004: Building Your Digital Products

Join Sarah Beth this week on Money Maker Monday as we begin creating your own digital product suite in Week 3 of Blueprint to Breakthrough®. Learn why digital products are booming and how they can become a significant income stream for your business with high-profit margins. Sarah Beth shares a step-by-step guide for building a scalable digital product, including identifying your audience, planning, designing, pricing, and marketing your product. Don't miss the actionable steps and expert tips designed to help you monetize your expertise and achieve financial freedom.

00:00 Introduction to Week Three

01:46 The Power of Digital Products

03:03 Overcoming Common Obstacles

05:28 Creating Your Digital Product SOP

06:52 Design and Supporting Materials

08:21 Pricing and Sales Platforms

09:58 Launching and Promoting Your Product

14:02 Action Plan for the Week

15:33 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Download Your Workbook Here: Code Blueprint

This podcast episode is exclusively for members and accountability partners of Blueprint to Breakthrough®. All content provided is for educational and motivational purposes only. Results may vary based on individual effort and application.

For more information and resources, visit www.sarahbethherman.com.

If you have any questions or need support, reach out through the cohort connection channel in Microsoft Teams. Let’s keep growing together!

Transcript

  📍   Hey guys, it's Sarah Beth, and today we are officially in week three Of blueprint to breakthrough.

This is your next moneymaker Monday call, and we are going to be doing something super incredible this week, creating your very own digital product suite. That's right. This week is all about building your very first scalable digital product.  Over the last couple of weeks, we've been focusing on craving results.

Getting our head right, reading books that are teaching us to be relentless in the pursuit of excellence when it comes to our businesses. Stopping at nothing, keeping our blinders on, and staying the course. We've been building our SOPs and really laying that foundation for our businesses and our brands.

And now we are ready to step forward into the world of true moneymakers. The kind of income that keeps working for you long after you have created it.  Let's talk about why digital products are such a big deal right now.  In the last six months alone, the digital product industry has seen incredible growth.

According to the latest data, the global e learning and digital product market is projected to hit 325 billion by the end of 2025. People are hungry for immediate solutions, whether it's through guides, checklists, templates, or even courses. And the kicker for all of this is that digital products typically yield a profit margin of 70 percent or higher.

Compare that to physical products, those tangible things you hold onto, that usually lands around 30 to 40%.  The predictions for the future? Even bigger. As businesses and consumers continue shifting everything online, digital products will only become more in demand. This is your chance to take a slice of that pie early on.

Whether it's A guide for a niche topic, a workbook, a set of templates. There is room for you to create something impactful that aligns with your brand, your vision, all the things for your business.

Now here's where a lot of people get stuck. They are worried about what others will think of their product or if their product will compare to someone else's. Let me tell you, that doesn't matter. What matters is that your product is useful. It doesn't need to be perfect, and you don't need to spend six hours creating it.

I want you to use tools like Canva, where you can start with templates, change the colors and the fonts to fit your brand. Make it yours. Don't overthink it. You can even use tools like ChatGPT to help you outline and simplify your content. The key is to focus on solving a problem, And providing value.

That's it. It doesn't have to be complicated. And I'm going to show you exactly how to make this work for your business. In the show notes today, I'm going to link my digital product store. So you can see an example of what it looks like in action.  You'll see various things that are geared just towards business professionals.

You can take a look at all of them and get ideas for what you might want for your brand. Being part of Blueprint2Breakthrough, you get access to all of my digital products at no charge.

 If you are someone who is asking, is this worth my time? The answer is a resounding yes. Creating digital products is one of the most effective ways to monetize your expertise while scaling your business. You're not limited to a nine to five grind or tied to a physical product that has inventory you have to carry. 

Digital products are huge. You could offer a product for free to someone by giving you their email address  and then they get a special code to download your product at no cost.

That same digital product can be priced at 20, 30, 50, 100 and anyone else that might come across your digital product store will only see there's a price attached. They will come and pay for that product, even though you offer it for free other places, just because they didn't do the research. They didn't find it through a modality that you offered it for free.

This happens to me every single day. I have all of my products for sale. People happen to find me through Google or another search engine or just through my website, and they end up downloading my digital products and actually paying for them.

 Now that we've talked about why digital products are such a great opportunity, and what this spread really looks like, I want to talk about how to build one.

So we're going to create an actual SOP, your standard operating procedure, for this process.  Why, you might be asking? Well, because having a step by step guide not only helps you stay focused, but it also helps make sure that your process is repeatable and scalable. So these are going to be the components of your digital product SOP.

I want you to grab a pen and paper, or pause this episode and wait till you get wherever you're driving to, and let's write it all down. You can even use the Notion app, a Google Drive document, or a simple Word document to write this all out.   This SOP will have nine sections to it. The first, I want you to identify your audience and problem. You're going to define who your product is for and what the problem is that it solves. This step sets the foundation for everything else. So always start here. Number two, plan the product. Decide on the format of your product.

Is it going to be a guide, a workbook, a checklist, templates? Map out the content and break it into manageable sections. This is a great time to introduce the use of ChatGPT. Number three, design your product. So you're going to use tools like Canva to create a visually appealing design.  Customize templates to align with your brand.  Think about your colors, your fonts, your logos. You can also search templates inside of Canva 

When you use ChatGPT in conjunction with editing an existing template, you can literally tell ChatGPT, my checklist has seven line items, a title section and a footer. How should I design this checklist for this business and it will literally guide you through all of it We want you working smarter not harder again.

This is not a six hour project for design This is a 15 to 45 minute activity In fact, I want you to set a timer for 45 minutes before you start doing it Press start on the timer and time yourself Get the project done before that 45 minutes is up. Or if you only have 20 minutes, set it for 20 minutes.

