How to launch your first digital product

If you are blogging with the aim of generating a long term sustainable income, then sooner or later, you’re going to want to sell some kind of digital product on-line. Selling other people’s stuff can be lucrative, but there are few things more profitable than creating something yourself, and unleashing it to the power of the internet.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a series of posts over the next few days, I’m going to give you some pointers, ideas and a plan for your first launch. This is based on my personal experience with three launches:

• The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter (sadly pathetic – I was the only buyer in the first 7 hours, but thankfully now selling well)
• The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging (A good first week, and now a steady but unspectacular seller)
• Beyond Blogging (The most amazing success, and one of the biggest ever E Book launches)

You might want to subscribe to the RSS feed, or better still to my email newsletter to make sure you catch the rest of this series. The button and form are to your right.

Now then, what are the key elements we need to think about on a product launch?

1. Choosing a subject
2. Creating the product (For this example we’ll assume it’s an E Book)
3. Format and design
4. Creating marketing materials
5. Selecting a sales process
6. Developing an affiliate program
7. Designing a sales page
8. Choosing a launch date
9. Pre launch process
10. The launch!
11. Post launch follow up
12. Keeping momentum going

Let’s tackle the first three today.

Choosing a Subject

If you’ve been blogging for some time, you’ll know what the hot topics are in your niche. Which posts get the most reads? What area of your niche is attracting the most interest right now? What common problems do your readers have? Are there certain questions which come up all the time in comments? All of these things should lead you to the point where you can choose a subject for your first E Book.

As you saw above, mine was about Twitter. The timing was good as many people were, and are just getting into Twitter. And as with anything new, it can be hard to understand what’s going on when you first arrive on the scene as a Twitter noob.

What you should be looking to do with your first paid-for product is to solve a problem for people. If you can do that, then you stand half a chance of selling a few. Try to put yourself in the position of your readers and think what problems they would like solved. In my Beginners Guide to Blogging course, I use the classic car niche as an example all the way through the course. If you’ve ever owned a classic car, you will know there are numerous problems you’d like to have solved for you! Where can I buy low price good quality servicing materials? What’s the best technique for polishing without wearing the paint away? How do I preserve chrome? These are all problems which could be solved and answered in a single E Book about the practical aspects of owning a classic car.

Now apply this technique to your blog and your niche, and then choose a subject for your E Book which will solve or deal with as many of those problems as possible. Hint: One problem everybody, in every niche faces is a lack of time. If you can find a way to save them time, then you’ll almost certainly have a decent selling book.

Creating the product

By this I mean writing the book. Treat it as a series of blog posts, so that you don’t get daunted by writing a book. Set yourself a daily objective of so many sections, words or pages to write.

Either write it in Google Docs, or in Open Office – both have a fantastic native PDF export that works, and keeps all your formatting.

Length is up to you – I’ve seen excellent and useful E Books that are less than 30 pages long, and completely useless ones that are 150 pages long. Content matters more than size!

Use images often, and choose a larger text size than you normally would. I tend to use “justify” as well to provide clean edges to each page.

Finally proof read it yourself and get as many other people as you can to do the same. It’s amazing how many small mistakes you and others will miss. It can ruin the perceived value of your book.

Format and design

The simplest thing you can do is simply export your document to PDF. But think about the design – would landscape work for it? Should there be a border? What about a decent front page image?

I would also advise creating a content section and numbering the pages – it makes reading it and referring back to it so much easier. Don’t delete the original document or Google docs version either – you may want to add to it, revise it or even use it to upload as a Kindle book one day.

In an ideal world, you can get a designer to create a bespoke template for your book, which matches all the marketing materials and the brand. We were able to do this for Beyond Blogging, and although it was very expensive, I believe it was worth every penny, and several buyers described the “Wow factor” when they opened the book for the first time.

It’s worth spending time in this phase – look at different fonts, different text colors and play with the images until they sit well on each page. Get other people’s opinions as well – you won’t see things the way others do as you’re so close to the project.

We’ve come to the point where we have a “ready to go” book. Tomorrow we’ll be looking at the whole sales side of the operation, from marketing materials to designing your sales page. Don’t forget to join the feed or subscriber list!

What would you add from your experiences?

Here's a link to part two.