It’s a well-known fact that creating your own product is one of the greatest ways to make money from your website, YouTube channel, or podcast.
You build something you already know your audience is interested in, and offer it for sale.
More so than any other product you’ve promoted before, buyers pull out their credit cards, because they already know, like and trust you.
After all, the free content you put out is already great, so whatever you’re charging for must be really freaking good.
However, most bloggers don’t offer their own products for sale, which perplexed me a little bit. After asking a bunch of bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters why this is, the response was almost always the same:
“I don’t have time to create my own product. Besides, I can just offer other people’s products as an affiliate.”
This post is going to destroy that excuse once and for all. In this article, I will share with you 5 product ideas you can start and begin selling this week.
Before We Begin – The MVP Strategy
Even people who choose to create a product, often don’t end up following all the way through until release.
Why? Because they spend too much time on it. They chase perfection, especially if it’s their first product, without realizing that a perfect product doesn’t exist.
I’m going to tell you to do the opposite of that – release the absolute bare minimum you need, so you can get going faster.
This is called the minimum viable product strategy and was popularized through the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
The idea is that you get a bare-bones product out into the marketplace, then refine and improve upon it over time, as you receive feedback and ideas from customers.
It also prevents you from investing too much time in a product that may not be a huge hit, so you can minimize your losses and bounce back from something quickly.
In essence, it minimizes your risk, both in time and money invested. As someone creating your first product, this is even more imperative. Let’s face it, the real reason you haven’t created a product yet is because you’re afraid it wouldn’t be worth it. If you thought it would be a monster success and 10x your income right away, you would have done it long ago. Everybody would have.
Therefore, this strategy is almost always worth pursuing, and in fact, I still use it for all of my products today.
5 Quick-To-Launch Product Ideas Worth Considering
1. eBook / Downloadable PDF
Perhaps one of the most common products content creators sell, eBooks still work surprisingly well at generating revenue.
You’re already putting out content that people are spending time to consume. Not only that, your audience likes it so much, they come back regularly to consume more of it.
This makes an eBook tailored to your niche a wonderful choice for a first product.
eBooks have several advantages to take note of:
- You should have a good idea of what problems your audience is looking to solve. Therefore, you know a demand is there for the product.
- eBooks are very straightforward to create. Come up with a topic, write the content, pay for a book cover, and publish it.
- eBooks can bring in additional exposure to your brand, especially if they’re well done. Selling your book on marketplaces such as Amazon, Google Play, and iBooks will bring in entirely new people who have never heard of you before.
- If selling the book yourself, or on a marketplace that makes this possible, you can start building a ‘buyers list’ – a segment of your email list that consists of proven buyers. These people will be easier to sell other products to later on.
- eBooks are a fantastic tool to generate leads for your company, and can funnel people to more expensive digital products later on.
2. Course
Even better than an eBook in many situations, you may consider producing and releasing a course.
Courses have a few huge benefits over eBooks:
- You can charge more, even for the same content.
- It’s easier to up-sell or cross-sell other products you offer in the future.
- Courses are more easily updated as new information becomes available.
- Courses are better at building connections with buyers.
- You can include interactive elements, such as tests or quizzes.
That being said, courses are generally believed to be harder to create than eBooks, due to everything that goes into the recording process.
Like eBooks, courses can be created on any topic imaginable, but technical, informational courses with actionable takeaways tend to work best.
I highly recommend checking out my own courses – particularly the blogging, email, and success mindset courses, as these will help you increase sales of your own as well.
3. Membership Site
If you have the resources to do it, building a membership site can be a fantastic way to pull in additional revenue, and provide even more for for your audience.
Membership sites are closed off sites that typically offer a monthly subscription for access. In exchange, the member gets some key benefits over non-members.
Common examples include:
- Extra guides, resources, or tools.
- Better access to the content creator – be it group coaching, priority support, one-on-one streams, etc.
- Extra content you don’t publish on your normal platform (be careful with this – you don’t want to hurt the relationship you have with your existing audience.)
- Unlimited access to a collection of products (such as all courses the content creator has created, vs buying them individually.)
- Community access – invitations to a group of others interested in your niche, often for networking, friendships, or collaboration.
What makes a good membership site will be highly niche dependent. Ideally, you’ll be looking for an opportunity in which you can solve problems and add value on a regular, recurring basis. This will encourage people to sign up for longer periods of time.
However, membership sites have a few key benefits:
- You get money coming in each and every month, from the same people.
- If your website delivers on its promises, you should expect to retain these members over time.
- While there will always be members unsubscribing, ideally this rate should be lower than the number of new subscribers you acquire. This means that your monthly income should increase over time at a fairly predictable rate.
- You may consider dripping content out over time, meaning somebody always gets a certain piece of content X amount of days after signing up. This means that it’s possible to have all of your content done well in advance!
4. Freelancing
One of the quickest ways to begin bringing in more revenue from your company is to begin offering freelance services. It’s direct, it’s simple, and it’s easy to sell.
This can be providing a skill (such as writing, design, programming etc.) or something more tailored to the individual, like coaching, consulting, or tutoring.
In my baby product company, we’re going to be rolling out of a service to provide baby sleep consulting very soon, as this is a problem our audience has indicated that there is a strong demand to solve.
See, even if you’re not an expert at something, that doesn’t mean you can’t offer the service. You just need to be great at identifying true experts (who actually know what they’re doing) and bringing them in as part of your team.
Bring in clients at a price higher than what you pay out to others. It’s a service business at its most fundamental level.
For more information about why I recommend freelancing, especially as a first product, click here. You’ll also learn some tips about scaling a freelance business to massive levels.
5. Related Merch
One unconventional, but potentially quite lucrative method of making money from your website, YouTube channel, or podcast, is to sell related merch such as shirts, mugs, or decals that relate to your content.
For example, check out these products that one of my companies sells a lot of:
The data doesn’t lie – people love to make their passions known to others!
So why do I consider this to be a ‘digital product’ that you can offer when quite literally, it appears to be the exact opposite?
It’s because the entire process can be entirely outsourced, and you never have to actually touch the products you’re selling.
Let’s Work Together On This One
I own a factory based out of Ferndale, Washington here in the United States, and we’d love to work with you to get your products up and going.
The way this works is simple:
- You send us your product designs. Alternatively, we can make the designs for you at a fair price.
- You list the products for sale on your site.
- When you make a sale, you let us know. We make the product and ship it to the customer.
- We later bill you per the terms negotiated.
Depending on the price you choose to sell your products for, you can make significantly more than what we would charge for this sort of service, and best of all, it immediately gives you your own unique products to sell, without any of the hassle of product creation!
If you’re interested in this service, please reach out to me for more information. We can lock you into better rates now since it’s still so early on (in fact, this is the first announcement I’ve made of this service on this website.)
Within a few months, I’ll begin pushing this service heavily on my website, and will have to offer higher rates to new clients. Therefore, the best time to get in on this deal is now.
Conclusion
Every content producer needs to have a product of their own, to help fledge out their monetization strategy.
Product creation can seem daunting and difficult, but it is only that way if you make it that way. In reality, all it requires is creating something valuable enough that people are willing to pay for it.
I hope that this article has given you some ideas. As always, if there are any questions I can answer for you or you’d like to bounce some ideas off of me, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
And of course, once you’ve got your product up for sale, please do us a favor and share it – we would all love to see what you were able to create.
Looking forward to it,
– James McAllister
