Follow THIS Blueprint To Make $10k Per Month Selling Digital Products (That AI Won’t Kill)

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0:37Capella University gets that. With their FlexPath learning format, you can set the pace and earn your degree without putting your life on pause. You've built experience and you know what you're capable of. Now, this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. In the past 12 years, I've helped over 400 ,000 people start, grow, and scale their online business. And I've seen the same pattern happen over and over again. So many people think they need a massive following. They need viral content. They need some sort of marketing hack to make money selling digital products.

1:15But that's completely wrong. I started selling digital products with no following. I've helped entrepreneurs make$10 ,000,$50 ,000, even$100 ,000 per month. and none of them have millions of followers on Instagram. What they do have is the blueprint I'm about to share with you today. If you are someone who's struggling to make consistent income online and you're tired of trading time for money, this episode is gonna change everything for you. By the end of this episode, you're gonna have a clear step-by-step system that has already helped thousands of my students go from zero to$10 ,000 a month selling digital products.

1:51Let's jump right into it.

1:58Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey.

2:35Step one, find a profitable problem to solve. I've spoke about this briefly in previous episodes, but we're going to go a little bit deep. You want to start with problems people are actively searching for solutions right now. Why? Because these are people that are hungry to pay you money, all right? You want to solve problems that already exist. This is important, and you want to find the people that are voicing these problems. A lot of people, they create products and services without this in mind, and they try to sell a product or service solving a problem that people don't even recognize they have.

3:09Don't do this, because you're going to waste a lot of time, money, and effort, and a lot of people get demotivated to the point where they quit entrepreneurship altogether. together. So how do you do this? Well, you go to places like Reddit, like Amazon, and I'll tell you exactly what to do. Go to Reddit, go to the conversations that are asking the same questions over and over in your niche. Say, for example, you're in the health and wellness space. Go to the threads about that. And what are people complaining about? What are they finding hard about losing weight or gaining muscle or even just maintaining their health?

3:38If you're in the personal finance space, go to amazon.com. Go to the books in your genre. So personal finance and search for the three-star reviews. What do people say? Because three-star reviews are going to be very, very fair. Five-star is usually glowing and there's no feedback there. And one-star is usually a hater. Okay, so three-stars will tell you what they like, what they want to hear more of, what they found beneficial from this book. But they're also going to share, I wish the author spoke about this. I wish it solved this problem. I wish that it really went a little bit deeper when it came to this issue I have.

4:12This is a goldmine of information for you. This is the best R &D you can do because you're going to be able to build products that people actually want. What I found is that the marketplace, they're very good at complaining. They're very good at expressing how they feel negatively about a certain situation when they're in pain. And that's fine. But they're not very good at solutions. No one's going to tell you, here's what I want. That's your job as the entrepreneur, as the creative, is to come up with good, cohesive solutions. I say cohesive because it has to actually solve the problem to the complaints that they have.

4:46Like I mentioned before, you want to jot down the language people are using when they are sharing their emotional pain points. What is keeping them up at night? You want to actually use the same words when you're describing your solution to your problem. Because the first thing you do when you sell a product, whether it's on a sales page or even in person, or maybe even selling from stage at an event, you're gonna explain the problem that you solve. And if you explain it in the same words that people are using, you're gonna resonate with them. They're gonna feel like, hey, you get me, okay? Now, the other thing I wanna talk about in this step is that you wanna just focus on one specific problem, not 10 different things.

5:26And this is one of the challenges of entrepreneurship because a lot of entrepreneurs, we're creative, we come up with all these great ideas and you wanna do everything at once. No, what you want to do at the start is just a focus on solving one problem. Okay, you're going to have plenty of time and plenty of opportunity to solve other problems around this idea. But right now, just one problem. So for example, when I was starting my software company, Webinar Ninja, our software helped people run webinars easily. Now, there's so many things I can do. There's so many problems I can solve. But at the start, I had to solve one specific problem, which was to make it easy for people to run the webinar by themselves.

