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How to Create Digital Products (That People Actually Want)

A digital product that sells while you sleep is the ultimate dream, but you might be wondering how to create digital products in the first place.

What makes a great digital product, and how can you set yourself up for success?

Let’s take a look at why digital products are worth exploring and how you can start using them to follow through on your online business ideas .

What are digital products?

A digital product is any product that a customer can purchase and use online. In many cases, this includes some form of content, such as a newsletter, podcast, video, ebook, or course.

Most digital products are either entertainment (such as music or a storybook) or educational (such as a course or instructional ebook).

You may have heard plenty of people say that digital products don’t sell online anymore and that most consumers expect to receive their content for free. (We all know uploading an ebook to your website won’t automatically make it sell.)

However, the digital commerce industry is filled with multi-million dollar businesses that sell purely digital products. 

Why create digital products?

If you’re considering selling a product or service, a digital product may be the best option for a few different reasons.

Scalability

The first benefit of digital products is that you can reach a much larger audience without working any harder or accumulating more cost.

For example, if you want to help people cook healthier meals, you can offer cooking classes, but you’ll be limited to serving the people in your town.

Additionally, if you want to grow this business, you would have to hire more chefs and pay for more equipment and kitchen space.

However, an alternative option is to learn how to create digital products. You could write an ebook with your favorite recipes, sell it online, reach an unlimited number of people, and you’ll never have to increase your output — it’s one way to earn money freelance writing .

Passive income

Another reason why digital products are excellent is that they require very little effort after the launch and will continue to help you make a living online .

With a service business, you only make money for hours you’re working. With an ecommerce business, people may send orders at any hour of the day, but you still have to fulfill them and keep the items stocked.

However, digital products can be purchased at any hour of the day and never have to be re-stocked. Therefore, it’s the ultimate business model for passive income.

Low startup cost

Finally, most businesses involve startup costs and overhead that can easily run a person into debt. Most people want to learn how to create digital products to avoid that headache.

For example, if you have an ecommerce business, you may have to purchase some of your products upfront. Therefore, you will have to pay for not only the products, but also the storage space.

Service businesses also typically have ongoing costs. For example, if you’re a personal trainer, you may have to pay to rent gym space, deducting from your profit.

When you learn how to become self-employed by selling digital products, you only have to pay for your website and any marketing costs (which are also costs you would pay if you had an ecommerce or service business).

Examples of profitable digital products

So, what kind of digital product should you sell?

In general, most digital products are educational (teaching people how to do something) or entertainment. Once you select a topic and know what you want to sell, you can use a few different models to deliver the content.

Here are the most common ones:

• Podcast (Joe Rogan – $30 million before Spotify deal)
• Ebook ( Carol Tice $45,000 )
• Online Course ($1 billion)
• Newsletter (The Hustle – $27 million)
• Subscription Content (Bloomberg, New York Times )
• Premium Video (Netflix – $30 billion)

While some of these forms of content are typically free, many people are willing to pay for them if what you offer is significantly higher quality or exclusive. 

For example, there are plenty of free newsletters available, yet many people are willing to pay for premium newsletters. 

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How to create digital products in 5 steps

You’re probably wondering how to create digital products for your own content ideas .

The web provides an unparalleled way to launch a business — small or large — with very manageable levels of investment and risk.

But just as you won’t learn how to become a freelance writer by thinking or reading about it — you can’t passively launch a new business. You have to take action.

At this point, I’ve seen hundreds (maybe thousands) of folks build viable businesses around an online product or service, and I’ve noticed five areas of focus that are crucial when you’re getting started.

Here’s what they are.

Step #1: Build an email list with an autoresponder

Probably no huge surprise here. We’ve been talking about email marketing for a long time on Copyblogger, because it’s the key mechanism you’ll use to pull your audience together and let them know what you have to offer.

I started with an email autoresponder on day one, and I suggest you do, too.

Why? Because it gives you a great way to capture the attention of every interested person you run across, and to turn those individual relationships into an audience.

It’s worth doing a good job on your autoresponder, but you don’t need it to be perfect , especially at the beginning. Come up with 5 or 7 messages that will:

• Help your audience member solve a simple problem they care about
• Give that audience member important information about why you do what you do
• Educate the audience member about why your solution is a great way to solve the issue they have in your topic

Each autoresponder message can do one or more of the above.

For various reasons, I like to create strong, interesting “teaser” messages in the email itself, with a click to read the full article.

The best time to get your email autoresponder going is about five years ago. The second-best time is this week. Forgive the business cliché, but that really is the first step in how to create digital products.

Step #2: Craft your cornerstone content

I like to build an autoresponder first so I can capture every drop of audience attention as it comes in.

So where does audience attention come from? Well, your blog post ideas , of course — but more specifically, from the cornerstone content that you create for your site.

Cornerstone content answers the most important questions, both:

• The questions you’re asked all the time about your topic,
• … and the questions you wish you were asked all the time about your topic

Again, they should be good, but they don’t need to be perfect — you’ll continue to evolve your cornerstone posts over time.

Step #3: Expand your network

One nice thing about really solid content is that it tends to attract people who can help your business. They might share your content , or recommend your work, or even be candidates for great partnerships.

But you don’t just sit back and wait for people to notice you. Start expanding your network now, to create the most possible opportunities for your new project.

Guest posting is still an excellent way to expand your audience and your network of professional writers . It won’t bring you overnight success (and neither will anything else), but it’s a solid, steady strategy to increase your influence and authority. It’s a piece of the puzzle when it comes to how to create digital products.

Social media channels are also good places to find other content publishers. Naturally, you won’t want to spam them with “Do me a favor” messages. Make yourself useful, be a good egg, and make sure you have solid content you can refer them back to.

Step #4: Seek market intelligence

A digital product is like any other product — you absolutely must find out what people want before you invest time and money in creating a product.

Choosing a niche for your online business is critical, and you can use great platforms, like Semrush, for researching market needs and desires.

With Semrush, you get to analyze data, track rankings, and uncover valuable insights that can help you tailor your content and strategies more effectively.

Ready to get started? Check out this Semrush 14-Day Free Trial Coupon .

Social media can support your initial findings. Remember to listen more than you talk .

• What problems are people wrestling with in your topic?
• Why do existing solutions frustrate them?
• Which objections prevent them from moving forward?

Remember, you don’t need to do all of your social media listening on your own page or site. Anywhere your potential customers are hanging out makes a great listening post.

Once you have an audience (even a modest one), you can supplement your social media listening by holding free Q&A calls. It’s helpful to gather questions in advance for these, and then deliver the answers in a live session.

This isn’t just a terrific way to find out what your market is hungry for. It’s also a powerful confidence booster for your business blogging . Conducting a few free Q&As will show you just how helpful you can be in your topic, as well as revealing areas where you can get even better.

Step #5: Craft your Minimum Viable Product

All of your research on how to create digital products leads to this.

We’re big fans of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach . It’s used by lots of software and technology companies, but it’s a smart approach for creating nearly any type of product or service.

How do you pin down what your first MVP should be? Answer this question:

What’s the absolute smallest product or service I can create that will offer a meaningful benefit for my audience?

Not every MVP is a paid product

Many small online businesses launch a few free offerings to test the waters, before zeroing in on an idea with traction for the initial paid product.

MVPs allow you to put a small amount of focused work into a product concept, then launch it to your audience and see how it goes over.

• Is this type of product something your audience wants?
• What do they like about it?
• What’s not working, either for your customers or for you?

Once you find an MVP that’s capturing some interest, you can start to optimize it — doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

And if you launch an MVP that’s a complete dud — that’s valuable market intelligence. Something is off in your product concept or your marketing message. If you keep the MVPs small enough, this won’t frustrate you (too much). It’s just another experiment to learn where the wins are.

Best practices for creating digital products

Now that we’ve covered the five main steps to creating digital products, here are best practices to keep in mind as you go through the process of building and selling yours.

Naturally, you’ll start with brainstorming ideas for the type of content you’ll sell.

In general, creating educational or informative content is much easier to sell than entertainment (such as music). That’s because the quality of entertainment is generally more subjective and more difficult to measure than informational content. 

Therefore, brainstorming your skills is an important part of learning how to create digital products. You might be surprised that many people are more than happy to pay to learn your skills.

Here are just a few examples of skills you might write down:

• Speak Spanish
• Personal experience with weight loss
• Video and podcast editing
• Knowledge of Shopify stores
• SEO for content writers
• Cook healthy meals regularly
• Fashion styling

Notice that each of these skills can be turned into digital products.

If you still don’t think you have any skills, think about what you do on the weekends. Plenty of people are willing to pay money to improve their hobbies, so don’t write off hobby-related skills like chess or swing dancing.

Customer research

Customer research is perhaps the most important part of the entire process. If you don’t understand your customer, it will be very difficult to sell your product.

Start by creating a persona for your customer. A buyer persona is a detailed description of the title/position of your customer and their personal struggles. 

This will enable you to create more targeted marketing strategies and tailor the product specifically to their needs. It’s all part of the process of how to create digital products.

For example, you may decide to create a weight loss video course. However, targeting all people who want to lose weight is too broad and will likely not sell very well. 

However, as you do this exercise, you may discover that your target audience is actually women who had babies about six weeks ago and need some motivation to get back into shape. Perhaps these women used to work out and are finding the transition difficult. 

Notice that this niche is much more targeted and more likely to convert women who fit the description.  

Here are factors to keep in mind as you create your buyer persona:

• Typical gender/age/title/income level of your target
• Key pain point in their life right now that your product solves
• Solutions they have considered/tried before they find yours
• What they search for on the internet before finding your solution
• Indirect desires they have that your product will solve (indirectly)

Here’s an example of this buyer persona in action with the weight loss example:

This helps you understand not just how your product will solve a single pain point (such as losing weight), but also how your product will impact their life (she will look like the perfect mom).

Note that you should be talking to potential customers to fill out this form rather than just guessing. If you’re guessing, you’re committing one of the most common content marketing mistakes . And you’ll miss out on a lot of key pain points and underlying struggles.    

Pricing for your digital products

Your pricing point is essential, as a $5 ebook will require much less work than a $300 monthly subscription newsletter or $3,000 course.

In addition, some niches may not have a market for a high price point. For example, while many people would be happy to pay $1,000 for an SEO course, you may find that there simply isn’t a market for a $1,000 swing dancing course. 

Therefore, the best place to start is by doing competitor research. Are there any competitors in your niche selling a digital product similar to the one you have in mind? If so, what’s the price point?

Note that the price point does vary drastically based on:

• The quality of the content
• How you present the product 
• Additional bonuses (community, Q&A, etc.)

Therefore, even if you see an SEO course on Udemy for $100, that doesn’t mean that you can charge $2,000 for a similar course … even though some people will only pay for higher-priced products because they believe they have more value.

Just be sure you can find other courses in your niche similar to the price point you want to charge.

Note that most of the courses with higher price points are typically not listed on course websites, so you may have to Google around or ask in a forum like Quora for the best courses in your niche.

Pro tip for how to create digital products: validation

This is often an overlooked part of the process of how to create digital products.

Ideally, you want to see plenty of competition in your space (fitness, SEO, cooking, etc.). If there’s a lot of competition, that means that plenty of people have this pain point, and you’ll be able to tap into the market.

However, your course needs to offer some unique value that would make people want to buy it over other courses.

Therefore, you would take each of the courses mentioned above and look for reviews on them. What are the most common complaints? What are things people liked about the content? 

For example, here’s some feedback on Brian Dean’s course that I found in a review blog post.

In addition, here are some questions people had on Reddit that they wanted to see in the course:

While this process is a little more difficult to do with newsletters or ebooks, you can ask people on social media or in Slack groups for newsletters/ebooks/podcasts in your niche that they have paid for and what they liked/didn’t like about them.

Now that you have a few ideas of unique selling points, you can create an outline of the course or your unique value proposition (if you’re doing a podcast, newsletter, etc.) and get people on a waitlist for the product or presell it (with an estimated timeline of when the product will be delivered).

Once people have handed you money for your product, then you can go and build it. If you try to build it first, you may find that you built a product that nobody wants.

So, if you’re going to do any step in this process, it’s validate your idea!

Typically, the best place to start validating your idea is with friends. (Note that while it may be awkward to ask friends for money, it’s essential. Simply asking if they like the idea is not the same as handing over cash for it).  

However, if you have a B2B niche and not many friends/following in the space, you may want to build a quick landing page with a tool like Instapage, put up your offer (no, you don’t need a product to make the offer), and then run Facebook or Twitter ads to it.

If you have an email marketing strategy in place, just send out a quick email asking people if they would like to purchase it at a discounted rate.

Here’s an example from Julian Shapiro:

Digital product creation and development

If you’ve already done the steps above, creating the product is fairly straightforward. If you have cash on hand, you might consider hiring people to help you out.

For example, you may outline the ebook and then hire a writer to write most of it. 

If you’re doing an online course, you may record the videos and then send them off to someone on Upwork to edit them. The most difficult aspect might be figuring out technical aspects, such as uploading your podcast to Apple Podcasts or finding a great designer to help you with your ebook.

Here are some guides to help you get started with each of the various content types:

• Podcasting: How to Start a Podcast
• Ebooks: How to Write an eBook
• Online courses: How to Build an Online Course
• Curated Newsletter: Create a Curated Newsletter

Build an audience (quickly)

As you’re building your product, you should simultaneously be building an audience.

Unfortunately, building an audience usually takes time, which is a commodity you don’t have. Therefore, these tactics are the most effective way to build an audience as quickly as possible.

As a general rule, you should spend about 20% of your time creating your course and roughly 80% of your time building an audience for the course launch.

Get on podcasts

One of the best ways to build an audience quickly is simply doing podcast tours. Look for podcasts in your niche and tell them about your experience, results you’ve helped achieve, and pitch them an angle on how you can provide value to their audience. 

For example, if you’re launching a fitness course for women with infants, consider getting on a podcast for moms.

The key is to pitch them a story and unique value proposition of what their audience would like to hear.

Run paid promotion

Another great way to start driving traffic to your website is to run paid ads (Facebook, Twitter, or Google) to a landing page where you can announce the launch and perhaps offer a snippet of the digital product for free in exchange for their email address.

If you keep growing your email list and nurture subscribers weekly, you’ll develop relationships and have at least a small audience by the time you launch. You can also offer to presell them the digital product.

Partner with influencers

If you can partner with an influencer to review your product and promote it to their email or social channels, you’ll generate some great initial traction. 

The key to making influencer partnerships a success is to ensure that the audience aligns with your high-quality digital product. 

One excellent way to partner with influencers is to include them in your product. For example, this could be including their quotes in an ebook.

Ideally, it should require little to no work on their part to be included in your product.

An excellent example of this is when Eric Jorgenson created an Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which he calls the Navalmanack . While this is a little extreme in that the entire product is based on Naval, it had a similar effect. 

Eric didn’t ask Naval for anything, and Naval willingly promoted it, which made it a massive success. Having Naval as a backer also opened the door for him to acquire a forward from Tim Ferriss.  

So, think about how you can creatively involve influencers. You can also always find a relevant influencer on one of these platforms and pay them to review or promote your launch.

Launching your digital products

Once you’ve done all of the work above, the launch should be relatively straightforward. Have a checklist for all of your social channels and email lists that you need to hit when launch day arrives. 

Even if you’ve prescheduled everything, be sure to double-check that there are no glitches. If you’re working with any influencers, reach out to them on launch day and ask if they need any help. 

In addition, you probably have at least a few followers now, so consider going live on social media and host a Q&A about the product. 

The most important thing on launch day is to make sure that everything is working and people can easily download or access your content.

Long-term marketing plans

Once you’ve launched, you’ll probably close the offer again and then cycle your subsequent launches. Therefore, while the initial launch is done, you’ll want to keep building a strong online presence. 

It will help your digital product get more exposure over time. 

There are a few key components of a successful long-term marketing plan:

Content marketing

• Social media

Each of these channels takes time to build, which is why they’re not top priorities in the first phase of building an audience, though they are essential to your long-term success.

SEO enables you to rank for keywords like “best fitness course” and “how to lose weight” on Google. Showing up for these keywords will bring ideal customers directly to your doorstep, so don’t overlook the power of SEO. 

The main components you should analyze are:

• Strong technical foundation
• Mobile friendly
• Great user experience
• Logical architecture
• Optimized for keywords

While SEO is a great place to start, the problem is that all of the other websites trying to rank for your keywords are also optimized.

So while SEO is necessary to rank, it won’t propel you to the top of search results. That’s where content marketing shines within the process of how to create digital products.

To properly execute a content marketing strategy , consider all of the searches your customers make in Google before buying your product.

For example, a woman interested in purchasing a course such as fitness for new moms might Google something like:

“How to get back to the gym with a newborn” “Motivation tips for new moms to work out”

For moms who are ready to buy, they might Google something like:

“Best fitness programs for new moms”

To appear for these kinds of search terms, learn how to write a good blog post that includes informational content with tips and tricks.

Though before you start writing anything, do a Google search of your target keyword. Chances are, your competitors have already written something on the topic. 

So, how can you outrank them?

The best way to outrank a competitor is to write better content . After all, Google’s goal is to present the best information to the searcher. 

To produce better content, consider how you can:

• Provide more comprehensive information
• Include original stories and case studies that hold the reader’s attention
• Present the information in a more organized manner (headers, table of contents, better design, etc.)
• Add more visualized illustrations of the information
• Follow a thorough proofreading and editing process

Finally, your email list will be essential to the success of your business. When people purchase educational content, they want to feel as though they really know the person selling the digital product. 

Email marketing is the best way to build this relationship.

For example, Ramit Sethi sells almost all of his courses exclusively through email and has had launches range up to $5 million in just a week.

To build a strong email list, email regularly in a personal tone of voice that achieves the right balance of storyselling .

Create digital products that solve problems

Creating a digital product is relatively easy. The hard part is finding your audience and communicating why your product in particular is ideal to solve their pain point. 

Even if you’ve tried launching a digital product before, these tips about how to create digital products will help make your next one a success.

If you take it seriously, and have a broad understanding of digital marketing, you could turn your idea into the next multi-million-dollar digital product.

The good news is that we’ve narrowed down this range of competence to three core areas we teach inside Copyblogger Academy : It’s what I call the trifecta of core skills.

Business owners who implement these three core skills find that their businesses tend to grow more effortlessly. They attract bigger, higher-quality audiences who buy.

Interested in mastering these three core skills?

Find out more about joining us here .

Tim Stoddart

Tim Stoddart is CEO of Copyblogger. In 2011, Tim founded Stodzy Internet Marketing . He currently lives in Nashville with his wife, his son, and their pitbull named Alice. Follow Tim on Twitter.

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Reader Interactions

Reader comments (5).

March 5, 2022 at 1:58 am

Thanks for the tips! I recently sold my 13 year old lifestyle blog (for 6 figures … yay!). And now I’m starting from scratch again with a few blog. I really want to do things right/better from the start this time around. I don’t want to put all my eggs in the ad revenue or sponsored content basket. I really need to create a digital product that will help teach people what I did to build a business from scratch and then sell it for 6 figures. I was great at pitching brands, and getting big partnerships with brands. Just trying to figure out how to create a digital product based on that.

March 7, 2022 at 1:28 pm

Right on — thanks for sharing your journey, Rachel!

March 5, 2022 at 7:30 pm

Having spent many years working with digital products, this is a great article that breaks down the nuances of this area. Great work.

March 10, 2022 at 5:04 am

This is an extremely comprehensive article and I think it’s valuable you talk about not only the “exciting” stuff around creation + selling, but also the “less sexy” stuff about promotion + SEO.

I created a low-cost digital product and got so caught up in the excitement of bring all the pieces together – I completely forgot to do the boring stuff like SEO and missed a lot of opportunities until I re-traced my steps.

It’s also worth seeing if you can submit your product to AppSumo who allow creators to sell their work on their platform – they have a HUGE client base so it’s well worth tapping in to that.

March 11, 2022 at 1:41 pm

All of that excitement around creation can certainly lead to disappointment if you don’t follow through with an effective promotion strategy.

We’ve all been there! You learn a lot from it. 🙂

This article's comments are closed.

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How to build successful products in a digital world

Great digital products don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. In fact, they are sophisticated artifacts that have successfully grown into great products after a careful product discovery process. They are delightful experiences, easy to use, and beautiful to look at, providing outstanding value to its users.

“Building a great product is an art as much as a science.” — Paul Adams

The vast majority of products fail during the discovery process or shortly after launch. Either they fail at providing a meaningful user value, people do not use them frequently or the number of users does not grow properly. Few products will serve the market: Meaningful products that have mainstream attention, innovative solutions no one imagined before, causing a change in people’s behavior. These are the products we commonly know, admire, and remember. These are the products we want to build.

The idealised 3 strategic product development cycles.

What it means to build great products

To build successful digital products we need to focus on the things that matter most: On a real problem people have and that is considered worth solving — the problem-solution fit —, on a market demanding the offered solution — the product-market fit — and on scaling the product into mass market — the distribution-conversion fit. We want to build economically viable and technically feasible product innovations that people care about.

Understanding the opportunity

Brand new products usually originate from business opportunities. In order to identify and thoroughly understand the opportunity, the basic conditions need to be clarified first: “Why are we doing this?” — “What is the current situation?”, — “What do we intend to change?” — “Which impact do we expect?”, — “Which constraints do we have to consider?”.

When, for instance, bicycle sales in the US dropped significantly, IDEO cooperated with Shimano, a Japanese manufacturer of bicycle components. To identify the opportunity they started to learn why 90% of American adults did not ride bikes anymore, even if they enjoyed it as kids. After interviewing American adults the project team discovered that the excessive costs of purchasing and maintaining a sophisticated machine ridden only on weekends and the danger of cycling on roads not designed for bicycles deterred the consumers ( “Change by Design”, by Tim Brown ). In the end, the real opportunity here was to tackle these discovered pains by design, and not by building even better bicycle components.

Finding Problem-Solution Fit

Steps, complexity, and timeline of the problem-solution exploration.

