A Step-by-Step Guide to Picking Your First Digital Product to Create
Turn your knowledge into income.
Creating a digital product is one of the smartest ways for creators to monetize their audience and scale their impact.
Even if your (free) content is top-notch, you can always go a step further by offering paid products that go into more detail or provide more structure for the learning experience.
But if you're just getting started, the options can feel overwhelming.
Should you create a course?
A template?
An ebook?
A paid newsletter?
What’s the most profitable choice?
What’s the easiest to create?
What does your audience want?!
Well, the truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer because every creator, business, and audience is different.
If you hate to record videos, creating a video course might not be the smartest path, even if people tell you that courses are highly profitable.
The good news is that there is a smart path forward, depending on your goals, strengths, and audience.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
The most effective digital product types for content creators.
The pros, cons, and best-fit creator for each type.
Two distinct monetization strategies to choose from.
How to pick your first product based on your strengths, audience, and goals
At the end, I’m also sharing a self-assessment guide and a powerful set of AI prompts to help you make important decisions about your first digital product and get started today - this is exclusively for our paid subscribers.
Who Is This Guide for?
Before we get started, I quickly want to highlight who this guide is for to avoid any confusion.
At Write • Build • Scale, we help experts, coaches, consultants, and creators write with confidence, build their audience, and scale their income.
Our ideal readers are educators who want to share their knowledge, expertise, or experiences with others to help them achieve their goals or overcome certain problems.
All our resources, including this guide, are built for this type of educator/creator business.
So if you're writing to share your knowledge with the world, this is for you.
If you’re writing fiction, poetry, personal essays on various topics, or other types of content, our resources might not be the best fit for you.
The 6 Digital Product Types That Work for Creators
Each of these formats has helped dozens of creators we’ve worked with go from content-only to successfully monetized.
We’ll give you the real use cases so you can see which path might make the most sense for you personally:
1. Courses
Courses are one of the most popular digital products to create because they come with a lot of flexibility and creative freedom.
You can build a tiny course and sell it for a low price, or you can build an expensive offer that promises a complete transformation.
It's entirely up to you.
However, there are certain best practices that we recommend following when building a course—especially your first one.
These are the most important distinctions to make between different types of courses:
Flagship Courses
A flagship course is your main or signature course.
Usually, creators use this as their most comprehensive and high-value product since it covers a complete transformation or framework and is often priced higher ($199–$1,000+).
It’s a core offer in your ecosystem, which means that anyone in your audience will eventually learn about this product—whether it’s through automated sales sequences or live launches.
Your flagship program can change over time as your business and content evolves. But typically, you sell this offer for more than a year and through a variety of channels.
At Write • Build • Scale, for example, we currently offer two flagship courses:
Substack System, an in-depth program where we help creators build a best-selling Substack publication:
Mini-Course Accelerator, a step-by-step program to build and sell your first mini-course:
Self-Paced Courses
A self-paced course contains pre-recorded resources like video lessons or worksheets.
The resources are typically available right after the purchase, and the buyer can complete the course at their own pace without any interaction with the course creator.
Once your self-paced course is published, the content runs on autopilot—your main focus becomes marketing and customer support.
Hybrid Courses
What's becoming increasingly popular nowadays are hybrid courses that the buyer isn't just completing all by themselves.
Instead, hybrid courses combine pre-recorded resources with live elements like a community or group coaching sessions.
At Write • Build • Scale, almost all our offers are based on this hybrid approach because we genuinely believe that accountability and being able to get feedback on your work and progress are crucial in order to make fast and reliable progress.
Generally, courses are best suited for creators who already have an audience and can teach a proven framework or process.
They are a great way to monetize your work because they are scalable and can help you build authority.
With a course, you can achieve a deep transformation for your client, and the bigger the transformation, the higher the perceived value, which means you can charge a significant amount of money.
In most cases, most resources you create for the course itself and for its marketing are reusable.
Courses also provide a great opportunity for upsells or bundling, which means that you can either offer your students additional products or even coaching services, or you can bundle the course with other resources for special occasions and promotions.
We do this all the time. When you purchase Mini-Course Accelerator, for instance, you get the chance to add a discounted private coaching call to your purchase:
The biggest downside of courses is that they require a significant time investment, especially if you're building your first one.
They need structure and a proper curriculum, and ideally, you’ll also pre-validate your course idea before you spend too much time on the creation process.
The biggest mistake creators make when building their first courses is to build something that people aren't willing to pay for.
That's why we spend a large amount of time validating ideas before we move into the actual course creation and marketing phase with our clients.
2. Mini-Courses
Technically, a mini-course is just a course, and most of the things I shared above apply to mini-courses as well.
The difference, however, is that mini-courses can be fast to create and focused on a very specific pain point or outcome for your customer.
They are an excellent choice for first-time product creators since a mini-course is usually priced lower than a typical online course and is much easier to complete, which means there is a lower risk for the buyer.
A mini-course is typically priced between $27 to $100, and the buyer is able to complete the course within 1 to 3 hours, so they can immediately take action and achieve the promised result.
Inside Mini-Course Accelerator, we teach how to build your mini-course from scratch in less than 14 days.
Another advantage of a mini-course is that it helps validate interest in a topic before you invest in building a larger offer.
It's a perfect compromise for creators who want to ship their product quickly, get feedback, and make money without wasting months on the course creation process.
