TOP 6 Digital Product Ideas To Sell Online In 2021 I The Future of Creator Economy

hey guys welcome to silicon valley girl today we're going to talk about creator economy and this is a topic in general in particular we're going to talk about digital products that you can create and i know i've done this video a couple years ago i think but things have changed dramatically like before we go into digital products i just wanted to talk to you about how creator economy is growing like crazy so five years ago we would talk about like influencers creating content making money these days we're talking about the whole new phenomenon where influencers become entrepreneurs and the next generation of middle class entrepreneurs would be somehow connected with social media a lot of people who are just starting out with their companies they think about creating an audience and there are two ways to do that either they're producing content themselves or they hire people to do that but content is king finally silicon valley people started to realize it and i'm just glad that there are so many investors that are interested in investing in creator startups these days and this is why we see so many platforms where people can monetize their creator side and that's why the video i made two years ago still applies to these days but there are so many tools that you can use in 2021 to monetize your blog so today we're going to talk about creating digital products either for your blog by the way or for your small business let's start with number one something that i'm experimenting with uh these days is a paid newsletter some people might say emails are actually dying and this is something from older age i would argue here because yes we started not hating email but we started liking it less just because there was so much spam all the time but now if i want to follow someone like i used to write a lot of posts on instagram i minimize the number of posts like once a week because i just feel that i'd rather create a newsletter for a specific cohort of my subscribers and talk about topics that i'm super passionate about but talk about them at a deeper level and this is why i created a substract newsletter for creators mostly youtubers i'm still experimenting with it so i'm not like widely advertising it but this is something i'm working on it is free right now and i'm not really thinking of monetizing it these days because i'm just trying out the form at you know trying out whether i would have enough discipline to write something regularly but basically sub stack is this platform where you go and it is so easy i love how they created everything but it's super easy to set up your own email list and to start either free or paid newsletter but it has to be i think here it has to be you it can't be just a random copywriter creating text for you it is really important that you spread your thoughts uh and spread your ideas through this email number two membership websites and again let's talk about the trend first the trend is going like again two or three years ago we would talk about creators striving to get millions of views millions of followers but then the amount of people who can actually achieve that is a small small number and i think it's very unrealistic if you go into creator space and think oh i'm going to start an instagram and i'm going to get 1 million followers in two weeks no it's it's not the way it works these days these days so we are coming to an era where we have a lot of different influencers a lot of niche influencers and uh we have less followers per influencer just because you know when everyone arrives an influencer you just need to make sure you're not following everyone around you but the thing is i actually like it i like that in order to make a living from being an influencer these days with all the tools that i mentioned in this video you don't have to have millions you just need to have your 100 true fans 1 000 true fans well if you have a 1000 true fans and they pay 100 each per year to buy your product to subscribe to your sub stack to access your membership website that's something i'm going to talk about then it's 100k a year and you don't need more well there's still a funnel it's not like you get 1000 people and uh 1000 people are going to buy from you you need at least i would say 10 000 followers to monetize 1000 that's a good conversion rate by the way but anyways the next step that you can do with your followers is create a membership website you can use patreon you can use circle you can use member press or if you're on youtube you can use their memberships but the thing is again this is about saying i'm not talking to all of you guys here i'm talking to a specific group of my fans who's maybe interested in my i don't know if i'm doing english classes so i'm talking to this group who's particularly interested in taking toefl and i'm creating this membership website where i'm gonna post toefl videos twice a month and we're gonna have a closed community where you would be able to ask me questions and i would go live once a month and i would also provide you with one free pdf template that you can use to prepare for your exams this is something people pay for and again something i really like as an entrepreneur it's all subscription based so you're actually not just selling them something once you're bringing them to your platform and they continue paying monthly as long as you keep providing great content so they need to see value in this membership i used to be a part of a couple of memberships of different youtubers where we just jump on a call with them i've been there for two or three months and i think just live streams with qas this is not the best strategy i would do something else but definitely look into membership websites and now i want you to think even wider so