6:04As a solo founder, can you run this webinar without having an assistant, without having somebody who's going to be in the back hitting record or hitting start webinar or making sure everybody can see what you see, all that kind of stuff. That was really the main problem. I wanted to make people feel like, hey, this is easy. Even by myself, I can run this webinar. Now, there's all kinds of things I can create in the software. I can create automations. I can allow them to run different kinds of webinars. I can allow them to flash offers. And guess what? We did those things later on. But in the beginning, the specific problem is that we want to make it easy for them to run the webinar solo.

6:40So that's all I focused on. The last part of the step when we're finding a problem to solve is we want to validate demand by checking what people are already buying on other platforms. So say, for example, you want to launch a new course on how to play poker like a pro. Okay, you want to help people make more money playing the game of poker. Well, are people already buying poker courses? You can go to Udemy and check out what courses are selling on poker, what kind of courses, what type of poker courses are being sold. Is it beginner? Is it advanced? Is it talking to people that are playing cash games or people playing tournaments?

7:16You want to get as much information to see what's already selling, what's already has demand and that are actually generating revenue. So go to different places that you can see examples. It doesn't have to be exactly your product or your service, but go to other examples. So say, for example, I have this idea of I want to help people wash their car without them having to take it to the car wash. OK, so for example, I would come to their house, I would pick up their car and I would wash their car in my own garage and then bring it back to their house so they would never have to go to the car wash ever again.

7:48Now, maybe there's not a specific service like that out there. But there are signals I can follow. I can find out, do people actually pay money to wash their car? Okay, how much do they pay? Well, let me go to local car wash, find out how many customers do they get? You know, maybe I can ask them, you know, a question. A lot of business owners are actually quite open and are happy to give you information. Like I've done this before where I go to a business and say, how many customers do you get in a day? Like while I'm paying for a muffin or something like at a cafe. And they're like, oh, we get around this much, you know, like people are willing to give you information.

8:17So you can literally do this. So you can get a gauge of how much money you can potentially make and how many customers you can attract in a current market. But this is like a very simple example, but there are places you can actually visit, whether online or offline or in person, to find out are people actually paying to get a solution, a solution to this problem. Maybe it's not your solution, but some form of a solution. Today's episode is hosted by Hostinger. I don't know about you, but I have way too many logins for so many tools I need to run my online business. There's so much to pay for and to manage.

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10:17iExcel is used in 96 of the top 100 school districts in the U.S. And studies show kids who use iExcel score higher on tests, proven in all 50 states. As a former school teacher, I can tell you firsthand when kids come back from summer holiday, they're a bit rusty. but it doesn't have to be that way. Your kid could be ready to go and have that advantage with just a few minutes a day using iXL. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get iXL now. And the$100 MBA show listeners can get an exclusive 20 % off iXL membership when they sign up today at iXL.com slash MBA. Visit iXL.com slash MBA to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

11:06Step two is to create your value ladder. Now, your value ladder is quite simple. You want to create steps or you want to create a journey for your audience. Now, a lot of people, they think when they create a value ladder, they think, okay, I have to start by thinking about what do I create at the beginning of the ladder? Like, what does my free content looks like? You know, something like a YouTube channel or a newsletter. I think the best thing to do is to start with your flagship product because at the end of the day, you want people to get there. Now, your flagship product is basically where you're going to make most of your money.

11:38You can make money in a lot of different products, but what is the product that actually makes you 80 % of your revenue? So you just want to outline what your flagship product is going to look like and what's the price point. So let's say your flagship product is a group coaching program where people are going to pay you$2 ,000 a month. That is your price point. And this group coaching program will be weekly calls where you're going to help people in whatever you help them with. So that is kind of like where you want to eventually get everybody to, that part of the ladder. Now, there might be other products that are higher priced beyond that, and there might be products that are lower priced, but let's just start outlining that product.

12:14After we outlined our flagship product and understand which product is going to make most of our money, we're going to then take one step down on that ladder and create an entry-level product. Price your first products around$9 to$49. Why? Because the point of this product is not to make money. The point of this product is to earn trust with your audience. This is your first real transaction where people are actually giving up money to see if you're worth their money, to see if you're actually going to return on their investment. You're actually going to give them the value for what they paid.

