#132 - Digital Product Blueprint: Step 3 – Build a Digital Product That Attracts Buyers, Not Just Downloads

You've chosen your digital product. 

You've designed the transformation.

Now it's time to build.

But before you start recording videos or designing workbooks, there's one important question to answer:

Are you building something that attracts buyers... or just people who collect free resources?

In this episode of the Digital Product Blueprint series, I share one of the biggest mistakes I made while creating lead magnets, and how changing my approach completely transformed the quality of the people joining my audience. 

Then we'll walk through the six practical steps to build Version 1 of your digital product without getting stuck in perfectionism. 

In this episode you'll learn:

•  The difference between a DIY resource and a Decision Resource 
•  How to attract people who are ready to solve a problem, not just download another freebie 
•  The six-step checklist for building your first digital product 
•  Simple, low-cost tools (including Google Workspace and KIT) to get started 
•  Why Version 1 should be finished—not perfect 

Download your free Digital Product Blueprint Workbook and build alongside me as we create a digital asset that can continue serving your audience and your business for years to come.

Start your Free Newsletter Plan with KIT. (that's my affiliate link! 😍)

Schedule a 15-minute Discovery Call HERE

Mindset to Market is a Luminous Creative Production. If you'd like to learn more about our business coaching program and group coaching container, please visit us online at DeborahcSmith.com.

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Mindset to Market is produced by Deborah C. Smith and designed to inspire and support big-hearted creatives in finding their own unique path, building a sustainable business, and creating financial, spiritual, mental wellness and abundance.