Once we deeply understand the business opportunity we need to explore the problem-solution space to find out what to build. The main objective is to find a problem worth solving for a specific customer segment and to provide a proper solution, that has an impact on the customers’ lives. To make sure the solution is an enjoyable experience people love and use frequently, people need to be put at the center of the problem-solving exploration. Thereby, the risk of building something nobody wants can be reduced.

“Making products for your customers is far more efficient than finding customers for your products” — Seth Godin

To assure for a real impact on the project’s desired outcome we have to identify the target customer segment. They make up the most important variable within the project. Gaining empathy with the project’s target customer segment and truly understanding them will help making decisions based on findings — not assumptions.

Finding a problem worth solving

Finding a problem this customer segment has and is widely considered worth solving is crucial for the success of the discovery. By translating user feedback and observations into insights, we learn about their current experiences, pains, gains, needs, wants, desires and jobs they are trying to do. By this, in short, an existing problem can be uncovered. If we discover a problem we did not expect in the first place we must embrace and value it as an insight, ideally leading to a disruptive product innovation that has a real impact on peoples’ lives and, in turn, on the project’s outcome.

“Embrace unexpected discoveries”

By defining the problem the product is going to solve, the question “why do we build this product?” is answered. The answer defines the product vision. It gives the business opportunity meaning as it tackles real user needs. To find out if we are really solving the right problem for the target customers we need to test the user problem with a proper solution. In doing so, the problem-solution fit can be qualitatively validated.

Exploring a proper solution means creating a strategy how the problem will be solved. Based on both user insights and problem assumptions the possibilities can be narrowed down to the most promising and feasible solution. While testing the strategy, peoples’ interest in the product can be measured. From user feedback we should learn if there is any chance the product provides any value for the users. This helps to iterate on strategy, solution & value proposition to build the next iteration.

If we have built something of a certain value we need to test the product on the market with real data, because what people say they want does not necessarily equal what they really want and pursue. This is why the product-market fit is the next critical part in the product discovery process.

Finding Product-Market Fit

Steps, complexity, and timeline of product-market testing.

Given, we have figured out what to build we need to find out if the product is something people really want and use frequently. The goal of the product-market fit is to release a minimal version of the solution, iterate, experiment and improve it until it quantitatively proves both its user value and economic viability. We need to know if we are building the right product for the right market.

To build and release a minimum viable product (MVP) to the market that early users adopt very quickly and remain engaged with, we ship the core features we assume to offer the greatest user value. This can be done by measuring the number of people actually using and willing to pay for it. A proper product-market fit makes sure there is a market for the solution that can be monetarised. From this very first product version the core experience of the product needs to be extended and developed until the whole user experience becomes outstanding. The quality of the core features, the interactions, and the visual appearance have to be iterated and improved constantly.

Unfortunately, solely releasing a minimum viable product will not be sufficient. We need people to actually use the product. To get them on board, we must understand the path people need to take before they get to the product and remove barriers: “How do people get aware of it?” — “How do they come to use our product?” — “What can we do to remove barriers?”

“Ideas are cheap. Execution is the hard work”

While measuring if the released product version can change the key metrics, we see if our planned business goals can be achieved or not. We are looking for evidence that the product effects change in users behavior, makes users come back, use the product, and makes them willing to pay for it. After all, we have to ensure to have a viable business model in the long run. At the moment the product gets quantitative evidence of market demand it is time to grow the user base outside of the targeted customer segment.

Finding Distribution-Conversion Fit

Steps, complexity, and timeline of distribution-conversion growth.

Once we have found product-market fit we have to focus on the distribution-conversion fit. Therefore, the main objective is to successfully scale the product to accelerate sustainable growth — we do not want just more users, we want active users willing to pay. We need to attract a large base of new people, keep them engaged and convert them into loyal fans and paying customers. We are interested in and aiming at the mass market.

To attract new people we need to focus on distribution, onboarding, conversion, and sales: “How do we attract these people?” — “How do we get these people into using the product?” — “How do we convert these new users into loyal fans?” — and finally — “How do we sell the product?” We want to build a coherent way from peoples’ attraction over first contact with the product to frequent use.

“The best marketing isn’t advertising, it’s a well-designed and remarkable product.” — Seth Godin

To attract a large base of new people we must not wait for people to come. We need to discover adequate ways to reach out to people who have never heard of the product. As soon as we find a way to make people aware of the product, our priority is to convey the instant value of the product to them and to highlight why they will benefit from using it. The goal is to convert them into loyal fans, willing to pay for the product. Therefore, we must identify what keeps people from using the product and remove these barriers.

As demand grows trough proper distribution, new customer segments will start using the product — people for which the original product was not made for. Very likely they will use the product in ways we have not imagined before and generate new use cases. Handling these new user groups becomes our biggest challenge at this point. How do we meet their needs? During this phase of growth we need to care about designing a product that works for all of the users, not only the early adopters. As we want to grow fast, adding new and relevant features for a more diverse user-group is the easiest way to keep growing. Quickly the most original features, built for our early adopters, experience less and less usage as they become overgrown in both user numbers and revenue by feature demands of other user segments. After some time we have to either revamp or remove the original features. The former specialised product becomes one of the mainstream products.

Building successful products is challenging. Most of them will fail. There never is a guarantee to be successful, but if we make sure to focus on problem-solution fit, product-market fit and distribution-conversion fit we can very likely reduce the risk of building something nobody wants, the risk of building something for the wrong market, and the risk of no sustaining growth at all. A proper product discovery and design process that puts the user in the center can make the difference. It might be hard, but it is not completely impossible to build the next big mainstream product everyone of us is dreaming of.

This post was originally published on Nikkel's Medium profile .

Further reading:

• Hiring Creatives II: Retaining Talent
• What is Product Design?
• Framing The “Right” Problems In UX Design
• How Design Systems Can Help Build and Prototype Better Digital Products
• CEOs Should Care About Design Sprints Too

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Product and interaction designer at XING, Hamburg. Founder of Design Made For You . Follow me on Twitter @JAF_Designer .

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Creating a Digital Product: Steps & Challenges

Building a strategic, powerful, and impactful digital product can allow you to tap into a new market, delight users, and grow your business.  

But if you don’t begin your project with the right plan and approach, you risk getting held up by challenges and mistakes and ultimately wasting time, money, and effort. 

Learn the key steps to creating a digital product and how to overcome the challenges that organizations most commonly face when building their product. 

Things to know about developing a digital product:

• What is a digital product?

Balancing art and science in digital products

• Why should you build a digital product?
• 10 steps for creating a digital product
• Challenges of digital product development

What is a digital product? 

A digital product is the technology surface, a tangible digital touchpoint that users interact with that’s been designed to solve specific, targeted user challenges and offer them some kind of benefit or service. 

Successful digital products are equal parts “art” and “science.”  

The “science” side is where the code lives, where the infrastructure lives, where the software engineers and data scientists and cloud architects build the infrastructure and modules and microservices that support the product’s goals.   

But truly digital products also involve the “art” side. This is the human side, the creative side, where products are built for users, for customers, for employees, for business partners. Critical to these products is the design that users see, the experience they encounter, the strategy that drives accomplishing your business goals, and finally, the future the product anticipates. 

Why should you build a digital product? 

We live in an increasingly digital age, and if you want to solve your organization’s biggest challenges, you need to seize the opportunity to leverage technology and break new ground.  

An effective digital product, created with the right approach and goals, empowers your company to stand out in a sea of competition. 

10 Steps for Creating a Digital Product 

If you want to build an impactful digital product that delights your customers and delivers value, follow these steps:

• Set your vision: Identify and understand your North Star metrics. What are the key objectives of your product and what are the areas you want to move the needle on? Examples of this could be selling more product, increasing user conversion, or helping people with complex diseases get quicker access to medical help. 
• Identify key outcomes: The business outcomes should be specific, measurable, and achievable. For example, reducing processes from seven steps to three steps, or increasing the average customer order from $30 to $40. 
• Service mapping: Map out existing customer services and touchpoints across departments and recognize the roles that your product engages with. This can include customers, partners, suppliers, and other businesses. 
• Creating user journey maps: Develop an anticipated customer journey that begins before they even touch the product and ends after they are done using it. Identify the experience and emotions associated with each step of the user’s journey. 
• Story mapping: Create a map of epics and stories (common tools in Agile ) to support desired functionality in a product. 
• Technology assessment: Understand the technology ecosystem that you will be building the product on top of. You need to be deeply familiar with your technology architecture – such as your cloud infrastructure , a legacy database, and an API layer – to understand how to select technology for your product. It’s also vital to have a full understanding of how your teams function; for example, do they follow Agile? How long are their sprints?  
• Create an entity map: Referring back to the story map from step 5, create a diagram that outlines the relationships between the entities in your product ecosystem.  
• Involve key stakeholders: In order to enact the change that comes with developing and launching a new digital product, you need to involve your main stakeholders who act as decision-makers, SMEs, and influencers within your organization. 
• Develop a roadmap: Again, refer to your story map, reprioritize the epics in the stories, and create a high-level roadmap. Decide if you want to conduct user research and determine how you get to MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and MMP (Minimum Marketable Product). This step is also when your team should establish projected release dates, but remain flexible with these dates so you can adapt to new market changes, competitive pressures, and technology. 
• Create a set of risks and assumptions: Building a new product usually involves risks and assumptions, and it’s necessary to identify those so all of your team members are on the same page. For example, there are risks with building on older technology, just as there are risks associated with building on leading-edge technology.  

Challenges of Digital Product Development 

Launching a new digital product is no small feat, and organizations frequently run into the following challenges and mistakes: 

• Allocating the time. Developing a worthwhile digital product that accomplishes your key objectives requires your organization to dedicate a significant amount of time to the initiative. 
• Identifying the vision of the product. Building a product without specific, measurable, and achievable business objectives in mind often results in an unsuccessful product. Before you begin, your team needs to know specifically why you are creating the product and how you are going to accomplish your organizational objectives. 
• Identifying what your users actually want. Building a digital product is a significant investment of time, money, and effort, and if you don’t ask what your users need and want, you risk wasting that investment. When businesses do not talk to users, they risk building the whole product, giving it to their users, and finding out they’ve missed the mark. 
• Seeking and incorporating user feedback. When building a digital product, your team should use the lean startup philosophy: build, measure, learn, pivot or persist. Build an iteration of your product, give it to your users in a research setting (not making the product public yet), measure those users’ feedback and learn from it, then decide whether that was a good approach to keep moving forward with or to pivot and make changes. Continue this feedback loop until you have an MVP. 
• Scaling your product. It is no use having a great product if it can’t scale to serve the number of users you are trying to reach or support the performance that is critical to reaching your goals. Ensure you have the right technology, infrastructure, and processes in place to successfully scale your product. 

Create a Powerful Digital Product with AIM Consulting

When your organization looks to bring its big ideas to life, it helps to turn to experts. 

At AIM Consulting , our unique capabilities in product design, digital strategy, software engineering, data analytics, and agile delivery enables your company to tap into a distinctive set of capabilities that will deliver you a strong digital product, not just another app. 

Insights By

Jeff Rubingh

Jeff Rubingh is AIM’s National Director of Digital Experience. Jeff has decades of experience designing, building, and delivering solutions in the technology industry. Jeff’s mission is helping companies “discover the future.”

You have big ideas, we have innovative solutions.

An effective digital product requires not only a clear strategy, with planning, design, development, and testing – but a combination of power and craft.

Let’s tackle your next big project together.

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Crafting Digital Products That Solve Real Problems

In today’s digital age, creating a product that resonates with your target audience isn’t just about innovation; it is about addressing real problems. To ensure your digital products hit the mark, follow this guide:

1. Understand Your Audience: Begin by deeply understanding your target audience—their needs, pain points, and desires.

2. Identify a Problem: Discover a problem that your audience faces and is actively seeking solutions for.

3. Market Research: Dive into market research to validate the problem’s existence and assess competition.

4. Brainstorm Solutions: Collaborate with your team to brainstorm potential solutions.

5. Prototype and Test: Create a prototype of your digital product and test it with a small group of users.

6. Gather Feedback:  Collect user feedback to refine your product. Continual improvement is key.

7. User-Centered Design: Prioritize user-centred design, ensuring your product is intuitive and user-friendly.

8. Build, Launch, and Learn: Develop your digital product and launch it in the market.

9. Monitor Performance: Continuously monitor your product’s performance and gather user data.

10. Iterate and Innovate: Use the insights gained to make improvements and add features.

11. Stay Agile:  Embrace an agile approach, responding quickly to changing needs.

12. Support and Update: Provide ongoing customer support and regular updates to keep your product relevant.

The Power of Solving Real Problems:

Relevance: Addressing real problems ensures your product is relevant to your audience.

Customer Loyalty: Satisfied customers become loyal advocates.

Market Demand: Solving problems meets existing market demand.

Differentiation: It sets your product apart from the competition.

Creating digital products that solve real problems is the key to success in today’s competitive landscape. When you truly understand your audience and provide solutions to their pain points, your product becomes not just a product but a game-changer.

Ready to turn your problem-solving idea into a digital product? Explore Hygrit’s business startup services and project management expertise.

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Pillars of Digital Product Design

Software today is ubiquitous—it’s everywhere you look. It’s gone from something that was just used by a handful of select individuals to perform intense calculations in a basement server room to something we use so frequently, most people don’t even have to consider how it’s created.

Intentionally or not, every piece of software you use every day, from Instagram to your local DMV website, has been designed. In an ideal world, all software would be intelligently designed in a way that creates a better experience for the people using it, but that doesn’t always happen. Truth is, the demand for software is frequently outpaced by the supply of thoughtful software designers.

Plenty of new bootcamps, start-ups, and online curricula are trying to address this issue by putting more software designers into the industry. Still, it’s often difficult to understand what people who design software actually do day-to-day.

To those starting out in the industry or just curious about what software designers do, this guide will hopefully shed a bit of light on some of the key foundational pillars for designing user-friendly software for digital products.

First, let’s answer a very basic, if challenging, question to make sure we have the terms right: What do you call someone who designs software?

Official design-based titles vary widely across the tech industry. Some companies have separate roles between UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) designers, to split the responsibilities between those designing the visual interface of the product, and those who design the flow and logic for someone using the product.

Interaction Designers and Service Designers, meanwhile, will focus on either the micro or macro level of customer touch-points with software. Graphic designers, content designers, web designers, brand designers, and more can all individually play a distinct role when creating software.

The most common way folks refer to software these days is as a “product,” so it’s natural that the person who designs that product is called a Product Designer, so we’ll use that term here going forward.

At Slack, product designers are responsible for a whole host of things, from the UI to UX and beyond — sometimes all the way down to software sound effects. It’s our job to make the product come together in a way that our customers will find delightful and simple to use.

While product design is not rocket science, it’s also no simple task. It requires careful attention to detail to keep track of all the use cases, flows, user & business requirements, brand guidelines, and accessibility standards. These considerations often end up floating around in your head all at once.

This can feel like a lot to juggle! At the end of the day, though, there are three key foundational pillars that a product designer should focus on when designing for the masses.

1. User-centered problem solving

Every product solves some sort of problem for the person using it. The product can solve a functional problem (like a hammer that installs a nail to hang a picture frame) or it can solve an aspirational one (like the fuzzy dice that hangs from your rear-view mirror to signal: the driver of this car is obviously killin’ it).

These days, the problems are often a mix of functional and aspirational. Nike, for example, solves a mix of functional problems (shoes protect your feet) and aspirational ones (shoes help you fit in with your peers). The ultimate goal of designing any product is to understand who will use it and what problems it will solve for them.

As a designer, your goal is to design a product that is both useful and valuable to the person using it, so they, in turn, end up utilizing the product and (hopefully) paying for the services. A truly well-designed product is a win-win situation for both the customer and your business.

Things to keep in mind for optimal user-centric designs:

Empathy Many misunderstand this term as a shorthand for just “thinking as the user,” but the most successful designers go beyond this, by understanding the context the user is in before, during, and after using your product, as well as how they might be feeling throughout.

Thinking empathetically also helps you counteract implicit biases that could prevent you from understanding how your work might be misinterpreted, abused, or even harmful to others. Build empathy by observing customers using your product, soliciting feedback (through your customer service team or surveys), and actively listening to diverse voices who can offer varying perspectives on ways the product might be used.

Goals, Anti-Goals, and Audience Creating a list of user goals and anti-goals before starting to work on a product feature will help balance your user goals with your business goals, as well as identify potential problems and edge cases that might arise. For example, as a Slack user, I want to be able to communicate quickly and easily with my teammates, but I don’t want to feel distracted or overwhelmed.

A great way to frame these goals is through personas or jobs to be done : essentially groups of your target audience based on real data, that can offer a better understanding of who you’re designing for and what they need. It’s important to make sure your personas have just enough detail to be helpful in decision-making, but not too much to overcomplicate your process or focus on the wrong attributes. Remember to again check your unconscious biases about even hypothetical users.

Problem Framing Once you start to understand who you’re designing for, framing (and re-framing) your problem statement correctly is key to ensuring that your design successfully solves that problem. Even a great solution will fail when built to solve the wrong problem.

One technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda called The Five Whys can often help better identify the root problem by asking “why” to each subsequent answer of “What is the problem?” five times. Problems are rarely as simple as “users don’t click the ‘add-to-cart’ button.” If you dig further by focusing on specific user personas and researching their needs, you’ll discover that the problem is actually something closer to “users avoid clicking the add-to-cart button because they aren’t confident that the item will get to them in time.”

Idea Generation Lots of designers make the mistake of skipping right to this step without first taking the time to understand what and whose problems they’re attempting to solve. When product designers invest in understanding their users and problems upfront, generating ideas can be much more intentional and collaborative because you’ve identified the right structures in which to guide the idea generation. Collaborative idea generation is really where the best magic happens. Ideas can come from anyone, but it’s your job to help facilitate the idea generation and guide it into something you can work with and design an effective solution for.

“Design thinking” is a phrase that gets thoughtlessly passed around a lot these days, but the real idea behind it is the process of guiding the generation of high-quality ideas with a group of people. There’s many tools and techniques to do this, like Design Sprints with your team, brainstorming sessions with cross-functional partners across your company (like product, sales, customer service, or engineering), or simply sketching in a design tool with a pal.

The key is to be able to generate enough divergent ideas to help you understand various approaches on how you might solve the user and business problems you’re focused on, then determine which ones have the biggest opportunity to succeed. From there, you can start to dig into the actual design and explore potential solutions based on a hypothesis. For example: “We hypothesize that by providing a shipping time estimate next to the add to cart button, we’ll relieve some of the stress of people not knowing when they will receive their product.”

User testing, feedback, and validation When you’ve gone through the process of understanding who you’re designing for, the problems they face, and potential opportunities to solve these problems, how do you go about picking the right one and if it’s going to work or not? The reality is, you can never be 100% sure about any decision, but you can gain enough confidence to move forward by collecting feedback at the right moments, especially from the users you’re designing for.

User feedback can come in many ways. You can create and show a sketch or an interactive prototype of the idea to select current or potential users in a research session and get their feedback. You can design and build a test version of the product and release it to a small subset of people. You can even design, build, and launch an “ A/B test ” to test two different versions of a solution to actual users and see which one solves the problem you set out to solve more successfully based on specific metrics.

User feedback can come in many forms. A few strategies:

• A sketch or interactive prototype: Select current or potential users for an in-person/remote research session, then collect feedback.
• A “closed beta”: Build a test version of the product and release it to a small subset of potential users.
• An “A/B test”: Release two different versions of a solution to actual users and, using specific metrics, see which one better addresses solves the problem you set out to solve.

Ultimately, you’ll never know if something works until it’s in users’ hands. Researching and staying in touch with your users at different points during the process allows you to proceed with confidence that the direction you’re going in is correct and is going to work for them.

2. User interface and experience design

When most people hear the word “designer,” the first thing they picture is someone who makes something visual. (The second thing they picture, for some reason, is someone wearing chic glasses and a beret while sipping a latte, but we won’t get into that now.) As we’ve established, a product designer is certainly responsible for more than just the design itself, but that doesn’t make visual design any less important. All of the best digital product ideas still require a compelling user interface.

But how do you go about designing that interface? It’s a mix of traditional graphic design principles—color, shape, spacing, typography, layout, etc—as well as a mix of interaction principles based on modern inputs (things like touchscreens) and even sometimes on analog interfaces (like knobs and switches on an old car radio).

The goal is to make something that feels natural to the person using it. At Slack, we have a product principle of “Don’t make me think” that covers this a little in both interactions and visuals. Your typography should have the right hierarchy so that users are able to glean the information that’s most important to them, the right spacing to feel like things aren’t cramped or stressful, and the right interactions to feel like it’s working the way your users expect it to.

A few ways that visual design breaks down for product designers:

User experience (UX) design and user flows Digital products are by their very nature not static. While using your product, a user will experience many different screens, states, and inputs. By considering how the user will “flow” through your product, you can understand how to best get them where they want to go while anticipating the edge-cases, potential errors, and other aspects they could run into.

More often than not, most product designers start by designing a series of “ wireframes ,” or loose sketches of what a screen layout could look like, to illustrate the steps a typical user will take to achieve their goals. For very complex flows, like onboarding or account setups, you can also lay out the different paths a user could choose—for example, different pricing plans, options, and other settings—as well as any additional information users would need to add and any errors they might experience that would prevent them from moving forward.

Think of it like outlining an essay: mapping out what you want to build in a step-by-step flow in a lower fidelity helps you see the whole picture of the user’s experience and better understand whether your solution can be successful or not. Jumping into the details too soon can easily distract or even overwhelm you. Once you’re ready to move on to higher fidelity designs, you can still follow the pattern you designed at the beginning and create clickable or interactive prototypes to get earlier feedback on your solution from your teammates or your customers.

Branding, visual, and user interface design The visual design of digital products breaks down into many different facets. It takes into account the brand of the product you’re designing for (does this feel like something this company would make?), the visual consistency of the system you’re designing in (does this look and feel consistent across all the different parts?), and the information architecture of how the screen is structured.

