5 days to clarity on your digital product idea – Part 4

There's no rule about what to start with. First, you don't have to start with something that you think is going to be the easiest. We need to start with what is going to suit your customer's needs best.

5 days to clarity on your digital product idea – Part 4

This is now day four of the five days to clarity on your digital product idea. Whether you have way too many ideas or you have no idea where to start.

In this week's training series, starting from Part One, I'm walking you through each step in the formula. If you like the step-by-step formula of creating a digital product that people want and need and will pay money for.

So today we're looking at what format and how to create it, what tech to use and what format, whether it's going to be an online course or group program, or a membership, an ebook, or a template.

 

Choosing the right format for your audience

There are so many different types of formats that you can have your digital product in and I think there's this big misconception that you have to create an online course and that the online course you create has to be the big signature course. That it's teaching everything. It's teaching the massive transformation.

Instead, you actually need to create what is going to suit your customer's needs best. So for example, often people will say, well, I want to start by doing an ebook because that's going to be easier than an online course.

Firstly as somebody who launched an ebook many years ago now, I think it was about four or five years ago. I would not recommend launching an ebook because it's easier than an online course, because I found it way harder. It was harder than writing my actual book that's in print. This ebook that I published was 150 pages long. And what I actually found was that it didn't suit my audience's needs best because they didn't have time to sit and read 150 pages and work through the workbook section.

They just wanted shorter lessons telling them what to do. So it doesn't have to be an online course. It doesn't have to be a membership. It doesn't have to be a group program. It doesn't have to be an ebook. There's no rule about what to start with. First, you don't have to start with something that you think is going to be the easiest. We need to start with what is going to suit your customer's needs best.

Now there is a strategy for choosing which format your product will be in and there are pros and cons to each format. There is no best strategy but there are pros and cons and it's up to you to make an educated decision based on the pros and the cons and your customer's needs.

The next little thing I want to talk about before we start with comparing online courses versus group programs versus memberships versus eBooks versus templates, those are the main formats we're going to look at in today's blog but before we look at any of those, I want to talk about tech really quickly because I think this is the thing that scares people off.

From creating a course or a membership they think it'll be so much easier to create an ebook. I'll just write the stuff in a Google doc and then I'll make it look pretty in Canva and that's it, I don't have to worry about the tech.

But when you're creating an online course or a membership, if you use a platform like Kajabi, which is the one that I recommend for anybody who's planning to launch a course or a membership, you can bypass a lot of the really tough tech stuff you don't have to glue together all the bits and pieces because it's all in that one platform, they will host it. You can sell it there. You can create your sales pages there. It's a really easy solution to the tech side of it all.

 

The main formats

Let's look now at online courses versus group programs versus memberships versus eBooks versus templates. Let's start with online courses because I have built most of my business around online courses. I love creating them. I love launching them. I love teaching them. I love seeing my own students get results when they launch them.

 

Online Course

First, your online course does not need to be a massive online course. If it makes more sense for you, if the problem that you're solving is smaller, it can be a mini course or it can be a really specific course focused on solving one very specific little problem. It doesn't have to be the complete system that solves all of their problems and delivers them to their dream outcome.

 

Pros

In just one course, it doesn't have to be ongoing costs. It can be a one-off workshop or a one-off recording that they sit through and watch for two hours or 90 minutes or however long it takes to teach them what they need to know to solve the problem or achieve that transformation. So an online course doesn't mean that it has to follow this one particular framework and it doesn't have to be eight weeks long with prerecorded lessons and a Facebook group.

It doesn't have to follow a set structure, you can create it and design it however you want to create and design it. Let me use Launch Magic as an example. So Launch Magic is my signature 12-week course to get that profitable launch and relaunch your digital products over and over and over again.

Launch Magic is delivering a pretty big transformation which is that profitable launch framework that you can repeat over and over. The way that I taught Launch Magic the first time around wasn't with pre-recorded lessons, we didn't have a Facebook group. It was live zoom calls twice a week. On a Tuesday morning zoom call I taught a lesson and then the Thursday morning zoom call was Q and A time. That was the first time I taught it.

