In this video, I’ll walk you through five digital products I will personally start with if I lose everything today and have to start over from zero. I’ll break down why you should create, where to sell it, and why each one is a smart move. If you’re new to the channel, my name is Sean. I used to be a broke guy trying to make money online. failed in a bunch of different businesses, then I found the digital product business model, and that’s the first thing that actually worked for me. made my first dollar online, then I hit 10K per month, then I hit hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, eventually made millions of dollars from selling digital products. So, if I were lose everything today and have to start over from zero, these are the five products that I would get started with. Now, a quick disclaimer before we jump into the rest of the video. Most people who start a business fail, and that’s completely normal. And although selling digital products is an amazing business model, it’s still a real business, which means it can absolutely fail if you approach it the wrong way. And that’s exactly why I make these videos, to give you a higher chance of success and help you avoid the common mistakes most people make when they get started. And for those who want even more guidance, that’s why we have our mentorship program where we go even further and help guide you step-by-step throughout the entire process to give you the best chance to succeed. You can click the link in the description and the pin comment below to learn more about that. But with that being said, let’s jump into the video. So, let’s talk about the first digital product I will look at if I were starting from zero, and this is definitely not the fanciest option. It’s simply one of the easiest ways to turn what you already know into something people can pay for. And that’s why digital product number one is a mini course. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I run a full course plus coaching program with the one-on-one calls and live support. So, it’s definitely not a mini course. This is a full-blown coaching mentorship program, right, with a lot of hand-holding, a lot of active stuff going on. So, that takes a lot of time, but you can start way smaller than that. You don’t have to offer the same thing that I’m offering, right? So, you just record a set of videos, you upload them to a course platform, and you can let the platform handle the payments and delivery for you. As an example, here’s a platform a lot of people use to host their courses. You can upload video lessons, PDFs, quizzes, and much more. And students either pay once for lifetime access or pay monthly, which you can charge a subscription for. The platform handles the payments, the hosting, and the students, and all you have to do is teach, basically creating these mini lessons. Here’s a real example of someone else doing that. So, it’s called the complete freelance writing course. This brand has 18 courses all around freelance writing. They cover smaller topics, too, like nonfiction writing and beginner to advanced lessons. And here’s the cool part. These were recorded once. Unlike YouTube videos, you don’t have to keep recording them over and over. Technically, with YouTube videos, yes, you record one video just once, right? But what I mean by that is like, you know, you have to keep posting content to stay on the YouTube algorithm’s good side, right? Or else your channel just slowly dies. So, you know, everyone talks about the YouTube hamster wheel. Well, that’s what I’m talking about here. So, this example course sells for $9.99, and you can see it has over 8,200 students enrolled. So, that’s over $80,000 in sale from just one course. Now, just keep in mind, these numbers are estimates, obviously, and you know, it’s revenue, not profit. But for selling a $10 course, that’s still pretty good. So, here’s what makes a mini course a good option for beginner. So, first, you can sell what you already know, right? If you can explain a skill in a clear and simple way, you can turn that knowledge into a course. And with platforms like Udemy, you don’t have to build your own website or figure out payments and student access yourself, because Udemy handles a lot of the tech side, the back-end stuff. So, you can just focus on teaching something useful. And because this is a mini course that you’re probably going to be selling it for 10 to 20 bucks, there’s not a lot of pressure in terms of, you know, making a super good product, right? Of course, you should try to make it as good as possible, but it’s 10 20 bucks. I mean, if people complain that it’s not good after paying 10 20 bucks, I mean, that’s probably not your ideal customer. But also, you can just give them the refund and just move on. The second pro here is Udemy already has people searching for courses. So, you can pick up organic sales on Udemy itself. So, you don’t need a big audience to get started here. If someone is searching for a topic, your course has a chance to show up in front of them and make sales without you doing anything. Now, you still need a clear title, because that means you need to SEO optimize your course title, the metadata, those kind of things. You have to do the Udemy SEO, but it’s not that hard, right? You just find what people are searching for and then create a course on that. So, you need a good title, a good thumbnail, and lessons that actually help people, but you can piggyback off of Udemy traffic, which is a pro. The downside