Branding is a big part of visual design for digital products. A company’s brand will determine the character of the product you’re designing; the colors, typography, and even spacing and motion choices will help illicit a specific feeling you want your customers to have. If you’re designing for, say, a bank, you want it to feel trustworthy & secure. If you’re designing a product for children, you might want it to feel fun & engaging. If you join an established company, they might have already created guidelines for the brand, so it’s important to adhere to those so the features you design fit in with the rest of the company and its products.

Visual design can also have a clear impact on a user’s ability to easily use and understand the product you’re designing. If similar objects (like text inputs and buttons) don’t match, users may not immediately understand how to use it. Without the proper affordances, users may not know they can interact with it. Too much color usage or the typography is too close in size, and a user might not understand what elements they need to be focused on. The Gestalt Principles have a lot of power here as well.  Visual design is a very important tool to be able to help users both understand what to do in your product and how they might feel while using it. This can all lead to a pleasant user experience that eventually builds brand trust & user loyalty with your product.

Motion and interaction design The best (and sometimes challenging) part about designing for digital products is that they’re inherently dynamic. Things can move, scale, change, beep, and boop. When you design for physical things, you often don’t get that ability.

This means that when someone interacts with an object, you can design it to change slightly to let them know that interaction is correct—hover effects, like those over links and buttons, are a great example of this. These smaller interactions are often called “ micro-interactions ,” and they allow you to thoughtfully consider how you want your product to respond to a user’s interaction. Maybe you want a star icon to give a little glitter burst when you click it, or a button to scale up in size when you hover. You can also design how screens transition between each other, or how parts of the user interface reveal or hide.

Much like visual design, micro-interactions are a small way product designers can guide users and inspire a bit of delight in the product, as well as embody some of the brand principles. Harnessing the power of interaction design can allow you to orchestrate how dynamic a product is and guide the user through the product in a way that is both deliberate and fun.

Content design Good typography is useless unless the words it displays aren’t meaningful. Good content design helps guide users through your product, explain things that might be confusing, and help inform them of important errors or success states after they complete their task.

Content design is your opportunity to talk directly to your users. It’s important that the directions you have for users are clear, but it’s also an opportunity to do so in a voice that feels like your product’s brand is speaking with them, in a tone that conveys the right meaning. You don’t want to make a user feel anxious if something didn’t go right, and you don’t want to be too celebratory when something they did wasn’t actually that meaningful.

At Slack, and at a lot of larger companies, dedicated content designers often partner with product designers on features. Regardless of whether it’s an official role, content design is a major consideration in product design—designers should always consider what they’re saying to customers, and how they say it.

Accessibility Throughout the design process, it’s important to remember that not every user of your product is 100% able-bodied. Many users will be coming to your product with varying degrees of impairment, from visual to mobility, and their needs should be taken into account when designing digital products for a wider audience.

For example, for users with visual impairments like color-blindness or blurriness, consider the contrast of the colors and the size of the typography you choose. Also consider users who depend fully on software called screen readers to dictate their experience using digital products. For users with mobility impairments, especially when designing for touchscreens, consider how far apart you’re spacing key actions a user must perform.

Your users are likely going to come from a wide spectrum of abilities, both cognitive and physical. As a designer of a product, it’s important to remember that you have the power to exclude groups of people who want to use your product; to counteract this, you’ll have to intentionally design with these specific needs in mind.

3. Collaboration and communication

Of all of the steps in designing digital products, collaboration can be the most fun—and also the most difficult. The reality is, no designer is an island. With few exceptions, nearly every digital product that you’ll be paid to work on will involve working with someone else—often many people, all with their own priorities and opinions. This can be difficult to work through, but if done well, it can make the process more enjoyable and mean better odds that your product will be successful.

The design portion of product development is often where multiple decisions and ideas come to a head. Sometimes seeing an idea or a decision visually represented generates a whole new slew of questions. Sometimes you design something that you really love that your teammates don’t. On top of all of this, you’re likely going to need to partner tightly with an engineer to ensure they have everything they need to build it in code.

It’s important as a designer to expect and be able to manage all of these things. The more you grow in your career as a product designer, the larger slice of your time is dedicated to collaboration and alignment of your teammates.

Here’s some different ways product designers collaborate:

Documentation Contrary to the science-fiction novels you might have read, people who work in tech aren’t mind-readers. (Not yet, anyway.) Being able to clearly communicate and write down your thoughts in a manner that your teammates can easily understand is one of the most important skills a product designer can have.

Often, when product designers are thinking through ideas, sketching, and iterating, they’re making lots of implicit decisions in their heads. It’s important to be able to chronicle those decisions explicitly in a way that makes sense for people who will undoubtedly be impacted by those decisions. As a designer, the beauty of this is that you have the ability to do this with words, pictures, and other narrative devices.

You’ll need to be prepared to rationalize a decision, explain an edge-case , or describe a specific interaction that you want to achieve. With your design superpowers, you can help organize the decisions being made into easy-to-understand formats so your team is always aligned.

Feedback and alignment Because design is such a visible function, you’ll find that many people will have many opinions on the designs you create. Navigating the feedback you receive, and being able to align with your team on what is important, is a critical skill for a product designer.

Design feedback can come through sessions with other designers called critiques , where someone presents a design they’re working on and other designers offer ways they can build upon or improve their design. This is a key point in the design process; it’s important to learn how to receive feedback, but it’s also important to learn how to give it as well.

The good news is, absorbing feedback, suggestions, and thoughts from your teammates will give you different perspectives beyond your own, and it will help your team align on what is most important. At the end of the day, the designer must take all the feedback they receive and incorporate necessary adjustments to make the product they’re designing even better.

Collaborating with engineering When all the feedback has been incorporated and the designs are ready to be built in code, then it’s time for your engineering partners to start building it. Ideally, they won’t be surprised because you’ve been working closely with them throughout the entire process; they will have been offering feedback on potential technical constraints from the jump, while also understanding where you’re heading with the design.

The process usually involves specifications around sizes, typography choices and other design decisions so that engineers know what to code. There are tools that can help with this by translating this information to engineers, but some designers also create detailed specifications themselves, with detailed notes and lines to signify spacing between elements called “redlines.”

The goal of the handoff process is to ensure what gets built mirrors what you design as closely as possible. Building prototypes is a helpful practice to show how specific interactions and flows work. At Slack, we have another product principle we call “prototype the path” that ensures we’re thinking through the dynamism of our product as we’re designing it, so that no one is surprised when things make their way into code.

Only the beginning

Obviously, there are plenty of aspects of product design that were not included in this introduction. If we wrote the entirety of what a product designer does, it would likely be 1,000 pages long and need many more gifs.

But hopefully this serves as inspiration for those just starting out in their career in product design, or those who might simply be curious about the profession — after all, there are always many people involved in a given design process, and plenty of them won’t be designers. While some of this might seem daunting, the reality is it’s all learnable.

Tweet at us about elements you’re most curious about (either @slack_design or @kyleturman ), and we may publish a more in-depth follow-up or two. Stay curious. Keep learning. Let’s design the future.

A few additional resources:

• There are plenty of online courses from Udacity , SuperHi , Coursera , Nielsen Norman Group , Shift Nudge , UX Beginner and more. Many design schools now also have tracks specific to product design.
• Read up on a few great books like The Design of Everyday Things ,  Don’t Make Me Think , Interaction of Color , A New Program for Graphic Design , Designing Products People Love , Product Design for the Web , Badass: Making Users Awesome , and all of the books from A Book Apart .
• Try joining a design community on Slack and get to know people in the industry. Here’s another good list .

Want to also give a huge shout out to MJ Livingstone who helped bring this article to life as well as Milan Moffatt and Pedro Carmo for the great feedback, and all of Slack Design for great resources.

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Trying to create a digital product? Don’t fall in love with the solution

When organizations fall in love with their solutions, they tend to create products no one cares about. Overcome common digital product challenges and become a champion for your users.

By Elli Rader and Pat McClure

Remember the avian flu? Relenza was perceived as the antidote in the medical world and seemed ready to rake in the cash. It only had one competitor, it was more effective, and it was cheaper. But, surprisingly, it lost. Why? Its form and delivery method, a diskhaler, negatively affected people with respiratory problems. Add to that its side effect warnings and people fled to its sole competitor, Tamiflu. Relenza lost sight of its customers because it fell in love with its superior product. This blinded them to the fact their customers didn’t feel comfortable taking it.

This serves as a timely reminder for businesses trying to create a digital product. While you may start with a business problem, it’s easy to fall in love with what you’re creating and lose sight of the goal. Organizations must build digital products that solve business problems, and they usually fall under three categories: business challenges, consumer challenges, and experience challenges. Solving these problems with digital isn’t easy. Why?

Organizations can build at scale but have a hard time innovating

To build digital products that solve business problems, organizations must fill the skill gaps in their team. Mid-market enterprise organizations may be effective at developing things at scale over time. That is a very different skill set, however, from what’s required to invent something new or innovate for the consumer. To innovate, companies need to create ideas, test them, and weed out the losers (e.g. less viable concepts) quickly. Innovation is necessary for business growth, but companies aren't always structured to do it. Teams often won't have the resources in place to manage the product a partner is helping them build. These resources range from a trained team to a technology solution. One advantage of a good technology partner is they can help create the resources to support a new product when it’s ready to take to market. Another way organizations can counter the challenges they face is by getting a fresh perspective on their market. Companies are usually adept at understanding their industry, but bringing in an outside partner can help them identify and understand how similar problems are being solved in other industries. Apart from a fresh perspective, clients often benefit from getting support with:

Creating and developing the product strategy and vision

Validating the product strategy and vision

Vetting and preparing a design team to go ahead and build the initial release or the MVP

The right partner can help an organization take their product vision to the next level by applying modern development principles to it, validating it, and then developing it further. Still, organizations need to be wary of the challenges associated with creating digital products.

6 challenges that organizations face when using digital to solve business problems

The reality about attempts to be innovative is that you usually uncover other issues along the way. This is because true innovation requires you to create products quickly and efficiently, which isn’t easy for companies that weren’t born digital. Here are six common challenges organizations face when building a digital product.

1. Dated systems

Mid-market enterprise companies tend to have dated systems, meaning they’re building onto and off of an unsophisticated service layer system. They are also dependent on the user interface that goes with the enterprise software they purchased for their company rather than tailoring user experience to meet their needs.

2. Long development cycles

Mid-market enterprise organizations tend to have long development cycles and the wrong team structure for an agile approach. Their agile teams are organized around systems and not consumer experiences — creating duplicate effort and slowing down development cycles.

3. Funding challenges

It’s common for teams to approach funding initiatives in a project-focused way. The mindset is: Once something is delivered, they don’t need to invest further (commonly a CFO or CEO mindset). This doesn’t work for modern product development.

4. Adopting the continuous development mindset

Your competitors used to be other companies in your space. Now you’re competing with the best-in-class products people are interacting with every day. To keep up with ever-rising consumer expectations, you must be willing to continue developing your product.

5. Access to users

Continuous development and discovery should always be centered around real people. However, branding, PR, marketing, and customer service concerns often make it a challenge for the development team to get access to users.

6. The right level of detail in the agile enablement phase

You can’t be agile if you're trying to define the entire system at every single level of detail before building anything. In fact, the more you try to define everything at the start, the less you get it right in the end.

While these challenges are common, you don’t have to accept the status quo. Product leaders can take steps to ensure product success. That’s not to say it’s easy.

It’s time to fall in love with the problem and prepare to rock the boat

To create a successful digital product, you have to get the leaders around you to think differently about building digital products. During the most successful engagements, the clients said: “I’m probably going to get in trouble a lot.” Being agile and rocking the boat is more difficult, but it's a better path for building digital products the right way. The right partner should surround you with the right information and strategies to help you have those bold conversations with peers and leadership.

“If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.” - Frank A. Clark

Another key to success is to be in love with the problem instead of the solution. It’s easy to fixate on how you’re going to build X product. But it’s crucial to take a step back and first identify the problem the product is going to fix. Loving the problem helps organizations and individuals think creatively about solving the problem since they’re focused on outcomes instead of defined deliverables. If you're building digital products the right way and what you’re doing is valuable, you’re going to rock the boat. Digital is not for those who just want to blend in at their company. Be bold and build a digital product that solves real business problems and adds value to the lives it touches.

Key takeaways

• Find a partner that will challenge your assumptions and beliefs about how it should work.
• Find people who genuinely want to solve the problem. People have to believe in the problem to get creative about solving it. This helps it feel fun even when it’s difficult.
• Get comfortable with testing. This process demands that everything you put out there won’t be polished.

Continue reading about Digital Transformation

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Digital Product Strategy Guide: From Idea to Execution With Low-Code Plugins

Justin Calderon

• July 28, 2022

Table of Contents

A digital product strategy is a blueprint for creating valuable products and implementing digital transformation. 

Importantly, this planning stage should come before anything else. 

By envisaging the future lifecycle of a product , its value proposition, and target users, businesses can set themselves up to make decisions that better align customer and shareholder interests.

Only when thoroughly equipped with a clear digital product’s vision and its pathway for development can businesses create great and scalable products. 

Indeed, vague digital product strategies, on the other hand, can hinder project development, contributing to the failure of the 95% of 30,000 products that launch yearly. 

Today, there are numerous common components that are considered best practices when creating a digital product strategy. Some of the key components of this strategy include:

• How the product addresses customers’ pain points
• Exact details of product launch 
• How it attracts and retains consumers
• How the product can grow rapidly and sustainably

We’ll go into complete detail of these factors and many more in this article. 

Here, we’ll explain why a digital product strategy is a crucial foundation of product architecture, outlines steps to creating an effective one, and lists low-code plugin solutions for product strategy execution.

What is a Digital Product Strategy?

A digital product strategy is the vision and destination of a product. 

It is a plan that encompasses the lifecycle of a product , from research to distribution, as well as the required inputs from team members. A product strategy can be focused on one project or a set of products at the epicenter of a business’s digital transformation.

Generally, a digital product strategy comprises components such as:

• The problems the products solve, and the jobs it does for the customer and their motivation to purchase it
• A product vision and its alignment with the company’s overarching vision
• The unique selling propositions that give the product a competitive edge 
• The product-market-fit
• Cost and time implications 
• The challenge for team members, and the actions to be taken
• Key Performance Indexes to track and measure the product development and growth

For a holistic digital product strategy, team members must itemize questions around the product, their business, and the target market.

Why Does a Digital Product Strategy Framework Matter?

A digital product strategy helps products launch successfully and scale sustainably. 

Creating one is beneficial because it:

• Provides a structured process : Haphazard planning is the bane of most product failures. With a proper digital product strategy framework, team members can comply with unified approaches, timelines, and roadmaps
• Optimizes performance : A digital product strategy provides clarity and focus for team members. With objectives and corresponding duties delineated, strategic actions are directed to achieving a mission
• Helps develop impactful products: Impactful products solve customer problems. By meeting and exceeding consumer expectations, products can acquire and retain more customers. A digital product strategy provides the framework for great products.
• Aids growth and sustainability : A product strategy framework transverses the product lifecycle from ideation to the market. Since data and research are key components of a digital product strategy framework, businesses can constantly evaluate performance, market trends, and consumer demands to iterate and optimize product performance.

A digital product strategy framework could be the difference between products that fail and products that thrive.

Steps to Creating a Digital Product Strategy

An effective digital product strategy must be meticulously and inclusively prepared. It must be premised on factors and variables from different stages of product development, including team members involved.

The steps to creating a digital product strategy include:

Research and Goal-setting

A product strategy is a framework for achieving goals for the product and the business. 

Thus, the team must establish clear goals and an overarching vision for the product cutting across the target market, the customer needs and challenges, the product vision, and anticipated revenue.

The goals should revolve around research – and data exploration – into the product, the customer, and the market. 

Competitor Analysis

A comprehensive digital product strategy framework should include an in-depth analysis of competitors in the same industry and market. 

By analyzing their products and propositions, companies can identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing products and use them as a benchmark for theirs.

User Research

Products that excel address customer needs. 

An ideal product roadmap revolves around well-conducted user research that unravels who the user is — the user persona , understanding their needs through market research, conducting interviews, and listing their pain points and desires in products. 

Also, user research lays the foundation for future product evolution as consumer preferences change, ensuring that products can be tweaked strategically.  

Product Positioning

A synergy of user research and competitor analysis helps determine the product-market fit and unique selling propositions.

With an in-depth comprehension of user needs and a grasp of market gaps, businesses can plug existing demands and communicate their value to customers.

Product positioning also ripples through every aspect of the product life cycle, from development to marketing

Implementation and Performance Tracking

With a digital product strategy in place, businesses can begin to implement an aligned and cohesive approach. Every team member should work towards the same vision while deploying an agile methodology that keys into emerging data and market changes

Furthermore, product teams must set out key performance indexes(KPI) to track and measure product growth and development. 

Implementing Digital Product Strategy with Low-code Plugin Solutions 

Creating a digital product strategy gives every business a competitive edge, but effective execution is the game-changer. 

To implement a digital strategy, businesses must consider different components of the product lifecycle, such as management, marketing, and technical development. Of the components of digital product strategies, managing technical proficiencies are often the most challenging.

Whether businesses are looking to create internal products for increased efficiency or establish new streams of income , low-code plugins are effective solutions to technical challenges in a product life cycle.

Low-code development tools accelerate product development. Also, they help create complete product strategy frameworks faster by reducing costs and research burdens. 

Businesses looking to create innovative products should ideally explore low-code plugins that enable them to move from idea to market successfully, and many of the low-code APIs available today can be easily integrated into existing digital platforms. 

Here is a list of some easily integratable, low-code APIs that your business can use. 

Airtime and Data Bundles APIs

Airtime has become a multi-purpose currency . It can be liquidated to cash, used for remittances , disseminated as an incentive, and distributed to multiple recipients simultaneously.

Airtime money transfer has become a crucial component of the global payments system , and with an ever-expanding market , more businesses can create digital products based on airtime services. Products they can build with an airtime API include: 

• Top-up services
• Cryptocurrency for airtime exchanges
• International mobile top-ups and remittances
• Wide-scale distribution for other companies

Similar to airtime are data bundles . Data bundles sales – locally and internationally – are a valuable add-on service to most businesses. Valued by mobile game studios, cryptocurrency companies , social media platforms , and digital research firms, data bundle APIs are low-code plugin tools that can be used to offer value to the market.

Digital Gift Card APIs

Digital gift card APIs are low-code tools that can accelerate the creation and development of an innovative and scalable product strategy. With the increasing demand for digital gift cards in an expanding gift card economy , businesses can serve a teeming market all year round by integrating a gift card API.

Uses of digital gift card APIs include:

• Reselling gift cards
• Incentivizing customers and increasing engagement
• Increasing marketing and sales conversions
• Processing payments

Bills and Utility Payments APIs

Tracking and keeping records of utility payments is difficult for customers and utility payment companies alike, opening a pathway for businesses to offer bill payment aggregator services through a utility payment API .

By offering convenient payment methods and processors for end-users and recipient businesses, businesses offer a digital product that is scalable, profitable, and impactful.

Final Thoughts

Digital product strategies are the architecture of successful products, and their successful execution is dependent on an aligned operation between managers, designers, engineers, and marketers

While technical requirements are most challenging, low-code plugin solutions are viable tools to circumvent complex product strategy and development processes, getting companies to plan, build and bring their product to market faster. 

Contact the Reloadly support team if you are interested in creating a scalable digital product with effective and easy-to-integrate low-code APIs. 

This might also interest you:

How to Buy Gift Cards in Bulk: A Reseller’s Guide

Bulk Visa Gift Cards for Employees: How to Easily Get Started

What is a Utility API? Benefits for Businesses and How to Integrate Them

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8 Steps to Creating and Launching Profitable Digital Products

You know you want to ... you know you need to ... so here's how..

A little over a year ago, I decided to take a shot at selling a digital product: I put together a collection of my columns and articles, created PDF and Kindle versions, and did a little marketing. (OK, I did no marketing aside from mentioning it in my bio.)

To my surprise it's sold tens of thousands of copies and, as icing on the revenue cake, helped me land a book deal with Penguin Random House.

But that doesn't make me an expert on creating and selling digital products--in fact, far from it.

But I know someone who is.

The following is a guest post from Ryan Robinson, an entrepreneur and marketer who teaches people how to create meaningful self-employed careers. (A version of this post was originally published on the blog at Selz, the easy-to-use online solution for creative entrepreneurs to sell what they make.)

Here's Ryan:

By now, you've probably seen how many entrepreneurs are creating extremely profitable businesses for themselves through a foundation of high-margin digital products.

Digital products like e-books, online courses, audio products, downloadable templates, software, etc., are increasingly attractive because of their low creation costs (your primary investment being your time and expertise) and inherently scalable nature.

However, with well over 300 million new websites being created each year, there's a staggering amount of competition to grab people's attention in just about every topic area you can think of. And as time goes by, it will only get more crowded.

Making money online is no longer a game of putting up some banner ads, implementing affiliate links, and taking sponsored content from your favorite brands. Sure, those are all viable monetization strategies, but that's not where the real money is going to be flowing in the future.

You need to be considering how you can sell digital products with your business. If you have a valuable skill set, think of ways you can package your services as do-it-yourself online courses. If you're an experienced designer, perhaps your more junior counterparts would be willing to purchase templates from you. If you're an expert in any field, I can guarantee there are people who will pay for an accelerated learning experience through digital guides and instructional videos.

To me, selling digital products is by far the most attractive online business. They're infinitely scalable once you create the products, you have almost zero associated costs for each unit you sell, and if you do a great job of promoting your products you'll be able to rank high in organic search results and bring in new customers at a very low cost.

In his seminal book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss writes, "Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate." Digital products have been the platform by which countless successful entrepreneurs have made a name for themselves.

Of course, like any business of true value, you will not achieve overnight success. You'll have to put in the hard work first. Here are my eight steps to launching profitable digital products:

1. Validate Your Digital Product Idea

I regularly speak about the importance of validating your business ideas, primarily because it's something I've failed so miserably at in the past. Think about it this way: There's no point in devoting all of your energy for days, weeks, or months to building a product that nobody actually wants.

