot for making money with a digital product online. So let’s break this down. I want to give you some examples here of each of these categories. So hobbies, what are the things that you have for hobbies? Things like crafting, sewing, coaching, Little League, home decorating? And then let’s talk about your professional skills. Think about if you have a corporate career like I did, I learn tons of things and excel.

 

Speaker1: [00:04:23] I learned more things in Excel than I learned when I was getting my MBA. So school did not teach me nearly what I needed to know. But in my career, I had to know these complicated formulas and different things like that in excel. And that’s where I developed those skills. And those are skills that people outside of corporate would love to know more about. Other kind of professional skills include graphic design, bookkeeping, home improvement or a chef. You know, that’s a great example. Recently I have been looking for what they call a personal chef, which is essentially someone that can come into my home and cook us a few meals at a time because I work, my husband works, and at night we like to spend the time with our two children. So if I had a personal chef that came in, that would alleviate a lot of our nighttime routine so we could spend more time with them instead of spending all the time cooking in the kitchen. And that’s a professional skill that someone has that they could repurpose into a service outside of something typical, like working in a restaurant. They could also help people online, teach other chefs how to take their skills and become a personal chef and think about how that’s a scalable skill that you could be teaching online, especially during a pandemic, like how many people are going to restaurants right now?

 

Speaker1: [00:05:42] So if you think about it, you can take your professional skills, teach. Them to the masses through a digital product, all based on what you learned in your career or in school. OK, the third category I want to talk about is life experience. This is things like parenting, marriage, traveling, like think about the things that you do every day that you’re not necessarily classically trained in. It’s not something you learned in school, but it’s something that you experienced and something you can help other parents with. Something that comes to mind is with parenting is I went through a really bad postpartum PTSD after my first daughter. I started blogging about it and I show up in Google for it. And now other moms reach out to me with their experience. That’s life experience that I turned into a topic I could talk about online. OK, so hobbies, professional skills, life experience, you have to brainstorm all of the things that fit into those categories that you possess. So go ahead, write it down on a piece of paper, hobbies, professional skills, life experience. Now, once you’ve narrowed down exactly what you know and that you were good at, you need to make sure it fits into what I call a profitable theme online. And I’ve broken this down to six main things that people are basically willing to spend money on because, you know, if they’re not willing to the money, this isn’t going to get us very far with a digital product.

 

Speaker1: [00:07:00] So those six categories include money. Now, think of this as either saving or making money. So, topics like debt, budgeting, financial planning, how to make money online. The second profitable theme is pleasure. So people are willing to pay for information on traveling, crafting, hiking. These are all subcategories that could fit under pleasure. The third would be saving time, I think, of things in terms of being a mom. So I think of things like chore charts, a planner, bullet journaling. Heck, we just bought a potty training chart for my just turned three year old. That’s a digital product that I bought that was printable that we could laminate, put on the wall, and check off every time she goes to the bathroom. Also, the fourth category then is health, wellness and fitness. So you can break this down by things like Kitto, running, meditation. Think about someone who maybe recently lost a lot of weight, trained to do a 5K. Now they want to teach other people who are on their weight loss journey how they went from not being able to run at all to running a 5K. These are all things that could be put into a digital product. The fifth profitable theme to think about is relationships. This goes to parenting, marriage, dating, things like that. And then the sixth profitable theme is professional development.

 

Speaker1: [00:08:20] So think about things like public speaking or learning a new skill that will advance their career. So in my last round of the Empowered Business Lab, I had a few teachers who are teaching other teachers how to do things like communicate with their students better or teach a certain subject better. So people are willing to pay for professional development. Think of things that companies are willing to pay for and what they’re not willing to pay for. And in your industry, there could be a gap where, for example, a school district might not be willing to train teachers on something that you’re really great at. But you could develop an online course to train teachers and help them further their own professional development. Now, in order to be successful with selling your digital product, there are four things that we need to come together. And I want you to think of these things in terms of four circles. So when all four of these circles meet in the middle, that’s where the money will be. And the four areas are passion, expertise, problem and solution. So let’s talk about what each of these are. So we’ve taken the time to brainstorm the different things that we’re already good at. Then we talked about, are the things we are good at, do they fit into a profitable topic online? And now we’re moving into let’s make sure that there’s passion. There’s expertise, there’s a problem that actually needs to be solved and that there’s a solution that you can provide.

 

Speaker1: [00:09:48] So let’s talk about passion. This is where you’re thinking about what you’re passionate about. What can you talk about forever and not get bored if you want to sell something online, but you actually hate the topic, it’s probably not going to make you a whole ton of money then expertise this is the second circle, this is where you want to think about what have you taken the time to master? What have you invested a significant amount of time and energy into becoming the best. Then the third circle is problem. Think about the roadblocks that people run into when trying to learn the skill that you’re already great at, because essentially your digital product needs to solve a problem. So you need to identify what the problem actually is. And then the fourth circle is the solution. This is how you can solve their problem better than anyone else. And the way that you solve the problem is with the digital product. So when you combine passion, expertise, problem and solution together. Think of four circles that meet the middle and then big dollar signs in the middle, all of these have to come together for this to work now to get started. I want to start with the first two, which is passion and expertise.