here is that it takes time, right? You need to record the lessons, organize the content, and make the course easy to follow. As an example, my course, Road to Hero, once again, it’s a course and coaching hybrid, but it has basically a complete video course in there. And guess how long that took? That took 5 months for version one, just to get it out. When I got started, I thought I could make a course in a month. I’m like, it’s probably going to take a month, but it ended up taking 5 months. And then from there, I had to update the course four times because information gets outdated, and every single time it took 3 months of my life dedicated to just doing that. So, that is 15 months, over a year of my life just doing the course. Now, of course, I’m not selling a mini course. I’m doing a full-blown coaching program, you know, a lot of stuff going in. I wanted to make this the best freaking course in the whole planet, which I think I did that because, you know, we’re getting a lot of good Trustpilot reviews. Like, we have hundreds of Trustpilot reviews with over 4.8 average rating, right? So, obviously, that takes way longer than a mini course, but just to paint you a picture, it’s probably going to take a lot longer than what you expect. Also, if you don’t like being on camera or you need quick money, this probably isn’t the best option for you. But, if you enjoy teaching and you can stay consistent, this can become a solid digital product that keeps building over time. All right, digital product number two is nonfiction ebooks. So, the second digital product here is the one I personally like the most, and this is probably what I would personally get started with out of all the five options if I lose everything and I have to start building from zero. So, when I say nonfiction ebooks, I’m talking about publishing ebooks on Amazon by using a platform called Amazon KDP. This is Amazon’s free platform where you can publish your own book and sell it as an ebook, paperback, hardback, even audiobook. And this is actually the first digital product that worked for me after failing for four straight years, right? I was working a 9-5 job. I was trying to make money online. I kept failing and failing and failing in different business models until I found book publishing on Amazon. That’s when I made my first dollar, then I made 10K per month, quit my job. I went on to make millions of dollars from doing that actual business. Then I expanded into other stuff like YouTube, coaching program, but I still do this book publishing business to this day. So again, personally, I made millions of dollars doing this. Results vary, of course, but I got many students who made four, five, six figures, even seven figures, right? Total. I have a lot of friends doing it. So it’s definitely possible. And here’s what most people do not get when I say book publishing on Amazon. You don’t need to be a writer, and you don’t need to overcomplicate this because it’s very similar to selling mini courses on Udemy. You just have to identify what problems people have, what are the search terms people are searching for on Amazon, and then you create a simple book that solves a problem and you rank it so that it shows up in front of them. You can use AI to build the outline and expand each chapter. You can also hire a ghostwriter if you want to completely outsource the book writing process, but nowadays, you can kind of do a lot of things with AI. So here’s an example of an ebook on Amazon. Look at the title and who it’s for. It’s focused on one clear outcome, right? Speaking better Spanish fast using daily phrases in real conversations. This is why ebooks still work so well because people don’t want a 300-page textbook. This is a very simple how-to book based on the knowledge that the author already had. The author is not like a professional writer or anything. She was just a Spanish coach, right? She actually coaches people on how to speak Spanish, and she just transferred her knowledge into a simple book, published it, now it’s blowing up, she’s making a killing with this book. So people want a short guide that gets them results fast. So if you can pick one topic and teach it clearly, you can turn it into a simple ebook. Make sure to keep it focused, keep it practical, make the promise very clear in 5 seconds in your book title, and you’ll be on the right track. The cool thing about publishing ebooks through Amazon KDP is that the same book can also sell as a physical copy or even audio as I mentioned. So, Amazon does this with the print-on-demand model. That means Amazon only prints the book after someone orders it. So, you don’t have to buy inventory up front risking your own money, right? You don’t have to store boxes of books like people do with physical products. A lot of people order a bunch of books and it’s in their garage just sitting, right? That kind of sucks to be honest and you don’t have to do that with a digital product business or a print-on-demand business. So, right now the same book on the paperback version is making 12 to 21,000 dollars per month in revenue, which is amazing, right? Just from the paperback, not counting the other formats. If you add that, it’s a lot more. By the way, if you’re wondering how I’m seeing this number, I have a free plugin called coauthor.ai. So, it’s a completely free plugin. You can look it up on the Google Chrome Store. But once you download it, you can see exactly how many daily sales a book is making, how many royalties per day, how many royalties per