QA 44 – How to find a good digital product to create

In today's Q&A, we are helping Arlene find a good digital product to create for her online business. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Google Keyword Planner Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: It says, "Hello, I'm from Cincinnati." We are very close to you Arlene. It says, "What steps can I take to find a good digital product to create?" This is a really good question. It's actually one that we get a lot. People always email us and they want to know, 'What should I make?' SHANE: "What do you think I could sell to make money online?" That's a huge thing we get in person a lot too. JOCELYN: Yeah, and that's really a great place to start of course, because you have to know what you are doing before you can figure out how to get there. So, what we did when we were starting our online businesses is, we decided to make something that would help us in our regular jobs. We were still working regular jobs at the time and we didn't want to spend a lot of time making products that may or may not sell. So my theory was, if I made something that would help me in my day job, at least I would be able to use it if it completely failed. So, that is how I got started making lesson plans and I did all of this in my free time of course and that is what I did. I didn't have to be the most state-of-the-art librarian. In fact, I had only worked as a librarian for like three years. So, I didn't know everything there was to know about making lesson plans or about being a great librarian. I just knew that I had a problem that I needed good quality lesson plans and I couldn't find them online. So I figured that if I had that problem, then someone else probably had that problem too and that is how we got started doing what we were doing. If you have a job where, maybe you can't really make a product that would help you, say if you are a – what would be a good example? If you are, say a cashier maybe and there is nothing that you can really do to improve on that job process, maybe you could do something on a subject that you really love. A great way to know what you should be doing a product on is to ask friends or family members: what am I really good at? What would you say that I could teach someone else to do? Even if you don't have an idea yourself, you might be able to have someone else come up with a good idea for you. SHANE: And the key thing to remember on what Jocelyn is talking about there is, you don't have to be you know, a PhD Nobel prizewinner to create a digital project. You just have to be expert enough. Jocelyn had been a librarian for three years but there are thousands of librarians every year that had less experience than her and she is the one who created the product. There might be people more qualified to create lesson plans for a library but they are not doing it. It's the same thing in your field. If you are expert enough in something, you should go out and do it and about the things that you love, whatever hobbies you have, you can create a digital product. Even just to learn the process and to start it online, don't think your first idea is going to make you millions of dollars. It's not going to but you need something to get started. So if you aren't really excited about maybe creating something for work, then pick the thing you love to do the most, your greatest hobby and create a digital product for that. I've got a buddy of mine who loves wrestling and he is dying to start a pro-wrestling podcast and he wants to write like a history book about pro-wrestling. [Laughs] So that's probably not a million-dollar idea but it would be an amazing thing to do just to get started, just to learn the process, how do I deliver this, how do I take payments, how do I do all these things. So those are the first two places that you really need to look at; it's just what do you really kno...