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Transcript

Welcome back to the Digital Product Blueprint series. This is a special six-episode series of the Mindset to Market podcast designed to walk you through the strategic steps of building a high-converting digital asset. This is something that's going to work for your business while you're offline. It's gonna work for your business from weeks to months to years after you create it. So this is not about creating more content. It's about creating something that can last and be evergreen for your business. And today is the episode where we're finally gonna start building the actual digital product itself, the asset. But before you open Canva, before you record a video or write a single page of your workbook or do any of the actual creation and building, there's one mistake that I see entrepreneurs make over and over again, and it's that they accidentally build a resource that attracts the wrong type of person to their asset. So instead of attracting people who are actually ready to solve the problem that you solve and wanna work with you, it attracts people who are just collecting free downloads and really wanna stay in DIY mode. And today I'm gonna show you the difference in how to avoid that when you build your product. And then I'm gonna walk you step by step through the actual building phase to get version one of your digital product ready without getting stuck in perfectionism. So let's get right into it. Hey there. Welcome to the Mindset to Market podcast, your go-to space for practical tools and solutions to the everyday challenges of being a creative and soulful entrepreneur living in a material world. I'm your host, Deborah Smith, a holistic business coach and marketing strategist with 17 years of experience. I help my clients bust through mindset blocks and learn daily marketing practices that balance personal wellness with financial growth and impact. I'm here to offer you support with creativity, mindset, practical how-tos, and getting into imperfect, messy action so you can experience daily breakthroughs as you grow. If you're a purpose-driven entrepreneur building an online business, you're in the right place. Let's dive in. All right, all right. Welcome back. So happy that you're here with me. So happy that you have been listening to this podcast. Thank you so much. If you're just joining us and you haven't listened to the other episodes in this series, then this is part three of the Digital Product Blueprint series. There's six parts in total, and so we've already covered part one, which is choosing the right product that you're going to create for your business, and then part two, which was about designing the transformation that it's gonna provide to the people that get it from you. So this week we're gonna talk about building. So I do recommend if you haven't done so already, pause the episode, go to my show notes, click the link for the free blueprint, the digital product workbook that I gave you. It's in the show notes because today's checklist is gonna make this entire process much easier. And just in general, having a checklist to follow through the process will help you. And also, then you'll get weekly reminders from me by email about the series so you don't miss anything. And if you have not yet listened to the first and second episodes in the series, I do think it would be helpful. These are steps that go in order. So if you're interested in building a high-converting digital asset that brings you qualified buyers and really attract the right people to your business, then this series would be great for you. Go back and listen to one and two, and also grab the digital product blueprint. And that link is deborahcsmith.com/blueprint. Okay. So before we build- I wanna tell you about a mistake that I personally made for many years. And now that I've been able to solve this problem inside my own business I can't help but see it everywhere. I see it in free offers that I see on the internet all the time. I see it in people's messaging in their emails. I see it when people bring me ideas or when clients pitch me ideas for digital assets. And so I wanna help you guys understand this today before we get into the building. So the problem was I thought the more information that I give away, the more people will obviously trust me and see me as a guide. So every lead magnet that I would create was, would be get bigger and bigger. I would add another worksheet. I would add another template. I would, make sure that the webinar was really meaty and full of all this information. I would tack on extra bonuses to get more people to come and give away entire systems, right? And I genuinely wanted people to succeed. Like, I really just want people to, to get the win, and I still do. And so I wanted someone to download one of my resources, apply it, get an amazing result, and then eventually think, "Wow, if this is what her free content is like, imagine what working with her must be like." But something different happened. People loved my free resources. They downloaded them, saved them, collected them. Sometimes they even told me, how much they appreciated them and how much success they were getting from them. So I was getting that result But then they weren't becoming my clients And it took me a long time to realize why. It's that I had accidentally created resources that helped people just stay in DIY mode instead of creating resources that helped them see me as the person who could help them get the work done. \ Now, before I go any further, I just wanna clarify that I believe that teaching generously should be a core strategy for your business. This, this podcast is a great example. It exists because I love to teach. I believe in teaching generously. But if you're building a business, your free resource has another job that it has to do in addition to teaching and educating. So it's not just to educate, but it's also to qualify, right? Because \ there's a massive difference between somebody who just wants another free PDF and wants to DIY, and somebody who's actively trying to solve a problem that they understand is a big problem and that they want support with that. So that first person is just collecting information and scripts and templates, whereas the second person is looking for a guide. And once I understood the difference, I really was able to go back and think more strategically about the way that I shaped the assets