One exciting aspect of being able to work and travel is meeting the other people who do the same work as you! We sat down with Louise from Solopreneur Sidekick to talk about how we have been able to make money while traveling and some of the ideas we have for you to join in the fun!

We met Louise while we were staying in Sayulita at a networking facility (for more info on these check out our other blog “How to Support a Life of Travel”). Louise has just gotten back from 3 years of living in Bali and, like us, was eager to travel. It just goes to show that there are plenty of people like us out there! If you’re excited about travel but you’re worried you’re the only one wanting to quit their job and hit the road, we promise you’re not alone. We meet people all the time who have chosen the path that we have and Louise is a great example of this!

Don’t know where to begin with making money through online businesses? Keep reading.

What is a Digital Product?

A digital product is tough to define. I mean it’s a product… that’s digital. Hmmm.

Digital products can be a huge variety of things. The main benefit of digital products being that it’s not something that needs to be delivered one-on-on or face-to-face. It can end up being as simple as sending someone a file (which can even be automated). Some examples of these types of products are online courses which are what Louise specializes in but could also be eBooks, templates, photography editing presets, and so many more. Overall, digital products are something that you only have to create once and then are able to sell it and varieties of the same product as many times as you want to as many people as you want! That’s why digital products are so exciting. Digital products are products that you can sell without having to deal with inventory or shipping. What an awesome deal?!

Louise has her online classes set up through her website (linked below), but for us, we were able to set up digital products through Amazon so we didn’t have to create our own online store. Amazon allows you to sell physical products, but also eBooks as well!

Work With What You Know

The idea of creating a digital product, especially something as intense as an online class, may seem daunting. How do you know how to even begin? Think about your skill set and what you consider yourself to be an expert in. Is it photography? Travel? Car detailing? Anything! The possibilities are truly endless. So you’re then able to take this skill set or expertise and turn it into an online course for others to learn from. People look to learn in ways that are clear, concise, and available online. Nobody wants to fall down the Google rabbit hole when trying to learn something new. People will absolutely pay for education especially if it’s all in one space. Find your level of expertise, niche down, and see what results you can deliver to people.

Finding Your Niche

So online courses and eBooks aren’t your strong suit. Then what? These aren’t the only options out there as mentioned before. In our “How to Support a Life of Travel” blog, we talked about freelancing opportunities. This allows you to get started and find that niche so you are then able to move up, and increase your income by moving to digital products. It can even be used as a supplement or could end up completely overtaking your freelancing work. Start small and build up if it seems too overwhelming at first. Building a clientele is crucial and we all have to start somewhere!

How to Get Started

The most important aspect of getting started in your online business is to have a clear outline of what you will be focusing on. This could be an outline of what lessons you want to cover in your online class or could be a timeline of all that needs to occur to have your digital product ready to sell. Keep these goals result driven to be sure you are aiming towards getting things done, not just conceptual points.

Resources That Help

There are plenty of templates and resources to help you get started as well. Software such as Teachable or You To Me allows you to plug in your points into a template to help create a successful online course. This allows you to focus on the content itself instead of having to worry about building a website. The students take courses from these platforms then a portion of the profits goes back to you.

How to Market Your Digital Products

There are so many ways to get the word out about your products. Using already instilled software or platforms such as the above mentioned Teachable or You To Me allows people to find your content while using platforms they are already familiar with.

Social media is also a great and cheap way to market yourself and your products. We use Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram to market ourselves and our products. We wouldn’t necessarily consider ourselves “YouTubers” in the sense that people think of the platform. We more feel as though it’s an appropriate way to market our products given that our products are online. YouTube isn’t only a social media tool but is more considered a search engine. People plug in what they are looking for and then come across our content. They are then able to learn more about our products and courses on our websites after finding us on platforms such as Youtube or Instagram. Social media such as YouTube and Instagram also is a way that we have found to generate a portion of our income as travelers.

Go Create!

Completely online businesses and products are a fairly new and sometimes difficult concept to understand. It may take a few (or many) tries to make it work for both your products and your lifestyle. We wanted to show you that it’s not impossible, but it is more work than just blog writing and posting on Instagram. So go out, find your niche, and start creating! You never know where it will take you.

Interview with Louise with Soloprenuer Sidekick

READ INSTEAD OF WATCH

Fin: 00:00 Look at this. I actually made a friend. This is the last in our video series of how to make money and travel. And I found someone else on the road who's making money and travel. So we're going to dive into Louise's story today. And thank you so much Louise, for jumping on to our channel.

Louise: 00:22 And we're real friends, you know, she's not paying me to be here. So I have a business, it's called Solopreneur Sidekick. And basically I help entrepreneurs create their own website and really make the tech in online business as easy as possible. So I have a YouTube channel and then I have an online course called Website that Wows and I teach people everything they need to know about creating a high converting website and actually book clients from their website. So that is the business that I have. And it allows me to work from anywhere in the world. I'm just so excited about the concept of as long as you have your laptop and wifi, which definitely determines where we go, the wifi thing.

Louise: 01:04 So there's that part. But yeah, it's been really cool. I did, I lived kind of more of a expat life for a while. I lived in Bali for three and a half years and that was amazing. And then recently, a few months ago, decided to embrace travel more.