As an example, we’re offering the SuperWriter Workshop, which is a mini-course for only $97:
While our signature products help our clients achieve a large, complex goal, this course has a clearly determined objective: Helping writers overcome procrastination and write more effectively.
3. Templates, Swipe Files, Toolkits
If you don't want to commit to building an entire course, you can start by selling individual resources like templates, swipe files, or toolkits. This is great for creators who have systems or resources that can be replicated.
These products can be extremely useful to the buyer because they save time while being easy to create for you.
Plus, you can sell them endlessly and easily bundle them to create a more expensive offer in the future.
That means you get many of the benefits of a course (like scalability and evergreen sales) without the same creation time.
At Write • Build • Scale, for instance, we’re offering a comprehensive Notion database that contains various templates for writers:
These types of products can be created in any industry and niche - here are a few examples of what simpler versions could look like:
Health & Fitness: A 4-week meal prep planner with macros and grocery lists
Gardening: A seasonal planting calendar and garden maintenance tracker in Notion
Pets: A new puppy training checklist with printable progress charts and routines
Personal Finance: A budgeting spreadsheet that auto-categorizes expenses and savings goals
Freelance Design: A client onboarding packet including proposals, contracts, and brand questionnaire templates
4. Ebooks & Digital Guides
If you want to keep things even easier, you can start by selling a simple ebook or digital guide.
Although you won't be able to charge a lot, selling a simple ebook can help you position yourself as an expert and start to gain some experience with monetization.
An ebook or digital guide can work really well as an entry-level product that helps you sell more expensive products later on.
An advantage is that you can either repurpose your existing content or turn the ebook content into other assets like emails, posts, or short-form pieces.
The more specific the topic of your e-book, the easier it will be to sell.
5. Paid Newsletters / Premium Subscriptions
Thanks to Substack's rise in popularity, more and more creators are considering starting their own paid newsletters and premium subscriptions as their first paid offer.
This can be a valid option if you’re not struggling to keep a consistent cadence and want to build a strong relationship with your readers.
Paid newsletters are particularly interesting because they can lead to recurring revenue, help you build a strong sense of community, and naturally fit into your existing content creation process since you don't have to create a large product at once.
Our paid tier at Write • Build • Scale, for instance, consists of:
A premium article that goes out to our paid subscribers every week.
A monthly in-depth workshop you can join live on Zoom.
Recordings of specific workshops that we are running for our paid subscribers.
The biggest risk of using a paid newsletter as your first monetization option is the high churn risk and the relatively low lifetime value of each paying customer.
A typical Substack subscription costs between $5-10/month. So even if somebody sticks with you for an entire year, you won't make a whole lot of money through each individual subscriber.
And if they only stick around for a couple of months, their payment will be relatively low, which means you have to consistently gain new paid subscribers in order to sustain a decent monthly income.
Plus, a paid newsletter means consistent delivery—for as long as your paid tier exists.
This is a fundamental difference if we compare it to a self-study course because you create the course once and can sell it infinitely without more work on the product.
Even though we love paid newsletters and recurring revenue, this is not the first digital product we recommend you create since it’s relatively complex to build and scale, especially if monetization is a priority.
6. Workshops, Cohorts, and Challenges
Last but not least, you can also create and sell individual workshops, cohort-based offers, or even challenges where you help your audience achieve a specific goal.
These offers can be a great fit for creators who love to engage with their audience and want to get their direct feedback.
You are very flexible with the pricing of these offers, and there are various arguments that make it easy to put a higher price on them since your buyers can get access to group accountability.
You can quickly build social proof through testimonials, and you can observe the transformation your audience is walking through.
These can also be great options to beta-test a bigger idea that can later turn into a fully fledged course. Plus, you can use these types of offers to invite your buyers into more expensive offers like private coaching programs.
These are great formats for teachers, coaches, and community lovers. But they won’t work for creators who don’t enjoy live formats or managing groups of people.
The Two Fundamental Monetization Paths
Before you pick a specific product to build, I want to share one more thing: When you're new to monetizing your work as a creator, expert coach, or consultant, you basically have two paths:
1. Start with a Higher-Priced Premium Product
Example: A $299 workshop, $499 course, or $1,000 coaching program
Best for: Confident experts who can promise strong transformations
Tradeoff: High setup time, but fewer buyers needed for profit
2. Start with a Low-Priced Entry Product
Example: $9–$49 ebook, template, or mini-course
Best for: New creators testing demand or building confidence
Tradeoff: Lower barrier to entry, but higher volume needed
Over the past five years, I have worked with thousands of creators, and I've seen many of them wanting to start with low-priced products because they feel easier and less risky.
And that's true, the barrier to entry is lower and you can test the demand without charging a lot of money.
But you need to be aware that you'll need to sell a lot of those low-priced products in order to make a significant amount of money.
So if your goal is to make $1,000, you can either do that by selling one $1,000 product or selling 100 items of a $10 product.
Ultimately, you achieve the same goal, but the path to get there is very different, and so are the skills you’ll have to invest in.
Again, there is no ultimate right or wrong here. Both approaches can work well. What you have to do is validate which path makes the most sense for you right now.
And here's how you do that:
What to Ask Yourself Before Deciding
Choosing your first digital product doesn’t have to feel random. Treat this section like a self-assessment or quiz. Grab a pen or open your notes app, and answer each question honestly.
By the end, your ideal product type should start to reveal itself.
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