month, those kind of information right on the product page for every single book on Amazon. I’ll leave a link in the description if you want to check it out. And since you already have the ebook file, turning it into an audiobook is very easy as well. So, this is how you can take one product or one book and create multiple income streams. So, let’s talk about the pros and cons. For pro, AI can make the process a lot faster, right? You can use it to create an outline, organize your ideas, or help with a rough first draft. You still want to add your own touch, right? We don’t want to just publish AI books. We want to create great books using the help of AI. But AI definitely speeds up the process a lot. Another great thing about ebooks is that you can turn one book into multiple formats as we talked about many, many times and that’s just going to add to your overall income. So, this can be a great beginner product if you can teach one specific results in a clear way. Now, the biggest benefit here that we haven’t touched on is that Amazon can help with the selling, printing, and delivery side, right? Just like how you can tap into like, you know, organic traffic that you have on Udemy, you can tap into Amazon and Amazon has way more customers than Udemy. Amazon is the biggest online store in the whole world. So, being able to tap into people who are searching for things on Amazon and make organic sales that way is just huge. In terms of the cons, one of the most common thing that people complain about is that it’s under Amazon, so Amazon can shut you down anytime. However, that’s actually not true, right? If you don’t follow the rules because you are publishing books under Amazon, if you don’t follow their terms and guidelines, yes, they will shut you down. But it’s not them shutting you down anytime for no reason. People love to complain, but that’s not the case. People who are getting shut down is because they broke the rules for the most part, right? It’s very similar to doing YouTube. If I stop following the YouTube policy and start saying some wild stuff in my videos, I guarantee I’ll lose my channel. So, you know, whatever platform you’re in, same as Udemy, you know? You just have to make sure you read the terms and conditions, understand the rules, and follow it. So, thanks to AI, writing a book is way more doable for beginners now. But with generic AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, it’s still not the easiest to create a high-quality book. Yes, you can write a book with those softwares, but creating a random book and creating a high-quality book that people actually enjoy is a completely different story. And this is exactly why I built coauthor.ai. It’s my AI book-writing software made specifically to create high-quality books. We’re not just selling ChatGPT here with a new label. Co-author is built for real publishers, and it takes you from a rough idea to a full, well-structured book way faster without the fluff and repeating content that most AI tools will give you. Inside Co-author, you can build detailed outlines, write chapter by chapter with real structure, strengthen your hooks, make your book clear and more helpful, generate the book cover for you, do the book research for you, even create super cool book trailers, and much, much more. So, if you want a complete tool for your self-publishing business, the link to Co-author is in the description below. So, publishing non-fiction books on Amazon is great for beginners. That’s what I personally would recommend. But if you’re more of a creative person, the next digital product might be a better fit for you because it’s more focused on designs instead of writing text. And that’s digital product number three, selling activity books. So, activity books are things like word searches, Sudoku, puzzle books, coloring books, mazes, and more. Basically simple books where the customer fills something in on every page. And here’s the best part, just like ebooks, you can publish these as real paperback books on Amazon KDP. You create the pages and the book cover, you upload the PDF file, and Amazon will print it out as a book with the print-on-demand model. So instead of writing a full book like you would with non-fiction with a lot of text, if English is not your first language or if you don’t want to deal with that, instead you’re making a fun or a useful book around a very simple activity. So this makes a great pick for beginners who are more creative or who just doesn’t want to make a traditional book. So this is a word search puzzle book like the one you used to see in newspapers, but this is a paperback book with over 100 puzzles inside. And based on co-author, once again, this is a free Chrome extension, it’s doing between 13 to 22,000 dollars per month, hundreds of dollars per day in royalties. So that’s just one example, that was a word search, but if you have basic drawing skills, coloring books are also blowing up right now. And the most popular coloring book designs or the categories are bold, simple designs made for kids. So this is a coloring book example, very simple illustrations, not a ton of reviews, and it’s still doing 1.6 to 2.6 thousand dollars per month in royalties. So here’s what you need to know about activity books. First, you don’t need advanced writing skills. There are tools online that can help you create things like word search, Sudoku, puzzle books, and more. So you choose a type of activity, you want to customize a layout, export the pages, and this whole process