The second time I taught it, I did the same live calls and Q and A sessions as the second call of the week. Then the third time that I taught at the most recent round that we had at the end of 2021, that one was the first time that we had prerecorded lessons and the first time that we had a Facebook group that had previously had a community inside Kajabi and for various reasons, I decided to move that Kajabi group into Facebook because I thought people would be more likely to check the group and interact if it was in a platform they were already using.

That is kind of the evolution of how Launch Magic went from being a course that I taught live via zoom each week, to being more of that prerecorded classic because of the Facebook group. But having said that, you don't have to pre-record your lessons ever, if you don't want to, it can be something that you teach live twice a year via zoom without any prerecorded lessons.

And on the flip side, it could be something that you only teach with prerecorded lessons. It can be something that you run as a cohort-based because like Launch Magic where I run it twice a year or it can be something that people can go through at any point in time. So you can make that decision based on what your audience needs.

For example, if they need more accountability and more support, that is when a cohort-based group can be really beneficial. If they want to just go through it at their own time, or if it's a problem that they have at any point in time, then you can have it available for them to go through at any point in time.

 

Cons

Some of the cons of an online course are that they can be a little bit more involved to create. So maybe you need to create slides. If you decide to include slides, I've been in a lot of courses where they don't have slides and it's just them talking to a webcam. So you don't have to create slides if you don't want to.

A lot of people think that your online course has to be this professional production where you've got a videographer in and it's slick and the transition's perfect and you never make any mistakes. I would definitely not invest in a videographer until I've at least launched that same course twice.

I've had customers come through it each time because you can outlay a lot of money on a videographer and then nobody buys the course, and that's a big risk to take. Unless you are a hundred percent confident in the course that you were selling, a hundred percent confident that people are going to buy it.

 

Group Programs

Group programs are similar to online courses in that you are teaching content but they are definitely cohort-based. Everyone's going through it together and they tend to be a little bit smaller than  an online course and they tend to have a little bit more of a high touch element and this includes things like masterminds as well.

 

Pros

With group programs, the pros are that there is a lot of support and there tends to be more accountability than in an online course. There also tends to be a little bit less content. So an online course might be a bit more content-focused.

Whereas a group program is more support and accountability-focused. Having said that though, your group program can be designed, however you want to design it. One of the big pros of group programs is that you don't have to create much content before you launch it and you can create that content week by week based on what people need. Some people do group programs that are entirely group coaching based. So there's no new content taught but the program itself is around.

 

Cons

Hot seat coaching each member of the group. If you're going for that format, you probably want to keep the group a bit on the smaller side so that people get as much coaching as they can in the sessions that you have together.

Typically you would run a group program over something like Zoom and you might find that a group chat or a small Facebook group works really well for the community element here.

 

Memberships

People think memberships are an easy sell because they tend to be cheaper than online courses. But they're quite tricky to sell because people don't want to be locked into more subscriptions. The other misconception with memberships is that they're easier than courses because they provide recurring revenue.

So I see a lot of people saying, oh, I want to have a membership because my audience can't afford the high ticket costs and because I want recurring revenue in my business. This is probably not the best way to approach it. There's a very clear time when membership will work better than a course and that is when you are either solving an ongoing problem, creating a habit or your audience needs ongoing community or ongoing support, or when you have content that needs updating regularly.

 

• Ongoing problem

So for example, an ongoing problem, let's say somebody is a podcaster and an ongoing problem that a podcast has is that they constantly need to find new content ideas. So a membership that would be really good for solving that ongoing problem would be content ideas each month.

• Ongoing habits

Might be something like building a meditation habit. Headspace has done this beautifully where they have a not typical membership that you would call a membership, but it's a subscription and it's that subscription model designed to get people into the habit of meditating over and over again.

• Ongoing community

We see this quite a lot with business memberships, where people pay a membership to belong to the community, to be able to come to events and to be part of the Facebook group.

