10 Kinds Of InfoProducts You Can Create (Other Than Ebooks And Video Courses)
So you want to be an entrepreneur.
You’ve been listening to Gary V or Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss for years and you’re sold on the goal of taking charge of your life.
You want to do work you’re passionate about and that you believe in.
You want to live life on your own terms and create financial freedom.
You want to make an impact on the world and get handsomely rewarded for it.
Great! But the 800 pound gorilla is… how???
There are countless business models to choose from and it’s hard to know where you should start: “Should I do ecomm, SaaS, dropshipping, affiliate marketing, apps, monetize a podcast, build an IG following and do paid shoutouts…” The list goes on and on.
Of course there are pros and cons to everything. But for most beginning entrepreneurs, digital products are the absolute best business model. For many reasons:
- Low startup costs
- High margins
- Location independence
- Recurring revenue
- Quick to launch
- And much more…
You might be thinking: “OK, I’m going to make a digital product! So… that means I need to write an ebook?”
(Quick tangent: most people think ebooks mean Kindle. But these are NOT the same thing. If you want to create an ebook that actually generates revenue, read this article to find out why Kindle isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and what you should do instead.)
Ebooks are fantastic digital products, but they’re far from the only option. In this article we’re going to lay out 10 ideas to create high-quality digital products that you can charge a premium for and build a thriving online business.
1) Ebook packages
Many aspiring entrepreneurs think “How am I going to make a full-time living selling a $10 ebook? I’m going to have to sell so many copies!”
The thing is, successful online entrepreneurs don’t sell $10 ebooks.
First of all, they charge much more because they’re not selling a book, they’re selling a solution to a problem. They’re selling an outcome. “If you buy this book, this problem will go away, you’ll attain this positive result, and your life will be better in the following ways…”
Sure, if all you’re selling is a couple hundred pages on a screen it might be hard to charge more than $10 or $20. But what if you’re selling the key to losing weight and feeling comfortable in your own skin, or getting hired at a new job that gives you purpose, or mastering a hobby that makes you feel fulfilled? All of those things are worth hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, right?
Secondly, successful entrepreneurs don’t sell a single book. They sell packages. In addition to the main ebook they include other ebooks that solve related problems. They include bonus reports that overcome objections. They include guides, worksheets, checklists, shortcuts, implementation plans, daily journals, and other digital products to build a simple ebook into a massively valuable comprehensive solution.
So you can do the same thing. What products can you add to your ebook to make it even more valuable? What related problems can you solve for your customer? How can you help them maximize their results or speed up their success?
2) Ebook Courses
Video courses are incredibly popular right now. But it’s easy to think “I can’t make my own course because I don’t have a nice camera, or lights, or a place to film, or fancy editing software, or…”
Most gurus would say “Those are just excuses! You can film amazing videos with your phone!” And while I do agree you don’t need a ton of expensive gear, it’s also true that producing high-quality video is easier said than done.
That’s why I love ebook courses. You can still provide the same content and the same course, but deliver it in the form of .pdf ebooks. (Universities charge hundreds of dollars for textbooks that don’t include videos! So there’s no reason you can’t charge a premium for your text-based course as well.)
Rather than giving your customer a single ebook, each module of your course could be its own .pdf. And each could come with supplemental study materials, homework assignments that get the student to take action, cheat sheets to summarize the information, checklists to help them refer back to later, and much more.
You could even include some kind of calendar or daily to-do list, that way you can tell your customer “This isn’t a book that you read at your own pace… and you never finish it. You’re not going to read the first few chapters and then spend months sporadically reading a couple pages at a time. This is a course that will force you to move through the material so you WILL get to the end result.”
3) Newsletters
When you hear the word “newsletters” you might think about an email list you join for free and you receive a weekly or monthly email. That’s not what we’re talking about here.
Take a look at this newsletter from James Altucher:
He sends it out at the beginning of each month, and each issue contains a massive amount of value.
