The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

144. Streamline Your Product Creation Workflow

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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Do you have a great idea for a digital product but feel totally overwhelmed when it comes to actually creating it? Or maybe you're like me and love jumping into a project headfirst—only to realize halfway through that you forgot a few key steps (oops!). Either way, this episode is going to save you time, stress, and probably a few headaches.

I’m walking you through the exact checklist I use when creating any kind of digital product, from initial idea to final polish. I’m sharing how I keep everything organized, stay focused, and make sure I’m creating products that are not only helpful, but actually sell. Whether you're building your first product or your fiftieth, this checklist will keep you grounded and on track.

I’ll also share some of the common missteps I see, plus the small tweaks that can make a big difference in your final product. We’ll talk about things like validating your idea before you dive in, making sure your content aligns with what your audience actually needs, and how to avoid burnout mid-project. If you're ready to create with more confidence and less chaos, this conversation is for you!

01:17 - Why the first step in your product creation workflow should be market research (and how to do this!)

03:49 - Important tips for the planning stage of product creation, and must-haves to include in your digital product

07:53 -  Advice for designing and making your product, plus my favorite tools to use

10:51 - A non-negotiable in your product creation workflow: quality control!

12:10 - Pricing your product and launch strategy for getting it in front of the right people

17:01 - What to do after launching your product to ensure it continues selling

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode144

Tired of constantly hustling to sell your digital products? Check out my free 19-minute training where I show you how to turn all those products you already have into a profitable, automated business. 

 