There are thousands of self-published books on Amazon that have only sold a few copies, usually to the author's friends and family, because they're on an obscure topic that no sizable audience is interested in learning about.

Always research your market before you begin to create any digital content. I start with Google Trends and search for topics of interest around which I could viably produce digital content. Once you enter a specific keyword phrase, Google Trends will show you the popularity of that phrase over a defined period of time.

The next tool I go to, one which really helps me validate the potential success of a digital product, is the Google Keyword Planner, part of Google AdWords. This allows you to analyze the monthly search volume and projected competition on specific keyword phrases.

If you can find a combination of high demand and relatively low competition, this signals a great opportunity to create and sell products related to that keyword phrase--if you have the right strategy and can provide more value than the other alternatives out there.

Don't be afraid to ask for feedback as long as you're careful to make sure it comes from unbiased sources. The opinions of your friends and family don't often reflect 100 percent honesty.

Search online for relevant forums and social media groups, and check out these 6 best websites for unbiased feedback to get truly objective, real opinions.

2. Set Up a Waiting List

People love anticipation. Setting up a waiting list is also one of the best ways to validate your digital product idea, as you'll very quickly see how many people express interest by driving targeted traffic to your signup page.

It doesn't matter how good your product is if no one knows about it. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets, thus it's in your best interest to build up your list with potential customers.

I recommend beginning by creating a simple landing page on your website before you build anything related to your upcoming digital product idea. This will give you a way to test the waters with this product concept, start getting indexed by search engines, and prime your existing audience. Here's an example of a very simple landing page I used to test the validity of an online course on starting a business while working full-time.

If someone is interested enough in your online course concept, downloadable product, or service, to give you their email address, you know that there is a decent that they'll be interested enough to buy your digital goods once they're live.

3. Start Building Your Audience With Free Content

Once you have a landing page on your site ready to collect email addresses, you need to begin by giving reasons for people to go to that page and sign up.

Start with creating some high quality blog content for your site and building a targeted list of potential companies, brands, and influencers who may be interested in sharing your content with their audiences. The people on that list you create will also be great prospects for publishing guest posts that you know their audience is already primed for. I use BuzzSumo for identifying these distribution opportunities.

Guest posting has been by far the best driver of new traffic and waiting list signups to my digital content. Since you determined your niche in the first step of this process while validating your idea, now it's time to hunt out other, more successful, blogs that cover the same niche.

Analyze these blogs and pitch ideas to them for posts you could write. Make sure that your pitches are on topics similar to what they already cover, but not identical to pieces they've published before.

You'll have to make quite a few pitches before being accepted if you're just starting out with your online brand, but you'll eventually manage to land a few guest posts, and you can then use these as leverage to gain more. Check out this extensive guide to landing high value guest posts by Ramit Sethi.

Most blogs will allow you to have a short bio attached to your post, and some relevant contextual (non-spammy) links within your post.

Of course, you will want people on your list to keep you top of mind, so be sure to keep up with occasional new content on your own blog--shoot for at least one solid post a month.

One way you can help speed up the uptake of names to your list is to create a small digital product that you can use as a "free giveaway" in exchange for an email address, offer a pre-launch discount, or even access to a free webinar or coaching session.

4. Create Your Digital Product

Once you've built an email list or have a sizable social community (shoot for at least a few hundred to a thousand people), you should have a trickle of regular traffic to your website, which will warrant spending more time building your digital products and getting early feedback from your community.

The idea at this point is that you start shifting your emphasis away from guest posting and gradually move back towards improving the quality and frequency of posts on your website. You now have enough readers to justify writing more frequent posts, so focus on ranking for your target keyword phrases, bring visitors over to your waiting lists, and even pre-sell your online course. Check out this amazing case study from Bryan Harris on how he made over $220,000 on his course launch.

Whether you feel ready or not, it's time to start building. To many, this is the hardest part of the entire process--actually creating the digital product--simply because it's a very new experience at first. The important point to remember, though, is that once the material is created it can be reused over and over again.

You may find that your audience responds well to online courses. Nathan Barry has shared his experiences with building digital products, and he found that most audiences want you to teach them, if you're an expert on a topic. If you can teach people a skill they value, they're happy to pay for it. Consider trying paid webinars, group coaching sessions, and gated sections of your website with more detailed blog content as relatively easily implemented monetization options.

Lastly, look ahead during your creation process and consider exactly how you'll be selling those digital products from your website. Which tools will you be using to set up landing pages? Which will you use for collecting payments? Will you collect customer data? Where will you store order details? Be sure to try out Selz, which is designed specifically for this type of scalability.

5. Incorporate Feedback and Tweak Your Product

If you want to succeed with your digital products, you want them to evolve with your audience. Listen to your audience's feedback. It is far easier to upgrade a digital product than a physical product, and your customers will appreciate receiving updated versions. If they see you continually adding value to what they have purchased, they are far more likely to buy your next product.

If you are doing some form of online coaching or courses, I recommend running a beta group through your course first, and make it better while you're still in the creation phase of your course.

A pre-launch group will also give you the opportunity to have your students implement your strategies. This should give you some great testimonials to showcase on your landing page once you launch to the world.

When Teachable co-founder Conrad Wadowski set up his Profitable Course Idea class, his aim was to set up a course that allowed people to walk themselves through the process of developing their own online course. They can also upgrade to personal coaching at a higher price.

To make the course a success, he needed real people to test it out for him and see if it indeed provided the value they were looking for. That feedback would go on to improve the course and give him meaningful testimonials to use in his sales copy and as marketing points.

6. Install the Right Monetization Tools on Your Website

Once you get to the point where you can monetize your website, you're going to want your site to run as smoothly as possible. This means that you will need to add some tools.

If you operate a WordPress site, there are some essential plug-ins that'll make your life a lot easier. Here are a few of my favorites:

• OptimizePress is my favorite WordPress template. It's great for creating high quality landing pages, implementing new functionalities, and publishing blog content.
• Zippy Courses is a basic WordPress theme that'll power any online course and serves as a member site for your users. You'll physically host your course content in this gated community.
• Selz for WordPress is an awesome embeddable widget that allows you to sell digital products and process transactions directly on your own site.
• SumoMe, among other things, captures email addresses and helps you welcome these people into your community.
• KingSumo Headlines helps you optimize your headlines and gives you a better chance of learning what types of headlines and content resonate most with your audience.
• AddThis provides clear social share buttons on each post to encourage people to share your pages and posts on their social media channels.

7. Target and Involve Strategic Launch Partners

You should make your digital product launch a big event. It'll get your audience excited, get you motivated, and the hype will bring you both higher conversion rates and more new customers, I guarantee it.

The more you can do to involve other influencers, brands, and bloggers in your space, the better. Imagine your outreach if you can partner with someone who has a substantially larger audience than yours, and they're interested in the same topics.

If you can manage to partner with somebody else in your industry who can promote your product launches (typically for an affiliate commission fee per sale), it's a win-win situation for both of you.

8. Launch to Your Audience and Expand From There

Launching your digital product is only the beginning, all over again. This is a brand new starting point, which requires a totally new focus on your activities. From here, you can scale everything upwards.

You'll want to set up a sequence of emails to build anticipation with your existing audience. This is one of the primary reasons you invest the time in building an email list in the first place. Focus on scheduling at least three to six emails that function in three strategic phases:

• Showing your audience the problem
• Agitating the problem
• Delivering them the solution (your digital product)

Once you've launched the digital product to your personal community, it's time to move outward and pick back up with your guest blogging (about topics related to your new product), onboard more affiliates with similar audiences, and continue blogging and creating more great content on your website with the goal of bringing in more organic traffic.

Now would also be the time to dabble with paid advertising on Facebook and Twitter, and even selling directly from your Facebook page, if you have a sizable social community, which will help increase your conversion rates.

Once your digital products are released into the wild, you'll start to see which channels are driving in more new customers for you. You could find that guest posting more often than publishing on your own site is a better utilization of time. Perhaps running Facebook ad campaigns turns out to be highly profitable.

Continue testing, learning, and multiplying your success until you're ready to start building your next digital product, based on the needs your new audience has.

Then, it's time to start the process all over again.

A refreshed look at leadership from the desk of CEO and chief content officer Stephanie Mehta

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Digital Product Creation Best Practices

This article is focused on digital product creation best practices  so that you’re ready to hit the ground running.

We are going to highlight how creating digital products in strong, evergreen markets should always be your main focus  when deciding what types of products to create or the topics you cover.

Evergreen  means that your market will continue to be in demand for years to come.

This would include topics like weight loss, relationship, and self-help, breaking free from habits like over-eating and smoking, credit repair, building a business, and so much more.

Evergreen + Problem Solving

This is so important because by   focusing your attention on creating  only evergreen digital products , you never have to worry that your content will become outdated or ineffective.

Because while some of the tools and resources featured in your content may need to be updated as new ones become available, the heart of your content will never go out of style, or out of date.

In addition, you should always focus each digital product on  problem-solving.

Problem-solving products are not only far easier to sell, but they serve a clear purpose. This makes it easy to identify and connect with your audience and to  create highly-targeted marketing campaigns.

Problem-solving digital products often follow a similar format. This “paint-by-number” approach makes it fast and easy to create winning products without creating an entire outline yourself.

For example, with a digital product geared towards solving one specific problem , you would likely begin by creating content in a “how-to” guide format that takes a systematic, step-by-step approach.

These products are fast and easy to create because your main job is to simply break down the information/steps and organize them so that your readers or students can follow along. If you are interested in learning more about fast and easy digital product creation ...

Check out this post https://promotelabs.com/blog/digital-products-done-right/

And now let's talk about how you can create an unlimited number of evergreen, how-to-style products in a matter of minutes—without having to create them yourself!

The Ultimate Product Creation Shortcut

Would it surprise you to discover that many of the top digital product marketers didn’t actually create the content that makes them the most money?

It’s true;  many of the digital products you love weren’t created by the brands that sell and promote them.

They were created by other people—freelance writers, developers, designers, etc.

Does this make those brands imposters? Frauds?

Not at all!

Even the most seasoned author  may occasionally hire a ghostwriter to complete a story or a project.

In fact, countless celebrities have turned to seasoned ghostwriters to write their autobiographies and memoirs—many of whom were able to land themselves on the New York Times Bestselling lists.

Sure, the story was theirs —as well as the ideas, perhaps even the outline, but the work itself was brought to life by someone else.

And Hollywood icons aren’t the only ones raking it in with ghostwriters.

Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Liam Fleming, and Michael Crichton are just a few bestselling authors in million-dollar genres who have used ghostwriters.

Did you know Tom Clancy, James Patterson, Liam Fleming, and Michael Crichton are just a few bestselling authors in million-dollar genres who have used ghostwriters? Learn more

After all, there are only so many hours in the day ( and a never-ending to-do list ahead of us ), and let’s face it—sometimes our creative well runs dry, or we lack the skills needed.

Just know that there’s nothing wrong with seeking help from someone with a fresh perspective or a bounty of creative goodness that they’re willing to share.

Of course, you can approach outsourcing as an “all in” or “partial” type of thing; it’s entirely up to you and what you’re comfortable with.

For example, perhaps you know your strength is in creating the outline for your digital products, but you feel you lack the skill to bring those ideas to life. Perhaps you aren’t a wordsmith, but you want your digital products to shine.

To accomplish this, you could create a solid, detailed outline and then hire a highly-skilled freelance writer to take that “blueprint” and transform it into a high-quality digital product.

That way, you still had a hand in its creation, and played an integral part in the process.

Or, perhaps you want to work on a few modules of a course, but you want to bring in an expert to cover more ground and help you free up your time. The point is that y ou can utilize a freelancer's skills in any way you wish and as much or as little as you need.

Best Practices For Outsourcing Digital Product Creation

Here are a couple of guidelines when outsourcing your digital products:

Create an outline or, at the very least, a summary.

You’ll want to be clear with your expectations and make it easy for your freelancer to bring your ideas to life.

One of the easiest ways to do that is by creating an outline that details your project, as well as the intended audience, preferred writing style, and the overall tone.

The more detailed you are, the easier it will be for your freelance to understand what you’re looking for and deliver the highest-quality product possible.

Interview Several, Hire One

When you’re new to outsourcing, the best approach is to keep it simple.

Interview a handful of freelancers so you get a clear idea as to the available talent and can browse through an array of portfolios and work history to find the perfect match. Then, hire just one.

You can hire additional freelancers later, but limiting yourself to working with just one when you’re starting out will ensure you don’t bite off more than you can chew.

You'll be able to manage the project, be readily available easily should your freelancer need you, and see one complete project through before starting the next.

Protect Your Brand

You'll want to consider having both an  NDA  (Non-Disclosure Agreement) and a  Ghostwriter-For-Hire  agreement created that your freelancer can digitally sign using a service like:  https://www.HelloSign.com  or  https://go.DocuSign.com

These important documents will help protect your brand and your projects, ensuring your freelancers never share pertinent information with future clients or use your work in their public portfolios. If you want to learn more about brand building we have a great book available here>> https://promotelabs.com/brand/ Next up... Digital product creation can be more than just making an outline and going from there. It can be something you create from a podcast or an interview!

Turning Conversations into Cash

Now we’re going to take a close look at one of the fastest and easiest ways  you can  create bestselling digital products  just by having conversations with thought-leaders and influencers in your market.

You see, people will always tune in to hear from experts. They trust their guidance and knowledge and understand the value of their wisdom and experience.

So, consider how much attention you’d get if you were to create a digital product that’s based on an in-depth conversation with an expert in your niche!

And don’t worry, you don't have to be an authority in your niche to successfully interview someone who is.

In fact, that's the entire point of contacting experts in your niche and asking for them to share 20-30 minutes of their time. Of course, you’ll want to offer them a reason for giving you their time—after all, their time truly is money.

And remember, compensation can come in many forms, so even if you’re just starting out in building your audience and you don’t have a lot of traffic or exposure to offer, you can still find something of value to offer.

And keep this in mind:

Just because they are experts on the subject matter doesn't mean they are  widely known  experts.

Many people have extensive insight on a topic but don’t own a website, a product of their own, or even know how to begin marketing their knowledge to the world.

This is where you could bridge that gap between your growing customer base and the expert. It would be a win-win for everyone involved.

So again, you don’t have to target the top influencers in your niche trying to land an interview—in fact, that’s probably more struggle than it’s worth.

Instead, look for people with experience and knowledge, or perhaps they simply have a different perspective to share but who aren’t prominently positioned in your market and ask to pick their brain.

You might be surprised just how easy it is to connect with people who have a lot of knowledge to share!

But before you set out to interview an expert in your market, you’ll want to have a plan in place. This includes choosing one specific topic.

That way, you can come up with interesting interview questions that you know your audience is desperate to hear without losing focus.

It also makes the entire interview process more manageable when you ask a handful of direct, themed questions, all geared towards solving one specific problem or addressing one central area.

This is when market research becomes so important. You’ll want to spend time analyzing your market, studying trends in commonly asked questions, and identifying problems in your niche.

All this valuable data will help you form the questions and entire structure of your conversation and interview with your experts—and you’ll be sure to hit a home run with your audience because you’ll know, with certainty, what their top questions are.

Product Creation Can Build Your Brand!

Partnering with experts allows you to “borrow” creditability.

Just by networking with someone that your audience may already know and trust will help you solidify your brand and position yourself so that you too are soon recognized an authority in your market.

Did you know that partnering with experts allows you to “borrow” creditability. Learn More in this article...

Interviewing Tip:

Write down your questions and read them aloud before the interview.

Make sure your questions sound natural and are worded so that there's little chance for your expert to be confused by the question or to go off track.

And here’s another tip:

You always want your questions to be open-ended so that your expert can elaborate on their answer. Avoid questions that require a simple "yes" or "no” so you can keep the conversation flowing.

Even if your interview is taking place through email, you want to give them clear direction with the questions you ask, ensuring that they fully understand your question. This will prevent miscommunication or the need for further clarification.

At the same time, you should get comfortable asking your expert to clarify points, if necessary, or to expand on topics in the event you are concerned that your readers might require additional information. If you love the information in this article then you should check out The Rapid Digital Products  course, available at  https://promotelabs.com/rdp/ ,  it reveals a foolproof system to getting established experts in any niche to create products for you—without ever having to pay them!

This course also reveals the  exact strategies  used by top creators to create bestselling digital products—and all without having to invest a lot of time or money. Thanks for reading!

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How to Solve Problems with Digital Products

How to create digital products and become an expert problem solver .

The best way to ensure continued sales and long-term customer retention is to frame yourself as an expert. When people need information or tips on how to do something, they always turn to an expert they follow. You can become that expert by sharing what you know with your audience and focusing on their problems. And this isn’t hard to do at all.

Harness Your Inner Expert

Whether you realize it or not, you are already an expert. If you're running any kind of business, you know how to do things that your audience doesn't. You've spent the last X number of years immersed in whatever it is you do while your audience members have been immersed in whatever they do. So, the key is to get in touch with your inner expert.

Ask yourself:

• What do you know that your audience doesn't?
• What are you good at?
• What do people often ask you about?
• What are your natural strengths?
• What things have you spent the last few years building up experience i

You just need to match this natural expertise with the problems of your audience, and then offer a solution using what you know.

Get to Know Your Audience

The better you know your audience, the better you'll understand their needs. When you match your products perfectly to your customer's needs, they'll think you have ESP. Just at the moment when they're struggling with their current problem or hurdle, you put out a product that walks them through an easy solution.

Solve Your Audience's Problems

Not all information products target specific problems. Some are purely informational. But if you can focus on a problem and solve it, you're assured sales and a strong following. Answer your customers' problems, relieve their pain, or teach them how to do whatever it is they need to do in order to get unstuck wherever they are.

Faster, Cheaper, Better

There is a good chance that someone else out there is helping your customers already with this problem. In fact, it's a certainty, and it's also likely that this is a big company with bigger resources than you have at hand. So, you can stand out within your market by offering a unique solution to the problem.

The best way to be unique is to help your audience do something faster, cheaper, and/or more efficiently. Everyone wants to save money. Everyone wants to make a problem disappear ASAP. Everyone is looking for a better way to do what they need to do.

Create Digital Products Through Rapid Fire Product Creation

The best strategy for information product creation is to produce a large number of small, tightly-focused products, rather than trying to create the be-all and end-all product for your topic. When you produce small products that each focus on and solve one single problem, you spread your expertise far and wide and create more opportunities for people to see and benefit from it.

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What is digital product management? A high-level guide

We encounter so many digital products every day. Apps and websites make things like managing groceries and calendars, tracking health, socializing with friends, learning skills, and many other things infinitely easier and more accessible.

Apart from that, the massive availability of data helps us make better decisions faster and enriches the customer experience. And we’re still in the infancy of this revolution; many more digital products will come along with advancing technology and disruption in the near, medium, and far future.

This article will serve as a high-level guide to the various processes, activities, skills, tools, and challenges inherent to the digital product management role, as well as a repository of valuable resources for further reading.

What is digital product management?

Digital product management is the process of overseeing and guiding the development, launch, and growth of digital products, ensuring that they align with user needs and business objectives.

A digital product manager is responsible for leading and executing the strategy, roadmap, and feature definition for offerings in a product-led company. They work closely with cross-functional teams, including design, engineering, and marketing, to plan, build, and launch products that create value for users and drive business growth.

The product manager’s role encompasses market research, user feedback analysis, feature prioritization, and performance monitoring to ensure the continuous improvement of their company’s digital offerings.

Digital product management means taking a customer-centric approach to solving problems by tracking metrics and KPIs as customers interact with your product. Based on insights gleaned from this data, it’s the product manager’s responsibility to develop a strategy that drives customer satisfaction, market share, and growth.

Responsibilities of a digital product manager

The core responsibilities that fall under digital product management include:

• Evaluating consumer insights — Product managers need to have a customer-driven mindset. It’s crucial to understand, interpret, and draw conclusions that can further improve your product from customer data, behaviors, and feedback
• Building wireframes and prototypes — It would be foolish to have your engineers start writing the code from day one without knowing what exactly you’re building. That’s why digital product managers and designers employ various techniques, such as wireframing , creating  mockups , and  prototyping , to test ideas quickly before building an actual product
• Formulating product strategy — A good product strategy starts with a high-level purpose that rarely, if ever, changes and narrows down to the day-to-day  agile execution of self-organizing teams , which will change often. The product strategy should motivate and provide clarity to your teams
• Working with engineers — Engineers turn mock-ups and plans into usable, functional products, making them one of the most important stakeholders in the digital product development process
• Managing customer experience — Customer experience refers to the holistic impression left on a customer through all their interactions with your product. This means the customer experience starts before the actual purchase, continues through the usage of the product, and covers the post-purchase phase as well
• Product roadmapping — A product roadmap helps communicate your product vision and strategy to the world. It’s one of the few tangible outputs a product manager can produce without going through the hands of designers or engineers
• Stakeholder communication —Contrary to popular belief, the PM is not the “CEO of the product”; they can’t just do whatever they want. More often than not, a you need buy-in from key players to get your initiatives moving
• Product ownership — The product owner role focuses on development and implementation through short-term activities and helping the product development team(s) understand what needs to be done. Basically, product ownership means setting up the team to create a reliable, scalable, secure, and maintainable solution
• Tracking metrics and KPIs — Without tracking metrics in product management, your product team would miss out on  meaningful insight into its customers . While surveys and  customer interviews  can provide a glimpse into a customer’s perception of the product, behavioral data can reveal trends and missed opportunities

The core objective of digital product management is to develop desirable, usable, effective, and reliable digital products. The more innovative, aesthetically pleasing, and functional, the more desirable the product. Usability, localization, and tolerance are crucial indictors of the reliability of a digital product. The product management function is responsible for ensuring the team takes these considerations into account throughout each stage of the product development lifecycle .

What does a digital product management process look like?