first of all we have all of these people starting their micro blogs we have the whole creator economy around that that means there will be so much more demand for people making influencers lives easier and one path that you can take is create a product for influencers and this is like a separate group of people here who entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs and the second group of people is where you can actually freelance or just help other influencers by creating digital products and what i mean by digital products for creators and influencers are for example templates you can create templates for instagram youtube pinterest like there are platforms that specialize on those canva et cetera but what i feel about like canva and other platforms is that they are very recognizable it's like ikea when it just came out you're like oh wow that furniture looks great well sometimes it didn't look great but still you're like oh this looks nice this looks minimalistic but then you just realize it's all ikea and it's like two bucks or five bucks per artificial plant i think it's kind of happening with canvas so as an influencer i would love to see more creativity in terms of templates like templates for your stories templates for your pinterest posts templates for your channel art and if you're wondering where you sell all of that stuff i buy a lot of digital products from the platform called etsy i buy a lot of digital products from like independent creators when they target me with their ads i spent over i think over 250 dollars on just buying those two posters from people on etsy and this is another uh digital product idea that you can have i had a bad experience by the way a couple weeks ago i bought a planner for youtubers because i'm working on my own and i decided to go to the platform and just look for different planners that people created and i paid i think i paid 15 for a six-page planner that had three great reviews and i realized that they were probably made by people who created the planner but anyways i was so upset like the planner said you need to create title thumbnail etc like such basic stuff and then they had some links to the videos that they posted on youtube i was really upset and the rule here guys if you're creating a digital product if you're creating something like a product make sure that you're over delivering very basic people expect like 100 pages give them 120 pages if people expect a one hour livestream give them two hour livestream like over deliver every time this is i think the only way to stay afloat on current market with so much competition and i always try to do the same with my products i know i'm not always like the top over performer because sometimes you just want to release a product but still like i always have this idea in my network i think i've learned about that when i was doing uh funnel hacking with the it was russell brunson i took part in their free challenge and they sent me like a box of goodies and i was so impressed that i never expected to receive like a gift box uh i expected to receive just a book but they sent me like different stuff that i could use like a planner as well and uh over delivering value is something that would drive people to buy more and more from you so keep that in mind as well quick ad break here alibaba is sponsoring this video and alibaba is the perfect platform for anyone who's thinking of not just creating a digital product but also thinking of creating a physical product something that you can touch so with alibaba you can send them your designs and they would produce a product of your choice and then you can either sell it through alibaba or you can sell it on your own platform i recently got a wallet from a guy called tech lead and he by the way has a lot of videos on how he produced a physical product but digital products not the only way to monetize the audience and uh i know it took him a while to like figure out what's the best design but i really like the wallet it is really high quality it's really thin and i think this is what he was targeting at and this is something that you can do as well this is alibaba's march expo trend hunter section and what i really like is that you can get inspired by different products that they have out here and i've talked to my investor friend here in silicon valley and he said the worst thing you can do when you start a company is produce hardware yourself order it from someone customize it and create your own product so basically you can take watches you add different colors and you create a customized product and you start selling it and so basically this is what people are buying these days uh they're buying smart watches for kids they're buying ladies health monitors all of the adapters oh my god this is amazing this is like clubhouse section so they call it usb gaming microphone i call it clubhouse microphone because a lot of people are really excited about being on clubhouse and they want to upgrade their quality so you take this mic you create a website a clubhouse mic and you start selling it and basically all you need is create your own custom packaging and do the marketing and then you create a markup on this pricing they have different sections for this trend hunter and i really like their home section because well number one is adjustable office desk and this is a game changer again if you look for adjustable desks um in the us the price would be a lot higher than this i think i got mine for like 700 something like that again what you can do take this customize it create a markup and uh generate revenue and then again i love this section for all of the ideas like who would have thought number four best-selling product disposable toilet brush the next trend solar powered portable freezers i actually know a blogger who started home makeup