Get more freedom and less stress ➡️ watch now at kristendoyle.co/training 

Check out my Everything Page at https://kristendoyle.co/everything

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the whole product creation process? Maybe you've got a great idea for a digital product, but you're not sure where to start, or like I often do, you find yourself jumping straight into designing and building the product without a clear plan in place. If this sounds familiar, then today's episode is one you don't want to miss. I am sharing a complete digital product creation checklist that'll help you streamline your workflow and boost your sales, whether you're selling teaching, resources, planners, templates or any other type of digital product. Let's get into the checklist. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like teachers pay teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no fluff, tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automation, and so much more. Let's get started y'all. Before you start creating anything, make sure you do some market research. You want to check what's trending in your niche across different platforms where people might be shopping or across social media platforms. You can also look for gaps in the market where people are asking for a certain solution but they're not finding answers. This is a great way to make sure that you're not wasting your time creating something that there are tons of options available for, because the last thing that you want to do is spend hours and hours creating a product that either nobody is looking for so they're not going to buy it, or creating something where there are already 1000s of similar options out there, and so It's really hard to make your stand out above everyone else's. One way you can do market research is to just ask your audience directly. So if you have a social media audience or an email list, which you absolutely should have, use those places to get in touch with people in your audience to see what kind of products they are looking for or what they would like to see in new products that you're creating. This can be as simple as dropping a poll on an Instagram story or in a Facebook group, or sending out an email and asking people to hit reply if they're interested and let you know what specific features they would like to see included. Another thing I really like to do is ask people to reply with an A, B or C or A one, two or three, letting you know which of these they're most interested in. It's a really easy way to get a lot of replies, which makes your email list look really healthy, and that helps to get your email deliverability rate up, but it also gives you some really good information, and because you're just asking for a one letter or one number reply, a lot of people will be willing to respond, who might not be willing to reply if they have to think about typing out an answer. Another thing that I would recommend you do is do a little research on the competition that's out there. But you have to do this very carefully. You have to make sure you're doing this in a way where you're not going to copy them or become so inspired by them that your product looks just like theirs. What I would recommend doing, instead of looking deep into their products, is to look at the reviews of similar products out there. This will tell you what customers are loving and what they are missing or what's not working out well for them. And that's where you'll really get good information about what customers want, more of what frustrates them, and what you can do to make your product better. Once you've done your market research and you're confident there's a demand for your product idea, then it's time to move into the planning stage, rather than jumping straight into the product build. Before you start building, create a strategy and a plan for your product. I like to start with a detailed product outline. This kind of becomes the blueprint for the product, and it helps keep you focused while you're creating. Because I'm sure, like I have, you've probably experienced that time that you thought you were going to create a pretty simple product, but the further you got into it, the more things you added, and it just spun out of control, and it became this huge product. And then sometimes that's great, but sometimes it also means your product is bigger than the pricing the market will allow. So start with and strategic. Outline a blueprint for what you want to sell, so that you can stay focused and stay on track during your product creation, so that you end up with a product that's perfect for the price point that you're going to sell it at. When you're doing this, make sure you are listing out all the different things that you're going to need, all those pieces of the product sections you might need. And the way you're going to organize it. Some must haves that I would recommend you include in every digital product that you sell are clear instructions or some sort of user guide or a teacher guide, if it's teaching resources. Think about the things that someone would need to know if they are brand new to using this type of product, whatever that is. Think about the tech that they may not understand or be familiar with, if they're just brand new to downloading digital products in general. Any steps that they will need to take. If you are designing teaching resources. Think about how a teacher would need to implement this. Especially think about brand new teachers who are just getting started and may not know all the things that veterans already understand. Lay those things out in a really clear User Guide for your product. Another important thing to include is easy navigation. A lot of times this looks like a table of contents that lays out the pages where everything is, or where to go to find things, if they're not all in one PDF. When you do this, if you can include clickable links to those resources, that would really help people to be able to find them quickly, and it just makes it so user friendly. And then think about any extras, those kind of supplementary materials that make your product even more valuable. So for teaching resources, this might include things like answer keys. I recommend including answer keys, even if you're listing suggested or possible answers, because it's just really helpful for exhausted teachers to have at least a hint of what they're looking for in student responses. Think about including things like rubrics for things that don't have a straightforward answer key. If you're creating something like planners, maybe you include tutorial videos. Or for templates, you include some examples of what a finished product might look like using the templates that you've provided. Another thing to think about is whether your product would benefit from having multiple versions or formats. So maybe you need different file types for different apps that people might use, or a print and a digital version, black and white and color options. Think about all those different ways that you could present something to make it easier for more people to use that product. So for example, I have a back to school flip book in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and I initially created it as an editable PDF. And some people love that. It makes it really easy for them to edit without worrying about messing up any of the design. But I started getting feedback that people wanted more flexibility, and editable PDFs just aren't quite as flexible as some other options. So I ended up adding in a PowerPoint version and then eventually a Google Drive version as well, so that people had lots of different options and were able to use it in the way that best works for them. Alright, once you have that solid plan in place, then it's time to start thinking about the design and actually making the product. And this is where most of us want to start, because it's exciting and fun to see our ideas start to take shape and come to life. But having that plan in place first really does make the design process so much smoother, and it will help you end up with a better product in the long run. So once you're ready, before you get started, think about what tool you're going to use. My go tos for creating printable resources are either Keynote or PowerPoint, because they offer a lot of flexibility with the layouts, but it still makes text editing really easy. See Keynote and PowerPoint while they're typically used for widescreen presentations, you can change that page size to portrait, and then you have complete flexibility for putting things wherever you need them to go on the page, but you still have the Keynote or PowerPoint text editing features, layout features with outlines and bullet points and check boxes and all of those things and spell check all of those things are there for you. I absolutely adore using Canva for cover images, thumbnails, previews, social media, anything I'm using for marketing, but spell check in Canva just does not work. I don't know how many times I have seen things that I know people created in Canva that have spelling issues that probably would have been caught if they had created in Keynote or PowerPoint. So anytime I'm doing something that is really text heavy, I like to put it in Keynote because I'm a Mac user, because that way I can make sure that that text is laid out well, everything lines up neatly, and it helps me to make sure that I am error free. The key really is to pick the tools that match your skill level, your comfort level, and what your product needs. You don't need fancy, expensive design software or anything like that to create really great products. You can probably use things you already have on your computer. And the most important thing is that you are comfortable creating in the tool that you're using. When you think. About the design itself, make sure you're focused on user experience. Keep your branding and your styling consistent so you're using those consistent