is usually a lot faster than writing a full non-fiction book. And that’s why a lot of beginners gravitate towards this because it’s a little bit easier for them. You know, doing something easy, picking the lowest hanging fruit, or going, you know, the the least friction path is not always a good thing because that means everyone else is doing the same thing. But if you want to get started with something easy, this is also a good option. The second reason is you don’t have to be a professional artist even if you’re creating coloring books, right? Because these illustrations are extremely simple. You just want clean lines, clear shapes, and a good theme that can work well. It’s all about coming up with a cool coloring book idea. Now, Co-author at the moment does not have a puzzle book generation feature, but we are working on it. It’s in beta right now, so it’s going to be coming out very, very soon. So, soon with Co-author you can create, you know, activity books like these. All right, digital product number four, moving away from the book category and we’re talking affiliate products. So, with affiliate marketing, you don’t create the product at all. You promote someone else’s product and you earn a commission on every sale. So, I do this on my own YouTube channel. I recommend tools that I actually use and I earn a percentage when someone buys through my link. So, if you look at the description section of any of my YouTube videos, you can see that I got a good amount of links and these are all either my products or affiliate links, right? So, Co-author Road to Hero, so these are my products, but, you know, the other stuff are usually affiliate links. So, obviously, you don’t want to push random products just to earn a commission. It is highly recommended to share what works and what you personally use and recommend, okay? So, if someone uses my link to purchase that product, then I earn a percentage as commission. So, it’s a pretty honest way to earn and it really adds up once you get steady traffic coming in. However, I want to give you a reality check here. If you’re just posting links on social media and trying to make money from affiliate products, realistically, you can do a couple thousand dollars a month in commission, but it’s probably not going to be tens of thousands of dollars per month. I’ll be pretty impressed if someone out there is making tens of thousands dollars per month from just affiliate products by posting on YouTube or other social media platform. Typically, if you want to get into like tens of thousands, you have to sell your own products and that’s why if you want to make the big bucks, I recommend you do, you know, like book publishing or something like that because those are your own products. But, if you just want to do like a side income, you know, posting content on YouTube once in a while and make a couple thousand dollars per month, then affiliate products is a good option. All right, pros and cons. Pros, you don’t create the product yourself. You promote products that already exist. That means there’s no writing, no designing, and no fulfillment. You just need traffic and to gain trust, which is by creating good content on social media. If people believe your recommendation, they might buy through your link and you can earn a commission. The downside is that you don’t own the product, right? So, the company can change the commission rate, remove the product, or shut down the affiliate program, which is very annoying when that happens. You spend a long time making content and you start getting paid and all of a sudden they change the affiliate program or they just shut it down and you have this content that’s selling the product still for them, but now you’re not getting paid. Super annoying stuff, but it happens. And that’s why, you know, if you want a full control, you should have your own product rather than an affiliate product, rather than just doing affiliate marketing. But again, it’s pros and cons. Lastly, you need traffic. Affiliate marketing works best when people already see your content and trust your recommendations. If you don’t have an audience, it’s extremely hard or basically impossible to do affiliate marketing. So, you have to build an audience first on social media, do something. If you don’t have an audience and you want to start making money, again, creating a very quick product and selling it on sites that you can leverage traffic like Amazon would make more sense. All right, last one. Digital product number five is niche AI tool or a custom GPT. So, for this one, I’m not talking about building a software company from scratch. I’m talking about creating a custom GPT or a lightweight AI-powered product that solves one specific problem for one specific group of people and you’re charging for access. The technical barrier to doing this is getting lower now because obviously AI’s, you know, really opening up the playing field for a lot of people, but you can use OpenAI’s GPT builder, Poe, other no-code platforms. You don’t need to write a single line of code. What you do need is a clear understanding of a real pain point that you can solve and then really kind of the understanding of how it works layout-wise, UI-wise, or user interface-wise as a software. So, you do have to understand that even if you don’t know how to code. So, I personally built coauthor.ai because I spent 10 years watching authors make the same mistake over and over. And also because publishing books were very expensive, right? We were already