Ecommerce is booming all over the globe, with consumers more willing than ever before to shop online. This has led to unprecedented opportunities for complete beginners to set up a successful business online.
There are many ecommerce options, which allow those with no coding skills at all to leverage their site builder and shopping cart technology to create a professional-looking, full-service eStore, filled with in-demand products. Examples of popular ecommerce aggregators include Shopify, WordPress Plugins, and SendOwl.
In this guide, we will be discussing how to create a hot-selling product and then give a brief overview of how to get setup to sell through your blog. At SendOwl, you can sell digital or physical products, but they specialize in products created by artistic business owners longing to share their work with a wider audience.
Digital products will be much faster to create because you have full control over the process from beginning to end. Good examples of digital product in high demand are:
- Ebooks
- Ecourses with audio/video
- Digital courses online for home study
- Music downloads, such as MP3 files
- Videos, such as instructional videos
Create the product, list it, set your price, and start selling.
It really is that simple.
You can sell at almost any price point. SendOwl is a great affordable option for getting set up to sell through your blog – easily.
If you want to run a competitive and profitable blog, you will need to know the “going” price of the products you offer. Try to match this price or even go a little lower. Keep in mind that it’s always better to under-promise and over deliver.
However, you do need to make a profit on the items.
How can you do that? Niche and product research is the key. Let’s get started creating your first hot-selling product by finding out what your prospective customers really want.
Your niche is the topic or area you wish to work in. You might be passionate about a niche like golf, quilting, or dogs. You might love Indian cooking, making your own soap, or starting an organic vegetable garden. Hopefully you already have a solid niche for your blog – but if not, try going through this checklist for evaluating a profitable niche and be sure that your niche has a narrow focus.
Choosing Your Niche
Everyone is an expert at something. You probably have at least one thing you enjoy doing and are passionate about. This enthusiasm makes you forget that you are actually working. Choose a niche/topic in which you are knowledgeable and experienced. This will help you build your authority status quickly.
Do you remember what it was like when you started a new hobby, activity, or even a new stage of life? As a beginner, you probably had a lot of questions. Maybe you were lucky enough to have someone answer all our questions, no matter how dumb they seemed. Or maybe you had to tough it out, facing all sorts of challenges and obstacles until you finally succeeded. Perhaps you learned the slow, hard, and perhaps expensive way.
You might have even become so frustrated that you thought about giving up. That is, until you found a product or solution that helped you get over the ‘pain point’ that was holding you back from achieving all your goals.
No one wants to do things the slow and hard way. They want the quick and easy way. They don’t want to pay a fortune for it, but they are willing to pay a premium price for something that really works.
As you choose your niche, keep these things in mind. Think back to a time when were new, needed info, or were looking for a solution on a specific topic (like building a successful, profitable blog!). Use your own experience with the topic make a list of pain points and problems/solutions that resonates with your audience.
Researching Pain Points
Your next step will be to choose which pressing pain point you want to tackle in your first product. To start, again you can think about what it was like for you as a beginner. Grab paper and pen and start brainstorming all the things you had trouble with and wished you had a solution for. Keep writing until you run out of steam.
Then think about the kinds of thing you bought in order to overcome the problem. What did you buy, around how much did you pay for it, and did it work? What did it do well? What could it have done better?
Visit Groups and Discussion Boards
Check out the groups and discussion boards in your niche to see what people are complaining about regularly. What troubles and frustrations do they have? What are their frequently asked questions (FAQs)? What do they chat about on social media? Above all, what do they recommend to each other?
Research at ClickBank and JVzoo.com
These 2 sites are the most popular for niche-related digital products. If you can find at least a couple of products related to your niche, then it is a paying niche you should be able to make money from. Analyze the products on offer to help plan what you are going to create. Look for gaps in what is available and think about a product you can create to help fill those gaps.
Research at Amazon
There are a number of research steps, which can help you lay the foundation for a profitable niche business.
Check out Amazon bestsellers in your niche, including the titles and price points.
Run a search in your niche. Look at all the products, categories and advertisers who show up on the first page.
Look at Kindle books. Since digital products are so easy to create, see what ebooks they have on offer in the Kindle format. Type in your niche, such as dog training, and then look for books.
Read reviews. Look at a couple of the 5 star ones. What do they praise?
Look at the reviews with low ratings. What do people complain about? What feature is missing? Make note of these needs.
Check to see if there are any magazines related to your topic. Magazines usually mean a paying niche of both consumers, and advertisers willing to pay money to put an ad in the magazines.
Research on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing
These are the 3 top search engines in the world. See who your top competition is in the following way. Check:
- Who is listed in the Top 10 organic (free listings) at each of these sites
- Who is advertising at each of the ad networks at these sites
- What do they sell? At what price point?
Now that you have done your research, you probably have a good idea of the kinds of things people really want and need related to your niche. So now it is time to start planning and creating your first product.
There is an old saying, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Not everyone is going to love your product, but if your goal is to be genuinely helpful and not rip off anyone, chances are that if your product does what it says it will, you will have a lot of happy customers.
Plan Your Content
When planning your product, think of how you can help others. Also, remember the main questions every prospective customer will have on their minds:
- What’s in it for me?