The digital product management process is linear and straight. The major stages of any digital product management process should include communicating with stakeholders, collecting customer inputs, and accelerating delivery speed to save time and money.

Most product management processes and frameworks incorporate popular methodologies such as agile , scrum , Kanban , iterative development , lean , and more to optimize product development and management operations.

No matter which philosophy you embrace, most digital product management processes involve the following activities:

• Customer feedback and user research — During this stage, product managers define user personas , seek to understand customer pain points, needs, and wants, and assess the customer journey to learn as much as possible about the ideal customer profile . The base of analysis is both qualitative and quantitative
• Wireframing and prototyping — Create a schematic illustration of the digital product’s overall concept based on the customer feedback and user research done in the previous stage. Start with a low-fidelity prototype and gradually create higher-fidelity prototypes as the development process progresses
• Prioritization — At this process stage, PMs align available resources with the prioritized features. Prioritization helps digital product managers accelerate the turnaround time to ship products and also informs the development and evolution of the product roadmap
• Development — At the programming stage, developers continuously collaborate with the product management function to define specifications and acceptance criteria . In addition, the development team determines how to tackle the product backlog through sprint planning
• Quality assurance (QA) — The quality assurance phase is an important part of digital product management. Nowadays, the QA phase is incorporated throughout the development phase in a process called test-driven development (TDD), which rectifies bugs and issues in the beginning and sanitizes the product quality.
• Launching and scalability — At this stage, digital products are launched incrementally , which provides the base to scale up the product. Digital products are data-driven, and launching in increments helps you refine the product based on customer feedback as you go. The minimum viable product (MVP) concept further supports the incremental product delivery approach
• Data and analytics — Digital product management is a data-driven function; massive troves of product analytics inform decisions at every stage of the process. The deep insights of research, customer and behavioral data, product usage insights, and QA data help digital product managers ensure positive outcomes

Managing the product lifecycle

Digital products are not physical products; they can be accessible via the internet and are thus easy to deliver to customers. Digital products are easy to manage, update, evolve, and scale based on customer inputs.

Furthermore, many digital products can understand customer behavior based on how they interact with the product. By accessing these behavioral aspects, PMs can continuously improve the product based on these valuable inputs throughout the product lifecycle.

The product development lifecycle (PDLC) consists of five main stages :

• Conceptualization
• Development

Each stage has its own set of sub-steps, with ideation and conceptualization focusing on generating and validating ideas, designing and development involving planning, iteration, and technical implementation, and delivery encompassing launch plans and marketing activities .

Throughout the PDLC, the product manager plays a crucial role in facilitating discussions, encouraging creativity, and gathering expertise at each stage to plan and execute products that are both valuable to end-users and suitable for the market. The PDLC is distinct from the software development life cycle (SDLC) in that the PDLC is an overarching process focusing on the product as a whole, whereas the SDLC is a subset of the PDLC that concentrates on the technical implementation of product development.

The product development lifecycle helps product teams identify market needs and develop valuable solutions for customers quickly and at scale and emphasizes the significance of learning and iteration in agile product development.

Key skills for digital product managers

Apart from critical thinking, problem-solving, technical , and soft skills that are crucial to any role in a product-led company , the following skills and behaviors are crucial for digital product managers to define a clear vision and ensure optimal product outcomes.

A successful digital product manager is one who is:

• Customer-centric — Always prioritizing the needs and desires of the customers to drive product development and improvements
• Fact-based and data-driven — Basing decisions on empirical evidence and making data-informed choices to optimize product outcomes
• Team-oriented — Collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams and fostering a cooperative work environment to achieve shared goals
• Respectful of others’ expertise and skills — Valuing input from team members and leveraging their unique strengths to create the best possible product
• Outwardly confident — Demonstrating confidence in decision-making and inspiring trust among team members and stakeholders
• Accountable — Taking responsibility for product success and failures, and using these experiences to learn and grow
• A good listener — Actively seeking feedback from team members, customers, and stakeholders, and incorporating insights to improve the product
• A selfless leader — Prioritizing the success of the product and team over personal accolades and fostering a supportive environment for growth

Tools, techniques, and metrics

Metrics and KPIs digital product managers track the team’s progress against defined goals and objectives .

The main advantage of tracking product metrics is to analyze, interpret, and hypothesize new features and capabilities to improve customer satisfaction. These quantifiable measures allow the business to track its success and keep the stakeholders, marketers, and product management team accountable, motivated, and well-equipped to make informed decisions, set goals, and solve problems.

The key strength of a digital product team lies in choosing a few key metrics to track and spending less time managing and more time acting upon the key results .

Product analytics encompasses a variety of tools, all aimed at helping you understand how people use your digital product. These tools all deliver something slightly different. For example:

• User behavior analytics tools  — Monitoring user behavior on websites or applications provides visibility into how people interact with your product, where they experience frustration, whether features are being used in the way you expected (or at all), and much more
• A/B testing tools  — Using A/B testing tools to evaluate how different feature updates, UI changes, and other tweaks to your product affect KPIs and user behavior can help inform product decisions and ensure you’re headed in the right direction
• Customer feedback tools — Collecting customer feedback through support chats, surveys , feedback forms, and other methods opens a direct line of communication between your team and your end users
• Data visualization tools  — Seeing data displayed visually can help you more easily identify trends and anomalies

So, how do you select the right product analytics tool to meet the diverse needs of different parts of your team? You need to think about what core features you need and what metrics you want to measure.

A product analytics solution like LogRocket can help you deliver on your goals and objectives by providing insights into user needs and behaviors, which product features your users are using (or not using), what new features to prioritize or existing features to improve, and more.

Google Analytics is another valuable tool for calculating and visualizing digital product success.

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Challenges of digital product management

To build a successful digital product, you need to understand your users’ needs thoroughly. Technology, innovation, and disruption are key pointers that make products successful and popular among customers.

Some of the top challenges associated with creating and launching digital products include:

Understanding user needs

Identifying the product vision, team alignment, communication.

A digital product manager has to think like a customer by putting themselves in the customer’s shoes and developing an emotional connection. Regardless of great features and disruptive technology, users’ needs always come first. Hence the digital product team needs to prioritize the user’s needs and start by building a simplified version of the product that is easy to use and consume.

Take notable failed products like Microsoft Zune, Apple Newton, BlackBerry Storm, and Fire Phone, for example. Despite being innovative and backed by top technology firms, these products fell flat, in part due to a failure to understand the user’s needs.

Before you build a digital product, you need to communicate the product vision to the team . The product vision should convey why you are creating the product and what objectives the team must accomplish.

Defining a clear product vision helps ensure that everyone is working toward the same goals, allowing for better decision-making and prioritization throughout the development process.

The agile setup of shipping the product is conducive to speeding up the time to market. As a result, agile teams are often working under tight deadlines .

In addition, keeping alignment during the short sprint cycle is typically challenging to adapt to the new changes and information daily.

To overcome this challenge, the digital product team needs to maintain frequent communication, adopt a flexible mindset, and work collaboratively to adapt to changes and ensure everyone is on the same page.

Communication is key, and it should be seamless. An excellent product concept can fall apart without clear communication among the team, stakeholders, and leadership.

Starting from pitching a great idea to getting the buy-in of leadership, digital product management is a game of stellar communication. You should establish regular check-ins, provide clear guidelines, and use the appropriate tools to keep everyone informed and engaged.

Remaining competitive means constantly innovating on business models . With strict deadlines, multiple stakeholders, and endless tasks, digital PMs are often swamped with tons of responsibilities and forget their directive to embrace innovation culture.

To foster a culture of innovation, digital product managers should encourage experimentation, provide opportunities for continuous learning, and regularly review and evaluate new ideas and approaches to problem-solving.

Great products are driven by a digital product manager with a clear product vision. Starting from ideating to building, and launching, and managing a live product, the foresight of a PM plays an important role throughout the product lifecycle.

At the end of the day, the quality and success of your product depends on the team’s ability and commitment to identifying, anticipating, and addressing users’ most pressing needs and pain points.

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Design Thinking: How to Develop a New Product that Solves a Problem

Did you know that 90% of startups fail within the first 120 days ? As sobering as that statistic may be, it’s not said to discourage you. Quite the opposite. My hope is that by acknowledging the risks, you’ll be encouraged to implement the strategies necessary to buck this staggering trend. And you can! So how do you avoid being in the 90%? By designing a product that solves your customers’ problem.

This article will guide you through the process of product development using what’s known as “design thinking.” How will you solve your audience’s problems? What’s the relationship between a person, that person’s problem, and your product-solution? Learn all about what design-thinking is and how you can use it to create a product your customers can’t resist.

Let’s dive in.

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The Principles of Design Thinking

When it comes to design thinking, the “design” isn’t about website graphics or pretty animations. In design thinking, “design” is everything related to the person your end product is meant for, i.e., your customer.

Design thinking is a way of framing and directing the process of new product development. As a framework, design thinking adheres to a set of principles:

• Human first . Design thinking is always about people. A quality product solves a problem for the audience and fits into the context for which it’s intended, e.g., a person’s commute, etc.
• Bidirectionality . There are two types of thinking required: divergent (quantitative) and convergent (qualitative). First, we work on the objective number of problems to identify or ideas we’ll need to create, and then we use our best judgement to choose the right ones to address.
• It’s okay to make mistakes . Design thinkers accept their mistakes and do not hesitate to make them. And often, that mistake will lead to a  break-through idea or an extraordinary decision.
• Prototyping . It’s not a product but something that explains how the product works. It can be a short critical essay , a chart, graphics, a  presentation , or just a  hand-drawn picture on a whiteboard. The main thing is to explain what turns this product into a solution.
• Test as soon as possible . When a prototype is ready, give it to someone else for feedback. Improve it. Then make it again. Testing and analyzing a prototype is cheaper than creating a first series for retail, and it protects your product from major failures after launch.
• Design thinking never ends . So you’ve used the method of design thinking and developed the perfect product. Is that it? Far from it! First, everything can be improved. Second, your solution can become dated over time. That’s why savvy design thinkers periodically repeat the design thinking process to ensure they’ve got the best possible product for their audience’s problem at any given time.

Design thinkers don’t believe that every Jack has his Jill, aka “there’s a customer for every product.” They act differently: do research , define customer pain points , and develop a  product-solution for each one.

For your e-commerce business to succeed, you can’t be like the parent who cooks bad food and forces their children to eat it just because they made it. And some entrepreneurs are; they launch websites just because they have something ready to sell, and they never consider whether or not users actually want to buy what they’re selling. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. The only thing that matters is whether your audience likes it.

Long story short, develop products with design thinking in mind .

Design Thinking in the Process of Product Development

As a method, design thinking consists of  six stages : empathy, defining, ideation, prototyping, testing, and implementing. If you do everything right, you’ll get a ready prototype of your e-commerce product that will solve your user’s problem.

So, here’s how to develop a new product with design thinking.

Stage 1: Empathy

• Type of thinking : divergent, quantity-oriented.
• Time required : about 15 minutes per person, from 10 representatives of your target audience.
• Equipment : a notepad, a pen.
• Additional tools : a voice recorder, a video recorder.

Empathy is about understanding your customers and their lives — knowing what they do, think, and feel. It’s not about conducting sitting at a desk and hunting around the internet for ideas. It’s about actual communication with your would-be customers to determine if there’s a problem and how you might solve it.

In practice, this stage is best implemented through interviews.

Directly observe what users do, ask what they want, and try to understand what might motivate or discourage them from using your product. The goal is to get enough information that you begin to empathize with your target audience.

It helps to create a buyer persona and a  customer journey map , as well as examining the correlation between a customer, his problems, and your product (or your competitors’ product if yours isn’t ready yet).

During the empathy phase, ask about your user’s latest experience related to the problem you think your product solves. Try to reveal as many pain points as possible. Imagine yourself as a doctor diagnosing a disease: the more symptoms you find, the better your diagnosis, and ultimately, the better the treatment you’ll give.

Lifehack: Buy coffee coupons or Amazon gift cards, and offer them to your audience as incentive for the interview.

Let’s say you sell smartphones. So you need to know why a person needs a smartphone, how they choose which smartphone to buy, and how they search websites to find it.

First, ask them about smartphones:

• What do you use your smartphone for?
• What do you see as the advantage of a smartphone over a regular phone?
• How often do you use your smartphone?
• What kind of problems do you have when using your smartphone?
• What problems would you like to solve with your smartphone but can’t?

After that, ask about their latest experience with buying a smartphone online:

• How do you buy devices?
• What problems did you have when shopping online?
• How did you buy your latest smartphone? What did you like and dislike about it?
• What was your #1 problem while buying a smartphone online?

If the person you’re interviewing is one of your current customers, ask about their experience using your website:

• Could you please tell us about your latest purchase experience with our store?
• What device did you use? Did you find us on Google or social media?
• Did you know which product to buy beforehand, or did you search our website for ideas? How long did it take to decide that you wanted to buy this product?
• Did you talk to our online consultant? How would you rate that communication?
• What problems did you face when buying in our online store? Is there anything we should improve or keep doing?

Sometimes customers lie: not because they necessarily want to lie, but because of their inflated ego or  self-doubt. So, ask and observe. Learn to see where words fail to meet actions. Keep your questions open , avoid binary responses, and ask plenty of “Why?” questions to mine for more information.

In short, get to the heart of the problem. Find out something about your customers that they don’t know about themselves. Become like a psychologist who learns everything about your clients’ lives, and know when to stay silent to make sure they have plenty of time to speak. In other words, observe, engage, and listen . This is the secret to creating an  exceptional customer experience .

Stage 2: Defining

• Type of thinking : convergent, quality-oriented.
• Time required : about 40 minutes to analyze your collected data plus a few minutes to define the problem statement.
• Equipment : the data, a notepad, a pen.
• Additional tools : a laptop, a whiteboard.

If you did everything right in the empathy stage, your notebook should be full of problems, needs, and comments from your audience by this point. If you interviewed 10-15  people, you should have enough data to highlight their common problems. If you interviewed more than 20-30  people, you’ll also be able to segment those audiences a bit more to define commonalities between people of similar demographics and psychographics.

There’s no need to highlight every possible segment: two or three should be fine. Define their points of view to understand them better, and this will help you define your problem statement (a short statement of the problem your product will address).

Based on what you’ve learned about your customers and their context, define the challenge you’ll be addressing. To do that, you’ll unpack the observations you gathered at the empathy stage.

Take all the data you got from interviews and create a table — like the one shown in the image below — to develop a  buyer persona : name, age, gender, contacts, occupation, interests, etc.

After you’ve done this for all your interviewees, determine what they have in common and segment them into different groups based on those connections. If a substantial percentage of interviewees seem to have the same problem, see what unites those people.

Then you’ll take the problem most of your audience shares, and start generating ideas to solve it with the help of your new product development process.

To define the problem, consider HMW (How Might We…?) questions.

Stage 3: Ideation

• Time required : about 10 minutes.
• Additional tools : a set of techniques for brainstorming (mind maps, sketches, screens).

Now that you know the audience and their problems, it’s time to generate the broadest range of possibilities to solve them that would enable you to  grow your business .

The ideation stage isn’t about finding the right idea just yet. It’s about brainstorming and creating as many ideas as possible. Here, you’ll sketch out different ideas, mix and remix them, rebuild others’ ideas, etc.

The first 5-10  ideas that come to mind during a brainstorming session are usually boring or duplicative of others. For effective marketing brainstorming, consider a  7-10-17  strategy.

Follow these 7 rules:

• Organize a  comfortable workspace for brainstorming.
• Appoint a person who’ll write down all the ideas.
• In case of a  group-wide brainstorming, organize a  warm-up so all participants can get to know and get comfortable with each other.
• Pinpoint the problem.
• Don’t rush the product development process.
• Don’t gather more than 10 people for a brainstorming session.
• Encourage each member of the group to share their ideas.

Avoid these 10 mistakes:

• A brainstorming session with no topic.
• A team with no motivation to create something remarkable.
• A team with no  problem-solving skills.
• A team of people with similar mindsets: invite people with different backgrounds, not marketers only.
• A team of people with competing projects.
• Too many breaks during a session.
• Clinging to traditional and  already-developed solutions.
• Being too serious during a brainstorming session.
• Calling for rapid response.
• Approving ideas in the moment.

Consider 17 brainstorming techniques when you develop products: travel in time, teleport, reshaping yourself, assuming different roles, filling the gaps, spying, switching brains, choosing the best ideas, building mind maps, searching for help, playing sports, no stops, a SWOT analysis, criticizing, unlimited resources, a random factor, exaggerating.

Stage 4: Prototyping

• Time required : about 40 minutes with a good layout.
• Equipment : use whatever you need.

You’ve developed a bunch of ideas to solve a problem during brainstorming. Now it’s time to build a tactile representation of those solutions to ask for feedback from your audience.

During this stage, your goal is to understand what components of your idea work and don’t work. Create a solution prototype (a new landing page , product descriptions, category, lead magnet, etc.) to see what customers think of it. The prototype is an explanation of how the product will work.

When building a prototype, don’t spend too long on it. Your task here is to build an experience and let users practice it as soon as possible. They’ll experience the prototype and share their thoughts on it. (Opening and  follow-up questions will help you gather feedback.)

Change the prototype based on the  feedback you receive , and then observe users’ reactions. Each prototype of your product gets you closer to the final solution.

Create several prototypes of your product. It can be an upgrade of an existing product, an additional service, or an entirely new product.

Oftentimes, your audience will reject the ideas that you initially liked. And that’s what makes the design thinking method so valuable for new product development: it helps you avoid products that could have been expensive failures without the right feedback.

Stage 5: Testing

• Time required : minimum of 60 minutes per person, 10+ representatives of your target audience.
• Equipment : prototypes, user feedback, a notebook, a pen.
• Additional tools : a voice recorder, a video camera. It’s also good to conduct your test in a place where the product will be used in real life.

The testing phase is about gathering customer feedback on your prototype. You show them something tangible and ask, “How about this?” Even if a user likes the idea of the product, they may not consider its prototype the best.

If possible, recreate the environment where consumers will use the product. If it’s a new café design, you can use 3D models, turn on background noise that might be heard in a café, and bring coffee and croissants to the test. If it’s a new kitchen machine, you can rent an apartment for a day and conduct tests there.

Record everything your participants do during the test. Next, analyze your participants and identify patterns: and remember, their behavior can often tell you more than their words.

Your prototypes can offer varying levels of detail. Develop your work plan so you’ll have time to conduct several tests. First, show drawings of your new product; then its 3D-model prototypes; and finally a working prototype and your ready-to-sell product.

Let’s say you sell clothes. You create your first prototype for a new pair of jeans, and after introducing it to your audience, you discover that a select segment would like jeans specifically for disco dancing.

So, your next prototype is a drawing of your jeans with a new light-emitting weave to make customers stand out on the dance floor. Your second audience likes these new jeans more, but wants you to make the weave bigger. You take this recommendation into account and create a  corresponding 3D model of your jeans to show them from all sides.

Now your audience says they would like to see weaves that wrap around the entire jean. So, you do that. They ask to make the weaves on the back smaller. You do that too. Now you’ve fine-tuned the prototype enough that you create a working sample for your audience to try on.

They worry about buttons, a zipper, and whether the weaves would be wiped out during washing. So you change the buttons and the zipper, and give them the jeans for a month to test by washing them every two days. Then you gather their feedback, make tweaks, and repeat this final stage as needed until the desired product is achieved.

Stage 6: Implementing

As the most crucial step of design thinking, “ implementing ” is the key to successfully launching your new product.

The final stage of design thinking is about staffing, funding, and mapping out your e-commerce product timeline. This is where you’ll determine milestones for your solution and develop a  funding/long-term revenue strategy to grow your business.

Points to consider:

• Any costs you’ll incur, including staff and marketing.
• Choosing reliable funding sources.
• The number of sales required to hit your revenue goals. (How will you create repeat business? Will you introduce new versions of your product later?)
• Your long-term goals. (What will happen with your product in five years?)

Note: The product design process never ends. You’ll ideate and test your product again and again to deliver the best possible solution and encourage your customers to keep returning for more purchases in the future.

Designing E-commerce Products: What’s Next?

So what have we learned?

With design thinking, you’ll create and refine products that solve real problems for your target audience. And solving problems means more profit, happier customers, and lifelong fans.

Harness your new design thinking skills to  start creating products that sell .

From fresh-baked cakes to digital art. Sell what you sell with Ecwid. Learn more

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• What is a Product Prototype
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• Why You Should Sell Unprofitable Products

Sell online

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About the author

Lesley Vos is a professional copywriter and guest contributor, currently blogging at Bid4Papers.com . Specializing in data research, web text writing, and content promotion, she is in love with words, non-fiction literature, and jazz. Visit her Twitter @LesleyVos to say hi and see more works.

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Digital Economy

3 challenges to digital innovation and how to overcome them

May 25, 2021

Digital transformation doesn’t mean just adopting new digital technologies — it requires drawing on them to create many types of business value, a continuous process with multiple initiatives underway at once. Yet launching even one successful digital initiative can be tough, especially for large, well-established companies.

To overcome that challenge, companies need to become “serial innovators,” developing the capacity to engage in multiple fast-paced experiments, according to studies from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research . 

Serial innovation better positions companies to develop digital offerings, that is, revenue-generating solutions that leverage digital technologies to address customer needs, according to CISR research scientist Nils Fonstad and research affiliate Martin Mocker .

Companies hoping to launch digital offerings need to find out what customers want, what customers are willing to pay for, and what technology will work and prove economically viable, Mocker said. This means trying lots of different things.

“They’ve got to experiment, and many of these experiments will fail,” Mocker said.

Assuming a 90% failure rate, a company that’s only working on three initiatives isn’t likely to have many success stories.

In a recent case study , the researchers outlined how Munich Re , a 140-year-old insurance company headquartered in Germany, created a systematic way to overcome three main challenges — funding, expertise, and technological capabilities — in order to continuously test and develop digital initiatives.

