Creating digital products to sell on your blog can seem overwhelming, though it doesn’t have to be! Many options require little to no design skills, you simply take the information you’ve already published on your blog, and make it pretty in your chosen design programme. Need ideas? Here are five digital product ideas that will work with your blog, no matter what your niche is or how long you’ve been blogging.
Meal plans and shopping lists
If you’re a food blogger, then selling meal plans is a great way to add an extra income stream to your business. You can give a sample meal plan as a freebie/opt-in to bring in your readers to your email list. Then send out an email each week and be sure to mention your awesome meal plans and how much time they’re saving everyone!
You can create simple meal plans in Google Docs, or get a little creative and design them in a platform like Canva for example. Canva has tons of templates you can use to create meal plans, grocery lists, and more.
Turn your most popular posts into meal plans. If you find that your most-visited blog posts are Air Fryer recipes, make an Air Fryer meal plan. If they’re Keto, make a Keto meal plan. You get the picture. 🙂 Deliver what your audience already loves!
BRAINSTORM: What do your readers want? How can you create a bundle of meal plans or a meal plan service where your readers pay by the week or month and get a new meal plan delivered every week (or month)?
Cheatsheets and PDFs
Everyone loves PDFs! Whether it’s a cheat sheet about adopting a minimalist lifestyle or cooking times for InstantPot, they go crazy on Pinterest.
Look at the most popular posts on your blog. To do this, go to Google Analytics and select a time frame. I like to look at the past year because trends tend to be seasonal. Though there are exceptions to the rule and anything can go viral at any time, I find that looking at past analytics can give you an indication of what the next year will look like.
Knowing your top ten posts, are there any that match up? If they’re in the same category, you may be able to create a cheat sheet that you use as an opt-in for multiple posts. After you get people on your email list, you can upsell them on a bundle of cheat sheets.
BRAINSTORM: Which posts can you add cheat sheets to? How can you improve your posts with an opt-in? Which topic(s) can you create an entire bundle of cheat sheets for?
Monthly Membership
One of my favourite recurring income streams is a monthly membership! It doesn’t get much better than consistent bank deposits every single month.
There are many ways to create monthly memberships. If you’re a food blogger, you could offer new meal plans every month. If you’re a travel blogger, you could offer top secret travel itineraries that you don’t otherwise offer publicly.
Any type of “insider” information you can share, along with printables or even videos, will keep your readers hooked month after month. Make sure to provide value that it’s worth them paying for each month. People love to be part of a club, so give your monthly membership a cool name!
BRAINSTORM: What do your readers need regularly? Why do they need it? How can you convey how awesome it is and tell them why they NEED to sign up for your membership?
PRO TIP: Be sure to load great content ahead of time, just in case something comes up. If you promise to have new content loaded up on the 1st of each month, have it ready at least a week ahead of time, and all scheduled out – the emails and everything! That means if something comes up and you can’t get online, or you just want a break, you can take it.
Mini-Courses
Don’t freak out! Anyone can teach a course! You may not be aware of how much knowledge you have in your brain that others would pay for. Mini-courses are a simple way to grow your authority in any niche and help your readers along the way.
Again, look at your top posts for inspiration. What do you love to talk about, help people through, etc? If you’re a lifestyle blogger that talks about getting out of debt and saving money, you are going to change lives by sharing your tips! Food bloggers offer courses on a variety of topics, but you can teach a broad topic or a tiny one. For example, if you write Keto recipes, you could do a mini-course on getting started with Keto. Do a few short videos, add some cheat sheets, and funnel them into larger courses when you’re ready.
Don’t worry if your topic has been taught before. Your readers aren’t paying for the information, really. They’re paying to be taught by you! They trust you because they read your blog and you’ve helped them in some way, so they want more!
BRAINSTORM: What do you talk about on your blog that you can expand on? What questions do your readers ask about most often? How can you help your readers through the next steps to solving those problems?
Full Courses
If you have a few mini-courses under your belt, it’s time to try a full course! Full courses don’t have to be super long with dozens of videos, but they need to be more thorough than mini-courses.
Think about the problems you regularly solve on your blog and then dive deep. If you write about organisation or living a minimalist lifestyle, you may want to create a course walking your readers through the steps of purging all of their junk and organising each room in their house.
The best courses I’ve taken combine both video and written content. Keep in mind that everyone learns differently, so providing audio and video content, as well as written content, will be most beneficial in the majority of niches.
PRO TIP: A workbook can go a long way. If you can, take your course and bundle it with a workbook. Each lesson can have a page or two for your students to work through. If you haven’t created a workbook yet, you can do so easily over on Canva. They have several templates you can use. Really want to impress your students? Make sure your PDFs are fillable, so they don’t have to print them unless they want to. You can make PDFs fillable by using PDF Escape.
BRAINSTORM: What are your readers most overwhelmed with? What is something you can take them from ground zero to proficient with?
I hope you’ve found some inspiration to get your creative talents growing to help you build your online business.
I only share tools and resources that I use myself, in the hope of helping you avoid some of the pitfalls of the online marketing world. And I’m still learning myself – there’s always something new to learn!
Here’s to your continued success!
Lesley
If of interest to you, here are some of the tools I use to build my business:
The main platform I use is GlobalNPN
Here I have in effect a “Business in a Box” which provides me with a whole bunch of integrated tools:
- a capture/page builder
- an autoresponder
- tracking tools
- website/blog creator plus an instant blog (where the set-up is all done for you)
- audio and video hosting
- plus all the training modules on how to use the tools effectively.
- on top of this, there’s the affiliate programme, with various different entry points to the business that you can promote. And, even more, on top of that…
- anyone you bring into the business will be followed up by the Global NPN team themselves, and they help you with lead generation and conversions.
All this for a relatively small monthly payment (far less than other ‘single’ tools charge in themselves, so a great money saver).
I use Canva for my images and design. There’s a free option and a pro option to choose from.
If you get stuck writing your blogs, emails, etc., and need some help, then consider using PLR material. I’m quite new to the concept, though I’ve found it to be of tremendous help so far. With PLR (private label rights) you can either use the material as is, or you can adapt to your own style, add or delete parts, rearrange it etc. Really helpful. I’ve been using some material from PLRforBlogs, which is really cost-effective.
Also, a whole new world opens up with AI (artificial intelligence)! Yes, get inspiration for your blogs, social media posts, emails etc with the help of AI. I’ve recently joined Jarvis and getting to learn how to use it effectively.
To create my eBooks I use Designrr. This is a really cool tool, and you can easily upload your content from a pdf or your own website after you’ve chosen your template from one of their many templates. Check out this blog post which tells you How to Create an eBook in 7 Steps.
Hope that helps!
Lesley Hallows
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