What are Digital Educational Products?
Ebooks, Workbooks, Planners, Online courses and templates that have been created to educate the user are all examples of digital educational products and no matter what niche your business or expertise is in, you can make money from creating any of these digital educational products, all from home.
If you are looking to make some extra money as a freelancer or grow your brand as a business owner, then digital educational products are definitely something you should be considering.
Let’s look at the benefits of creating your own digital educational products before we dive deeper into how you can generate income from them.
Why is Digital education so popular?
The e-learning industry has a predicted market value of 645 billion USD by 2030 (Straits Research) and this is reliant on one factor and one factor only: Demand.
Since Covid-19 there has been a worldwide revolution in the education and training industry and digital education is now becoming the assumed choice of delivery for any form of e-learning and digital education and that is because digital education is so accessible today and that has been made possible with digital educational products.
Is there a difference between e-learning and Digital education?
The difference between e-learning and digital education is almost like splitting hairs. They are so similar that it is difficult to see the difference between the two, but there is a difference.
E-learning tends to refer to ‘currently’ to learning that is done online. This can be with an online teacher, tutor or coach or this can be done alone via an online course.
Digital Education is far more immersive because digital education can be delivered in a number of different formats but also interacted with and this is one of the main differences between e-learning and digital education. With digital education, you can interact with the teacher, coach and/or students in real-time. This is achieved with live streaming, such as live tutorials, chats, and seminars. E-learning tends to rely on email and forums for communication purposes.
Interactive communication in real time is much more preferred by most students because students can ask questions when they arise, and teachers can directly respond. Interactive communication also increases engagement and gives a more ‘life-like’ learning experience. This has it’s benefits because both students and teachers, coaches or trainers can sometimes communicate better directly, rather than writing an email or other.
Digital education can also include workbooks and ebooks with the pre-recorded video content in them, audio content and even streaming links to classes and other digital educational product content.
In short, digital education has widened the net and expanded e-learning into a multi-dimensional digital education universe.
And digital education has not reached its limits by any means, in fact, I took one of my degrees online with a University in London via the capsule of digital education!
All digital education uses digital educational products and at all levels, so what are the most common types of digital educational products?
16 examples of Digital Educational Products
- Ebooks
- Workbooks
- Planners
- Textbooks
- Templates
- Training Manuals
- Masterclasses
- Courses
- Electronic applications
- Audiobooks
- Patterns
- Digital Graphic Bundles
- Music and Audio recordings
- Podcasts
- Video Tutorials
- Software Programs
How to create digital educational products that sell
If you have a passionate interest, a professional experience or a particular knowledge about a certain subject, you will stand more of a chance of creating a digital product that will sell and that is because you have an unfair advantage! This means you will have a deeper insight into a certain topic or industry that could help others overcome certain problems. This is valuable knowledge.
If you can then use that knowledge to teach / coach someone else how to overcome a particular problem to help them reach their goal, you are ideally placed to create a digital educational product by turning that knowledge into a digitable educational product.
The secret sauce is in the niche, not the product! You can have the best digital educational product ever but if it is not niche specific or aligned to the needs of your niche audience, it won’t sell.
To relate to this more, create Niche Digital educational Products.
What are Niche Digital Educational Products?
Niche digital products that have been created for educational purposes are products that have been created to serve a certain subgroup of users as a learning resource within a specific segmented marketplace.
Creating digital educational products for a specific niche is the best way to ensure that you create a digital product that is going to be useful to your students and also one that will sell.
If you try to create a digital product that educates everyone it is likely that the detail within the product is not specific enough for learning. This will then make it difficult to sell.
Ideally, you want to create one amazing low-cost, digital educational product that is low cost and then use that to gain feedback from your students to grow your market area and create additional digital products that further deepen the knowledge and experience that the first digital product was based upon. Think of your digital product as an educational tool because technically that is what it is.
However when you think of a product as a product and not an educational or learning tool, your focus is occupied with sells and money rather than creation and processes to educate others. This may seem a small detail but believe me, it can make the difference between selling tens of thousands on repeat to selling nothing at all.
If you would like to learn more about niche and would like to discover more niche ideas before you get started on creating your first digital educational product, use our FREE Niche finding tool here.
How to create Income with Digital Educational Products
One of the best ways to create income with digital products is to, first of all, determine what niche your current knowledge lies in and what is your niche market and audience.
Then you should spend some time researching your audience within it’s niche. I find the best way to do this is by using forums, not social media.
Why?
