- Hey y'all, it's Aurelius. Welcome back to the channel. All right, so in this video you are going to learn a step-by-step process to starting your very own
digital product business for $0 and next to nothing. So what you'll be learning are the steps so that you can set up
your own online business. And we're not talking so much about things like drop shipping and
affiliate marketing, but more so creating your own products. So if you're a content creator, a coach, or someone who wants to
simply sell products online and in a digital form such as eBooks and courses, then this video is for you. In many cases that I see
beginners seem to overcomplicate and overwhelm themselves on the process of starting an online
business when in fact you can get started for
next to nothing, $0, and I'll be sharing the exact tools that you can get started
with in this video. But don't get overwhelmed with thinking that you need everything
and all your ducks lined up to get started because the
process really is simple, it's just a matter of taking action. So with that said, let's get started. Okay, the very first step
you are going to wanna take is to do some basic research. You wanna have an idealise,
of what niche you're going to enter and what products you
could potentially sell online and to your audience. I assume that you already know
what your passions, hobbies, interests, or skills are, because that's a good
starting point in terms of what niche you'll be entering. And some people may say,
don't go for something that is based on your passion because it might not be monetizable. That's where the research
comes in, of course. But a good starting ground and a good tool to start with
is Ubersuggest by Neil Patel and it's free with limitations. And just like all of these free tools, there are limitations. And if you do want more
results, for instance, like with Ubersuggest, then
you are going to upgrade. But for the most part, you are just going to use the basic options and
results that it gives you. So what I've started with is
callisthenics for beginners. And if you don't what callisthenics is, it's a form of working out, right? It's a way to work out
using your body weight, but that's what it is. And what I've searched for is
callisthenics for beginners, and I've chosen English and location United States
since for the most part, this is what my market is. And you do a simple search. What you'll be given
are the search results such as search volume. You've got SEO difficulty, pay difficulty and costs per click. But what you wanna look
at is the search volume, and this is per month. And it saying that there's
6,600 searches per month, which is average, and that
gives you an indication as to how high, moderate or low a
particular search term is. For SEO difficulty, you can ignore this because you are not going
to so much set up a website and then have that ranked up. That's icing on the cake. But we're not so much gonna focus on that because SEO does take
quite a number of months to start seeing results, paid difficulties where the ads show on Google and it's showing how difficult
it is compared to, you know, if you are going to have enter
a niche where there are lots of advertisers for a particular keyword or key term, then that's
where this is indicated. And it's saying easy
because not many advertisers are advertising and
targeting these keywords, does give you indication
in terms of the viability on how monetizable it is as well. And cost per click, this is how
much advertisers are willing to pay for per click. And the higher it is, the
more competitive it is. And this does give you an indication as to how profitable a keyword or key term is. The more higher, the more difficult it is and the more it's going to cost you. Because advertisers know
that in order to gain a lead that's going to cost them X amount, but that'll convert into let's say a $100. So if they're only paying, let's say $5 and then that converts to a $100, then that's a good return
on investment, right? So people in the niche of finance, crypto, all that that's high costs a
lot of money to advertise for, that's where the difficulty lies at, how competitive a particular
niche or key term may be. But not to overwhelm you, you don't need to look at all these finer details. I think the biggest thing you need to look at is the search volume. This gives you an indication,
you wanna see that at least some people are searching for what you wanna create. This is a product, let's say an ebook or an online course that I wanna create called callisthenics for beginners, or I wanna create an online
course targeting beginners in the callisthenics community. Another tool you can use to do some keyword
research is called Semrush. And this one also gives
you the search volume and they do use their own backend system and algorithm to give you
these types of results. So it may not be consistent, everything's laid out differently
as you can see compared to Ubersuggest. So it really depends what kind
of layout you like as well. And it shows you the volume based on geographical location as well as global. So globally, callisthenics for beginners get searched 15.6 K times per month. It also gives you keyword ideas. So based on these keywords,
people are also searching for callisthenics workout
plan for beginners. So if you could create
something like a workout plan, that would be ideal because
it still gets searched. Another tool you could use, but more focused on YouTube
search results is vidIQ. I've been using this for many years to gather ideas on
YouTube topics and titles and things like that, and
it's been a game changer all because of vidIQ. So for instance, you could
use the keyword tool, enter the keyword, so I've just entered callisthenics
for beginners once again, and you'll see the keyword results as well as related keywords. And you'll see the search volume. So callisthenics for beginners on YouTube get searched over 255,000 times. You'll also be able to