At Munich Re, generating more and better digital offerings required creating dedicated resources, adjustments in leadership, and shifting company mindset. As of 2020, the company had launched more than 70 digital offering initiatives, with 10 on the market or about to be released. Several have led to new sources of revenue.

Munich Re was in a strong, established business position when it launched its innovation initiative, which counterintuitively made it hard to create momentum to make a change, said Dirk Heiss, head of digital platforms at Munich Re. But the company wanted to be proactive in the relatively slow-changing insurance industry.

“Otherwise, we’re the incumbent who will be attacked by new players,” he said.

Here’s how Munich Re created a systematic approach to serial innovation.

Know the three main challenges and how to overcome them

Munich Re, a company with nearly 40,000 employees, recognized that digital initiatives were often set back by challenges related to three key resources: funding, expertise, and technological capabilities. These are all critical resources, and common challenges for companies trying to launch multiple innovations, the researchers said.

After encountering these issues repeatedly, Munich Re came up with a systematic way to overcome each one.

Companies need to test digital initiatives to learn whether they are desirable, feasible, and viable enough to move forward. Risks include wasting money on innovations that won’t bring real benefits, or failing to ensure that promising projects receive enough funding.

To mitigate these risks, Munich Re created an innovation lab that provides funding for initiatives within the company. The lab aims to distribute 100 million euros annually (about $199 million in U.S. dollars) to about 30 initiatives. Employees can apply for a limited budget for an initiative through a relatively informal process by answering five questions. Funding has several stages, and if an initiative meets pre-determined goals, it becomes available for another, larger round of funding. The lab also provides mentoring and office space.

2. Expertise 

Digital innovation requires experts in technology, data analytics, and agile design thinking. But talent alone isn’t enough. The experts need to be able to overcome siloed decision-making and drive the initiative through development. At Munich Re, the IT department was focused on internal systems, so project leaders often turned to external contractors — who might not be available or don’t know the company as well — for digital initiatives.

To overcome this, Munich Re created a new unit within its information technology department called Business Technology, which is exclusively dedicated to innovation initiatives. The unit has experts including software developers, data scientists, and design thinking and agile coaches. Importantly, initiatives have dedicated dual leadership — one person from the business technology team to serve as chief technology officer for the initiative, and someone from the business side who serves in a CEO function. Having two complementary leaders as co-founders of an initiative ensures buy-in and support from different stakeholders.

3. Technological capabilities

Digital offerings often offer functions that users can’t find elsewhere. Yet companies can end up dedicating significant resources to developing technological capabilities that provide only basic functionality instead of a competitive advantage. Successful firms tend to create digital platforms that can be reused, but those platforms can be seen as burdensome tools, imposed by the company, that slow down innovation.

Because different digital offerings often share the same technology needs, Munich Re created a digital platform called Excite that is a repository of shared software components that can be used by people working on different digital offerings. Instead of mandating its use, Munich Re lets teams decide whether they want to use the new platform. Many do because developing these capabilities is expensive and time-consuming otherwise.

This method has been successful for his firm, Heiss said. For example, Munich Re’s recent partnership with Google to provide cyber insurance for Google Cloud was a product of its innovation protocol. 

“What we're trying to do is develop new technologies, develop new offerings, which were always linked back to our core business,” Heiss said. When working with a prominent company like Google, Munich Re needed its startup mindset, but also the grounding of its core business and its reputation. 

“We had the strength and the competence of Munich Re, combined with our digital offerings, that made that deal happen,” Heiss said.

A new approach to digital initiatives also required adjustments in leadership and company mindset.

Embrace a ‘test and learn’ approach

Moving from a few digital initiatives to serial innovation requires embracing what the researchers call a “ test and learn ” mindset.

In the past, companies might have had a long development process for a new initiative, and only once an offering went to market did the company learn whether customers wanted it and whether the company could scale the offering to meet demand, the researchers said.

The test and learn mindset gives teams the autonomy to try new things, the support to test these ideas in incremental ways, and mechanisms in place to evaluate whether they are worth pursuing.

“If they learn that in fact their effort merits the next round, the next stage in development, fantastic. Go for it,” Fonstad said.

Create internal resources and ensure employee buy-in

In the past, Munich Re and other companies looking to build digital initiatives often used outside corporate accelerators, worked with startup companies, or invested in new firms, which are all important options, Fonstad said.

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But these choices focus on external solutions and don’t build internal capability. Munich Re listened to employees to find common challenges and then built useful services that projects could opt to use, rather than making them a requirement.

The digital platform, Excite, was a ready-made option available to initiatives. Pairing people from the tech and business side to work together on the project gave different departments a sense of ownership and a desire to see the project through. And the relatively simple funding process was more appealing to employees.

Heiss said about 80% of initiatives end up using the company’s innovation platform, especially when they realize how much is involved in bringing a product to market. But it’s ultimately an option.

“I’d rather see the services, the technologies, as more as an offering, not as, ‘If you want to do any projects you must use this,’” Heiss said. “Sooner or later, a lot of initiatives come back to me and say ‘I would like to leverage your facilities, your infrastructure, your services.’”

For Munich Re, building internal resources also helped them gain a competitive advantage against startups and other companies.

“That’s part of what Munich Re is learning, is how to innovate as an incumbent in ways that no one else can,” Fonstad said.

Focus on value  

At Munich Re, digital initiatives are expected to pursue new sources of revenue by addressing five domains that are strategic to the company: cyber insurance, Internet of Things industries, digital cooperation models, digitally augmented underwriting and claims, and mobility. Employees are encouraged to pitch ideas that meet those targets.

Whatever their line of business, company leaders should be clear about how digital offerings will provide value for the organization, such as generating new services for new and existing customers.

Top management also needs to be clear about what success looks like.

“For example, revenue per product or service, do they anticipate that going up? Do they anticipate revenue per current customer going up? Do they anticipate generating new sources of revenue from new kinds of customers?” Fonstad said. “Those are all opportunities for digital offerings, and they need to be clear about how much of the company's efforts should go towards realizing that kind of value.”

Problem Solving: 10 Common Digital Marketing Issues and Their Effective Solutions

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing, navigating the intricate process requires a strategic and comprehensive approach. This article serves as a guiding beacon, offering a step-by-step masterclass in the intricacies of the digital marketing process.

From conceptualization to implementation, each step is dissected to empower marketers with the knowledge and skills needed for excellence in the dynamic online realm. Explore the nuances of audience targeting, content creation, analytics interpretation, and the latest tools to master the digital marketing journey and achieve unparalleled success in the digital sphere.

Table of Contents

Key takeaways:.

• Holistic Understanding: Gain a comprehensive understanding of the digital marketing process, from initial ideation to execution, ensuring a well-rounded approach to online promotion.
• Strategic Implementation: Learn to strategically implement digital marketing tactics, including audience targeting, content creation, and utilization of cutting-edge tools, for optimal results and campaign success.
• Adaptable Mastery: Acquire adaptable skills to navigate the ever-changing digital landscape, staying ahead of trends and technologies, and ensuring sustained excellence in the dynamic world of online marketing.

The Challenges of Digital Marketing

Navigating the ever-evolving realm of digital marketing comes with its own set of challenges.

In this section, we’ll dive into the obstacles marketers face in a crowded online landscape, the pursuit of high-quality leads, establishing a strong online presence, making sense of and leveraging data effectively, keeping up with rapid technological changes, striking a balance between organic and paid marketing strategies, maneuvering through social media algorithms, and managing negative online feedback.

Stay tuned as we unravel the complexities of digital marketing and explore potential solutions to these hurdles.

Competing in a Crowded Digital Space

To successfully compete in a crowded digital space, businesses need to implement a series of strategic steps in order to stand out and capture the attention of their target audience. One of these steps is to identify a unique selling proposition (USP) that helps differentiate them from their competitors.

Additionally, businesses must create high-quality and engaging content that adds value to their target audience, as well as optimize their website and content for better visibility on search engines. Another effective strategy is to leverage various social media platforms to build a strong online presence and engage with the target audience.

Lastly, businesses should implement data-driven strategies to analyze and understand customer behavior and preferences. By incorporating these strategies into their digital marketing approach, businesses effectively compete in a crowded digital space and achieve their desired marketing goals.

Generating Quality Leads

Generating quality leads is definite for the success of any digital marketing strategy . To effectively generate high-quality leads, consider the following steps:

• Identify your target audience: Understand who your ideal customers are and create buyer personas to tailor your marketing efforts.
• Create valuable content: Develop content that provides value to your target audience and addresses their pain points .
• Optimize your website: Improve your website’s user experience and optimize it for search engines to increase organic traffic and attract qualified leads.
• Use lead magnets : Offer valuable incentives, such as ebooks , webinars , or free trials , to encourage visitors to provide their contact information .
• Utilize social media: Leverage social media platforms to engage with your audience, share valuable content, and drive traffic to your website.
• Implement email marketing : Build a strong email list and send personalized, targeted emails to nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel.
• Track and analyze your results: Use analytics tools to monitor your lead generation efforts, identify what’s working, and make data-driven optimizations.
• Provide excellent customer service : Deliver exceptional customer service to build trust with your leads and turn them into loyal customers.

Fact: According to recent statistics, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.

Building a Strong Online Presence

Developing a robust online presence is essential for businesses in the digital era. In order to establish an impactful online presence , companies should prioritize the following strategies:

1. Formulate a comprehensive marketing plan that encompasses techniques for optimizing your website, improving search engine rankings , and fostering a strong social media presence .

2. Craft compelling, high-quality content that resonates with your target audience , encouraging them to engage with your brand .

3. Employ digital marketing tactics like search engine optimization (SEO) , social media marketing , and influencer collaborations to expand your online reach.

4. Regularly analyze and evaluate your online performance using data analytics and reporting tools to identify areas that are improved.

5. Provide exceptional customer service and support across various online channels, cultivating trust and loyalty with your audience .

By implementing these strategies, businesses establish a solid online presence and effectively connect with their target audience .

Understanding and Utilizing Data Effectively

Understanding and utilizing data effectively is driven for digital marketers to optimize their strategies and achieve maximum marketing ROI. Here are some tips:

• Collect and analyze relevant data to gain insights into your target audience , their online behavior , and preferences .
• Use data visualization tools to present complex information clearly and understandably.
• Segment your audience based on their characteristics and behaviors to personalize your marketing messages.
• Track key metrics such as website traffic , conversion rates , and customer engagement to measure the success of your data-driven campaigns.
• Stay informed about industry trends and changes in search engine algorithms to adjust your digital marketing tactics accordingly.

Adapting to Continuous Technological Changes

Adapting to continuous technological changes is vital for achieving success in digital marketing. Marketers must stay informed about the latest advancements in digital platforms and trends in order to navigate this challenge.

They should be proactive in implementing new strategies and optimizing existing ones to keep up with changing consumer behaviors and preferences. This includes utilizing cutting-edge technologies and tools, such as marketing automation, data analytics, and search engine optimization techniques, to effectively reach a broader audience and maximize marketing return on investment (ROI).

By embracing change and continuously updating their digital marketing strategies, businesses position themselves ahead of the competition and effectively engage potential customers in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Balancing Organic and Paid Marketing Strategies

When it comes to digital marketing, achieving a harmonious balance between organic and paid strategies is vital for achieving success. Here are some key considerations to bear in mind:

• Organic strategies: These encompass techniques like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing . Their focus lies in creating valuable, relevant content that captivates and engages your desired audience.
• Paid strategies: This entails investing in advertising to boost visibility and broaden your reach. Paid strategies, such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads , enable you to directly target and connect with specific demographics.
• Benefits of organic strategies: These approaches yield long-term results, enhance brand credibility, and provide cost-effective means of attracting organic traffic.
• Benefits of paid strategies: These tactics offer immediate visibility, allow you to target specific demographics, and provide measurable outcomes.
• Challenges of balancing: Striking the right balance between organic and paid strategies are challenging due to limited resources and budgetary constraints. It requires identifying your goals, target audience, and the resources available.
• Integration: The optimal approach is to integrate both organic and paid strategies. Leverage organic methods to establish a robust foundation and enhance credibility, while employing paid strategies to amplify your reach and specifically target desired audiences.

Navigating Social Media Algorithms

Navigating Social Media Algorithms is a daunting task for digital marketers. However, with these strategies, you can overcome any challenges:

• Create compelling and relevant content that truly resonates with your target audience. By doing so, you can significantly increase visibility and expand your reach on various social media platforms.
• Strategically incorporate relevant hashtags to optimize your content’s discoverability and boost its reach.
• Drive audience engagement by encouraging them to participate through thought-provoking questions , exciting contests, or even showcasing user-generated content .
• Consistency is key! Make sure to post consistently and at optimal times when your target audience is most active on social media.
• Leverage analytics tools to track engagement and make necessary adjustments to your content strategy based on the data.
• Expand your reach by collaborating with influencers or micro-influencers who have an engaged audience that aligns with your target market.
• Investing in paid advertising is worth considering as it greatly enhances your visibility and helps you overcome any limitations imposed by the algorithm.
• Stay informed about platform algorithm changes and adapt your strategy accordingly to stay ahead in the game.

By implementing these effective strategies, you will navigate Social Media Algorithms with ease and ensure that your content reaches a wider audience, ultimately generating meaningful engagement.

Dealing with Negative Online Feedback

When dealing with negative online feedback, it is important to respond promptly. Address the feedback as soon as possible to show that you care about addressing concerns.

• Stay professional when dealing with negative online feedback. Maintain a calm and professional tone in your response, even if the feedback is unfair or unjust.
• Take responsibility for any mistakes or shortcomings when dealing with negative online feedback. Acknowledge them and offer a sincere apology if necessary.
• Offer solutions when dealing with negative online feedback. Provide a resolution or offer to rectify the situation to show that you are committed to customer satisfaction.
• Encourage dialogue when dealing with negative online feedback. Invite the customer to continue the conversation privately or offline to further resolve the issue.

Fact: According to a study, 78% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Possible Solutions for Digital Marketing Challenges

Looking to overcome the challenges in digital marketing? This section dives into actionable solutions that help you navigate the digital landscape with confidence.

From conducting thorough market research to leveraging influencer marketing, implementing SEO techniques, and embracing data analytics, we’ll explore various approaches to tackle these obstacles head-on.

Crafting a targeted content strategy, utilizing marketing automation tools, engaging with customers on social media, and providing excellent customer service is also part of the arsenal of solutions we’ll be discussing. Let’s dive in and discover effective ways to tackle the digital marketing world!

Conducting Comprehensive Market Research

Conducting comprehensive market research is critical for successful digital marketing campaigns. It is important to identify your target audience and understand who your customers are, their demographics, interests, and online behaviors. In addition, analyzing competitors’ digital marketing strategies and identifying gaps in the market is essential.

Defining clear objectives for your digital marketing campaign, such as increasing website traffic, boosting conversions, or enhancing brand awareness , is also important. Collecting relevant data from various sources, including website analytics, customer surveys, social media insights, and industry reports , is a necessary step.

It is also vital to analyze market trends and stay updated with the latest industry trends and consumer preferences to align your marketing efforts accordingly. Segmenting your audience based on their demographics, behaviors, and preferences to create personalized marketing messages is another key aspect.

Testing different marketing strategies and measuring their effectiveness through A/B testing, tracking metrics, and making data-driven optimizations is important as well.

By conducting comprehensive market research, you gain valuable insights into your target audience, competitors, and industry trends. This knowledge will empower you to tailor your digital marketing strategies for maximum impact and success.

Crafting a Targeted Content Strategy

When it comes to crafting a targeted content strategy for digital marketing, there are several essential steps to follow:

• Identify your target audience: Understand who your ideal customers are and what kind of content they are looking for.
• Conduct market research: Gather insights on your target audience’s preferences, interests, and pain points to inform your content strategy .
• Set clear goals and objectives: Determine what you want to achieve with your content , whether it’s increasing brand awareness , driving traffic , or generating leads .
• Create high-quality and relevant content: Develop valuable content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their needs , using a mix of formats like blog posts, videos, infographics, and more.
• Optimize for search engines: Incorporate relevant keywords and optimize your content to improve search engine rankings and increase visibility .
• Establish a content calendar: Plan and organize your content creation and distribution schedule to ensure consistency and maximize engagement .
• Promote your content: Share your content on relevant social media channels, email newsletters, and other platforms to reach a wider audience and drive traffic .
• Measure and analyze: Monitor the performance of your content using analytics tools, track key metrics like engagement, conversions, and return on investment, and use the insights to refine and improve your strategy .

Implementing Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Implementing search engine optimization techniques greatly improves the visibility and ranking of your website in search engine results. Here are some steps to effectively implement SEO:

1. Keyword research: Identify relevant keywords that your target audience uses when searching for products or services.

2. On-page optimization: Optimize your website’s meta tags, headings, and content to include your target keywords.

3. Quality content creation: Produce high-quality and engaging content that incorporates your target keywords naturally.

4. Link building: Generate backlinks from reputable websites to increase your website’s authority and credibility.

5. Mobile optimization: Ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices, as mobile-friendly websites rank higher in search results.

6. Website speed optimization: Improve your website’s loading speed, as faster websites are favored by search engines.

7. User experience optimization: Enhance your website’s usability and navigation to provide a positive user experience.

8. Regular monitoring and analysis: Continuously monitor your website’s performance using analytics tools and make necessary adjustments.

By implementing these SEO techniques, you can increase your website’s visibility, drive organic traffic, and improve your search engine rankings.

Leveraging Influencer Marketing

Leveraging influencer marketing is an effective and powerful strategy for overcoming digital marketing challenges and expanding your reach to a wider audience.

• Building brand credibility: By partnering with influencers who align with your brand values and possess a strong following, you enhance your brand credibility and foster trust among potential customers.
• Reaching target audience: Influencers have already cultivated a loyal audience that matches your target demographic , providing you with the opportunity to connect with potential customers who may not yet be familiar with your brand.
• Increasing engagement: Influencers produce captivating content centered around your brand, encouraging their followers to actively engage with your brand and resulting in higher engagement rates.
• Improving search engine ranking: Collaborating with influencers often leads to valuable backlinks and social media mentions, which positively impact your search engine ranking and enhance your online visibility.
• Driving conversions: Through the utilization of influencer marketing, you boost sales and conversions as their followers are more inclined to trust their recommendations and make informed purchasing decisions.

Fact: A survey reveals that 40% of individuals have reported purchasing after witnessing an influencer’s recommendation on social media.

Utilizing Marketing Automation Tools

Utilizing marketing automation tools greatly streamline and enhance digital marketing efforts. These tools offer numerous benefits, including:

• Efficiency: Marketing automation tools can efficiently automate repetitive tasks, saving time and increasing productivity.
• Personalization: By utilizing automation, marketers segment their audience and deliver personalized content and messages based on individual preferences and behaviors.
• Lead nurturing: Through automation tools, businesses implement automated email campaigns and lead scoring, nurturing leads through the buyer’s journey until they are ready to make a purchase.
• Improved targeting: Utilizing marketing automation tools enables marketers to track and analyze data, helping them identify and target the right audience with relevant campaigns.
• Analytics and reporting: These tools provide valuable insights into campaign performance, assisting in measuring the success of marketing efforts.

By effectively utilizing marketing automation tools, businesses optimize their digital marketing strategies, save time and resources, and ultimately achieve better results.

Embracing Data Analytics and Measurement

Embracing data analytics and measurement is essential in overcoming digital marketing challenges. By incorporating tools and techniques to collect and analyze data, marketers gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, refine their strategies, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.

The use of data analytics enables the identification of trends, preferences, and key metrics that drive success. It also aids in comprehending the customer journey and creating personalized experiences. By embracing data analytics and measurement, marketers make well-informed decisions, optimize their marketing efforts, and achieve the maximum return on investment.

Engaging with Customers on Social Media Platforms

Engaging with customers on social media platforms is vital for achieving success in digital marketing. Implementing effective strategies to connect with your audience is fundamental.

Here are some tips to help you achieve this:

Create valuable and relevant content that truly engages your target audience on social media platforms.

Regularly engage with your followers by promptly responding to their comments, messages, and mentions.

Utilize contests, polls, and giveaways to incentivize user participation and enhance their engagement.

Showcasing user-generated content is a great way to demonstrate appreciation and involve your customers in your brand.

Consider collaborating with influencers and brand advocates to broaden your reach and enhance your credibility.

Pro-tip: Building strong relationships with your social media audience requires authenticity and genuine two-way communication.

Providing Excellent Customer Service and Support

To provide exceptional customer service and support in digital marketing , it is crucial to prioritize providing excellent customer service and support. This is achieved by being responsive , practicing personalized communication , and actively solving problems . By efficiently addressing customer inquiries and concerns in a timely manner, trust and loyalty are built.

Moreover, personalizing the communication by using their names and making reference to previous interactions significantly enhances the customer experience. It is also important to have a strong problem-solving approach, involving active listening to customer feedback, showing empathy toward their concerns, and taking proactive measures to resolve issues.

By consistently delivering outstanding customer service and support, digital marketers greatly improve customer satisfaction and foster positive brand interactions.

Some Facts About Digital Marketing Problems and Solutions:

• ✅ Small budgets and competition from bigger competitors are common digital marketing problems.
• ✅ Segmenting the audience can help maximize marketing ROI.
• ✅ Enhancing Google My Business page and listing on other directories improve local marketing strategy.
• ✅ Focusing on dominating the best-performing social media channels is better than managing multiple profiles.
• ✅ Constant adaptation to evolving technology is necessary to stay ahead in digital marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. what are some common digital marketing problems and their solutions.

Some common digital marketing problems include struggling with a small budget and standing out against bigger competitors. However, solutions to these problems include segmenting the audience to maximize marketing ROI, enhancing Google My Business page and listing on other directories for local marketing, and focusing on dominating the best-performing social media channels instead of managing multiple profiles.

2. How can businesses overcome the challenge of poor conversion rates?

Poor conversion rates may be caused by targeting the wrong audience or having a website design and copy that doesn’t resonate with visitors. To overcome this challenge, businesses should reassess their target audience and ensure their website is optimized to provide a seamless user experience that resonates with visitors.