fonts, consistent colors, consistent styles of clip art or graphics. Think about readability, especially if you are creating teaching resources. It's so important that all the text on your page is easy, not just for the teacher to read, but for those kids to read as they are working on those activities as well. Keep in mind, customers buy digital products that look good, yes, but they are more interested in buying products that are functional and that solve their problems. So if your product is absolutely adorable, but the fonts are hard to read, they're not going to purchase. So make sure that you are prioritizing readability and usability above everything else. When you finish creating your product, make sure that you do some quality control. This is a non negotiable. The last thing you want is to put products out there that have lots of errors, typos, missing links, things like that that cause a bad user experience. So one of the first things that I recommend you hire out for is proofreading and editing on your products. See, it is just really difficult for us to see our own mistakes. Once you have spent so much time working on a product, when you go back through to proofread it, your brain will just automatically, naturally correct the mistakes that you've made, because you know what it's supposed to say. So I really do recommend hiring out for proofreading, if that is at all possible. Now, if that's not in your budget right now, you can use a tool like Grammarly, or ask a friend. Maybe you have another entrepreneur friend who also needs proofreading, and the two of you can swap off those proofreading jobs so that you're editing each other's work instead of editing your own. That really is just going to lead to a better product in the long run, and those typos and mistakes can lead to bad reviews and refund requests. So investing in proofreading upfront, or working with someone else, trading off with a friend, can really save you a lot of headaches down the road, and can keep your products from getting bad reviews. Alright, once your product is designed, it's all proofread, it is ready to publish. Let's talk about how to price it and how to create a little bit of a launch strategy to get it in front of the right people. First things first, you want to make sure that as you are listing your product, you are optimizing for SEO across all the different platforms where you're listing your product. Good SEO helps your product show up higher in searches, whether that's on a marketplace site like TPT or Etsy or on Google for your own website, but you do have to optimize differently for those different places, and they'll use different keywords. Now, I really do recommend doing some keyword research before you create your product, because it can help you to determine those gaps in the market. But if you haven't done that, definitely do keyword research before you list your product, and if you have access to it, do keyword research specifically for each place where you're going to list the product. So TPT keyword research for that, I recommend the SEO tools from Your Data Playbook. If you have something that allows you to do Etsy keyword research, definitely do that and for your own website, for things you are listing on your own website store, do google keyword research with something like Uber Suggest or kW finder. You can also use the search terms that are showing up as suggestions in the search bars on any platform as a guide, because those are popular search terms people are actually using right now. Once you find your search terms, make sure you include them in titles, in the description, use them in tags, if that helps on your platform, and if it makes sense to do so. Alright, let's talk about pricing. A lot of times, people want to price based on how many pages their product includes or how long it took you to create, but the better approach to that is to price based on the value that your product provides to the buyer. You can also do some research on similar products, just to get some pricing benchmarks, a general idea of how much people are willing to pay for products in this general niche. But I would encourage you to make sure when you're looking at other products, that you're really looking at what they include in order to determine if they are comparable to your product or not. Think about when you're buying a house and the realtor goes out to get comps. They are looking for houses around the same size, in the same zip code, same number of bedrooms and bathrooms, same lot size, those sorts of things in order to find those comparable prices for your house/ Think about your digital products the same way. Just because something covers the same topic doesn't mean it's really comparable to yours. So make sure that if you are comparing prices, you're comparing things that are comparable. And the biggest thing to think about in terms of pricing is that pricing is not permanent. You can. In and you should adjust your prices over time based on your conversion rates and how well your product is selling. Once you start getting more page views, then you can start adapting your product to hit that just right sweet spot. So let's talk about launching a little bit. When it comes to digital products, a lot of people think that the only type of product you launch is something big, like a course or a membership, but you can launch even small products. The launch might look a little different, but you definitely should still be promoting those new products and getting them out there to your audience. Don't just rely on publishing the product on the marketplace or on your website and people starting to find it organically. So when you launch a product, think about emailing your list. This is probably the most effective way to launch a product, and I would do this in a couple of emails over maybe a few days or a week, doing at least one email that primes your audience for this product, highlighting the problem that you're solving, nudging at that pain point just a little bit so that they are ready for a solution, and then following it up with an email that says, I just created a product just for this, and it is just for you if you've been struggling with that problem I talked about in the last email. This is a great way to get your product out to people who already know, like and trust you because they're on your email list. Don't forget to promote it on your social media as well. And depending on the price point, you might consider running some ads to your product too. Another thing a lot of people do is offer an early bird discount for people who purchase, maybe before a launch, depending on your platform, if that's something that you can do, or a discount for the first 24 or 48 hours once you've published your product. A strong launch of a product, getting lots of sales early on, can help move your product up in search rankings and help you get that data you need to set that just right price point, and it really can help give you an indicator of long term success potential too. Once you have launched your product and you've started getting those sales and feedback in, those first few weeks, are a great time to start looking deeply at the feedback you're getting and making those quick improvements based on the customer feedback that you've gotten. If you are selling in a place where you can contact your buyers, somewhere like your own website, you might even reach out to those early buyers, thank them for purchasing, and ask them for their feedback. Whether that looks like asking them for a review on your platform or you're just asking them personally. Is there anything I could do to make this product better, that would give you an opportunity to really improve your product based on information from your buyers, so that down the road, it's even better. Alright, so there you have it. That is your complete digital product creation checklist that covers market research, planning, design and launch strategy. Now let's talk about some simple action steps that you can take. If right now you are just starting out with a product idea, then pump the brakes. Instead of diving straight into the product build, which I know is what you want to do, take a little while to do some market research. Carve out just an hour to send a quick poll out to your audience, or check what people are asking for in Facebook groups or other communities where your people are hanging out. If you're in the middle of creating a product, pause for a little bit. Make sure you have a clear outline, check that you're including all of those extras, all of those things that make your product more valuable and easier for people to use. And then get back to the creation. And if you've already created a product and you're almost ready to post it, focus on quality control. Get someone else to review your product, and then plan out a launch strategy with some dates so you can really promote your product as you're doing that launch. Whatever stage you're at, as you're working through this, create yourself a simple, detailed checklist, specifically for your type of product and for your process that you can use and refine every time you create a new product. This will take a lot of the mental load off, and it'll make sure that you're not skipping any important steps the next time that you create something. All right, friends, that is a wrap on our deep dive into digital product creation processes. I would love to know what has been most helpful for you in your own product creation process! Send me a DM on Instagram @kristendoyle.co and let me know which part of the process you find most challenging, or share a tip that works really well for you, and then I will be glad to share it out with everyone else. If you found this episode helpful, I would be so grateful if you'd hit that follow button on your podcast app and maybe even take a second to leave a rating or a review. It helps more than you know, and I really appreciate it. I'll talk to you soon!