Have you thought about starting a business making passive income? Digital products are one of the best ways to consistently make money working from home if you want to escape the corporate 9-5. But the thing is, where do you start? Lots of aspiring business owners have wondered the same thing and been in your shoes before.

Today I'm going to share with you 6 tips to become the go-to business for all things digital planning. We're going to cover:

Identifying your niche target market
Generating product ideas
Developing an efficient product development process
Utilizing online marketplaces
Search engine optimization
Email marketing

Step 1: Identifying Your Niche Target Market

The first step in starting a successful business is knowing who you want to buy your products. Your ideal customers are going to determine what kind of products will resonate best, how to market your business based on where your target audience is hanging out.

Having a specific niche will help you position your business as the go-to solution for your audience's problems. Some may say that the world of digital products is already too saturated, but that doesn't have to be the case when you build a business that caters to a unique audience with niche products that specifically help an intended group of people.

So how can you choose a niche? Here are three tips to choose a profitable and enjoyable industry for your digital planning business!

What are your values?
Chances are that your life values played a key part in you starting your business and translate into your business's core values as well. When this is the case, your audience likely will share the same values as you. Furthermore, you can niche based on personality and values instead of just industry.
What are you good at?
By combining your talents with a way to make money, you'll ensure that you love your job! When you have passion, it becomes easier to market yourself authentically because people can tell you love what you do and put your all into the products that you're selling! You can also think about the experience that your past jobs have equipped you with and use that to your advantage to be seen as an expert.
When it comes to a digital stationery business, the sky's the limit to what type of planner you can create. Don’t get tied up on what’s already out there and feel free to create something completely new!

What does the world need more of?
This is where you can think more about the problems you want to solve with your products. Do you have a signature method that you're developing into a digital planer? If you have a current platform, think about the most common requests of your existing audience. What do they need to improve their lives?

The answers to these questions will help you to position yourself in a niche that is both profitable and needs your help to improve their lives!

Step 2: Generating Product Ideas

Now that you've established who you're selling to, it's time to move on to the next step in our checklist - deciding what exactly you're going to be selling! When it comes to creating products that your audience wants to purchase, the best place to start is with market research! Market research is the practice of gathering information about a target audience's wants, needs, and preferences. If you utilize social media or email marketing in your business, you can create a survey with a series of questions for your audience to answer about what they want in a new digital planner collection. You can even ask them to pick from a list of predetermined ideas you've brainstormed.

Keep a list of all your product ideas and the market research you've collected in a project management tool. I recommend Notion and Airtable to keep track of feedback from past and potential customers, along with databases of more technical information! If you've launched digital products in the past, go over your metrics and see what products have had the most success. What do they have in common? Questions like these will help you launch a successful collection of digital planning products.

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Step 3: Developing an Efficient Product Development Process

It's time to enter the next stage of creating a best-selling digital planner! Now that you've completed all the pre-work involved, we can move on to developing your digital products. We can break development into five different phases:

Creating a wireframe for each main page of your digital planner
Digitizing your planner pages
Choosing whether or not to sell a dated or undated planner (or both!)
Adding hyperlinks to your digital planner
Exporting and testing your planner

Psst! Learn everything you need to know about creating best-selling digital products at our free masterclass - Start Your Digital Planner Business. Click here to sign up and watch now!

I personally love to start creating my planner on the iPad using a Concepts app by sketching a simple idea for each page. This helps me to ensure that there's enough space to write, add stickers, and have a design that is both functional and visually appealing.

Next, I open my favorite design program and get to work bringing my wireframes to life on my laptop screen. After I have recreated my sketches in a digital version - I can finally see my planner taking shape! The biggest decision comes next - deciding whether or not to create a dated planner.

Most digital planner shop owners I've worked with sell more dated planners, but they also take much more time to create! You may even decide to create one of each and maximize sales.