He includes up-to-date investment advice. He writes about cutting edge trends. He shares business opportunities you can capitalize on. He digs deeper into subjects you might have heard about in his podcast. He explores strategies for implementing the ideas in his books.
It’s a perfect fit for people who have read his books, which is why they happily pay for it.
A typical newsletter like this can be anywhere from $17/month all the way up to thousands of dollars per year.
So start thinking, what ongoing help do your customers need? Are there changes in your industry they need to stay up on? Are there new opportunities always popping up they need to know about?
Or maybe it’s something as simple as they need to stay motivated and inspired. You can send them stories and encouragement to keep their foot on the gas. Or if you’re in the health and fitness space, an easy variation of this would be monthly recipe collections and meal plans.
Figure out how you can include a newsletter in your product offerings, and you can add recurring monthly revenue to your business.
4) Worksheets
One of the challenges with digital products is getting your customers to follow through on the information you’re teaching them.
If they never read your information and implement your methods, they probably won’t buy from you again. But if they follow your advice and get massive results, they’ll be a raving fan for life.
That’s why it’s important to look for ways to get your customers to follow through. A great way to do this is with worksheets.
You can create a worksheet that helps them come up with ideas.
You can create a worksheet that forces them to organize their thoughts.
You can create a worksheet that leads them to set goals for the future.
Whatever the case, worksheets help you sell implementation. “Have you bought books before about accomplishing _ but they just sat on the shelf? Buy these worksheets, fill them out, and you’ll be well on your way to finally bringing your goal to life.”
And here’s a bonus tip: once you’ve designed your worksheet in Keynote, use PDFescape.com to add fillable fields.
5) Private facebook group
Community is an incredibly important part of education. If you were the only person in your high school or university, would you have gone to class? Technically you would have gotten amazing one-on-one instruction, right?
Well we need the social component as well. We need people to explain things and answer our questions. We need peers to encourage us. We need people we can exchange ideas with. And the same is true for online education.
Creating a private facebook group is a simple way to do this. Give access to your ebook customers, and suddenly your book goes from an individual experience to a rich group learning environment.
It’s fast and easy to set up, but it adds a whole new realm of benefits that you can offer on your sales page. “Have you tried other methods in the past but failed? Are you starting to wonder if you have what it really takes to succeed? Well when you buy my ebook today you also get access to our private facebook group where you will receive encouragement and support, so your chances of success go through the roof!”
6) Membership Site
The term “membership site” can be intimidating. It probably makes you think of a huge site with tons of content and lots of videos. But the fact is, you absolutely can create a membership site using only text content.
One of the biggest benefits of doing so is being able to have comments sections. Let’s say you were thinking about writing an ebook that teaches someone how to get a raise at work.
Break your system down into 10 steps. Rather than make each step a chapter in a book, make it a module on your site. So there are tabs that say Module 1, Module 2, etc. Click on a tab and it loads a page where they can download the ebook for that module, or maybe the text just loads in the page.
Either way, have a comments section underneath the content. Now on your sales page you can say “As you read through the program you’re probably going to have questions. Ask it in the comments section and other members will answer, or I will personally. I’m in the comments all the time!”
This will allow you to offer a form of personal interaction with your customers, yet you don’t have to promise to be available at exact times or commit to doing live videos or group calls. I’ve seen many entrepreneurs use this with huge success, and it transforms your same content from a regular ebook to a highly personalized product.
7) Daily Journal
You’ve probably seen some version of a daily journal before.
Michael Hyatt has The Focus Journal.
John Lee Dumas has The Freedom Journal.
Mimi and Alex Ikonn have The Five Minute Journal.
These are typically books that have daily prompts with empty writing space. You fill in the blanks, and over the following weeks and months the book walks you towards your end goal.
You can create a digital version of this same thing using PDFescape.com which I mentioned above.