12:47Hopefully, you're going to give them a whole lot more value than what they paid. And this is why I like to price these at that price point,$9 to$49. One, because it's not going to be a huge expense. It's not something that they need to think about a lot. $9 to$49 is like between a coffee and a candy bar and a lunch. People pay for these things without thinking too much about it. They don't have to like consult with their accountant. And this is what you want to do here. You want to sell a product that's basically an entry level product. And now you might be thinking, well, do I have to create a whole new product to serve this part of the ladder?

13:19No, you can actually just create like the most minimal viable version of what your flagship product is. So say, for example, you are doing a weekly call with your coaching program, and those coaching calls are about 90 minutes. And on that one coaching call, you're going to teach one concept to all your students. Well, this could be your entry-level product where you just do a one-time webinar, a one-time workshop where you charge$29 for entry, and then you deliver value. People, they pay you money, and you give them what they're looking for to solve one specific problem. And by doing this, they're gonna be like, hey, this is great.

13:54You give them the recording, you give them a workbook. And then at the end of the webinar, you could say, hey, if you liked this webinar, if you got value from this and you wanna continue learning, if you wanna take things to the next level, then I have a program. It's a coaching call. And as you can see, that's the next step of the ladder. I should say a coaching program, not a call, just a call, but an ongoing program so that they have the accountability, they have somebody that they can ask questions, they have a community around them, you get the point. But you don't need to create something from scratch.

14:21You can literally just take a small portion of the bigger product. One of the things that I want to stress is that you wanna make sure your entry-level product, your low-priced product, is aligned with your higher-priced product, meaning that it's a taster, that it's similar in terms of how you're delivering it. So the example I gave with a coaching call and then you do a webinar, you're basically teaching live and giving them value. That's the similarity. But if your flagship product is something else, like for example, I was running a software company and I was selling a software that people would pay for monthly or annual, my entry-level product was not coaching.

14:56My entry-level product was a tool for them to use just like a software is a tool. So one of the things we sold were templates, like email templates that they can send to sell more of their products and services, or templates that they can plug into our software and have follow-up sequences so that they can sell more of their product after the webinar. This was valuable to our customer because our customers are not looking to learn. They're looking for solutions because it makes sense for somebody who's going to buy my software and be interested in that entry-level kind of product. So you could literally create a template.

15:26And by the way, if you don't have a template for whatever you want to do, you can download our templates of templates. I know that sounds pretty meta, but we really have that. Just go to 100mba.net slash templates. It's completely free. And you can download like a worksheet template. You can download a checklist template. It's super simple. And that way you can start creating these entry-level products. The whole point of all of this is to build trust with your customers before you start selling them your high-ticket program, your high-ticket product. Now, your high-ticket thing could be completely different.

15:58It could be an event. It could be tickets to maybe a retreat or whatever it might be. But the point I'm trying to make here is that make sure each product leads to the next. It actually helps you sell the other product. And this is what the whole point of these entry-level products are, is that it gives them a taste of what it's like to be a full-time, a big-time customer with you. As much as possible, solve one specific problem for each product and not everything at once. Why? Because you will overwhelm your customers and you don't want to do that. One of the rules that I reiterate over and over at the$100 MBA is a confused mind never buys.

16:35If your customer is confused about what your product does, and often they're confused because it does too much. They're like, what is this exactly? What does it solve? How do I get started? Do I actually need this? That is a huge red flag for any business. What you want is simplicity. So it's easy for them to understand and say like, oh, I have this problem. This product solves this problem. Clear. And one of the ways to do this, and this is something that I did back in the day, about 10 years, maybe more than that, 15 years ago when I started my entrepreneurial journey full-time, is I mapped out the journey of my customer.

17:10I actually put myself into my customer's shoes, and I asked myself, what is the first type of problem my customer will have as they start on their journey of getting better at whatever they want to get better at, or improving their life in some way? So for example, if somebody is in the fitness industry, and they've never stepped foot in the gym, they don't know anything about nutrition, They don't know anything about eating healthy. Maybe the first step for them is to understand just some simple exercises they can do at home. Something that they can do for 15 minutes a day, whether it's stretching exercises, yoga, maybe it's just push-ups and sit-ups, whatever it might be.