3. What are some challenges in digital marketing related to technology?

Constant changes in technology pose a challenge in digital marketing, as businesses must constantly adapt their strategies to stay ahead of the competition. Staying informed about new developments and trends is a solution to this problem, ensuring businesses adjust their strategies accordingly.

4. How can businesses handle the overwhelming amount of available data in digital marketing?

The overwhelming amount of data available in digital marketing can make it difficult for businesses to identify relevant and useful data. Solutions to data overload include using analytics and reporting tools to track key metrics and using data visualization tools to make sense of large amounts of data.

5. How can businesses overcome the lack of personalization in digital marketing?

Lack of personalization is another problem in digital marketing, as businesses struggle to tailor marketing messages to specific segments of their audience. Using customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation software helps businesses overcome this challenge by enabling personalized communication and targeting.

6. How can businesses choose the right agency to work with in digital marketing?

To avoid common errors in digital marketing, businesses need to choose the right agency to work with. Screening their experience and track records, ensuring they are familiar with different digital marketing channels, and having a detailed digital marketing brief help align expectations and establish a fruitful partnership.

Top 10 Challenges in Digital Product Engineering: Conquering Complexity and Embracing Innovation

UST Product Engineering Team

The challenges can feel overwhelming, and you may feel that disruption is happening faster than you can handle.

The increasing application of digital transformation technology and the need for continuous innovation and iteration is driving the growth of the global product engineering services market. One study states that the digital product engineering services market will reach $1610.6 billion by 2031. This growth is further driven by continuous technological advancements, the emergence of IoT technologies, and the surging demand for accelerating Time to Market.

What is digital product engineering?

Digital product engineering involves designing, developing, and maintaining digital products like mobile and other apps, software, and websites. It demands various skills like understanding the latest trends and technologies, technical know-how, problem-solving abilities, and engineering capabilities. However, it also faces several challenges that can make it hard to deliver high-quality products in a timely and cost-effectively.

Challenges in digital product engineering:

1. complexity:.

Digital products involve multiple layers of technology and integration with other systems. This can be complex, making identifying and fixing problems challenging and increasing the risk of errors and security vulnerabilities.

2. Constant change:

The field of digital product engineering is constantly evolving, with new technologies and best practices always emerging. Keeping up with these changes can be challenging and staying ahead of the curve can be difficult.

3. Limited resources:

Digital product engineering projects often have tight budgets and limited resources, making it challenging to deliver high-quality products. There may need more time or money to thoroughly test and debug a product, leading to problems that are only discovered after the product has been released.

4. Communication barriers:

Digital product engineering teams often include people with a wide range of skills and expertise, and effective communication is essential to ensure everyone is on the same page. However, communication can be challenging when team members are in different parts of the world or when there are language barriers.

5. User experience:

Users expect digital products to be easy to use and intuitive, and it can take time to strike the right balance between simplicity and functionality. User experience can lead to low adoption rates and negative reviews.

6. Security:

Digital products are vulnerable to hacking, data breaches, and malware. Ensuring the security of a product is a constant challenge, as new threats are constantly emerging.

7. Integration with other systems:

Digital products often must integrate with other systems, such as databases and APIs. This can be challenging, as different systems may use various technologies and standards.

8. Lack of standardization:

There are many different platforms, languages, and tools used in digital product engineering, and often no one-size-fits-all solution. Choosing the right tools and technologies for a project can make it easier.

9. Testing and debugging:

A significant challenge is ensuring a reliable and bug-free digital product. Testing and debugging can be time-consuming and costly, and it can be challenging to identify and fix all problems before a product is released.

10. Scalability:

Digital products often need to handle many users and a high traffic volume. Ensuring a scalable product can be challenging, as it may need to be redesigned or re-architected as it grows.

How to overcome challenges of digital product engineering

The challenges can feel overwhelming, and you may feel that disruption is happening faster than you can handle. The question is, is your organization structured to address it effectively? Starting with the most significant issues facing your operations is the right step forward. What do you want to improve? Production flexibility? Energy usage? Throughput? Digital adoption? Answers to these questions will help you navigate the digital transformation landscape successfully.

The process starts with identifying gaps in product engineering processes , reducing complexity and cost, monetizing digital transformations, and continuously improving product design.

A clear roadmap

One of the major pathways to overcoming these challenges is the need for a clear roadmap for digital transformation. With a well-defined and comprehensive business plan, it will be easier to identify potential areas of improvement and prioritize the changes. The right strategy would ensure that your efforts align with the company's business strategy and objectives. There may be resistance from employees or stakeholders to change, which can further complicate the process, which needs to be considered during the planning. Involving them at the onset of the process will ensure that they are willing to make changes as necessary to achieve the desired outcomes. The plan should be flexible so that you can continuously assess and adjust the plan. Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) is also essential to measure the success of the digital transformation.

Agility and automation

Implementing agile development methodologies and automating processes to reduce complexity and cost in product engineering is essential. This can be achieved through DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices. It is also helpful to leverage cloud-based technologies and adopt a microservices architecture to improve scalability and flexibility.

Identifying the right audience

Identifying and targeting specific market segments or customer groups most likely to benefit from the changes to monetize digital transformations is essential. Additionally, it may be helpful to develop new revenue streams or business models that can be leveraged to generate additional revenue.

Invest in R&D

Finally, to continuously improve product design, it is important to invest in research and development and gather customer feedback regularly. This can be achieved through user testing and surveys and implementing a customer feedback loop.

Identifying gaps

In terms of identifying gaps in product engineering processes, it would be beneficial to conduct a process mapping exercise or a gap analysis to understand the current state of the product engineering process. This can be done by analyzing the workflows, communication channels, and decision-making processes that are currently in place. Once the current state is understood, it will be easier to identify areas where improvements can be made.

Set the team up for success

To further reduce complexity and cost in product engineering , it would be important to establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members and implement standard operating procedures (SOPs) for everyday tasks. Additionally, investing in training and development programs for team members may be beneficial to ensure they have the skills and knowledge necessary to implement the digital transformation plan effectively.

Invest in market research

In terms of monetizing digital transformations, conducting market research and identifying potential revenue streams that align with the company's strengths and capabilities are crucial. Establishing partnerships and collaborations with other companies and organizations are essential to help generate new revenue streams.

Set up a solid feedback channel

Finally, to continuously improve product design, it is vital to establish a process for gathering and analyzing customer feedback. This can be done by creating a customer feedback loop that allows customers to provide product feedback and suggest improvements.

Gain a competitive advantage with end-to-end digital engineering

As we can see, the above digital product engineering challenges can make delivering high-quality products promptly and cost-effectively difficult. But the latest technologies, best practices, and help from the right technology partner can help you overcome these challenges.

UST's end-to-end digital engineering offerings address enterprise-grade, next-gen engineering challenges and help and deliver products that meet the needs of their users. We provide faster development cycles and go-to-market strategies with fewer touchpoints. Best practices allow us to impact P&L and create differentiation among peers positively.

Learn more about UST's unique approach to digital engineering.

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33 Innovative Digital Product Ideas for Creative Entrepreneurs

Author  William P     0

Updated on March 8, 2024

Looking for the perfect digital product idea?

It’s not easy coming up with an idea that takes advantage of your expertise and gives you a marketable niche, but if you get it right, you can create a flexible, scalable business with minimal start-up costs.

And the best part?

There’s an excellent opportunity to build a recurring, passive income - so, let’s look at finding you the ideal digital product idea. 

Digital Products vs. Physical Products

Let's keep this simple and to the point...

Digital products, such as e-books, online courses, software, and digital art, are intangible goods delivered electronically to consumers.

In contrast, physical products are tangible items that require manufacturing, inventory, and shipping, like books, gadgets, or apparel.

Each has it's own positives and drawbacks, but if you're looking to set up a new business, digital products are an extremely appealing option. 

Benefits of Selling Digital Products

• Lower Overhead Costs: Digital products eliminate the need for physical materials, manufacturing, and storage, significantly reducing overhead costs.
• Global Reach: Digital goods can be sold and distributed worldwide without the logistical complexities and costs associated with shipping physical products.
• Scalability: Once created, digital products can be sold repeatedly without depleting inventory, offering unparalleled scalability.
• Instant Delivery: Digital products can be delivered instantly to consumers, enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing the time between purchase and consumption.
• Higher Profit Margins: The combination of lower overhead costs and the potential for high-volume sales can lead to significantly higher profit margins for digital products compared to physical ones.
• Environmental Benefits: Selling digital products reduces the environmental impact associated with the production, packaging, and transportation of physical goods.

In summary, while physical products have their place in the market, digital products offer unique advantages that can lead to greater efficiency, profitability, and reach for businesses in the digital age.

Digital Product Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Going

There's no limit to the kinds of digital products you can create and with technology moving so fast, there's demand for new products all the time. 

While you'll want to focus on areas where you have specific expertise, we've put together a list of digital ideas that should give you some inspiration. 

Digital Products for Any Niche: Unlocking the Door to E-Learning Success

In today's fast-paced digital world, education has transcended traditional classrooms, reaching learners across the globe through screens. In fact, the growth in online learning has been incredible, with the industry set to be worth over $370 billion in the coming years.

If you're passionate about sharing knowledge and facilitating learning, digital products offer a golden opportunity to scale your impact. And the best part? You don't need to be a tech wizard to make it happen.

Explore Universal Digital Product Ideas

1. online courses, 2. planners and journals.

3. Membership Sites

Why Digital Education Products?

Getting Started

Tool Tips: Essential Software for Launching Your Educational Digital Products

Example of an online course: Influencer Marketing Hub

Picture this: Your expertise, packaged into engaging online courses , unlocking new horizons for eager learners everywhere. Whether you're a math whiz, a language lover, or a history buff, your knowledge can shape futures. We'll guide you through setting up courses that not only educate but also captivate, with interactive elements like quizzes and forums to keep your students hooked.

Organizational tools like planners and journals are the unsung heroes of the learning process. By creating downloadable or printable planners tailored for education, you provide learners and educators alike with a roadmap to success. Imagine helping someone organize their study schedule or track their learning progress, all with a product you designed.

3. Membership Sites 

Example of a membership site: Female Entrepreneur Association  

Ever dreamt of having your own club? A membership site is your digital version of that, offering exclusive content to members for a fee. This could range from advanced tutorials, specialized courses, or even a community forum. It's not just a product; it's an ongoing relationship with your audience, fostering a dedicated community of learners and educators.

• Accessibility: Your digital products break down geographical barriers, making education accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
• Flexibility: Learners can engage with your content on their own time, at their own pace, making learning a part of their everyday lives.
• Passive Income: Once set up, these products can generate income while you sleep, allowing you to focus on creating more content or simply enjoying your free time.

You might be thinking, "This sounds great, but I'm not a tech guru." 

Fear not! The beauty of digital products lies in their simplicity. 

With a myriad of tools and platforms available , creating and selling your educational products online is more straightforward than ever. From easy-to-use course platforms to simple payment integration, we'll walk you through the process step by step.

Creating impactful digital education products hinges on utilizing the right tools to bring your ideas to life. Whether it's for crafting online courses, designing educational materials, or establishing a membership site, the software you select is pivotal. Here, we focus on indispensable tools, with Thrive Apprentice leading the charge for online courses.

Thrive Apprentice is a standout WordPress plugin tailor-made for online course creation and sales. It's user-friendly, integrates smoothly with sales platforms, and allows for extensive customization, making it an excellent choice for educators aiming to offer unique and engaging learning experiences.

More Tools for a Complete Digital Education Suite:

• Canva : Ideal for designing planners and educational graphics with ease.
• Zoom or Loom : For recording high-quality video lessons or live workshops.
• Drip or ConvertKit : Essential for email marketing and community engagement.

While Thrive Apprentice serves as the foundation for your online courses, integrating it with other tools like Canva for design and Zoom for live interactions can enrich your educational offerings. This strategic combination ensures a comprehensive and engaging learning environment for your students.

Digital Wellness Products: Nurturing Mind, Body, and Spirit Online

The quest for wellness is universal, yet each journey is deeply personal; there's a unique opportunity to touch lives far and wide with products that nurture the mind, body, and spirit. 

Imagine your expertise and passion for wellness transforming into accessible tools that anyone, anywhere, can benefit from. Even without deep technical knowledge, you can craft digital wellness products that resonate with and uplift your audience.

Explore Wellness Digital Product Ideas

4. Guided Meditation and Mindfulness Audio

5. Wellness and Habit Trackers

6. Video Series on Health and Fitness

Why digital wellness products, tool tips: choosing the right tools for your wellness vision, 4. guided meditation and mindfulness audio .

Example of a digital wellness product: headspace

Dive into the serene world of wellness by creating audio tracks that guide listeners through meditation and mindfulness exercises. These digital products can serve as a haven for individuals seeking calm and focus in their hectic lives.

5. Wellness and Habit Trackers 

Design interactive PDFs or apps that encourage users to track their wellness habits, from hydration and diet to exercise and meditation. Such tools not only foster healthy lifestyles but also provide users with a sense of accomplishment and control over their well-being.

Example of a video series: Pliability

Whether it's yoga, pilates, or nutritional advice, a series of instructional videos can be a powerful way to share your expertise. Engage your audience with comprehensive guides that cater to beginners and advanced enthusiasts alike, promoting physical health and mental clarity.

• Flexibility: Create and manage your products from anywhere, offering a perfect balance between work and personal life.
• Passive Income Potential: Once developed and launched, digital wellness products can generate income with little ongoing effort, freeing up time to create new content or enjoy leisure activities.
• Personal Satisfaction: There’s profound fulfillment in knowing your work contributes positively to others' well-being, making every sale not just a transaction, but a step towards a healthier, happier world.

Embarking on creating digital wellness products is an exciting venture that blends your passion with the opportunity to impact lives globally. Here’s a streamlined guide to help you begin.

• Find Your Focus: Zero in on what aspect of wellness excites you most, be it mindfulness, fitness, or nutrition.
• Know Your Audience: Understanding who you’re creating for shapes your product to better meet their needs.
• Select Your Medium: Decide if you’re making audio tracks, videos, digital guides, or apps.
• Draft Your Content: Outline what each product will cover, ensuring clarity and purpose from the start.
• Create Your Content: Dive into production, focusing on authenticity and value over perfection.
• Refine Through Feedback: Share early versions with a test audience, using their insights to improve.
• Build Anticipation: Use social media and email marketing to tease your product launch.
• Decide on a Sales Platform: Whether it's your website or an online marketplace, choose a platform that fits your product and audience
• Listen to Your Customers: Post-launch, keep collecting feedback to refine your products.
• Grow Your Offerings: Use insights to expand your product range and explore new wellness territories.

Embarking on the creation of digital wellness products might seem daunting, but with user-friendly platforms and software, it's more accessible than ever:

• Audio Recording Software: For meditation and mindfulness tracks, quality audio recording software is essential. Tools like Audacity or GarageBand allow you to record, edit, and produce high-quality audio files effortlessly.
• Video Editing Platforms: To bring your health and fitness videos to life, leverage video editing software such as iMovie or Adobe Premiere Rush . These platforms offer a range of editing features to create engaging and professional-looking videos.
• Design Tools for Trackers and Guides: Canva and Adobe Spark are excellent choices for designing wellness trackers and educational PDFs. Their intuitive design interfaces enable you to create visually appealing and easy-to-use digital products.

Digital Products for Freelancers: Charting the Path to Independence and Success

The journey from starting out to becoming a sought-after freelance professional is both exhilarating and daunting. The digital age brings with it a wealth of opportunities for freelancers to learn, grow, and connect, transcending traditional barriers to career development.

For those embarking on or looking to elevate their freelancing voyage, digital products not only serve as vessels of knowledge but also as bridges to communities and networks. Here’s how you can leverage digital products aimed at helping freelancers succeed, regardless of your niche or experience level.

Explore Freelancer Digital Product Ideas

7. beginner's guides to freelancing, 8. e-learning courses on professional development, 9. online communities for networking and support, why digital products for freelancers, tool tips: crafting your freelancer digital toolkit.

Example of a guide to freelancing: Thrive Themes

Imagine a comprehensive, step-by-step guide that demystifies the freelancing process, from setting up your freelance business to scaling your operations . This digital product can be your flagship offering, designed to guide newcomers through the initial phases of freelancing. Include actionable advice, templates for proposals and invoices, and strategies for finding and retaining clients. Such guides can be the beacon for many at the start of their freelancing journey, providing clarity and direction.

In the realm of freelancing, standing still is akin to moving backward. Offer e-learning courses tailored to freelancers seeking to enhance their skills or expand their service offerings. Cover a broad spectrum of topics, such as advanced project management, mastering freelance sales, or niche-specific skills enhancement. These courses not only aid in professional growth but also empower freelancers to command higher rates and tackle more complex projects with confidence.

Freelancing can often feel like a solitary endeavor, but it doesn't have to be. Create an online community platform where freelancers from various fields can come together to share experiences, exchange tips, and support each other. This digital product can take the form of a membership site, offering forums, networking events, and collaboration opportunities. Such communities not only break the isolation often felt by freelancers but also become a rich resource for learning and business growth.

• Empowerment: Equip freelancers with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed, fostering a sense of empowerment and self-reliance.
• Flexibility: Digital products allow freelancers to learn and grow at their own pace, fitting their professional development around client projects and personal commitments.
• Community Building: Beyond individual success, digital products for freelancers help cultivate a sense of belonging and community, crucial for mental well-being and professional networking.

The journey to creating digital products for freelancers begins with understanding the unique challenges and needs of the freelance community. Here’s how to get started:

• Identify Pain Points: Conduct surveys or interviews with freelancers to understand their biggest challenges and learning aspirations.
• Choose the Right Format: Decide whether your product will be a downloadable guide, an online course, or a community platform based on what best addresses the needs you’ve identified.
• Leverage Your Expertise: Draw on your own freelancing experiences or collaborate with other experts to create content that is both authentic and valuable.
• Focus on Quality: Ensure your digital products are well-designed, engaging, and high-quality. This can mean investing in good design tools, editing software, or even professional help.
• Market Strategically: Use content marketing, social media, and freelancer networks to promote your products. Tailor your messaging to highlight how your products address freelancers' specific needs and aspirations.

Creating compelling digital products for freelancers requires a blend of content creation, marketing, and community management tools. Consider the following:

• Content Creation: Adobe Creative Suite or Canva for designing guides; Camtasia or ScreenFlow for creating professional-looking courses.
• Platform Building: Host your products on a WordPress website and use Thrive Architect to create your online content + Thrive Apprentice for courses and membership sites. 
• Marketing and Engagement: Drip or ActiveCampaign for email marketing; Slack or Mighty Networks for managing online communities.

By harnessing these tools and platforms, you can transform your insights and experiences into valuable digital products that inspire, educate, and connect freelancers worldwide. Whether through comprehensive guides, transformative courses, or supportive communities, your digital products can play a pivotal role in shaping the future of freelancing success.

Digital Products for Design and Creative Professionals: Cultivating a Marketplace of Innovation and Inspiration

The digital age has ushered in an unprecedented demand for design and creative assets. As the world becomes more visual and brands seek to stand out, designers, artists, and creative professionals find themselves at the heart of this vibrant ecosystem. 

Digital products in the realm of design and creativity not only fuel the industry's engine but also empower creators to monetize their talents in new and exciting ways.

Whether you're an illustrator, graphic designer, or any creative enthusiast, here's how you can tap into the digital product marketplace to showcase your work, inspire others, and generate income.

Explore Digital Product Ideas for Creative Professionals

10. graphic design templates, 11. stock photography and illustrations, 12. fonts and typography designs, 13. brushes and digital tools for artists, why digital products for design and creative assets, tool tips: essential software for creating and selling design assets.

Example of selling graphic design templates: Indieground

Consider the power of offering customizable templates for everything from social media posts to business presentations. These templates save time for businesses and individuals looking to enhance their visual appeal without starting from scratch. Your designs could be the key that unlocks creative potential for non-designers or provides a foundation for other professionals to build upon, ensuring your work becomes an integral part of countless projects.

Capture the world through your lens or illustrate your imagination into digital form. Stock photography and illustrations are in high demand, catering to bloggers, marketers, and media outlets seeking unique visuals to complement their content. By creating a diverse portfolio of images available for purchase , you're not just selling photos or drawings; you're offering a vision that can elevate any project or campaign.

Example of selling fonts: Indieground

Fonts can transform the tone and perception of written content, making them a crucial element for brands and designers alike. Crafting unique fonts or typography designs can be a niche but lucrative digital product offering. Designers and brands are always on the lookout for fresh and expressive fonts that can help their work stand out. Your creations could become the signature voice of the next big brand or a beloved indie project.

Custom brushes, patterns, and textures for digital art software like Photoshop or Procreate offer artists and designers the tools to push the boundaries of their creativity. These digital assets can enhance the workflow, allowing creators to achieve specific styles or effects with ease. By developing and selling your digital tools, you're contributing to a community of creators, enabling them to explore new artistic horizons.

• Scalability: Digital products allow you to create once and sell an unlimited number of times, offering a scalable income source.
• Accessibility: Your creations can be accessed and utilized by people from all corners of the globe, broadening your impact and reach.
• Creative Control: You have the freedom to explore and produce assets based on your interests and trends, maintaining creative integrity while meeting market demands.

Turning your creative skills into digital products involves more than just talent; it requires strategy and understanding of the market. Here are key steps to get started:

• Research and Identify Gaps: Look for underserved areas within the design and creative market. What do your peers complain about not having? What could make their creative process easier or more efficient?
• Build a Portfolio: Create a diverse range of assets to showcase the breadth and quality of your work. This portfolio will serve as the cornerstone of your digital product business.
• Choose the Right Platform: Whether it's selling through your website, joining marketplaces like Etsy or Creative Market , or utilizing stock photo sites, find the platform that aligns with your products and target audience.
• Market Your Products: Utilize social media, content marketing , and collaborations with other creatives to spread the word about your offerings. Engaging with your audience is key to understanding their needs and refining your products.
• Design and Illustration: Adobe Creative Cloud for comprehensive design work; Procreate for iPad artists.
• Asset Management and Sales: WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads + Thrive Apprentice for setting up an online store. 
• Marketing and Promotion: Canva for creating promotional materials; Buffer or Hootsuite for managing social media campaigns.