that I created. So my list didn't necessarily grow any faster, but it grew much, much better because it was calling in the right type of people, people who are qualified potentially to work with me. So before we get into building, I just wanna help you understand the difference between these two types of resources. So one I think of as a DIY resource, and then the other I think of as more of a decision resource. And so I started noticing that a lot of lead magnets fall into one of those two categories, right? The first helps somebody just do everything themselves. The second one helps somebody understand the problem well enough to realize that solving it matters and that they may actually want help. So let me give you some examples. A DIY resource might say something like, "Five sales scripts that close more deals." Now, who would that attract? That's gonna attract people collecting sales scripts. Sounds great, right? Five sales scripts that'll close more deals? Let me have it. Now compare that to a decision resource, which might say something like, "Three hidden reasons your sales calls die around minute seven." Wait a second. Now we're attracting someone who's losing sales, and they wanna understand why. And you are qualified to, in theory, help them figure that out. So that's very valuable because they're doing sales calls, they're losing the sale, things are dying down, people start to, like, stop paying attention. You're giving them information that's gonna help them fix that. All right, example two is DIY type of resource would say something like 100 Instagram captions and prompts. Instead, a decision resource would say something like, "Why your content gets likes but doesn't create clients." Right? So you can see the first one is just giving them the captions, giving them the prompts, sending them off to go do the work without you. The second one is teaching them something important about the thing they're trying to accomplish and positioning you as the person that can help them. Okay, third example the DIY resource would be something like the complete retirement planning workbook. Sounds like a great freebie for a retirement planner. We used that example in, in episode two. Instead, a decision-making resource would say something like, "Five costly retirement planning mistakes most people don't discover until it's too late." So notice the difference there. One promises information, the other promises insight, and the path to a solution, it also promises to show you how you might be making a costly mistake. So one is saying, "Here's more stuff. Go do it." The other says, "Let's understand what's actually happening before you do it." So your goal isn't to convince somebody that they never need you, right? Your goal is to help them clearly understand the problem, experience a meaningful quick win, and then see why solving it was worth the investment of their time, which will automatically position you as a great guide and leader for them. And this is what leads to clients. So it's not because you would h- you're not gonna withhold information. We're sharing information. It's just the type of information that you share will attract a different type of person And in doing so, by the way, you build a lot of trust. When you show them a mistake to avoid or help them understand what's happening, it builds trust. And you know trust is the cornerstone of sales. So now that we've talked about who we're building for, let's actually build. So you can open up your digital product blueprint in the workbook, and you'll see today's checklist, which is gonna walk you through six very simple steps. And I want to promise you that this can be done simply before we start talking about this, and I do not want you to get overwhelmed when we start talking about technology. Step one here of building is gonna be to choose your tech stack, but don't worry because you can do this totally for free using really simple tools that you're probably already using. So do not worry because I promise you we're gonna keep this simple. And friend, this is where I see people lose weeks of their life because ... because they're comparing softwares, Kajabi, School, WordPress, Teachable, Thinkific. Here's my very simple advice. I want you to use the tools that you already have and know. Your customer does not care whether your workbook came from Google Docs or Canva. Your customer only cares whether it helps them. And so done is better than perfect. So in step one, we just need to make some basic decisions about where your digital asset is going to be created and where it's gonna live. And for anyone who's at the beginning of your online marketing journey and you don't already have this, you will need what I think of as an email service provider. This is different than just your free mail like Gmail, Hotmail, or any of those. This is because it's going to offer some privacy parameters, so it gives you the opportunity to capture somebody's email address, tag them, keep them safely on a list that is your proprietary information that you curate, and then automatically also send them out an email welcoming them, thanking them, et cetera. So if you don't have an email service provider, we'll talk a little bit more about that in just a minute, but you will need that tool. Otherwise, everything can live in Google Drive. You don't really need a website yet to do this. Okay, so let's move on. Step two is to create a landing page. Again, you can do this right in Google Docs. I have an incredible Google Docs sales page tool that I got from Nadine Hanafin. If you're interested, I'll put the link in the show notes where these are branded, gorgeous. They look like sales pages and landing pages on a website. Don't overcomplicate this. Your landing page basically just needs to answer three questions. Who is this for? What problem does it solve? And what's the quick win that they're gonna experience if they get this thing from you? And clarity beats cleverness every single time. Just be super clear. Who is this for? Is it for teachers that are planning a weekend lesson plan? What problem does it solve? Does it give them a template that gets their lesson plan done really quickly? What's the win that they'll experience? Get your weekend back because your planning's already done. You know, I made that up obviously, but clarity beats clever, so I just want you to keep that very simple And then where you're gonna create this landing page for people