17:41Then the next step might be, hey, them understanding their macros, understanding how they're consuming their calories and their diets and their proteins and all that kind of stuff, right? So how to track that. Maybe the next step in their journey is like, okay, now it's time to go to the gym. Let me show you some simple exercises you could do with gym equipment. Understand what steps they need to go through to get to the final destination, which is like they're in the best shape of their life, right? They're gonna get there, but there are steps to get there and you can serve them along their way with products along the way.

18:10I got a question for you. Have you subscribed to the podcast yet? If not, do it now. We have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's titled, Why Side Hustles Rarely Work and How to Create One That Actually Does. I'm gonna be brutally honest in this episode. I already scripted it, I already worked on it, and we're gonna be shooting it very soon. But the reason why I wanted to do this episode is because so many people start their business journey with a side hustle, with building something on the side. And I've seen so many businesses and entrepreneurs just never make it because they don't know how to create a side hustle that actually turns into their full-time thing.

18:44Most side hustles just completely fizzle out and never actually see the light of day. And I don't want that to be you. I wanna make sure that you have a successful one that becomes your full-time business and becomes your empire. So subscribe to the show so you don't miss that episode. Step three is to build a content strategy that converts. Now, the reason why I start with content as your marketing strategy, because content marketing is a form of marketing, is because it doesn't cost anything, okay? Content marketing is you creating relevant content to build an audience and build awareness for what you do and to build trust with your audience.

19:17And in a way, it's your first product because you are exchanging attention, getting people's attention for your content. You're creating this content so that you can get eyeballs on your brand, on what you do, who you are. If you are the brand, get eyes on you, all that kind of stuff. If this is intimidating to you, if you're like, Omar, I don't want to dance on TikTok. I don't know how to do this. Slow down a little bit. You don't need to dance on TikTok. You can focus on text-based platforms like creating posts on LinkedIn, threads, X. You can create content in different ways. You don't need to create talking head videos like this one.

19:51You don't have to create hyper produced people interviewing people on the street. You don't have to do that. A lot of people are successful with just text based platforms. Some people are successful also with video platforms using like reels on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube shorts, but they don't share their face. They share their screen. They use a whiteboard. They use an iPad. There's so many ways to share content and share value without having you to dance on TikTok. But there is a strategy to whatever type of content you create or share. And there are three types of content that you should be aware of and should be creating for your business.

20:26The first one is called top of funnel. This is for awareness. The next one is called middle for authority. You want to make sure that as people get used to you, they start to trust you more and more. And the last one is for sales to convert people from just being a viewer of your content to a customer of your products. The formula I like to use is 50 % awareness, 25 % authority, and 25 % sales content. Why this split? Because I'm highly aware after doing business for 20 years is that most people will not buy from you. You need to just be acceptant of that. Okay. That's just the reality of the world, but you do need to make as many people as possible aware of you because without awareness, they're not going to learn more about you.

21:07So you can trust you and they're not going to buy from you. So that's kind of the first step. This is why you want to cast your net a little bit wide. And that's why it's 50 % of your content is awareness. So think about all the content that you're going to create. If you're going to talk to the most wide spectrum of your audience, that is the amount of content, 50 % of your content. So for example, you'd say you produce 10 pieces of content a week, five pieces of content should be for the vast majority of people. So it should be something that applies to everybody. So say, for example, for me and my content, some of the content that would fit in the awareness piece is more like mindset, like how to be more confident, how to be able to sell your products without feeling salesy, how to validate your ideas.

21:48These concepts, these ideas, these topics apply to everybody that is thinking about starting a business, has a business, been running a business for 10 years. This applies to them. Now, the next step is authority or trust, 25%. This is a little bit more specific where I'm trying to give them information that applies specifically to a group to get them a result. So this is more like, how do you fire somebody properly? Not everybody is going to be interested in this content, but the people that are interested, the people that are in business, that have teammates, that have maybe some staffing issues, are going to want to tune into.

22:23Why? It's going to be valuable for them. And if they apply what they learn and they get a win, they'll be more interested in more content and eventually becoming a customer. The last 25 % is the sales part. And this is more like, hey, guys, making them aware that you have something for sale. You're not actually selling them, but you're just letting them know that, hey, you have a product for sale, you're doing an event, you are selling a new kind of product or trying something out, or maybe even just to join their newsletter. Joining your newsletter is a sale of some sort. You're moving them from social media to your email list so that you can contact them via email.