Get as much done as you can in 20 minutes. Just that dedication alone  will pay off time and time again   number four, I want you to create supporting materials. This should include a brief introduction and instructions on how to use the product or even a bonus resource.

So when you're asking ChatGPT to help you create this, think about the instruction that someone would need in order to use it. Think about having an intro letter,  a welcome page, whatever that needs to look like for you and this product. Number five, price your product. Determine a price point that reflects the value you are offering.

Start simple and adjust as you gather feedback To start off with you could make this a twenty dollar product offer it for free  if someone gives you their email address You have a lot of different options here on how you can price something Think about what it is and how someone might use it and also the industry that you're serving There are some industries with a lower price point and some industries with a higher price point.

What does it look like for you and your brands and the consumer that is spending money with you?  Number six, set up your sales platform. Decide where your product will live. Examples include Gumroad, Shopify, Standstore, even your own website. Make sure your sales page is clear and customer friendly. For me, I use the Stan store.

I also use my own website. I use my podcast. I use my social media accounts. There's a lot of places you can actually get my digital product form. Now when it comes to me using an actual store that has my digital products, I loved the way the Stan store is laid out and all the analytics in there.

You can ask people questions on how they heard about you. You can create discount codes, you can see where someone found you from, it is fabulous. For me, the bulk of the people that are downloading my product are coming from LinkedIn. So, that is a place that I heavily continue to market.  Number seven, launch and promote.

 That brings us right to my point. Share your product with your audience through social media, email marketing, and even collaborations. I want you highlighting the benefits and how it solves their pain points. Offer it for free right now just to get you some downloads going. Get your store out there. Get people reading the content you are putting out.

After you launch your product, get some reviews from people and testimonials to improve and refine your product. You might get someone that says this is perfect. It's everything I needed Then you might get someone else that says actually I really need a checklist on this. Do you have anything like this?

You can literally use that feedback to create more products or make something better that you already have existing   And number nine is iterate and expand use the feedback to enhance your product or create additional complementary offers the goal here is to keep the process simple and actionable. You don't need to spend weeks designing a product. Remember, progress over perfection. You taking 20 minutes, 45 minutes this week today to start working on this will mean that you can generate revenue  immediately. That's what we want, immediate results.

If you skipped over creating SOPs and you skipped over reading the book and you're skipping over mindset, let this be your sign not to skip over this. Last week I sold almost 200 items from my digital download store. 200 items. One of my products is priced at 29.

99. All of the other ones are at 19. 99. You could quickly do the math to see what I made.  I haven't done anything with these products other than the initial creation of them. 

A lot of people feel uncomfortable when it comes to sales, but I need you to understand something. You are not selling in the traditional sense. You are offering a solution to a problem. If your product genuinely helps someone, you are providing value.  Start with a price that reflects the value of the transformation you're providing.

A good starting range for a beginner product, in my opinion, is anywhere from 17 to 97. Keeping it underneath the threshold of the next flat dollar amount. So 17 is just under 20. 97 is just under 100. As your audience grows, you can expand to higher priced offers.  People buy when they feel a sense of urgency.

Consider adding some sort of limited time bonus or special launch price to encourage people to buy. You could even start off by saying, Hey, I have a digital product I'm creating. I would love to make it just a dollar for the first 20 people who download it. If you want to download my digital product and you can help support me 

by giving me some sort of a review or feedback that I could post publicly, I will give you this product for one dollar. 

Consider this your beta testing time period and you're doing this in exchange for honest feedback. Use their success story or use their experience with you to build your credibility.  I want you to make sure that you are keeping things simple. Specifically,

I want the common theme of everything that you're working on. The anthem of your goal. The path you are on. To be reminded  to simply be keeping it simple. There is nothing more important than you understanding this. And specifically your sales pages.

So if you do click the show notes and take a look at what my digital product store looks like on my website or how I advertise it. You'll notice that it keeps it simple. I'm not giving you a ton of information. You can click it, you can download it, you can have it immediately. It's a very easy and simple platform. 

This week's action plan.  I have four things I want you working on this week. Four simple steps.  Write them down and get ready to take action. One, I want you to define the problem your product is solving. Two, create the first version of your product.

Three, build a simple sales page to showcase it. And four, draft your own digital product SOP using all the components I just outlined.  I am estimating that this will take you a solid 90 minutes to do all four of these items.  First of all, if you were to use the same platform I have, which is Stan, you don't have to really set anything up.

It is all set it and forget it as soon as you enroll. If you already have a product, I want you focusing on enhancing it or expanding your product suite. I've included a workbook in the show notes to guide you through all of these steps. And remember, share your drafts and your sales pages with your accountability partner for feedback.

Your win for the week is to have your first product developed and ready for sale. That's your win. And I'm forecasting your win. I'm not saying that this is a win from last week. I'm saying that's going to be your win this week. Because we're living in anticipation of the goodness that's already meant for you. 

By next Monday, I want you to come back with something tangible. Something you've created that reflects your expertise and solves problems for your ideal client.  And before we wrap up, I want to leave you with this, who you are, your experience, your brain is monetizable.  It is a revenue generating asset of yours.

Do not underestimate the value of what you know and the impact it can have on someone else.  Building digital products isn't just about making money. It's about creating something that helps people. solves problems and establishes your authority in your field. And it is a pathway to financial freedom that allows you to scale your income while creating more time for what matters most.

Be sure to check the show notes for the links to my digital product store. So you can see how I've done it. You're going to create something just like this, and I can't wait to see what you come up with. As always, thank you for tuning in to Money Maker Monday. Keep pushing forward, keep building, and remember, you are perfectly designed for the success that you are stepping into.

That's all for today. I'll see you guys next week. And don't forget,  📍 the world needs more of what you're creating.