 

Speaker1: [00:10:58] And I call when I’m about to teach you the identifying your passion statement. OK, let’s talk about this. I am passionate about blank and I can help blank do blank because of blank. Now I sort of laugh because you’re probably thinking I just heard a bunch of blanks and that’s super not helpful. So let’s be a little bit more practical here. And I actually want to read you some examples that I’ve come up with to show you the different types of passion statements. So here’s one. I am passionate about data and I can help small business owners track incoming leads from multiple traffic sources because I have 20 years of experience in this field. Another one could be I am passionate about my Cricut machine and I can help new Cricut machine owners learn how to use their machine. And half the time, because I’ve made over a thousand crafts with mine and know every single thing there is to know about it. Another example would be I am passionate about home organization and I can help overwhelmed women get their house organized fast and easy because I’m a professional home organizer or because I’ve developed a system that is proven to work through years of trial and error. See what I did there? One is the person learn the skill through their professional career, their professional home organizer. And the second variation I gave you is they learned it through life experience.

 

Speaker1: [00:12:20] They developed a system that worked in their own home. Maybe they shared it with their friends and that’s life experience. So you can come at this from different angles. Now, if you’re still stuck, I want to give you some brainstorming prompts to think through. So I’m going to give you a series of five questions that you can ask yourself. The first one is what is one thing you could do over and over again and never get sick of it? The second is what lights you up and gets you so excited. Third, what do your friends and family ask you about all the time? Fourth, what do your coworkers always come to you about? And fifth, what does your current audience ask about the most? And I’m going to give you some practical examples here. Let’s start with what do your friends and family ask you about all the time? So what happened to me a few years ago was I had developed a little network of online blogging friends. Essentially, we all started as bloggers and I was very inquisitive, always asking the question, why? Why are we creating free content? Why do we care about this? Why do I want to put display ads on my site? Why do I want to do affiliate marketing? And because I have a corporate marketing background, my mind always focused on ROI, which is return on investment. And I kept thinking, why am I putting all of this effort into free content is what we’re told to do in the blogging model.

 

Speaker1: [00:13:42] And there’s very little payoff for it. And so then I started experimenting with Pinterest advertising and those same friends started asking me all the time about why are you doing Pinterest ads? Why don’t you just rely on free organic traffic? And the reason they were asking me that was because at the time, Pinterest advertising was super new and nobody was using it. Everyone was like, why would I want to pay Pinterest when they give me all this free traffic? And I saw this huge opportunity to use it to narrow my target audience to get super hyper focused on getting the conversion, which is getting hyper focused people on my email list so that I could sell a certain product to them. So I got so many questions about that that eventually it led to what became my signature course for four years on Pinterest advertising. Another example would be what does your current audience ask you about the most? So in this regard, after I had been selling my Pinterest advertising course for a while, I started realizing there was another gap. And that gap was people were coming to me to want to run ads, but they had nothing to run ads to that made sense. So I always say don’t run ads for traffic sake.

 

Speaker1: [00:14:47] So I was having a lot of content creators who had a lot of blog posts come to me and say, I want to run Pinterest ads. And I’d say, OK, why? And they’d be like, oh, just for more traffic. And then I’d say, why? And what I realized was they were missing a conversion mechanism. They were missing the fact that they want it to pay for ads for a reason. And that reason would be to grow your business, you know, to get people on your email list that you can sell to or sell a digital product or sell a physical product. And listening to my audience led me to then pivot away from Pinterest advertising and now do a whole new suite of products under the empowered business brand, where I help people create a converting sales funnel for their digital products. And that was born out of listening to my audience. Now, you might not have an audience yet, so think about what do your coworkers ask you about all the time? What do your other mom friends ask you about all the time? What do your high school friends, college friends ask you about all the time, there is something that people rely on your advice for, maybe you, like I said earlier, recently lost weight and people are like, how did you go from not running to running a 5K? How do you get motivated to exercise every single day? Like, what’s the secret? There’s so many things that we just overlook that we just inherently do every day that other people struggle with, because what we’re good at is not what everyone else is good at.

