Last year I made a little over fifteen thousand dollars from selling digital products and I'm on track to do that again this year digital products can be really life-changing they can be super valuable for you and your customers and so today I want to talk a little bitAbout how you can get started and a big thank you to dot store domains for sponsoring this video First things first we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room marketing you can design the best product in the world but no one's going to know about it and no one's going to care if they don't know that it exists but I'm gonna be honest here you don'tNeed to have hundreds of thousands of followers on social media to have some level of success selling digital products I personally got started when I had under 10k here on YouTube and I'm really glad that I had that just development early on I'm glad that I made those products early because asI've grown as I've succeeded as my audience is kind of trickled in I'm still able to sell those products they're still Evergreen they're still valuable I've updated them a little bit over time but they've grown along with my business and that's I think the really nice thing about digital productsThat once you put in that initial effort they can just kind of take off whenever but speaking of products let's talk about how to design something people will actually want to buy I'm gonna level with you here the key thing to understand when you're designing a product you're making a video orMarketing or whatever is to understand value your product it has to have value for someone it has to solve a problem it has to do something the way that you provide value can vary right it doesn't have to be strictly educational you can provide value with entertainment with customization with helping peopleActualize their preferences but education is I think maybe the most intuitive thing to think about when we're thinking about value so I'm going to stick with that for a minute some product ideas of things that actually provide value are things like tutorials guides instructional things like ebooks maybe like video tutorials onlineCourses Etc something that will actually teach someone something this can be as simple as like an ebook for how to get started with watercolor as a beginner or it can cover a very specific technique that you do in your own art that's unique to you that only you have theInformation the access to because you've made it yours you know what I mean it doesn't have to be like super life-changing but it has to have some kind of value proposition it has to have a problem that it is solving for someone so when you're designing your product IWant you to think about the following questions number one who is this product for what audience are you actually trying to meet here this might be kind of a confusing question to answer at least at first but I think it's really crucial to know who you're making thisProduct for how you Market that product will vary significantly depending on whether you were trying to build this product for seniors people who are a little bit older or younger people the language that you use the fonts that you use like just the way that you designThe entire look and feel of that product will vary a lot depending on the market that you're trying to appeal to here the second thing to think about is what problem does this product actually solve so this really ties back into the value proposition that I want you to figureOut earlier you need to figure out what problems you're trying to solve here and notice that I said problems there right it doesn't have to be just one problem that you're trying to solve it can be multiple but you should have a clear idea of the knowledge the point the purpose the takeawayThat you want someone to get out of using your product and the third question what will set your product apart from everyone else selling the same kind of thing if you don't know the answer to number three that's fine don't freak out don't like quit and like clickOff this video and abandon everything right now okay just take some time take some time investigate the market figure out who else is making the stuff that you want to make what features does it have who are they trying to Market to what is the vibe what's the aesthetic ofThe thing that they have made and how does that differ from your concept or how can you refine or change your concept to cater to a different market so let me tell you a story about my own experience developing digital products so when I was developing my art YouTuberWorkbook I was thinking really hard about what the market overall looked like for like YouTuber resources and when I was checking out this Market when I was trying to figure out who else had made stuff and what that stuff looked like and who it was for ETC just tryingTo answer question number three I was kind of learning that basically no one had made a really high quality resource for artists looking to grow on YouTube like specifically artists and I think that we Face some kind of unique problems on social media because like there's the art and there's the contentAnd there's the content about the art and sometimes you get into lots of traps there that are really hard to get out of that I've gotten myself into multiple times and when I was looking at the kind of broader Market here for YouTube workbooks and informational guides in general I wasn't likeSuper impressed with the stuff out there I was pretty disappointed actually in the quality and so I decided to make the most comprehensive thing that I possibly could at the time and I've updated that twice now with more information and I think that that market research reallyHelped me create the best product that I possibly could but before we get into actually creating your product you're gonna need to figure out where you want to sell it whether you choose to design your online shop on a place like WordPress Squarespace or Wix you'reGoing to need a domain name and that's where the sponsor of this week's video comes in store domains having your online store and in dot store instead of.com instantly sets you apart and instantly makes your audience associate your site with selling online dot store domains were proven to perform significantly better than.com domainsI'm getting you twice as many Impressions and 1.7 times as many clicks ultimately resulting in more sales creators like Rihanna and Mr Beast as well those Brands like Discord have all switched to dot store domains because they just do better I'm in the process of switching mine over right now usingDot store domains also helps you save more as an entrepreneur give you twenty five hundred dollars worth of discounts at places like MailChimp Wix and shipstation and if you use my code kelseystore at get dot store you can get your