see related keywords, so anything related to
callisthenics for beginners, like learn callisthenics or how to start
callisthenics for beginners, at home workouts, body weight training, callisthenics exercises. And again, this gives you
more ideas on what kind of articles, content pieces even, and an online course you could create. And by the way, vidIQ is the exception. It is a paid tool, however
you can sign up for free, but get limited results. However, if you want full
results like what you see here with all the keywords and ideas, then you can use the dedicated page below and there's a link in the description box so that you can get a full 30
day trial of the premium plan. This is called the boost plan for just $1. So $1 is all you need to
pay to get full access to the boost plan that gives
you full 30 days of access. Now if you do sign up,
you can get results, you can use all the other tools as well. Enter the keywords that you want. For me, at least with my YouTube channel, vidIQ is a good starting ground and a starting point to give me ideas and topics to talk about. But in our case, we are
looking to create offers such as online courses, eBooks,
and other digital products. But again, this is just
a good starting ground. Another free research tool, and one that I feel is
underrated is Google Trends. So Google Trends, how it works
is you enter a search term, what I've put in is callisthenics. So we're talking of a keyword
that has a more broader sense so that I can see the actual
trend of callisthenics. I've made sure to select
worldwide as opposed to a geographical location and in the past five years
so that I can see the trend and where it's gone
from the starting point all the way to date. And based on this graph,
it is on a incline trend. It's not so much like a crazy hype trend, but it's consistent, right? So this is a niche that
I could say to myself, it's sustainable, it's long term, there's good longevity in this niche if I want to enter it. You could also compare it to
something like home workout. Let's do a quick search and you'll see interest
over time, home workout, the search term, at
least has more interests than callisthenics. So people on Google last
searching for home workout as opposed to callisthenics, but it does give you, again, a
good indication on the trend. Alright, another way
to do some research is to look at the marketplace, look on places like
Udemy if you wanna create online courses and sell online courses. In this case, I search for callisthenics and was brought to this, how to start callisthenics for beginners. And this callisthenics
instructor has been selling this and has 1,599 students who
have enrolled and bought this. So it gives you an indication as to, yeah, people are interested in
this, they are buying it, and this is the course curriculum and the contents that
he's got in his course. Down below you'll see
other related courses, and right here it says,
"Students also bought," "Bodyweight Workout" and
there's like 11,290 students that took this and that's
a high number right there. I mean, you do the math, this
is in Australian dollars, but US is about something
like 35 US dollars, you know, multiply that by 11,290, not exactly sure, but yeah, you go ahead and work it out. So this instructor with this
particular online course has sold 11,290 times as you saw, but if I go to his profile, you can see that overall he's got over 72,000 students from his six courses. Other ways to do some
research is to do the obvious, and that is to simply look online, look on social media platforms
such as Instagram, TikTok, you know, you've got
Threads now too, as well as of course YouTube, look in
particular at the comments that people are placing on
those videos that are related to your topic, niche,
whatever you wanna create. And that gives you a very
good indication in terms of what people are struggling
with, what their challenges are, what they're asking, and the demand. If people are liking
that particular comment, that gives you an
indication that other people have that issue, that
problem, or that question. So don't rely so much on
using these keyword tools, which is a good starting point, but it's all based on
metrics and analytics. At the end of the day, you
will be selling to humans and the people and the
audience on these platforms. Hopefully by now I've
given you the resources and tools to do some proper research before moving on to the next step. And I hope that you can see the importance of doing the proper research and planning, because if you don't do
it, then you are going to go, basically, go ahead blindly. All right, step two is the creation phase. And you wanna create,
based on the research that you did in the previous
step, if you are going to create a course on
callisthenics for beginners for instance, and you have
kind of validated that and you're thinking,
yeah, this is a product that I wanna create, this is an ebook I wanna
create in particular, then you can move on to the next step. And what I'll be showing you is how to create an ebook in Canva. I'm not going to go
through every single step. I've got a tonne of videos on how to actually create one in Canva. I'll link it all up in
description box below for that so you can go through it step by step. But what I wanna show
you is once you log into your Canva account, you do a simple search
for document, right? So we'll search for document and what you'll see is an
option to click on documents and this will bring you
to the document templates. This sometimes does come under A4 document and also US letter size. So it depends what size you want, there's no one size fits all, and you can lay out your
ebook in an A4 format or a US letter size. You could even do it in a landscape. It really depends what you are trying to illustrate in your ebook. If you have images that
need to be, you know, landscape format, then yeah,
look for a landscape document instead right here. But this is where we can begin and select a template to our liking. Do note that there are some