to find you on the internet is right inside your email service provider or using a Google Doc. And by the way, you can also set up checkout payment accounts with places like Stripe and other systems where you can create an offer that is free. So you can use that to capture people's email addresses if you want to. Like I said, I recommend having an email service provider, but let's get into step three. So step three is about the delivery system. So I want you to ask yourself, how will someone actually receive this? And here's the really good news. You don't need expensive software. Google Workspace is just honestly one of the most underrated business tools available. You can build an incredible first version using a Google Doc, a Google Sheet, a Google Form, Google Slides. You can upload audio. You can upload video. Anything can live inside a folder. So you could literally say, get the whatever toolkit and have a couple of different things inside of a Google Drive folder and make the link shareable, and that's it. You don't have to have fancy technology. So do not let technology become the reason that you don't launch this, lead magnet or asset. Now, if you're ready to begin building an actual email marketing system around your digital product, that's when I recommend you should actually get an email service provider and use a platform. Personally, I use Kit, and one of the reasons that I love them and recommend them is because they launched a free newsletter plan. So this gives new users a plan that allows them to have one complete automation set up, and so an entirely automated email sequence that can go out once the triggers are set. So somebody opts in from your landing page, they get tagged, then they get sent the welcome email, delivered the digital asset, and then they can get sent a series of emails that nurture \ and, introduce you to them and builds a relationship. So you can do all that for free on their free tier. So this means somebody can download your resource today and automatically receive like a thoughtful series of connected tissue. And it's just a wonderful way to begin thinking beyond a single download and towards building real relationships and a real customer journey So if you wanna learn more about Kit, of course, I have an affiliate link. It's in the show notes. Check it out. I also have a bunch of tutorial videos that teach you how to set it up and use it. So that's just my thank you for people that use my affiliate link is I teach you how to set it up. But in step three, you're really figuring out how are they gonna get this thing? So if you decided to use a Google Doc you would just then need to send it to them, with the email address that they provide you. It's nice to have it automated, and you're gonna wanna have it automated at some point. But if you're sitting here thinking, "I don't have time to set up an email service p- provider, and I just don't understand any of that. I can't do that right now," no worries, my friend. Absolutely do not worry about it. You're gonna make the asset in a Google worksheet or somehow in Drive, and you can just send it to them manually. So again, do not let that stop you or hold you back. And moving on to step four, that's when you're gonna draft your welcome email. So here's the thing. You cannot just send them a link to download something and then disappear. Truly, the point of doing all of this is to build relationships, and so we really do wanna just think about it that way. This is about connections and finding your people. So you want to warmly welcome them. You wanna celebrate them for taking a big step. You wanna tell them exactly what to expect when they get the thing, and you wanna explain how to use it properly, how to make the most out of the resource that you gave them, and help them get their first quick win. Give them the support they need to get it done. And then I would also use that welcome email to let them know what's coming next. So if you are gonna send another series of emails, make sure that you think that through, and that it's strategic, and that it leads from, them getting their first little taste of what you do to having a deeper conversation Now, the welcome email can be a part of your automated series if you have an email service provider. If you don't, you could put, sort of a welcome page that comes before the resource. So for example, you were making some type of a guide, then you would just make the first page the welcome email. If your digital asset is in video format, you might wanna just draft a welcome email, put it into a Google Doc, and send that to them with the video or put it inside the folder. Again, if it's a mini course, you know, depending on what you're creating, you just wanna make sure they're getting that basic information from you. A warm welcome, celebration, what to expect, how to use it, and what's coming next. And again, think of this step as your first introduction to this new person and, warmly greet them and invite them to use your digital asset. Okay, step five is gonna be to test everything in the customer journey and really just pretend you're your own customer. So you're gonna fill out the form, you're gonna download the resource, you're gonna open every email, click every link, Not only just make sure they're working, but what does it make you feel? Notice where things feel, disconnected. Notice where things feel maybe a little confusing. Is the wording all flowing together? Does it feel cohesive in the voicing and in the branding? And you're gonna fix anything that doesn't quite fit or flow before somebody else experiences it. So testing is so important. You just wanna run through your own customer journey a couple of times. I usually go through the first time looking for just links and, basic technological platforms connecting correctly, The second time I go through it, I'm looking more for messaging clarity to make sure that it's actually all making sense. And then sometimes I go through a third time and I ask myself "What do I feel? If I got this and I was reading this and experiencing this, how would that make me feel?" And that can be a little bit tricky to do when you're so close to your own work, which brings us to step six, which is just to finish version one and really truly ship it. And so this is the most important step of the entire episode because version one is gonna be imperfect, and it's usually where people get really stuck because they feel like