• Content that needs updating all the time

I'm going to talk about this one because I actually created a course a few years ago, back in 2017, teaching people the basics of Facebook ads for their business. What I've found was that Facebook kept changing the ads platform so much that I needed to update the content all the time and that was eventually one of the reasons why I retired from that course because I wasn't interested in staying on top of all of the different Facebook changes.

 

Pros

But a great membership idea to create would be a membership teaching people who are running Facebook ads about all of the different changes that Facebook is constantly making to the platform to see how all of those things are fulfilling an ongoing need. It's not that membership is just ongoing content because people want content for content's sake. We have way more content than we could ever need these days. So it's not about creating more content but it's about that ongoing problem, habit, community, or content that needs updating all the time.

 

Cons

Membership is a real commitment. I had one back in 2018 and 2019 and it is such a commitment because you are constantly having to create content. You are having to keep on top of retention. Retention in membership is really hard. Everyone thinks that growing your membership is about getting more people into the membership but if you have more people leaving the membership each month than coming into it, you're going to grow backward and retention is a lot harder than you think it will be in membership.

So, yes, a membership can be quite a commitment. But having said that if you absolutely nail that ongoing problem or habit or community, it can be really successful and it can be a really powerful form of recurring revenue. But you need to have that right problem, habit or community or content that needs updating all the time.

 

eBooks

I talked about this a little bit at the beginning where people think, oh, I'm going to do an ebook because it's easier than doing an online course.

 

Pros

I guess one of the pros of creating an ebook is that you can always take that content and turn it into a course later down the track. That is what I did a couple of years ago. I had an ebook about Instagram strategy and then I ended up turning it into a course. So it was a lot easier for me because the content was already written, it was already there and I actually really enjoyed the process of writing the ebook. It did take me a very long time. I think it took me about nine months from start to finish. So it's not the quickest digital product to create.

Cons

The biggest con of creating an ebook is that it can take a really long time. The other con about creating an ebook is that a lot of people's ideal customers these days won't have the time to sit down and read an ebook. So it'll just be something that they buy and never look at or that they've read like the first couple of chapters and never finish. So if you are creating an ebook, how can you add some kind of element to it that entices them to finish it quicker?

Is it that they have 30 days to read the e-book and then they lose access to it? Is it that they have 30 days of Q and A, or two Q and A calls, or something that entices them to complete that content faster so that they actually do it and it's not just another resource that is available for them to consume at their leisure?

 

Templates

I've seen super successful launches of websites, templates, and content templates.

My students have done a lot of template launches and it's been really fun seeing how great these have been particularly for people like web designers and graphic designers who have been full to the brim with one-on-one client work and for them to be able to create a template option that was more affordable for people, and that enabled them to help more people at that lower price range without adding more work onto their plate. That was really rewarding for me to watch my students do that.

I've also seen awesome content templates, legal templates, and anything where you can save somebody time as well as email templates, for example, pitching templates anywhere where you can save somebody time in a process that they're going to be repeating over and over again. Those templates work beautifully.

Pros

The pro of creating templates is that it can be a great way to replace the done-for-you work that you might already be doing in your business.

Cons

But I guess the con, the biggest cons with creating templates are that they can take quite a while to create if you are doing something like design templates and that they weren't meet everybody's needs. It can be really easy when you're trying to create templates to be like, oh, but I want to make it for this person, and for this person, but it ends up becoming this rabbit hole.

Pro Tip:

So my biggest tip, if you are creating a template is to make it as specific as you can. So design templates for podcasters, rather than just design templates for everybody. Social media templates for marketers rather than just social media templates for everybody and the other thing that I would recommend is maybe adding some kind of customization option like an upgrade where somebody can buy the template and then pay a little bit more to get a one-on-one session with you or to get 30 minutes of your time customizing that template. So that you can help as many people as possible in a way that is more specific to them.

 

So there you have it. Five different types of digital products you can create. There are a lot more out there, but these are probably the most common ones that I see with my students. Particularly through Launch Magic, we tend to have online courses, group programs, memberships, eBooks and template launches are the most common ones.

 

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