paid templates here indicated with the little crown icon showing PRO, but feel free to look through the other templates
which may interest you. And if you hover over some of
them, you'll see the contents of those templates. Even if you look at a template and you're saying, "Oh yeah,
it's not to my aesthetics, not to my liking." Then you could still use it and it's a good foundation to start with. So let's say we like this one here. I'll click once, click on
customise this template. We can start by replacing the image. So we could go to photos, and if you don't see photos, you just need to add the Photos app to the
navigation on the left here. So simply search for photos
or find it right here and that'll place it right here. I'm going to search for
callisthenics so we can see what images come up. Do note there are some paid
photos as well indicated with the crown icon once again, but if you take a look at
this one here, it doesn't. So what you can easily do is just drag and drop the photo to the
existing and that'll replace it. And the rest is pretty simple. Replace anything you do want to edit, and in most cases you will need to, so we'll say callisthenics
and we'll say, for beginners, and you can of course just replace or resize the text so that it fits or is aligned the way you want, something like that. And you could go and play around with different font styles depending on the look that you want. Instead of the URL down
here, I can just put by the author name, which is, you know, I'll just put in my name
here, continue with the rest of the pages, filling in the
details, replacing the photos, and you can create the
ebook the way you want. If I'm creating a
callisthenics workout plan and I wanna show people how
to actually do the move, I can simply use one of these pages and let's say how to do a handstand and this is what I want to teach them. So it's as simple as that. And changing the title as well, HOW TO HANDSTAND, all right? And just replacing or more so resizing and then putting the image right there and then putting the
instructions on what to do. So in this case we've got
step one, do this or that, and we're gonna progress
from handstand doing certain exercises to get to that goal. But if you want a comprehensive
step by step tutorial on how to create an ebook, again, do look in the
description box below where there are a few resources
for you to go through. I do wanna point out that
we do have AI, in this case, we've got ChatGPT to assist
us if you ever need assistance on let's say coming up
with a table of contents. So I could very easily go into ChatGPT and say, you know, I want to
give them an idea in terms of what I'm creating. So I am creating a callisthenics
ebook for beginners. Could you provide an
example table of contents. In a realistic scenario, I would go into more detail so that ChatGPT will
give me a better result for my table of contents. But let's just use this in this example, and here's what it's
coming up with for me. So callisthenics for beginners, and we've got introduction, understanding, setting up your workout routine, essential exercises and more. So this is pretty good starting ground, and we can play around
with this of course, and with anything that AI produces, I would definitely customise
it and not just leave it as is. So feel free to use AI to your advantage. Use it whenever you're
stuck with content or ideas. And the last thing you wanna
do is put everything on a halt. And because if something is stopping you, then it's not a good thing, right? You wanna continue going and
keeping the momentum going. But once you're done with
your product, it's a matter of downloading the guide and there's an option to click on download and you wanna select PDF as
an option as opposed to PNG of image and then click on Download and that's the product creation phase. All right, so step three
is the platform to use to sell your digital product. And in this case, I'm going
to first start with Gumroad as one of the most obvious ones. Now, the downfall right
off the bat is that they do charge a 10% fee, flat fee it is, on top of the fees that
they charge for PayPal and Stripe use and the
payment processing fee. So it's about 3% from my understanding. So you are gonna pay
something like 13% at the end of the day for every
single sale that you make. So something important to keep in mind, especially if you are going for volume and if you're thinking
that if you're doing a product launch, you're going to make a large amount of sales, then yeah, that's something to consider. But I will say the
interface is really easy and intuitive to use. You simply enter your product
name, select what type of product you're creating,
such as a digital product, course or ebook, set your price, and then go through the
other steps later on. In addition, Gumroad does
feature this kind of marketplace, which they call Discover. And your product could be
potentially featured here and recommended whenever someone purchases a similar product, but there's
no guarantee at the end of the day you still need to
do the marketing and selling and promoting of your own product because they're not just
going to feature right here where it says recommended
for you or staff picks. You do need to at least make a
couple of sales to show that, yeah, this is a legit product and there are some criteria
that you actually need to meet in order to
get your product listed in the Gumroad Discover marketplace. Okay, the next platform where you can host your
product is on Payhip, Payhip's, very similar,
it's actually a competitor to Gumroad. The difference is with
the features of course, and it's pricing where it's less. So you're only going to pay
5% transaction fee in addition to the PayPal and or Stripe
fee that they charge. So you're looking at
about 8% fee per sale, otherwise you could upgrade
to one of its monthly plans, saving you on the transaction fee. So 2% versus 5% or the Pro