they want it to be so perfect and they want it to be this shining, exemplar of a digital asset. But the most important thing is that it's just done. Really, that's the most important thing. Your audience is gonna teach you how to improve it. There is a version two coming. I guarantee and promise you that. So version one earns you your version two. Version two is gonna be the one that starts to actually, gain some traction. So don't wait until it's flawless. Just finish it, ship it, learn, improve, and then rinse and repeat. And with step six, I want you to actually share it with other human beings. So if you have somebody you've been thinking about who this would be perfect for, send it over to them. Say, "It's version one. I'm looking to get feedback." Share it with your email list if you already have one. Share it with your mom. If you have nobody to share it with, absolutely share it with me. You can send it to me. I will go through your funnel and I will give you feedback. And that is something that will give me great joy. So do not hesitate to send me your finished version one. Okay, so we gotta recap the steps for today We're gonna build something bigger than just a digital product, right? We're starting the beginning of a relationship with people who are the right types of people who are buyers, not just looking for more information to DIY. And we wanna keep the experience really simple. We're gonna get through the six steps to finish version one. So we're gonna choose the tech, we're gonna create a landing page, we're gonna build the delivery system, we're gonna draft the welcome email, and we're gonna test the customer journey. And that's basically the surrounding mechanisms that help to take your digital asset from just a concept to something you can actually send out to other people in the world without you being online all the time. A couple of notes about this. Now, I know that I didn't just teach you how to actually shoot and film your video and edit it. I didn't just teach you what goes into your PDF document. I didn't teach you how to set up, a mini podcast series. That's because everyone listening to this podcast is working on something vastly different, and it would be impossible for me to walk you step by step through every different type of digital asset and exactly how to create it. Most of you will have come into this already knowing what you wanna create, and most likely it's in a format that you already understand. But for those of you who are at the very beginning, I do wanna say if you have no clue what you should be creating still by episode three- I would stick to something very simple at first. Start with a checklist or a guide or, -- a way to help people understand something that is in a word-based format. And if you are really unsure, please feel free to shoot me an email at hello@deborahcsmith.com. And I do offer, 15-minute discovery call kind of brainstorm sessions. No strings attached. It's not a sales call. We can jump on a quick call. And at this point in the process, this is where people usually go one of two ways. People split into two groups. There's-- the first group is gonna be excited, they're motivated, they know exactly what they're building. They are grateful for the steps, they're using the checklist, and they're already doing this. The other group starts thinking, "Oh, man. I thought this was gonna be so simple. It's just a lot of steps. I really don't have time for this. I'd really love either somebody else to help me get this done, or you're considering giving up, right? And so if you do want a set of experienced eyes on this before you spend 30 hours creating something that isn't the right thing, then that's exactly why I created my VIP version of the Digital Product Blueprint. So inside that VIP program, we don't just talk about the right product. We actually really break down all of the decision-making. We look at the title. Is it the right title? We look at the positioning. Are you using the right words to make sure you're attracting buyers as opposed to DIY, right? DIYers. We look at your entire customer journey, whether your free resource is attracting the right people, whether it naturally leads to the signature offer that you're gonna sell. So these are strategic decisions, and I know that they're sometimes hard to make. And they're much easier to make when somebody who's built and launched hundreds of digital products for literally nearly two decades is helping you. So if you would love some hands-on support, then you'll find all the details about that in the show notes. Just check out the VIP link. Okay, so what do we have to look forward to? Next week's episode is all about your customer journey and truly connecting with people so they're excited to experience your digital asset. So we're gonna talk much more about the delivery process, how to package, how to automate. We're gonna talk a little bit more about primary calls to action and what can go into the welcome email. So we'll get into those juicier parts of creating a really juicy customer delivery experience and just really connecting with people. Until then, I want you to go build something that you're super proud of. This is a great week. If you're following along with this, you can create your digital asset on your iPhone. You could do it at the beach. Just do not let perfection and technology slow you down or stop you. You could literally come up with a great way to help your ideal client and record it on your iPhone. So you have truly no excuse not to do this because literally some of the best digital assets are just off the cuff and are not polished, and people love them, and I love them, and I've had great success with what I would think of as messy digital assets. So I do not want you to get stuck here. I want you to build something that you're excited about. It definitely doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to exist. And the most important thing that I want you to remember is this isn't just another project that you're gonna complete. You are strategically building an asset that can continue serving your audience and your business for years to come. So I know I just said you could flip open your phone and do it from the beach. That's because you're just focusing on version one right now. We're gonna build something that you can test, and we're gonna refine that. So let's do this together step by step. And until next time, my friend, may you be vibrant