Digital products are great: they’re quick to produce and cost almost zero to deliver.

You need to have an idea that you want to turn into a digital product and some way of creating it.

Apart from that, if you’re making an audio or video product you may need to get used to talking to yourself again but that’s not difficult and you’re not showing the first signs of going mad if you go down that route.

Indeed, it’s how I create most of my digital products. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

Get an idea

Once you start creating digital products, ideas will probably spring into your mind. Usually at the least appropriate time but so long as you’ve got some way of recording those ideas (pen and paper, a note on your phone, whatever) that’s OK.

An idea can be broad (internet marketing for instance) or it can be narrow (coming up with an idea for your own digital product could be a complete product in itself) or anywhere inbetween.

I’d strongly suggest that you don’t go too broad. People can go to sites like Wikipedia if they want that – which also brings the perceived value of the information as somewhere close to zero.

Drill down – use the suggestions that come up as you type or browse a few “look inside” books on Amazon.

Make an outline

Sketch out an outline for your new digital product.

This will show you at a glance what you are going to be covering.

If your outline gets unwieldy that’s a good sign that you’ve gone too broad for your product idea.

That’s OK – it happens – and it’s much easier to deal with it at the outline stage than it is to deal with it part way through actually the main project.

Decide on a medium

That means the way your digital product is going to be presented to your customer.

It might in the form of a file that gets downloaded or it could be delivered in a web browser.

There’s no single “best way” to do it but the most common formats are:

• Electronic books (Kindle for instance) and PDFs
• Audio files – MP3s and streaming audio broadcasts
• Video files – usually MP4s or streaming video broadcasts
• Software – especially useful if you’re trying to automate a process or need to include some kind of specialist software to sit alongside your main product
• Support files – images, mind maps, resource links, bonus videos, etc

Start creating!

Yes, you need to start.

The days of procrastination central are over.

Set aside some time on a regular basis – daily is fantastic, weekly is OK, much less frequently should get you asking yourself if you’re serious about this project.

Then start!

Save frequently because computers have a habit of doing the “wrong” thing just when they’ve built up your trust.

That includes saving a copy of your work somewhere away from your current machine and location – Dropbox works fine for that.

If it’s a book of any sort, type away.

If it’s an audio or video, decide on the approximate time length of each section and flesh out your outline if necessary.

If you’re going down the audio or video route for your product creation, I’d suggest starting with chunks of between 5 and 10 minutes. They’re not too daunting for you or the end user and can usually be done in one “take”.

Upload to your site

You’ll amost certainly need to upload the finished product to your own website.

Make sure the download page is reasonably protected – I do mine in WordPress and use Exclude Pages from Navigation to stop them being shown in the menus, Search Exclude to stop them being shown in the site search, the Yoast SEO plugin to make the pages NoIndex & excluded from the site map. I also uncheck the AddToAny sharing buttons.

Foolproof? No.

Adequate? Yes.

Or you can get paranoid and build the virtual equivalent of Fort Knox around your download page but remember that if you go too crazy you’ll bug your paying customers.

Create a Sales Page

The headline is the most important part of this.

If that doesn’t attract people, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the page is, they won’t have reached that far into the sales process.

After that, your sales letter needs to be adequate. You can always tweak it later but if you haven’t written it in the first place that can’t happen.

If you’ve never written a sales letter before, get hold of Dan Kennedy’s book, Ultimate Sales Letter. Use it (even if you don’t use it brilliantly) and you’ll be ahead of most of your competition.

Add your payment link

Paypal, Clickbank, etc.

Otherwise you’re working for nothing.

Promote it

Of course, creating your new digital product is only part of the process.

You need to sell real copies to real people.

Amazon’s Kindle and CreateSpace platforms are good places to start if you’ve created your product in book format.

Forums, blog posts on your own site, Tweets, Pinterest pins, Facebook & LinkedIn posts, articles, document sharing, etc will all help drum up traffic and sales.

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