being no transaction fee, but you still need to pay
the PayPal/Stripe fee. The interface is simple as well to use and you select what you wanna sell such as a digital product or course, and the process is very similar. You upload the product, in
this case we created an ebook. You upload that product
file that PDF file, complete the rest of the details, adding your product image
into your description and publish your product. What I do like about
Payhip versus Gumroad is that they've got this
flexible store builder, so you can customise your
store to your liking, just like what you see here on the
left is where you can control the products that show. You can also change the header. You've got the footer
add a different section, as well as different pages
on your Payhip store. So you've got a collections
page, you've got different pages that you can also create. So if you've got an About Me
page, you can create that here. You can even change the store style going from different colours, fonts, buttons, and other elements on your page, as well as different themes as well. I can click on Switch to another theme and go from this default one
to one of these other ones as you can see. Another platform you could
use is called Lemon Squeezy. Their pricing is similar
to Payhip's, whereas 5%, but there's just a simple
50 cent per transaction fee as opposed to that 2.9 fee
that PayPal and Stripe adds. The product process is a lot simpler and there's not much flexibility. And that's one of the cons
of using Lemon Squeezy. Enter the product name, give
it a little description, which is quite limited and
you can't really do much in terms of formatting. You can bold things, you can
make italics, things like that, but that's about it. And choose your pricing and a few other things like
adding your PDF file right here. But what I do like about
Lemon Squeeze is that they are considered a merchant of record, meaning they are resellers of your product and they
handle all the payments and that's what they heavily focus on, fully automated sales tax compliance. So they handle the tax based
on your customer's location and their tax regulation, any disputes, chargebacks and things like that, Lemon Squeezy takes care of. Lemon Squeezy does hold your funds and they pay out every two
weeks, so twice a month. Whereas with Gumroad, I
think it's every seven days. And with Payhip, they don't
have that holding system. You simply integrate your
Stripe or PayPal account and then the funds go
directly into your account. Gumroad can also do this as well if you integrate
your PayPal account. A common question I get is,
can I just upload my product to all of these platforms, Gumroad, Payhip and Lemon Squeezy and other platforms? The answer is no. It's not
going to make a difference. Just because you've created your product and uploaded it, it doesn't mean that people will magically come and see and buy your product. You at the end of the day,
still have to do the marketing and sales and promotion of your product so that you can sell it. Yes, there are marketplaces such as Etsy and Redbubble where you
can list your products and potentially make sales, but the chances of that is very low because you still need to make
some sales in order to have Etsy and Redbubble push your product up in the listings and as results. So you still need to make those sales to answer that question, right? I wouldn't bother uploading
your product to all of the platforms, it's just
going to overwhelm you. And rather than doing
that, you wanna consolidate and have everything on one platform. So choose one of the
platforms of the three that I recommend. And so you are just focusing on that and leading your audience, your people, and your potential
customers to that one store. Okay, so at this point
you've done your research and planning, you've created
your product and you've put it and you've selected a
platform to sell your product. The next step is to actually
promote and sell your product. And this is where the hard part really is because as much as I'd like to say, yeah, sales will start coming as
soon as you create a product that really isn't the case because again, you need
to promote your product. And in order to do that, the best way is to start creating content
based on your niche. Creating content costs $0, and it really just is a game
of consistency, persistence, and a bit of a waiting game
because it's not like just because you posted one or two pieces of content
on let's say Instagram or YouTube, that viewers
and people will start coming and seeing your store. It's not the case. You have to keep going. You may take a hundred posts,
you may take 200 posts. For me on my YouTube channel, at least it, I didn't make a breakthrough until something like a hundred videos. So that first a hundred pieces of content may be the hardest, but I'd say that it's
probably the most important because that's where the learnings come, that's where you'll fail,
and then you get back up and learn from that. You'll know what topics will
resonate with your audience and you do more of that. But let's go and take
a look at some ways on how I do with content. Firstly, on Instagram,
Instagram isn't my heaviest and the biggest platform
that I focus on as you know, because I am on YouTube predominantly, and we'll discuss that later on. But on Instagram in
particular, I'm posting here and there, it's not consistent. I did mention, yeah,
consistency does matter, I do wanna be more
consistent on Instagram, but you just need to find that platform that you feel suits your
vibe, suits your personality, and where you feel natural
of creating content, you could feel more
natural creating content in words, right? So that's where articles
and Medium comes in and Threads, which is a
new platform for posting kind of text space, short
messages like Twitter. So you gotta find that platform
that makes it more natural for your way of creating. So if Instagram's a
thing, then yeah, go ahead and create Instagram posts,