- How will this help me?
- Why should I buy from you?
- What expertise or inside secrets can you offer that no one else in your niche can?
Once you have a good idea of the pain points, use the one that your expertise and research suggest would resonate best with your target audience.
- Outline what you want to cover. What are the 5 to 10 main points a person would need to know to solve their pain point or gain a new skill?
- Plan your format. Short, sharp one-solution digital products are very popular. You might not be able to charge a lot but you can sell a lot, if the price is right and the topic is in high-demand. An ebook is a good choice. Video is booming in popularity
Product Creation Ideas
There are many ways to create the content for your first digital product. Depending on the content formats and types you include in the product, as well as your skills, and current resources, you may discover that you can incorporate several of these content creation suggestions within one product.
Write it yourself. If you are a good writer, it should be relatively easy for you to create a five- to ten-thousand word ebook or course for your prospective customers (try this step-by-step guide to creating your first ebook).
Create an audio book. If you don’t type very fast or don’t think you’re a good writer, try creating an audio book, podcast, or webinar. It is still a kind of writing.
Consider interviewing someone who is in your niche or get them to interview you. If you can speak intelligently on a topic, you can create an interesting digital product with high value. You can even get a transcription and edit out the ums and ahs. You can sell it as a product or give it as a bonus.
Try Private Label Rights (PLR). PLR is pre-written content you can buy a license to use. It is cheaper than hiring a freelancer or ghostwriter. Search for (Your Niche or Topic) PLR on Google to see what is available. The PLR packs will come in various formats. Some will be article packs about the topic. Others might include an ebook, articles, emails, a cover and so on.
Using unedited and modified PLR is a bad practice, for a couple of reasons. The first is that some of the content may not have been written by a native English speaker and might need to be polished or corrected. The second is that about 98% of people will not bother to edit the PLR. This can lead to duplicate content penalties online, if you post content on a website. Amazon expressly forbids you to create a Kindle ebook, from unmodified PLR. Everyone wants original content.
PLR best practice is to edit it in terms of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Then add your own examples, case studies, personal style, tone, and stories. In this way, you will stand out from the crowd and it will only take a few days for you to write a book.
Hire a freelancer. There are many freelancers available at Fiverr and Upwork who can create good content for you. Just note that you might have to pay more for the best writers, and there may be a queue of people, causing you to have to wait to get your first product done.
Hire a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter is similar to a freelancer. They write a book for you, do the research if they need to, or interview you, and then write a book that you will put your name on. This will usually be the most expensive option but you will usually get a high-quality book as long as you work closely with the writer to make sure they are clear about what you want from them.
Curate content. Content curation refers to pointing people in your niche to the kinds of content and products they want in relation to your niche or a particular topic. A best Christmas presents for pet lovers buyer’s guide, for example, might include your opinions, but can also include reviews, content from the manufacturer, and other information that will save people time and money. Curation helps position you as an expert in your industry. Point people to valuable tools, with tips on how to use them, or comparison charts of the products available and their features and prices, and you should soon start to gain a reputation as someone worth paying attention to.
There are many ways to create digital products and many product formats to choose from. However, if you are serious about making sales to your target audience, you must provide them with the solutions they need and in the formats that work best for them.
Format the Content
Depending on the format, you will need various types of software. Fortunately, there are a lot of free or cheap tools to help. If you want to create an ebook, for example, use your word processor and save it as a PDF. You can sell online. If you want to sell it on Kindle, convert it there and set up the title for sale at Amazon.
If you want to sell videos, you can upload them to YouTube and mark them as Unlisted, in an unlisted playlist. This means you can send links to people to get their content, but it can’t be searched for or seen by any uninvited guests. Similarly, if you are creating an audio file or podcast, upload it to SoundCloud (it charges a low monthly fee for unlimited uploads) and give your customers links to your unlisted content. For PowerPoint decks, use Slideshare.net.
Audio, video, and PowerPoint files can be very large. Trying to host them at your own site (if you have one) and play them back can be very difficult. Hosting them at one of the top sites like Youtube or Slideshare, then embedding them at your site and giving people a link, will give views or listeners a superior experience.
But there are other ways to sell ebooks and video besides sending your customers to your content via links. One of them is to create products and sell them using SendOwl.
- Once you have your digital product created and formatted (ie. ebooks in PDF format, videos on Youtube, etc.), you’ll want to add your product to your SendOwl account.
- Enter a name for your product and the price point – then SendOwl will give you an “Buy Now” link for your product.
- Copy that link and insert it into the sales page you’ve created on your blog for your product. You could either add the link as a text link – or you can create a button image and link that button to your SendOwl product link.
- Now it’s time to launch your product through your blog!
Creating a hot-selling product can take time. You need a high-quality product that your niche really wants and needs as well as marketing content to get people excited enough to buy it. All online businesses should have a professional shopping cart or store where their customers can buy with confidence.
Fortunately, SendOwl makes it easy to sell and buy quality products. Customers will find it easy to use. Once you have created your product in your beautiful shop, you can sit back and watch your sales flow in. However, you may be so pleased with the experience and results that you can’t wait to release more products.
Do you have a product you’ve created already? Share in the comments below!