 

Speaker1: [00:16:14] And so I want you to approach this from that perspective. So, again, your passion statement is as follows. I am passionate about Blinkx and I can help blank to blank because of blank. So write that down. I promise. Once you get the flow of it, listen to my examples again. You’ll be good. Come up with your passion statement. Now, there are still those two ingredients left that we need in order to make a profitable digital product. We did the passion. We did the expertise. Now we have problem, and solution. Now I want to help you find your ideal customer’s problem and build a solution which will be your digital product to solve their problem and to help you, I’m hosting a four day live interactive training between the dates of April 20th and 23rd, where I will show you how to put the final touches on your perfect product idea. And if you want to join us live, you can go ahead and go over to empoweredbusiness.co/dash to sign up. And if you’re listening and it’s past April 20th to 23rd, that page will be set up to redirect to our current offer.

 

Speaker1: [00:17:17] We will run this challenge live probably several times in 2021. So keep an eye on empoweredbusiness.co/dash for the next time that you can join us live. OK, now I want to kind of pivot a little bit and I want to talk about something that a lot of people overlook but ends up becoming one of the biggest roadblocks, which is mindset. A lot of people have mindset blocks about creating their own digital product and asking for money actually selling it. So you’re probably still sitting there and wondering if someone will really pay for your knowledge. And I want to confirm to you that they will. Now, this is me directly talking to my content creator friends out there. People love to pay for shortcuts. They love a clear path and they love aggregated information. Not everyone, and I’m included in this, not everyone has the time to sift through hundreds of blog posts and distractions. Just give me what I need with a bow on top and I personally will pay for that. Your digital product is meant to get someone from point A to point B and the quickest, most efficient way possible so that they can enjoy the same results and successes that you have. People love to learn from people who have been in their shoes and have real world experience with their problem. I always like to say you don’t need to be the LeBron James of your topic to make an impact.

 

Speaker1: [00:18:42] You just need to be one or two steps ahead of who you are trying to help. There is a keto blogger that I follow who has amazing recipes. My husband lost 70 pounds on keto a couple of years ago. You know, after a while, eating the same thing over and over again gets boring. So there’s a keto blogger. I actually found her through Instagram, but unfortunately, navigating her site is difficult and using her recipes on my iPad while I’m cooking is near impossible because of all the pop ups and ads on her site. Personally, I would love to buy the recipes that she already offers me for free, but I want to buy them in an aggregated bundle broken down by either meal time, like breakfast, lunch and dinner or even meal type like chicken recipes, crockpot recipes, things like that. This would make it so easy for me to load it on my iPad and find whatever I need in the moment and not have to worry about all the ads popping up and the page refreshing. Honestly, she already did the work. She’s giving it to me for free and I’m willing to pay for it because remember, people love to pay for aggregated information. A lot of my Empowered Business Lab students tell me that they face imposter syndrome when creating their first digital product.

 

Speaker1: [00:19:51] And I always like to remind them that people love to learn from someone who’s just one to two steps ahead of them. Think about this thing about learning how to play basketball from LeBron. That would be really intimidating. I mean, there’s just no way, I wouldn’t even bother. I mean, it’s embarrassing. That’s what I think. But imagine learning from the varsity basketball coach at your local high school. Would that be as intimidating? No. And they are worlds apart. LeBron, from a varsity basketball coach at a local high school have varying degrees of expertise. One is a few steps ahead of you. The other is the biggest master of his skill. Very few people are looking for elite or perfection to learn from. They aren’t actually looking for what we term as a guru. They’re looking to learn from someone that they can relate to who’s also doing what they are striving to learn more about. So people who are actually. Practicing more on their level now, probably the last big objection I hear about is oversaturation in a particular market. I hear this a lot. My students will say it’s been done before or someone else offers it for free. And I just sit there and think, yeah, probably. But that’s not an excuse. There are billions of people on the planet, plenty of people to go around. You have a unique spin and not everyone wants to buy from the same person.

 

Speaker1: [00:21:14] For example, in the personal finance space, there are people who teach how to save money and others who teach how to make more money. Frankly, I am not a favor. So popular advice to skip my latte honestly makes me cringe like it’s not going to happen. I go to Starbucks every morning, no shame in my game. But if I chose to follow and take advice from a personal finance guru who says Never buy another latte again until you don’t have a single cent on a credit card, well, I’d never be drinking a latte again, probably. So learning how to maximize my earning potential is way more appealing to me. And I’d rather learn from someone who recently went before me, not someone who is recycling bad advice from how they made more money from 20 years ago. Can you imagine taking advice from someone who made money online 20 years ago and hasn’t made a dime since? Like their advice is going to be outdated? I want to take advice from someone who recently went before me. They don’t need to be a guru or the master at all things online. I just want to know their experience. I want to learn from their experience because they’re doing it more in real time. So here’s what this boils down to. This is the best advice that I can give you. Your first digital product should focus on solving one problem by offering one solution.