which is in the form of photos or images and quotes. You could even go with Instagram reels, which is more moving. And with video that is you
could create Instagram carousels where there's quite a few number of slides that one can go through and view. So as you can see, there are many forms of creating content on
Instagram in particular. Now, where people will
actually see your product and your store is in your bio. So if you click on my link
in the bio, it actually goes to a link in bio page where it features multiple links of mine. Viewers will be able to
see my latest video as well as signing up to my newsletter
and my products, right? So I've got my Master
YouTube Content Planner, I've got my 50 digital
Product ideas, PDF guide that people can buy me a coffee or donate. And this is how you can feature
your product and promote it. So your content, whenever
you talk about it, you could have a call to
action in the description of your post, okay, so
your post is right here, and then you could have a CTA or call to action that
says, "Go to my link in bio to get the guide or to learn more." You repeat the cycle by creating
more content on Instagram. And the only thing I
don't like about Instagram is that it's all about
relevancy and recency. So you have to keep spinning the wheels. And this cycle, it's
kind of vicious in a way is what I call it, because you have to keep creating content, right? Whereas with YouTube it's
a little more evergreen or I'd say a lot more evergreen because you create that video once and then you could potentially
continue getting views for many years down the road. So that right there is a
simple Instagram strategy that you could follow. It's nothing groundbreaking, right? It's just a matter of creating content and then nurturing that
audience that you build so that you gain that like that trust and people lead to that offer of yours. Whereas on my YouTube, I feature links in the
description of my video. So let's say, this one right
here, the YouTube SEO course, this is a video, and where I'm monetize is
right here in the description. So people can get a trial of vidIQ for $1, which I mentioned earlier in this video. And down below are my other links. And surprisingly these
links do get clicks. A past video that I posted
about five AI tools to turn text to videos generated quite
a number of links to each of those five tools. So each of them gains
something anywhere from 2000 to 5,000 clicks. So that right there does
show that it's proven, right? Many people do look at the description and then they go to that
link that you referred to. Continuing on with the description. You'll see tools and gear I use, which takes
them to my shop and the tools. I've got recommended tools,
which are affiliate links. But again, this could be a link directly to your offer on Payhip or on
Gumroad or on Lemon Squeezy. At the end of the day, it is a matter of consistently posting content. So choose a platform,
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. I love YouTube because
of that evergreen element to it whereby I've got
some of my popular videos, this one's gained 4.3
million, this one right here, from 1.5, I posted two years
ago, and it still gets views. And I'm not saying that
you have to be on camera to start a YouTube channel. In fact, many YouTube channels that have done well over a
hundred thousand subscribers, have created a faceless YouTube channel where it's simply educational,
it's all presentation based. And with the addition of AI,
you could use an AI voiceover to voiceover that text or that slide or that presentation of yours. And it's worth noting
again, if you are going to pursue YouTube, then it's a good idea to use a tool like vidIQ to do some research on those keywords. And as I said, many of my
videos that you see here that have done well are because of doing that
proper research using vidIQ and know exactly what keywords to target, such as how to change the
colour of an imported image. And those are some keywords I extracted from my research using vidIQ. And this one alone has
gained 233,000 views. Traffic, in other words, your audience and your customers are the
lifeblood of your business. So focus on creating content
so you can start building that following that subscriber base and nurture them, ensuring
that you take care of them and not just posting
content for the sake of it. And once you do build that trust, and if your offer's
good, people will buy it. As you can tell by now, work is required, effort is required. And also patience because
it's not like just because you know how to create a product, you've got it up there
of one of the platforms that people will magically come and you'll start making sales. But hopefully I've given you
a clear system, an outline that you can follow
step by step as opposed to overwhelming yourself
with all these strategies and tactics that you've
learned from other people. And then that results to procrastinating and just not getting started. So I've shown you the tools,
I've given you the resources to get started for free, $0. And as you saw, there are
options to upgrade to paid plans, which gives you more
results, things like that. But essentially, you don't
need all that to get started. You can get started for
free using the tools and choose which platform you want. Don't use all three platforms
that I mentioned such as Gumroad, Payhip, and Lemon Squeezy. Just choose one. The most important thing
you can do right now is to take that first step. Take that first step
in doing that ideation, doing that research, and then from that, the following steps just
come naturally easy. But that's all from me. Hope this video was helpful and if it was, by all means
give this video a thumbs up. In the meantime, I'll leave
up a couple of relevant videos for you to watch here and here as well as all in description box
below, and all the tools and resources that I
mentioned in this video. Talk soon and do take care. (upbeat music)
