Digital products are everywhere. Whether it’s the miniscule dips that get read by lasers when you play a CD or DVD, an on demand video, a Kindle book or anything else.

We’re becoming accustomed to digital products being everywhere.

And if you produce anything for your customers on the internet, digital products are definitely well received and are easy to produce once you get yourself into the swing of things. Which is where a digital product creation system comes into its own:

Start with a blank “something”. That could be a piece of paper, Word document, a spreadsheet or a mind map. Anywhere that you feel comfortable putting down your thoughts. The only place that’s not OK is your mind because we all have a tendency to forget things!

Then start with the end in mind.

That means deciding exactly what your new digital product will deliver.

Excellent digital products tend to concentrate on one thing and do it well, rather than being a jack of all trades and not succeeding. That said, if the aim of the product is to give a high level overview of a process so that people can decide where they want to drill down further, that’s OK as well.

The important thing is to know where you’re going to end up. That way you’ll have focus during the project and will know when you’ve actually completed it.

Next, split your project into sections.

Digital products seem to work best when they are split into bite-sized chunks. We don’t tend to “consume” an informational digital product in one sitting the same way we view a movie. Partly because there are often steps that we need to do on the way to reinforce what we’re learning.

Sketch out each of these sections – a meaningful word or two works well, as does a short sentence.

Aim for around 6 to 12 of these sections to make up your new digital product.

Next, split each of these sections into a series of subsections.

Your aim here is to come up with (again) between 6 and 12 sub sections.

Now step back and congratulate yourself – the hard work is done! You’ve got the content you’ll be covering and you’ll either know enough about each subsection to be able to cover it with ease or you can research the things you don’t know enough about yet.

Either way, this drill down approach works well. It’s akin to a one-person brainstorm.

Ideally, leave the project overnight and come back to it fresh the next day. That gives your brain a chance to spot any glaring omissions.

It should also be apparent by now how best to deliver the information. Whether it’s written (PDF) format, audio or video.

Do your best to be consistent with this – hopping from pillar to post in format is confusing for your customers. You can always offer a transcript of an audio or a video if you want to.

Then start creating your new brainchild.

Type or speak or screencast or whatever else fits your chosen topic and delivery method.

Save your work regularly.

Whilst computers are more reliable now than ever before, they still go wrong. Usually at the worst possible time.

If it’s important enough, backup your work. Offsite backup is best for this (personally, I set Carbonite to run unobtrusively in the background).

Once you’ve got a system in place, it’s easy to keep track of where you’ve got to and what still needs to be completed.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you need to keep the perfectionist side of you at bay.

It’s very easy to spend way too long with the final tweaks that you’ll notice but no-one else in the world will.

It’s far better to get your digital product launched.

You can always improve (it works for Microsoft amongst others) but the improvements are almost always best done as a result of feedback from actual customers.

If you’d like to know more about digital product creation, check out this complete course that I’ve created.