publishing books on Amazon, but we had to hire ghostwriters, you know, that was like a thousand, two thousand dollars per book. And then you had to hire a cover designer and then, you know, pay somebody for formatting, for book descriptions, everything. So, people are paying thousands of dollars to create a book and you don’t even know if you’re going to recoup the money, right? So, I wanted to make book publishing more accessible for everyone. And now Co-author replaces all of that. You don’t need to hire ghostwriters, you don’t need to hire cover designers. You can format right within Co-author, you can do description in Co-author. You can do everything you need in the publishing business with just a low monthly subscription. So, I already had my problem that I wanted to solve. And you just have to identify what your problem is that you want to solve in whatever space you’re in. So, the people who do this well find a task that a specific group repeats all the time. And they make that task faster or easier. A research tool for publishers, a script tool for real estate agents, a simple system for coaches, whatever that is, you find the boring repeated task that people do over and over and people complain over and over about and then you build the tool around it. So, this one has the highest income potential out of all the list. It’s also subscription based, so people keep paying every month. You don’t have a platform that takes a huge cut. There’s no printing and no inventory. And if you build something people use every week, they tend to stick around and the income keeps adding up, which is nice. So, it seems like this is the one that you should go with. However, obviously everything has pros and cons. So, the reason why this is number five is, you know, very simple. If you’re starting completely from zero, you probably don’t know a niche well enough to solve whatever problem that it has. You get that experience and information from real time spent inside a market. So, what I recommend is you do other stuff on this list, right? Sell the books, sell the mini courses, whatever you want to do and gain experience in whatever you space you’re in. Then once you spend enough time in your niche, you will start seeing problems that you can solve in a different form, which is going to be in a software form. So, that’s one reason. Another reason is simply put, creating a software is going to be the most time consuming and also the most expensive to get started out of this list. So, I still put it as one of the five, but I think it’s the least beginner-friendly option here. All right, so the big question here, what is the best digital product? Obviously, there’s no perfect answer. It really depends on your skills, your time, how much time you have to invest, right? What type of work fits your personality and so much more. But, if you ask me, what is the best digital product to get started as a complete beginner, just because I was a complete beginner, broke, not a lot of time, and this is what I’ve done to start making money and completely changed my life. That’s why I would recommend publishing books as the best option. And not just because it worked for me, if you think about it logically, it makes a lot of sense for a beginner, right? An ebook is super simple. You pick one problem, you write about it, you package it up into an attractive book, put it up on Amazon, leverage Amazon, and that book will be on Amazon and can sell while you sleep. It’s very passive, right? You do the work once, you write it once, and it can keep selling for a long time as long as you chose a good topic that people are actually searching for. You don’t have to deal with inventory, you don’t have to shipping, you don’t need a big audience to get started. And that’s why it’s super beginner-friendly. It kind of checks all the boxes. So, if you want to learn more about book publishing as a business model, if you want to take it seriously, consider joining our mentorship program. It is specifically for people who want to build a true lifestyle business that can grow into a semi-passive income stream over time. Authors already publishing who are frustrated with low sales and you want proper positioning and strategy guidance. Publishers who are already getting results, but you want to scale faster and operate at a higher level. Or individuals ready to treat publishing like a real business, not a hobby, and you want to move quick and really shortcut the process. This is a paid mentorship. It requires commitment, capital, and execution. We don’t work with everyone because again, this is not just a course. We’re going to be working with you one-on-one, so we don’t want to work with people that are, you know, doesn’t have a great personality and all that. So, you do have to book a 30-minute discovery call to see if this program is a good fit for you. But, if you do get accepted and join the program, you’ll be working one-on-one with a coach who actually makes real money with KDP. We guide you from start to finish. We review and approve your book before you publish it, give you access to multiple live workshops every single week, and plug you into a super active KDP community with thousands of successful authors, many earning a full-time income. So, again, you can check it out from the first link in the description, as well as all the tools and resources that I recommend, also in the description below. If you enjoyed this video, please leave a like, subscribe. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.