Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Arlene find a good digital product to create for her online business.
Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you!
Click here to ask your question!
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: It says, “Hello, I’m from Cincinnati.” We are very close to you Arlene. It says, “What steps can I take to find a good digital product to create?” This is a really good question. It’s actually one that we get a lot. People always email us and they want to know, ‘What should I make?’
SHANE: “What do you think I could sell to make money online?” That’s a huge thing we get in person a lot too.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and that’s really a great place to start of course, because you have to know what you are doing before you can figure out how to get there. So, what we did when we were starting our online businesses is, we decided to make something that would help us in our regular jobs. We were still working regular jobs at the time and we didn’t want to spend a lot of time making products that may or may not sell. So my theory was, if I made something that would help me in my day job, at least I would be able to use it if it completely failed. So, that is how I got started making lesson plans and I did all of this in my free time of course and that is what I did. I didn’t have to be the most state-of-the-art librarian. In fact, I had only worked as a librarian for like three years. So, I didn’t know everything there was to know about making lesson plans or about being a great librarian. I just knew that I had a problem that I needed good quality lesson plans and I couldn’t find them online. So I figured that if I had that problem, then someone else probably had that problem too and that is how we got started doing what we were doing. If you have a job where, maybe you can’t really make a product that would help you, say if you are a – what would be a good example? If you are, say a cashier maybe and there is nothing that you can really do to improve on that job process, maybe you could do something on a subject that you really love. A great way to know what you should be doing a product on is to ask friends or family members: what am I really good at? What would you say that I could teach someone else to do? Even if you don’t have an idea yourself, you might be able to have someone else come up with a good idea for you.
SHANE: And the key thing to remember on what Jocelyn is talking about there is, you don’t have to be you know, a PhD Nobel prizewinner to create a digital project. You just have to be expert enough. Jocelyn had been a librarian for three years but there are thousands of librarians every year that had less experience than her and she is the one who created the product. There might be people more qualified to create lesson plans for a library but they are not doing it. It’s the same thing in your field. If you are expert enough in something, you should go out and do it and about the things that you love, whatever hobbies you have, you can create a digital product. Even just to learn the process and to start it online, don’t think your first idea is going to make you millions of dollars. It’s not going to but you need something to get started. So if you aren’t really excited about maybe creating something for work, then pick the thing you love to do the most, your greatest hobby and create a digital product for that. I’ve got a buddy of mine who loves wrestling and he is dying to start a pro-wrestling podcast and he wants to write like a history book about pro-wrestling. [Laughs] So that’s probably not a million-dollar idea but it would be an amazing thing to do just to get started, just to learn the process, how do I deliver this, how do I take payments, how do I do all these things. So those are the first two places that you really need to look at; it’s just what do you really know how to do and what do you really love to do. Now, once you have kinda looked at those things, you got to research if there’s a market available. Is there anyone available to buy your product? You don’t need many people. We always go back to our root question whenever we are thinking of new digital products. We say to ourselves, “Can we get a hundred people to give us a hundred dollars?” And that would be $10,000. Can we create this product and find those people? Well, there’s billions of people on the earth, so surely you can find a hundred people to give you a hundred dollars and make that 10,000 extra dollars. So what you do to find that is, the first thing you go is to Amazon. Go to Amazon.com and type in your subject. If your subject is, you know, ‘the history of pro-wrestling’ or, I don’t know, what’s another – ‘Being a great cashier’, like Jocelyn said, which you probably not going to find a lot of books on that but if you go to Amazon and search for your subject, if they are already books about that subject, then there is a good chance there is a market there because somebody else has created a product for a reason. A company gave that person a book deal for a reason because they believe there were people that would buy that product. So just that, the most simple, basic form of market research; if competition exists, that’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it proves that there is a market. You can also go to the Google AdWords keyword tool which is a way that you can look up in Google what people actually have searched for and you can use that tool to see if people are looking for your product. If you have something on bee-keeping or painted gourds, I always tell people the story; a friend of mine painted beautiful artwork on dried gourds that he cured for like two years and made them dry and were used like art in people’s houses. And I was like, man, you could probably do that online. I looked it up and like thousands of people were searching to buy painted gourds like every month. So, go to Google and use the keywords tool and we will put a link to that in the show notes and you can also find a how-to tutorial to use that for free over at Flippedlifestyle.com/Keywords but use that keywords tool. If people are searching for it, then there is a market for it. So those are the easy ways that you can figure out what digital product you can create and also, if there is actually a market out there to sell that to.
JOCELYN: Hope that helps with your question Arlene, we appreciate it so much. If you would like to ask us a question, head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/QASJ and we will see about answering that for you.
SHANE: And another – one last thing on this subject, it doesn’t really matter if your idea is perfect or the winning idea or the best one ever, the most important thing is to learn the process, get it done and then you can act on every idea you have in the future faster. So eventually, you will find the one that hits. Until next time, we will catch ya’ll on the flip side. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: Bye.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Dave Starr says
An associate of mine I have known for years has been making money for years self-publishing in a different mode … he publishes only in paper format, but he does very effectively use the Internet for his sales and business operations.
The interesting part regarding subject selection is he has no real professional experience in football coaching at all, but he has coached for years in schools and amateur leagues.
4 of his best sellers are football coaching books … even subjects as arcane as “Clock Management”. You can see what he does at http://www.johntreed.com/coaching.html. Bottom line? People want to know!.
@RheumRN says
Thanks for the post. I am a Registered Nurse who works with kids…I THINK I have found a need that most people have… your suggestions will allow me to test that idea out, thanks in advance!