Digital product creation can be easy if you know what you’re doing.

And, of course, that’s the biggest issue most people face: they know bits of what they should be doing but they skip essential parts because they seem too small to be relevant or they miss parts because they don’t know they should do them in the first place.

I can’t cover everything in this short post but these tips should certainly help.

Be clear about what you’re offering

This short sentence covers a lot of things!

You need to do some research before even starting to create your new digital product. Personally, I tend not to do hours of research otherwise I don’t get out of the analysis stage.

At its simplest, research is checking whether there’s a big enough market – a very quick browse on Amazon and Google will tell you that. If there are few Amazon products and few adverts, that’s a warning sign. Unless you’ve really invented the best thing since sliced bread it’s highly unlikely there will be no competition.

Then check whether people are advertising on Google. Again, just few adverts means that most people are avoiding this area – recipe books a good example of this. The best sellers tend to be either the latest books by celebrity chefs or the latest “diet of the week”.

Make an outline

This is the next stage once you’ve got clear about what you’re creating your product about.

An outline is a quick way to work out what to include in your new product and will highlight everything you need to include, so it doubles up as a checklist for when you start making the product.

Again, don’t spend forever on this stage.

It’s an outline!

I tend to work with bullet points but you could equally use a mind map if you’re up to speed working with those – they’re really just a fancy diagram of bullet points anyway.

Decide on your format

The usual suspects are PDFs, audios, videos and maybe things like a bonus webinar or some software.

Often the ideal format will spring out at you once you’ve done the outline for the product. If it’s mainly visual, video is likely the format of choice. If it’s technical (SEO springs to mind) then a written format, maybe with some screen shots, would probably work better.

If you’re undecided or there’s the option of creating either PDF or video, go with the higher value format (video) and maybe include a transcript. You can get transcription done at places like Fiverr or if you prefer a more organised service then check out Get Articles Done which isn’t much more expensive and has more backup than a single provider.

I hit that problem on a freelance site recently where the transcriber listened to the audio, said “yes” and then 2 days later said “no” and refunded my money. Fine in terms of a refund, a lot less good for a time sensitive transcription which took another transcriber another 2 days to do a job they’d promised in 24 hours. It would have paid me to use the 3 – 7 day service instead (and the wide time range is probably to allow for just those issues!)

Start creating your product

PDFs can be picked up and written in small chunks – even a hundred words at a time if you need to.

Audios and videos can be done that way but I find that I lose my place and have to start over if I pause them for more than a handful of seconds. So they tend to need continuous time spent on each part of the recording.

If your time to create your product comes in fits and starts and you’ve decided on audio or video, aim for short “takes”. Between 2 and 10 minutes is a good target for this. Then tick each one off on your outline so that you don’t end up duplicating your efforts.

And keep your outline close by – I often add any URLs I’ve mentioned to the outline so that I remember to include a link on the final download page. It’s also useful for adding those light bulb moments where you remember something you need to include that wasn’t in the original outline.

Put it all together on a download page

I use WordPress for most of my sites which means that my download pages tend to be WordPress pages (I have done HTML in the past but it’s just easier to do everything in one place).

By default, WordPress will include the page in the navigation links and the internal search function – not something you want to do for a paid product!

I use 3 plugins to protect the pages: Exclude Pages From Navigation (which stops it appearing in the menus), Search Exlude (which stops it from appearing in searches within WordPress) and Yoast’s WordPress SEO (which allows me to set the page as no index and lets me exclude it from the site map),

Then it’s a simple matter of editing the page name so it’s not immediately guessable.

Apart from that, I don’t do much to prevent theft. It will happen and life’s too short to worry about digital shoplifters who were likely never going to pay even $1 for the product.

Then it’s just upload the various files and set the links to them to open in a new window.

Create a sales page

Sales letters can be complicated to write and I can do that kind of letter if I really have to. But a “proper” sales letter takes me between 10 and 30 hours to create and revise so it’s something I reserve for really expensive things.

A basic sales letter takes me about an hour to create. It’s not as powerful but it still works.

Dan Kennedy does an excellent job of explaining the process in his book Ultimate Sales Letter. If you need tuition from a world expert, that’s a good read.

If you know the basics, you can do a passable job that will work OK:

• Headline – make it catchy and powerful. Check examples on the web for inspiration.
• Sub headline – not always used but can add impact
• Bullet points – a good way to start the rest of the sales letter, then just expand on each one. If you’ve done a batch of videos or audios, this can almost be the whole sales letter!
• Other headlines – these provide a path through the sales letter for those who can’t be bothered to read the whole thing. Not something I do as much as I should on web pages – personally I don’t think people skim web pages the same way as they skim print, but I could be wrong
• Guarantee – strong, bold guarantees work best. If you get nervous about the strength of your guarantee, that’s a good thing. So double your money back, 1 year (or longer), money back plus $100, etc are all superb. But even just a no quibble money back guarantee will help.
• Buy now button and call to action – you need a buy button and you need to tell people to click it!
• Make it a story if possible
• Use NLP style embedded commands – you’ll like those and they’ll help sales (and the phrase “like those” is an embedded command)

Write it first, edit it later, ideally after a cooling off period of a few hours or overnight. The closer your sales letter writing is to a brain dump the better it will be.

Start getting traffic

Probably the hardest part of digital product creation unless you’ve got a responsive list of buyers or a list of eager affiliates.

If you haven’t got either of those then start creating pre-sell content around your product – pages on your site(s), articles on EzineArticles, videos on YouTube, posts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, maybe a few Facebook ads (remember to ensure that they’re pay per click, not pay per view).

Build your list up as well. Which could mean that your pre-sell pages concentrate more on that than on the initial product sale. Slightly more expensive short term but it can be nicely profitable longer term.

And, although it’s not my area of expertise, things like solo ads can be a good place to build your list and test your conversions.

I’ve written more about product creation here. (And I’m practicing what I preach on that page as it leads onto a list signup!)