By leveraging these tools and platforms, you can transform your creative endeavors into digital products that resonate with a wide audience. Whether through templates, stock images, fonts, or digital tools, your work has the potential to inspire, enhance, and facilitate creative projects worldwide, establishing your place in the digital creative economy.

Digital Products for IT and Tech Enthusiasts: Pioneering Solutions for the Digital Age

There’s a constant demand for innovative solutions that can address the unique challenges of this digital era. IT and tech enthusiasts, with their finger on the pulse of the latest technological advancements, are uniquely positioned to develop digital products that cater to the needs of businesses, developers, and technology hobbyists alike.

Whether you're a seasoned developer, a cybersecurity expert, or a tech hobbyist, exploring the creation and sale of digital IT and tech products can open up avenues for professional growth, passive income, and significant contributions to the tech community. 

Here's how you can make an impact.

Explore Digital Product Ideas for IT & Tech

14. software tools and applications, 15. e-books and guides on tech topics, 16. online courses and tutorials, 17. cybersecurity tools and resources, 18. website themes, 19. browser plugins, 20. code snippets, why digital products for it and tech, tool tips: key technologies for it and tech product development.

Developing software tools and applications that solve specific problems or enhance productivity can be a game-changer in the tech industry. Whether it's a new project management tool, a security software solution, or an app that integrates with existing technologies, your software can streamline operations and offer innovative solutions to common problems faced by businesses and individuals.

With technology constantly changing, there's a thirst for knowledge on the latest trends, best practices, and how-to guides. Writing and selling e-books or detailed guides on topics such as blockchain technology, cloud computing, or artificial intelligence can help demystify complex subjects and provide valuable insights to both beginners and experts in the field.

Leverage your expertise by creating online courses or tutorial series that offer in-depth training on specific technologies or programming languages. From web development frameworks to data analysis with Python, your courses can help upskill professionals and hobbyists, preparing them for the demands of the tech industry.

As digital threats continue to evolve, there's a growing need for cybersecurity tools , resources, and educational materials that can help protect individuals and organizations. Developing products such as security audits, vulnerability scanners, or educational resources on safe online practices can position you as a key player in the fight against cyber threats.

Creating and selling custom website themes for popular content management systems like WordPress, Shopify, or Joomla allows you to provide value to bloggers, businesses, and e-commerce sites. By focusing on clean design, responsiveness, and user experience, your themes can help users stand out online. Offering themes that cater to specific industries or interests can also set you apart in a crowded market. Consider including customizable features, such as color schemes, layout options, and widget areas, to accommodate diverse needs and preferences.

Develop browser plugins or extensions that address specific needs or enhance browsing efficiency. From productivity tools that block distracting sites to utility plugins that offer SEO insights or automate routine tasks, the potential for impact is immense. Ensure your plugins are user-friendly and add genuine value, focusing on solving common problems faced by users. Security, privacy, and performance should be top priorities, as users are increasingly conscious of the implications of installing third-party plugins.

Offering code snippets or libraries can be a boon to developers looking for quick solutions to common programming challenges. Whether it's JavaScript functions for web development, Python scripts for data analysis, or CSS snippets for design, your contributions can save time and improve the quality of projects. Packaging these snippets into easily downloadable sets or creating a searchable online database can make your offerings more accessible and valuable to the developer community.

• High Demand: The tech industry's rapid growth ensures a continual demand for new, innovative solutions and educational resources.
• Expertise Showcase: Creating digital products allows you to showcase your expertise, establishing you as a thought leader in your niche.
• Scalable Income: Digital products, once created, can be sold repeatedly without the need for additional inventory, offering a scalable source of income.
• Community Contribution: By providing tools and resources, you're contributing to the growth and education of the IT and tech community, fostering a more informed and capable ecosystem.

Venturing into the creation of digital IT and tech products requires a blend of technical knowledge, market understanding, and strategic planning. Here’s how you can embark on this journey:

• Identify Needs and Opportunities: Stay abreast of industry trends and pain points. Listen to the community and identify gaps where your skills and knowledge can offer solutions.
• Develop and Test Your Product: Whether it’s software, educational content, or cybersecurity tools, ensure your product is thoroughly developed, tested, and validated before launch.
• Choose the Right Distribution Channels: Depending on your product, consider selling through your own website, tech marketplaces, or online learning platforms.
• Market Effectively: Utilize tech forums, social media, and content marketing to reach your target audience. Networking within the tech community can also be a powerful tool for promotion and feedback.
• Development Tools: GitHub for version control and collaboration; Visual Studio Code or JetBrains for coding and development.
• E-learning Platforms: Host your own courses with Thrive Apprentice or check out Teachable , Udemy , or Coursera as 3rd party platforms..
• Marketing and Sales Platforms: WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads for setting up an e-commerce platform; ConvertKit or Drip for email marketing and audience engagement.

Embarking on the creation of digital products in the IT and tech space not only allows you to monetize your expertise but also plays a crucial role in advancing the industry by providing valuable solutions and knowledge. 

As you navigate through this process, remember that your contributions have the potential to shape the future of technology, driving innovation and empowering users across the globe.

Digital Products for Business and Startup Resources: Fueling Growth with Innovative Solutions

The journey of building and scaling a business or startup is fraught with challenges, yet it offers immense opportunities for innovation and success. In today’s digital-first economy, entrepreneurs and business owners are constantly on the lookout for tools, resources, and knowledge that can propel their ventures forward. This creates a fertile ground for digital products specifically designed to support business growth and operational efficiency.

For professionals with expertise in business strategy, marketing, finance, or any other domain critical to business success, developing digital products that serve the business and startup community can be both lucrative and fulfilling. Here’s how you can contribute valuable resources to help businesses thrive:

Explore Digital Product Ideas for Businesses

21. business plan templates and financial models, 22. market research reports, 23. e-learning courses on entrepreneurship and business skills, 24. legal and compliance toolkits, why digital products for business and startups, tool tips for product development and marketing.

Crafting comprehensive, customizable business plan templates and sophisticated financial models can significantly aid entrepreneurs in the planning and fundraising stages. These resources not only save time but also ensure that startups are considering the right factors and metrics crucial for their success. Tailor your offerings to different industries to add even more value, providing insights into market-specific challenges and opportunities.

Example of selling market research: Verified Market Reports

Compile detailed market research reports that startups can use to understand their industry landscape, competition, and customer demographics. These reports can help businesses make informed decisions, strategize effectively, and identify untapped market opportunities. Offering up-to-date, data-driven insights can set your digital products apart in a market hungry for accurate and actionable information.

Develop and sell online courses that cover essential business skills, from digital marketing and sales strategies to leadership and financial management. With the rise of e-learning, you have the opportunity to reach a global audience eager to learn and apply these skills in real-world scenarios. Interactive courses featuring case studies , templates, and tools can provide hands-on learning experiences that are highly valued by entrepreneurs and business owners.

Navigating the legal and regulatory landscape is a common challenge for many startups. Digital products offering legal templates, compliance checklists, and guides tailored to specific jurisdictions or industries can be incredibly helpful. Such resources can help businesses avoid common pitfalls and ensure they are set up for long-term success.

• Scalability: Once created, these digital products can be sold to an unlimited number of businesses, providing a scalable source of income.
• Impact: By aiding in the successful launch and growth of businesses, your products can have a tangible impact on the economy and job creation.
• Expertise Sharing: This avenue allows you to leverage your expertise, providing valuable knowledge and tools to the next generation of entrepreneurs.
• Identify Gaps in the Market: Research the most pressing needs of startups and businesses in various industries to find opportunities for your digital products.
• Create High-Quality Content: Whether it’s templates, reports, or courses, ensure your products are of the highest quality, offering real value to your customers.
• Choose the Right Sales Channels: Consider selling through your website, business-focused platforms, or joining forces with entrepreneurship communities and networks for wider distribution.
• Market Strategically: Use targeted marketing strategies to reach your audience, leveraging social media, content marketing, and partnerships with business influencers.
• Content Creation Tools: Utilize platforms like Canva for designing templates and Thrive Apprentice for e-learning course creation.
• Data Analysis and Report Generation: Tools such as Tableau or Microsoft Excel for data analysis and visualization, aiding in the creation of market research reports.
• Distribution and Sales Platforms: Choose between a self hosted website on WordPress , a e-commerce specific platform like Shopify , or a course marketplace like Teachable .
• Marketing and Promotion: Tools like HubSpo t for inbound marketing and Google Ads for targeted advertising can help promote your products to the right audience.

By developing digital products for the business and startup ecosystem, you have the chance to support the growth of emerging and established businesses alike. Your contributions can help demystify complex aspects of business operations, provide valuable insights, and equip entrepreneurs with the tools they need to succeed in today’s competitive landscape.

Digital Products for Content Creators: Empowering Creativity and Monetization

In the ever-expanding universe of digital content, creators are constantly seeking innovative ways to express their creativity, engage their audience, and monetize their efforts.

The rise of platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch has democratized content creation, but standing out in a crowded digital landscape requires both talent and the right tools. This presents a unique opportunity for digital product creators to offer solutions that empower content creators to produce, manage, and enhance their content more effectively.

For tech-savvy entrepreneurs, digital artists, and software developers, crafting digital products tailored for content creators can be a pathway to tapping into a vibrant and growing market. Here’s how you can create digital products that cater to the needs of content creators:

Explore Digital Product Ideas for Content Creators

25. video and audio editing software, 26. social media templates and graphics, 27. e-books and guides on content strategy, 28. content planning and management tools, why digital products for content creators.

Tool Tips for Developing and Marketing Products for Content Creatos

While there's no shortage of video and audio editing tools on the market, there's always room for innovative solutions that cater to niche requirements or offer more intuitive interfaces and workflows. Developing software that simplifies the editing process, includes unique effects or automates tedious tasks can significantly benefit content creators looking to produce high-quality content efficiently.

Social media content needs to be visually appealing to stand out. Offering customizable templates for Instagram stories, YouTube thumbnails, or Facebook posts can save creators time and enhance their visual branding. By providing a range of styles and themes, you can cater to a broad audience, from lifestyle bloggers to tech vloggers.

Content creation is not just about making videos or posts; it’s about building a strategy that grows audiences and drives engagement . E-books and comprehensive guides that delve into content strategy, audience building, and monetization strategies offer valuable insights to creators at all stages of their journey.

Example of a content planner: ContentStudio

Organization is key to consistent content creation. Digital products that help creators plan, schedule, and track their content can be immensely valuable. Think along the lines of editorial calendars, content management systems, or analytics dashboards tailored to the needs of individual creators or small content teams.

• High Demand: The content creation industry is booming, with an increasing number of individuals and businesses looking to produce digital content.
• Creative Fulfillment: Developing tools and resources for content creators allows you to directly contribute to the creative process, offering a sense of fulfillment.
• Monetization Potential: Content creators are willing to invest in tools that save time, enhance quality, or streamline their workflow, providing a viable revenue stream for digital product developers.
• Understand the Creator’s Needs: Engage with the content creator community to identify common challenges, desired features, and gaps in the current market.
• Focus on User Experience: Whether it’s software, templates, or planning tools, ensuring a seamless and intuitive user experience can set your product apart from competitors.
• Promote Through Content Creators: Collaborating with content creators for product reviews or tutorials can be a powerful way to promote your products and gain credibility within the community.

Tool Tips for Developing and Marketing Products for Content Creators

• Design and Development Tools: Adobe Creative Suite for graphic design; Unity or Unreal Engine for software development, especially if you’re targeting game streamers.
• Content Creation and Management: Trello or Asana for project management; Google Analytics and social media insights for content performance tracking.
• Marketing and Sales Platforms: Shopify for selling digital products; ConvertKit for email marketing campaigns targeting content creators.

By crafting digital products that address the specific needs of content creators, you not only open up a lucrative market for your skills and innovations but also play a crucial role in supporting the ecosystem of digital creativity. Whether through enhancing the quality of content, simplifying the creation process, or helping creators strategize and monetize their work, your digital products can empower a new generation of artists, educators, and entertainers to share their talents with the world.

Unique Digital Product Ideas: Innovating Beyond Conventional Boundaries

The digital world is teeming with opportunities for innovation, inviting creators to explore beyond traditional product categories and tap into niche markets with unique needs and interests.

By venturing into areas like printable games and activities, nutrition plans, music production assets, and more, digital product creators can carve out specialized niches that cater to specific hobbies, lifestyles, and professional needs. Here are some distinctive digital product ideas that combine creativity with utility, offering new avenues for digital entrepreneurship.

Explore Unique Digital Product Ideas

29. printable games and activities, 30. nutrition plans and recipe e-books, 31. music production assets, 32. customizable digital planners and journals, 33. virtual interior design templates, why explore unique digital product ideas, tool tips for crafting and marketing unique digital products.

In a world that's increasingly digital, there's a charming simplicity and appeal in activities that can be enjoyed offline. Printable games and activities cater to this niche, offering everything from intricate coloring pages for adults to educational worksheets for children, or custom board games that families can print and play at home. This category can also include party games, scavenger hunt lists, or themed activity packs for special occasions, providing endless opportunities for customization and creativity.

Example of nutrition plans and recipes: The Nutrition Plan

With a growing focus on health and wellness, personalized nutrition plans and recipe e-books cater to a wide array of dietary preferences and goals. Whether it's keto, vegan, gluten-free, or meal plans for fitness training, these digital products offer valuable guidance and inspiration. By combining nutritional advice with delicious recipes, you can help individuals achieve their health objectives while enjoying the process.

For music producers and hobbyists alike, high-quality production assets such as sample packs, loops, and instrumentals are invaluable tools for creativity and production. Catering to various genres and styles, these assets can help music creators achieve professional sound quality in their projects. Offering unique sounds, from vintage synth samples to contemporary beats, can set your products apart in a crowded marketplace.

Digital planners and journals have gained popularity for their convenience and environmental friendliness. Offering customizable versions of these products, where users can select layouts, themes, and features that suit their planning style or journaling needs, adds a personal touch. Incorporating interactive elements, such as clickable tabs and embedded trackers, can enhance usability and appeal.

As more people seek to beautify their living spaces without the expense of hiring a professional, virtual interior design templates offer a DIY solution. These digital products can range from room layout planners and color scheme selectors to detailed design templates for different home styles. Providing users with tools to visualize and plan their spaces can tap into the thriving home decor and renovation market.

• Untapped Markets: Unique digital products allow you to explore less saturated markets where there's room for growth and innovation.
• Personalization Potential: These products often offer higher customization, meeting specific user needs and enhancing customer satisfaction.
• Passion Projects: Creating digital products in niche categories can align with personal interests and passions, making the development process more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Getting Started with Unique Digital Product Ideas

• Research and Validation: Identify gaps in the market and validate your ideas by engaging with potential customers through surveys, social media, or niche forums.
• Focus on Quality and Originality: Ensure your products stand out by offering high-quality, original content or functionalities that can't be easily found elsewhere.
• Promote Through Community Engagement: Engage with communities interested in your product's niche, whether through social media groups, blogs, or online forums, to build awareness and credibility.
• Creative Software: Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator for designing printable activities and planners; FL Studio or Ableton Live for creating music production assets.
• E-book Creation: Tools like Canva for designing recipe e-books or nutrition guides; Scrivener for compiling and formatting written content.
• Marketing Tools: Platforms like Pinterest for visual products like interior design templates; Instagram and YouTube for sharing content that showcases the value and use of your products.

By diving into the world of unique digital product ideas, you can offer something new and exciting to consumers looking for specialized content and tools. Whether it's through enhancing hobbies, supporting personal goals, or providing professional assets, your digital products can enrich lives in myriad ways, fostering a connection between your passion and the needs of your audience.

Marketing and Selling Your Digital Products: Strategies and Tools for Success

Successfully launching and selling digital products requires more than just creating something of value; it involves strategic marketing and choosing the right platforms and tools for distribution and sales.

The digital marketplace is vast and competitive, but with the right approach, you can effectively reach your target audience and achieve sustainable sales. Below, we explore strategies for marketing digital products and an overview of platforms and tools that can aid in your digital product sales journey, with a focus on the importance of owning your platform.

Effective Marketing Strategies for Digital Products

• Content Marketing: Create valuable content related to your digital product. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics can attract an audience interested in your niche. High-quality content not only builds trust but also positions you as an authority in your field.
• Email Marketing: Develop a relationship with your audience through regular, valuable email communications. Segment your email list to offer personalized content and product recommendations based on subscriber interests and behaviors.
• Social Media Engagement: Use social media platforms to connect with potential customers, share engaging content, and promote your digital products. Interactive content such as live videos, polls, and Q&A sessions can increase engagement.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimize your website and content for search engines to improve visibility and attract organic traffic interested in your offerings.
• Affiliate Marketing: Partner with affiliates who can promote your products to their audiences for a commission on sales. This expands your reach and leverages the credibility of your affiliates.

Choosing Platforms and Tools for Selling Digital Products

The importance of owning your platform, such as a WordPress website, cannot be overstated.

While third-party marketplaces offer immediate access to a large audience, they come with significant drawbacks, including high fees, limited control over your marketing and customer experience, and dependence on the platform's longevity and rules.

By setting up your website, you gain full control over the presentation, marketing, and customer interaction, ensuring a branded experience that can lead to higher customer loyalty and repeat business.

Why WordPress and Thrive Themes?

• Customization and Control: WordPress, combined with Thrive Themes, offers unparalleled flexibility in designing your sales pages, landing pages, and overall website layout. This control ensures your site aligns with your brand identity and marketing goals.
• Integration with Payment Processors: WordPress allows for easy integration with payment processors like Stripe , PayPal , and others, providing secure and convenient payment options for your customers.
• Scalability: As your business grows, your WordPress site can grow with you, adding new features, products, and integrations without the limitations often found on hosted platforms.

Alternatives and Additional Tools

• E-commerce Platforms: Shopify and BigCommerce are powerful e-commerce solutions that can handle digital product sales, offering various integrations and payment options.
• Email Marketing Tools: Platforms like ConvertKit and Drip offer advanced segmentation, automation features, and integrations with WordPress, making them invaluable for building and engaging with your email list.
• Marketing and SEO Tools: Tools like AIOSEO for WordPress can help optimize your content for search engines, while MonsterInsights provides insights into your website traffic and user behavior.

Successfully marketing and selling digital products involves a combination of strategic marketing and choosing the right tools and platforms that offer the flexibility, control, and scalability needed for long-term success.

By focusing on building your platform with WordPress and utilizing powerful tools like Thrive Themes, you can create a solid foundation for your digital product business, ensuring you're well-equipped to attract, engage, and convert your target audience.

Turn Your Digital Product Ideas into a Success Story

The digital realm offers abundant opportunities for creating and selling digital products, ranging from educational materials to niche-specific tools. This avenue provides scalability, flexibility, and global reach, making it a compelling business model for creators and entrepreneurs alike.

We encourage you to consider digital product creation as a feasible and rewarding venture. By strategically marketing your products and utilizing robust platforms like WordPress and Thrive Themes, you can establish a profitable, impactful business. Embrace the chance to share your knowledge and creativity, impacting lives worldwide while pursuing your passion.

And if you're looking for the perfect way to host your courses and market your new business, then check out Thrive Themes Suite of products.

Get Thrive Suite today!

by   William P   March 8, 2024

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. W e only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.

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Problem-Solving with Digital Products

05/06/2024 06:41 AM

In the realm of business, establishing yourself as an expert is the key to sustained sales and customer loyalty. When people seek information or guidance, they instinctively turn to trusted authorities.

By sharing your knowledge and aligning it with your audience's problems, you can effortlessly become that sought-after expert.

Tapping into Your Expert Within

You possess a wealth of expertise, even if you may not fully recognize it. As a business owner, you have acquired knowledge and skills that your audience lacks. Leveraging your years of immersion in your field, you can unlock your inner expert and offer solutions to your audience's challenges.

Identify Your Expertise

Take a moment to reflect on these questions:

• What unique knowledge do you possess that your audience needs?
• What are your areas of proficiency?
• What topics do people frequently seek your advice on?
• What natural abilities do you possess?
• Which areas have you invested significant time and effort in developing over the years?

By aligning your expertise with your audience's problems, you create opportunities to provide solutions through information products.

Understanding Your Audience's Needs

In-depth knowledge of your ideal audience is essential. By comprehending their challenges, you can tailor your products to their specific needs.

When your offerings seamlessly align with your customers' requirements, they will perceive you as having exceptional foresight. At the precise moment they encounter obstacles, you will present solutions that effortlessly guide them toward resolution.

Problem Solving as a Sales Driver

Not all information products directly address specific problems. Some serve a purely informational purpose. However, targeting and solving your audience's problems guarantees sales and a loyal following. Aim to alleviate their pain, answer their questions, or provide practical solutions to their challenges.

Standing Out Through Unique Solutions

In most cases, your competitors are already out there, offering solutions to your audience's problems. To differentiate yourself, focus on providing a unique solution or a unique twist to an existing solution.

The most effective strategy is to help your audience achieve their goals faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost. By leveraging this approach, you cater to universal desires: saving money, resolving issues promptly, and finding improved methods for accomplishing tasks.

Rapid-Fire Product Creation

Instead of aiming for a comprehensive, all-encompassing product, consider adopting a strategy of producing numerous, concise, and focused products. Each product should address and resolve a single problem. This approach allows you to disseminate your expertise widely and increase opportunities for your audience to benefit from it.

By becoming a problem-solving guru through information product creation, you establish yourself as a trusted expert, build a loyal customer base, and achieve long-term success in your business.

Embrace your inner expertise, understand your audience's needs, and provide unique solutions. The world is waiting for your wisdom and guidance.

Steve Black

My passion is to help small businesses get access to the systems, tools and resources to help them get better referrals, better customers and have better businesses.

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