Now that your planner is nearly completed, it's time to connect each page and section by adding hyperlinks to your planner. This makes it possible to turn each page and jump from section to section easily.

Lastly, test your planner to make sure that every link works and that every section in your planner is useful for your ideal customers! Once you've done all this, it's time to package everything together and get ready to launch your new business.

Step 4: Utilizing Online Marketplaces

It's time to sell your digital planners, but where are people going to go to purchase your products? Online marketplaces are places where different business owners can all sell their own products to a group of people without you having to go out and search for potential customers.

One of the most common online marketplaces is Etsy - where people sell physical products you can have shipped to your doorstep and digital products that you can download as soon as you hit the "purchase" button.

Here are three simple steps to launch a successful Etsy shop:

Create your Etsy seller account – this is super easy! Fill in a few details and you’re set to start selling! For digital planners, you’ll be setting up a Digital listing so be sure to choose Digital from the listing type.
Set up your shop with your banner, bio, rules, FAQ, and your story - make your digital Etsy shop your own by choosing a unique style that sets you apart from other digital stationery shops that appeal to your niche and sticks in their mind.
Add your first product - at this stage, you’ll be uploading your files so that customers can access them when they make a purchase. Use stunning images to represent your product and optimize your descriptions to grab shoppers’ attention and increase sales.

Additionally, you can set up a digital shop on your own website - either to add another platform to your website or to further extend your brand that already exists. I personally recommend Squarespace to build a website that looks amazing and converts website visitors into paying customers! You can learn more about selling digital products and planners on Etsy in this blog post.

Are you interested in a comprehensive guide that gives you all the tools you need to start selling digital products on Etsy? This guide is perfect for you if…

You want to open an Etsy shop & need a step-by-step process to help you out
You’re new to the online business world and are ready to start selling
You want to start selling digital products on Etsy Shop
You’re willing to put time & effort into starting an online business!
You have an idea, but you’re not sure where to start

Click here to grab this 70+ page PDF guide and 50+ Etsy Shop digital planner of your own!

Step 5: Search Engine Optimization

Whether you're selling on Etsy, your own website, or both, SEO (search engine optimization) can help you increase website traffic so that more people are seeing your products and purchasing from your shop! SEO is an evergreen way of marketing your business. It's the practice of using keywords, phrases, and in-depth strategies to rank on search engines so that when your ideal customer makes a Google search, your website ranks high enough to increase website traffic organically!

Blogging is one of the best ways to build up a library of resources for your target audience and tank for more SEO keywords. But SEO can be tricky, so let’s answer some common questions about SEO keywords.

What are keywords? These are either single words or a short phrase that resembles something your target audience would type into a Google search.
Where do I use them? Use keywords strategically throughout your website, blog title, blog headings, and paragraph text. This way, you’re building up a whole library of keywords!
How does it work? When Google’s SEO robots come to crawl your website and see if you’re providing valuable content, they’ll see that your content is relevant and help others and recommend your website to those whose search criteria match the information on your website.

Step 6: Email Marketing

You've launched and now it's time to market your business so that the sales keep rolling in! My favorite way to build a community of loyal consumers is through email marketing. Why is this such a great platform to promote your business?

You can build lasting relationships with past, present, and future customers
Helps you make consistent sales through email automation
Supports you to nurture every lead, introduce your business and offer value through various types of automation
Promote your products and build like, know, and trust with your audience
You own your email list, unlike with social media platforms

Whew, you've completed all six steps to your checklist to start a best-selling digital planner business! If you want more tips on growing your business and designing a life you love, browse our blog for more helpful tips and tricks!

Digital Planner Academy, is our signature program, will help you complete every step of this checklist and more! Digital Planner Academy is a self-paced program and community of hundreds of business owners who have built businesses they love so they can reach their larger life goals - spending more time with their family, traveling the world, helping others, and more! Learn how to start and scale the digital planner business of your dreams through Digital Planner Academy. Click here to learn more and enroll!