line and she added this freezer to her line it's like a fridge for for makeup so she took the white one she colored it in her signature color added her logo and it's been one of the best sellers for her as well candles just look at the prices again an average retail price for a candle in the u.s it's like 10 right something that looks as high-end as this one will be 10 15. again it's all about customizing and adding your own personal details paint by number and there's another fashion section here with dresses with products one of my friends uh in the us created his own company selling eye patches and what he did he participated in one of those pairs uh he took eye patches like he bought a lot of different products he tested them on his girlfriend on eyes girlfriend's friends and started his own company so basically they took the product they just created packaging for the product and they started marketing through influencers here in the us again business idea for you and all the trending products are based on alibaba data so you know that there is actually demand for these products because people are looking for them people are buying them the link to all the information would be below thank you so much alibaba for sponsoring this video another idea for a digital product is actually creating reports and creating reports might seem like trivial why would you create a report but the thing is for example a financial report if you're a financial person and you want to work with individuals you can actually create a report that you could sell for a small amount of money and this way this would be the top of your funnel where you get your customers from and then you convert them to a private consultation or something like that so basically my financial spreadsheet it took me a couple months to come up with and then i hired a financial guy and he's like ah marina it's still not very accurate because of this this and that and that was really helpful so identifying your audience what are they struggling with how they're managing their financials and just creating this spreadsheet template spreadsheet where they put in information and it does automatic calculations like how much ideally they would invest this month and how much they would put into savings accounts or by how much they need to cut the costs in order to be at least break even so something like that would really help and the last but not the least are workbooks and uh checklists but uh something that i wanted to warn you about is that don't just repurpose other people's content because this is what i see happens everywhere in in the creator economy so the problem with that is so for example i'm looking for a writer and i ask them to come up with some ideas on how to monetize blogs up with less than 1 000 followers many of them just started sending me repurposed articles by other people and i wanted them to do their own research i wanted them to input something that's valuable for them and there was only one guy who actually did that and i think i'm gonna hire him he just sent me the the test task but the thing is don't just solely repurpose people are looking for you in the product they're looking for your life hacks so if you're not an expert don't do the product if you're an expert then sit down spend some time on it spend some time creating and spend some time coming up with the ideas and workbooks and checklists are these universal products that i think every expert can apply to their field like you can create a checklist on how to launch targeted ads on instagram or you can create a workbook on how to become a youtuber you can create a checklist on how to launch a pr marketing campaign it just depends on where your specialist at and this could be a first step to starting your business and uh to all the beginner entrepreneurs out there start with something you can create yourself something that would let you test the demand for your product and only then start hiring the whole team and thinking bigger i think it's really important that you come up with this first step to start your business and i hope that this video was helpful in that by the way creating a workbook if you already have an audience like i've had an amazing experience with that together with another influencer this is by the way a great way to collab we created a workbook in english language for english language learners and this is a product that makes every month it makes four thousand dollars though we released it in november 2018 so over a year ago and on the day of launch we made 25 000 dollars just selling it and i think it's great because well it took us four months to produce it again we tried to exceed people's expectations and it's a 180 page workbook and it has a lot of my knowledge a lot of other people's knowledge because we um had other people collab with us with specialists and my friend the blogger friend who we did it together with she's a great designer and a person who's like who can create a great structure for a workbook and this collab was amazing and another great thing that we did is that we talked about this workbook for a while before actually launching it so we were telling our audience that we're working on it we'll show the whole process and that made the launch really easy and it happened today when i was delivering emily and the website crashed and they couldn't fix it because i only had the password it was like a crazy day for for those guys because i asked not to disturb me and they did not and then we went back online it was cool but yeah we made 25 000 in a day and i'm still able to make some revenue from that workbook so a very good digital product to keep in mind thank you guys so much for watching this video up to the very end thank you alibaba for sponsoring this video and i will see you very soon in my next videos bye bye