 

Speaker1: [00:22:29] I always say don’t try to boil the ocean with your first product and dump a lifetime worth of learning into a thirty seven dollar product. Focus on getting your customer one specific result. OK, so right now as I’m recording this, just wrapping up the first round of my new signature program called the Empowered Business Lab. And this program is all about how to create and launch your first profitable digital product. And my students have created some amazing products during our time together. And I went and looked and came up with a few examples that I want to share with you, just so you can see such a wide variety of expertise in different types of products that people choose to create online. One of my students created an ebook about how to start a subscription box business super cool! Another student, she created a budget by day spreadsheet for busy moms. It’s a budgeting spreadsheet. Now, I mentioned my first digital product was and is because I still built a family budget spreadsheet. So think about that. One of my students created a budgeting spreadsheet. I created a budgeting spreadsheet. Both of our target audiences are busy moms, but there are millions and billions of busy moms on the planet. She shouldn’t have not created her version of it because I already did it right. So just think about that. I have students that create similar products to me as long as they’re putting their own unique spin on it.

 

Speaker1: [00:23:46] That’s all that matters from their unique experience. I have another student who created a homemaking binder and she did something cool. She uses a hashtag for the name Hashtag Homegirls. It’s really cute. Another student created a meal planning system using Airtable. Airtable is like a database that’s sort of like a spreadsheet but with colorful tabs. Actually it’s on my list to learn Airtable. But how cool. Right. Like she created a whole system to sell Airtable. Another student created an ebook about how to take care of livestock. I mean what you can create a digital product about that? Like how cool is that. Another one of my students created a guide for taking a day trip to Maryland. So she lives in Maryland. She’s partnering with local businesses to get discount codes on like different things that you can do with your kids in Maryland. It’s super cool. I mean, right now we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. But as we come out of the pandemic, she’s really setting herself up for all of the people who are itching to travel. She’s got this great resource for them. And then another one of my students created the ultimate guide for decorating and styling your living room. And what I love about that is when you think about decorating and styling, if you’re like a home decorator, how easy would it be for you to try to tackle the whole house? And she instead got super specific about the problem she wants to solve.

 

Speaker1: [00:25:04] But she’s saying, I’m not going to teach you how to do every single room in your house. Like, that’s a lot. I just bought a new house. I still don’t have, like, a single picture on the wall because we’re waiting for our you know, when you build a house, you get inspection where a year later, we’re basically they come in and make sure there’s no nail pops and drywall. You can tell that I know a lot about new construction. The point here is I’m totally overwhelmed with the house that’s like three times the size of my last house. I haven’t decorated at all. If I had to buy a guide and it was like, let’s decorate your whole home, I would be so overwhelmed by that. So she created a guide for a specific problem. Let’s do your living room. And as someone who needs to start decorating, I think what a perfect place to start, because that’s where we hang out the most as a family. So that’s a really good example of how she didn’t boil the ocean and she was very specific on the problem that she wanted to solve. I mean, there are so many cool products that I’ve seen made over the last three months inside of that program, the Empowered Business Lab.

 

Speaker1: [00:26:00] Truly, any skill or talent can be turned into a digital product and sold over and over again. Think about the unlimited profit potential that there is to create a product once and reach millions of people online. Now, if you’re interested in learning more about how to create the perfect digital product, I’d really love for you to join me in that four day live training I was telling you about. It’s called Digital Product Dash, and it takes place between April 20th and 23rd. So real quick, I just want to run through it. I’m going to teach you during that four day live training so that you can decide if it’s worth signing up on day one. We’ll elaborate on what we talked about today when we learn more about how to uncover your genius. Once you’ve decided what knowledge you want to share with the world, it’s going to be time to validate your idea on day two. No one wants to waste time creating something that won’t sell. Right. So I’ll show you a super unique process called reverse engineering, using only free tools. It will have you on your way to creating your first digital product in no time. Now, on day three, it’s time to choose the perfect digital product to create and you will define your value statement for your first product. I’ll also walk you through the four most popular types of digital products so you can choose the best one for you and your future customers.

 

Speaker1: [00:27:14] And on day four, we’ll have a super awesome panel of students. My students will come on and talk about the process they went through to create their very first digital product themselves. So I’d love you to join us. Digital product Dash. You can sign up right now at empoweredbusiness.co/dash Again, It’s happening April 20th to the 23rd. Now it’s your turn. I want to hear your passion and I would love it if you do me on Instagram at redefining mom and tell me what it is that you are about to create that’s going to change the world. What are you passionate about? What’s your expertise? And what are you going to create that’s going to change someone’s world? OK, I can’t wait to hear from you until next week. Bye. 

 

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of the Empowered Business podcast. If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, check out the Empowered Business Box, a flexible monthly membership with resources to enhance your digital products and sales funnels from top to bottom. Head to Empowered Business Dacko Gogglebox to sign up. As always, you can find all the links and information mentioned in this episode at Monica Froese, Dotcom forward slash podcast. Thanks for tuning in.

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