Keeping in the spirit of the discussion on “leverage” from the earlier post, the ability to create a digital product is a powerful capability for your business. The great characteristic of a digital product is the ease of reproducibility; develop once and the marginal cost of creating 1 more or many more is practically zero. This is huge leverage for you and your time. Note there are two different kinds of digital products, and they each have their nuances. The first kind seems to have caught on like wildfire in the past few years, particularly with the digital marketers out there. It’s basically taking your knowledge & expertise, digitizing it and selling it. Basically become an online “guru”. The second is a bit more traditional; creating and selling a software product. In this blog post, I’ll cover the former.
Creating and Selling Your Expertise
Suppose you played a sport like lacrosse in high school or college and perhaps you still play in an adult league. Or perhaps you now coach youth lacrosse. You love the sport, you understand the sport and it happens to be a growth sport in the realm of youth sports. So how do take a sport with physical contact and digitize it? There are a few ways centered around educating your audience. People have a desire to learn when it’s a topic their passionate about. With a growing sport like lacrosse, there will not only be players who are new to the sport but also their parents. Lots of passion and lots of educating needed. Players want a deeper understanding of the sport to become a better player and get a competitive advantage either on the field or getting into college. Parents want to know more so they can understand the sport their kids are playing. Here are a few of examples on how to provide value to your customers in a digital format
- Create an ebook and/or overview video of lacrosse. What are the positions, what are the rules, what type of equipment is used, what’s the history of the sport (i.e. the sport’s origins are from Native Americans), etc. This is great information for new players and parents alike.
- Create training videos which show players different drills to help them improve their skills. You could even create videos on different team drills which could be of value to coaches who may need help with drills for their team practices. Videos are a powerful training tool people love to consume. Demonstrating how to play using a video format is ideal for sports.
- Doing product reviews of lacrosse equipment, i.e. helmets, heads, shafts, gloves, etc can also be a revenue generator by becoming an affiliate marketer. By promoting products, viewers may go and click on the link from your from your review and buy the product. Then you get a cut of the sale.
These are just a few ideas in which you can create digital products once. Based on the value of your products, people will seek it out and buy. Create one video, perhaps sell it 100 times. Or 1000 times. The leverage comes from that fact you created one video and put it on your website to sell to an “infinite” number of people – with no real extra cost to you.
There’s a bit more work to get your digital product created and then marketed. You need a website, create content, market it, etc. In my research, I’ve found Miles Beckler to be a guru for helping people create their website and market their digital products. Once your site is setup with your digital products you’ll also want to invest some time in writing blogs to help increase search-engine performance to draw people to your site. Over time there’s a potential for your digital products to start generating passive income.