domain name for only 99 Cents domain names can cost tens to hundredsOf dollars every year so this level of savings is really nothing to scoff at like I get on this what are you waiting for let's talk about actually creating your product I think that you should aim to create the best product that you possibly can or evenThe best product in the category of thing that you're making I think you should be aiming for the moon here I think that you should hold yourself to a relatively high standard but big but massive disclaimer I think that you can't go into the creation process withThat in mind you can't aim to make the best possible product at first or else you'll never get started you'll be crippled with that just like imposter syndrome and that need to make everything perfect that you will never make a decision you will never get started soI think that you should aim to create a minimum viable product at first aim to create just the absolute Bare Bones of the thing that you're trying to make when I was designing my art YouTuber workbook I was designing it for whatever reason in Adobe XD I don't know why IDid this I shouldn't have but anyway I did and when I was outlining this workbook I basically made my pages in Adobe XD and I created this very visual outline for myself I figured out exactly what I wanted to talk about and I kind of put all of the pages like roughly inTheir place I didn't focus on design I just like wrote some stuff down and I kind of played around with it for a little bit but I created just the absolute skeleton of this product like really The Bare Bones I'm not kidding this was not like a highEffort format here I was vomiting on the page basically but once I created that minimum viable product I could then gradually add in layers of complexity I could refine that first draft and once I had a first draft that I was at least somewhat okay with like I thought that it was fine-ishI got some feedback and I think feedback is incredibly important sometimes in the case of instructional or educational content like ebooks workbooks courses whatever you're gonna need to make large structural changes to your content in order to make it as effective as possible for your students and yourCustomers when I was designing my workbook I had just like a ton of sections that kind of all overlapped with each other or like didn't have like a a clear sequential format and getting that feedback early on in the design process helped me outline things and present them so much more effectively IThink it made everything a lot clearer and the way that I got this feedback was really straightforward I went on my Discord server and I was like hey I'm designing this thing does anyone want it for free in exchange for some feedback and you'll help me design this thing andIn return you can have the thing when I'm done like I will give you the full finished version along with like the drafts that you'll receive in the interim and you'll just give me some thoughts and people were really really happy to do this and I'm so glad thatThey were because getting that feedback it made a huge difference in the overall end result the finished product of the thing all right now that you have some feedback it's time to build out the final version and we're not just talking about your product here at this pointThere are three things that you have to think about number one is your product photos while it can be really tempting to just like put up screenshots of whatever you've built and be like yeah that works please reconsider okay please make really good product photos your product photo is the packaging for yourProduct okay like a YouTube video thumbnail no one will ever click on the thing and realize how good your thing is if they don't have a good package okay if the thumbnail isn't like high quality enough you need to make your product photos as compelling and clear asPossible for things like my workbook and and my notion templates I use like this very simple iPad mock-up that emphasizes how digital it is it is a digital product but also it shows it in action right it shows my template or my workbook actually being used in theGenuine like real format that they will be used in and it's a much more compelling product photo than just a simple basic screenshot in my opinion and there are tons of mock-ups out there for a whole host of things websites like creative Market are usually my go-to toFind high quality mock-ups for just about anything I can think about and I highly recommend that you spend some time brainstorming some really cute product photo ideas for your digital products because you spent so much time creating it at this point that it's worth it to give it the attention itDeserves so your customers will actually follow through on purchasing it the next thing that you want to think about is your product description make sure your prospective customers know who your product is for or but probably middle solve okay and why it's different those questions that I asked you earlier allOf those answers should be in this product description okay it's really important that you include all of those things and there it will make a difference I pinky promise I'll include some examples from my online store on the screen right now but I overall think that it's a really good practice to haveInformative and clear descriptions for your product just to really communicate clearly to your audience and the third thing that I want you to think about is the delivery mechanism for digital products the thing that you're usually going to be doing here is uploading like a single zipped folder or a single fileI think folders are somewhat preferable here for a variety of reasons you can have your product or if there are multiple file versions include all of those in one package but for things like my notion templates it's a little bit different notion templates are just links they're just links there's no file toUpload so I include my instruction sheet and the link to the template all in one thing just one simple file then I upload that to my my personal website which is Squarespace and make sure you name these files as obviously as possible they shouldn't be things like workbook draftThree final final final final Final for real final it should be something like workbook and then read me for your instruction sheet once all of that's done you're finished congrats it's time to press publish and start marketing your first digital product selling digital products can be a complete GameChanger but again you're gonna have to figure out how to Market it and for that I have a whole host of videos on how to start building an audience that you can check out somewhere on the screen right now and I hope to see you there thank you again to store domains forSponsoring this video and I'll see you in the next one bye