Because on Social Media people are often only representing the parts in their life or business that they want to be known for. Rarely will you sell posts on social media whereby people are trying to find out the answer to deeply personal or troublesome problems? And the reason for that is that most everyone has to be identifiable on Social Media.
On Social Media, you have to have a real name and a real picture to use most social media platforms. Everyone can be easily identified on Social media. On forums like Quora and Reddit, it is the opposite. You can post anonymously if you wish and because of this people get to the heart of the questions … and answers.
Think I’m wrong? Think of a question you would never post on facebook and then post that same question anonymously on Quora.
Now, how does this help you to create more income with digital products?
Because if you can find out exactly what your audience is having trouble with and you know the answer, then you can create an amazing niched, educational digital product that will sell on autopilot. So research is important.
Next, you need to have a way of selling your digital product. And selling your product directly from your website, not Etsy not Amazon.
The reason for this is to stop people from copying your product or stealing your idea. There is a huge amount of spyware like erank and Amazonspy that will tell keen copycats exactly what is selling, how much and how many sales people are making a day with what product.
Those copycats will rip off your idea, change 15% of the detail and undercut you on price and on platforms like Etsy there is not a lot you can do about it. In fact Etsy is well known for this type of activity.
Selling from your own website is totally different. If you are completely new to creating digital products and you do not have a website, I really recommend using a Stan Store. Inside the Teacherpreneurs.online I also go further into detail in how to protect your digital products with copyright and trademark for digital publishing.
A Stan Store you can brand with your own name and you can set it up in ten minutes. It is low cost and is perfect for Social media. In addition, you can sell ebooks, workbooks, small courses, masterclasses, video consultations and a few more things too. Find out more here. I will also link this at the bottom of this post.
When you start generating more Income you can invest more in your own website and all the rest. But to keep things, simple and low cost until that happens, try Stan.
Create your digital eduactional product
Once you have decided what problem you can solve or coach others in. It’s time to think about creating your first educational product.
I would go with an ebook or workbook to start with because they are virtually free to create and you can test your idea out with a workbook. Any changes you need to make whilst testing can be done really easily, unlike with a course for example.
Workbooks can be renamed to suit your marketing objectives. You can rename these to be a Training manual, Study Guide, or learning program etc. This will be defined by your niche and the market position you wish to lever your digital product towards.
With a workbook you can add in links for tutorials, and also have some low content like trackers, exercises or charts for your students to complete. These can all be created in digital format using a free program like Canva.
From a workbook, you can upsell eventually to a masterclass, courses, 1-1 consultations, and more and use social media and blogging as a way to drive traffic to your website. This we call funneling and this infographic explains how you can sell your digital educational products via a funnel.
How to sell more digital products with a sales funnel
For more marketing tutorials, business support, digital product creation masterclasses and professional templates to grow your business, become a member.
You can definitely sell a lot more at a faster rate with a sales funnel as long as you are selling from your own website and not as previously mentioned Etsy or another platform. And when you get to this stage, I thoroughly recommend Kartra. I use it myself and it is the most cost effective digital marketing system ever, starting at $79 a month.
The key advantage of a sales funnel is automation. Automation removes all the manual processes (even the digital ones) you would normally do. Such as talking and convincing students to buy your digital product.
With a sales funnel you can set up a sequence of emails, and even tell your email sequencer what email to send and when depending on what action a student has taken or not taken when they land on your website or even open an email.
This is an incredibly powerful way of selling. Bear in mind that when someone reads your email it’s similar to them sitting there in front of you. To make sales from that interaction is always really nice.
However, selling via email is not the only way to increase sales on your digital educational products. You can also use social media platforms like Pinterest and Linkedin (both seem to have zero drama as far as a social media platform) and they allow you to link directly to your website or blog.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram make this more and more difficult. It’s important to really evaluate what platform brings you the most traffic and what quality is that traffic. This is something I never see business owners mention but 5K visits to your website or funnel is pointless if the traffic is low quality. By that, I mean not aligned to your niche and market position. The proof is in the pudding as they say!
5 examples of Niche Digital Educational Products
Hopefull this post has inspired you to get on Canva and have a go at creating your first educational product. If you are still unsure of how to start here are some ideas of different niches for inspiration!
- The Getting Married abroad Wedding Planner
- The Home School Starter Pack for kids 3-7years
- Phonic English for Chinese Kids Workbook: How to speak perfectly British!
- Home Highlighting Glow-up Manual: How to Highlight your own hair from home
- The NEW Virtual Assistant Roadmap
- The Teacherpreneur Business Plan: Go from Idea to Invoice with Digital Educational Products (one of my own products)