Turn your teaching into daily tasks and individual action steps, then package them as a daily journal. Design it in Keynote, and use PDFescape to create the fillable forms.
Now you can offer the same value that the entrepreneurs above do, but you don’t have to worry about cost of goods and physical inventory.
8) 30-Day Program/Challenge
If you like the daily journal idea but the subject you want to teach doesn’t lend itself to fill-in-the-blank type writing prompts, here’s a great alternative.
Take the thing you want to teach and break it into 30 small steps. Now write one mini guide for each step. Include anything your reader needs to know, most importantly what the action step is they need to take that day. Then turn each guide into a .pdf.
Set up your autoresponder so that when someone buys your 30-day program, every day over the next month they automatically get emailed that day’s .pdf. It’s like they have someone holding their hand and guiding them through the whole process.
The benefit is that, like we talked about before, this helps you sell the end result. “Are you skeptical that reading a book can help you accomplish a big result? Take my 30-day challenge instead. It walks you day-by-day towards your final outcome… and if you get to day 30 and you haven’t succeeded, I’ll give your money back.”
And of course you can do any other duration or interval you want.
9) Reference guide
All of the digital products we’ve talked about so far have been about you sharing your information with your customers. Your methods, your teaching, your programs, your advice…
But maybe you can create a product where you help your customers access other information.
Maybe there’s a ton of data in your industry that exists in hard-to-find sources. Can you do the research and compile all of the information in one place?
Maybe you have an amazing network of businesses, consultants, experts, or service providers that would be invaluable to your customers. Can you compile all of their contact information as kind of a rolodex or dream team?
Maybe there’s an overwhelming amount of articles, books, videos, and other content and your customers don’t know where to start. Perhaps you can curate all of the best stuff in one place, and add your own commentary as well.
Whatever it is, think about creating some kind of resource or almanac that your customers can refer to. Maybe it’s not an ebook they have to read from front to back, but just by buying and owning this product they’ll be able to reference it whenever they want. They can find the answers they need should a particular problem ever pop up.
10) Scripts/templates
A lot of digital product creators will say “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” This is their motivation for sharing their knowledge via ebooks.
I agree with this philosophy, but sometimes the opposite can be true too. Sometimes your customers are simply too busy and it’s more valuable for them to have a done-for-you solution.
The only problem is, done-for-you solutions are easy to offer as a service, but extremely difficult as a digital product. How can someone download an ebook that does a task for them?
The answer is scripts and templates.
Maybe your customers need to send emails to prospects, and you already have a bunch of emails that have converted and led to sales.
Maybe they need to write copy for their website, and you already have scripts where all they have to do is fill in the blanks.
Maybe they need to give a speech, and you’ve created outlines based on the best speeches in their industry.
When you think about it, writing and communicating and speaking play a huge role in much of the work we do today. So think about how you can create scripts and templates to replace some of this work for your customers.
Which will you choose?
Once you decide what you’re going to create, a whole list of questions pops up:
- What are you going to write about?
- How are you going to create the actual finished product?
- How are you going to sell it?
- How are you going to get your offer in front of potential customers?
Over the last 5–6 years, I’ve worked for some incredibly successful online entrepreneurs in the digital publishing space. I was part of an ebook business that did $500k in our first month. A newsletter launch that did 5-figures in ten days. I worked for a copywriting legend who hadn’t touched his business in 2 years and still did half a million dollars a month.
I’ve taken everything I’ve learned about infoproduct businesses from these people and put it into a 7-Day Challenge.
Most writing challenges give you prompts to help you start writing. But once you have the words on the page, what do you do with it?
This writing challenge is all about turning those words into dollars. It’ll walk you through the exact process of creating a thriving infoproduct business, in 7 bite-sized lessons.
Every day you’ll receive a video and worksheet. Watch the video, fill out the worksheet, and a week from now you’ll have a crystal-clear plan for bringing your business to live.
You can check it out here. Just click “Join Now” to get started.
See you in the challenge!