Fin: 01:20 And we ran into each other as a true digital nomad fashion at a coworking place here in Sayulita. And we, in fact, were in Bali at the same time, but just never ran into each other.

Louise: 01:32 This friendship could have started way earlier.

Fin: 01:33 That also is a good example of just once you are out on the road, you meet so many other people who have a similar lifestyle to you. So if you are feeling like you've been following along in the series and you're just like these all sounds so outlandish, it might just be your community that you're in right now. Because once we get out on the road, you just continuously meet people that have a similar lifestyle that you do. We're going to break this video down into three sections for you guys. We're going to talk about what is a digital product, how to start and how to market it and actually make some sales. So please Louise, teach us what is a digital product and the different types?

Louise: 02:11 I mean, okay, we were joking about this earlier because I was struggling to figure out how to say it. It's like a product and it's digital.

Fin: 02:18 That's it for you guys, we'll see you next week. Thank you very much.

Louise: 02:22 But basically, yeah, so there are so many different variations of what a digital product could be. And the main benefit is that it's not now you just selling your time. So it's not something that you need to deliver one-on-one. You can actually just send someone a file, which you can totally automate. So you're not actually emailing out files. So yeah, some examples for you are online courses, like I do. But then there's also eBooks, there's templates that you can sell. There's presets for photographers. I mean, there are so many different variations of this. But basically it's something that you create one time and then you can sell it as many times as you want to as many people as you want. So that is why a digital product is so exciting and you don't have to deal with things like inventory and shipping. So really, I mean it's a really awesome option I think.

Fin: 03:17 No kidding. And that is the true magic. And so if we just dive a little bit deeper on a couple of those. Since we're coming off of or our Amazon video earlier. When you're creating a digital product, you even can offer those in other spaces, it's not necessarily has to be on a website of yours. A lot of people sell digital eBooks off of Amazon. So it's not to say you have to create this entire space. You can write the book and sell it on Amazon. You know what? There's drilling and-

Speaker 2: 03:52 Mexico.

Fin: 03:53 There's Mexico going on. Louise, will you tell us a little bit about the fact that you have an online course? I mean, that sounds like such a daunting task. Where do you even begin to create an entire course online?

Louise: 04:04 Totally. Well I think a lot of people probably are already an expert in something. And you basically, you need to take that, package it up and make it as easy and concise as possible and give people an end result. So for mine, I took the task, the big task of creating a website and then broke that down as much as I could. Because otherwise people will absolutely pay for education, especially when you've gone through all the effort of figuring out the order of everything, all the steps. Because otherwise they're just going to fall into the Google rabbit hole, not be able to find the answer that they want. And yeah, so there are so many benefits to creating a course. But basically that's what I would say. You would find your level of expertise and then you would niche down and see what you can deliver to people. What result can you promise of that course? And then I think you could absolutely sell that pretty easily.

Fin: 05:01 And it's not even to say that you have to start there. I mean we talked in an earlier video about becoming a freelance, Matt was talking about freelancing for clients. And maybe you're doing that for a little bit to get on the road. But then to increase your income because you have one thing to sell multiple times as opposed to your time. Maybe you're creating that on the side in your niche, in your expertise, like Louise was saying, and then now you have a digital product that maybe supplements you doing client work. And then eventually maybe it completely fills all of your time just maintaining that digital product or multiple digital products.

Louise: 05:38 Yeah. So that's exactly, you just laid out the exact path that I followed. I started out one-on-one and then I added on the course and then consistently refined it and figured out marketing and everything like that. And then I was able to go full-time and just do the course without any clients. Yeah, but it's really great to start out with clients because then you can figure out your own unique system, basically.

Fin: 06:01 Oh, and actually that just made me think that you probably are tailoring your course then to the frequently asked questions that your clients have. So you have really good experience in the area to then, to help you make a great digital product.

Louise: 06:15 Yeah, definitely. It makes it a lot easier. And then you can figure out where people are getting stuck. And yeah, it's great. Because then you also know what you need to say in your marketing like, "Okay, I'm going to help you with all of these huge questions that you have."

Fin: 06:27 Okay, so I'm onboard. I have some clients already, maybe. I'm ready to get started. What are some of the resources? Where do I even go to know about beginning a course? I know the content, but I don't know how to get it out necessarily.

Louise: 06:43 Right, right. I think the first step would be choosing how you're going to deliver the course. Right? There's many different ways that that could look. You could have just slides and your voiceover, you could have you talking the camera like this. So you're going to kind of want to lay it out and definitely give yourself a big overview of all of the lessons or else it's just going to keep adding on and then end up as this like huge project.

Fin: 07:07 Like an outline.

Louise: 07:08 Yes. Give yourself a solid outline. And I think what you'll find is you end up making it even shorter. I think when I first created the course, I just wanted to include everything. But really if you keep it results driven and refined, don't overwhelm your students too much. But one really good resource is the Teachable Blog. So Teachable is actually the software that I use to host my online course. And they have so many free resources and a blog all about creating your own online course. So I would definitely go and start there. And then they actually make all of the moving pieces. They make that really easy as well. So you can go on and you can add all of your lessons, you can create your modules, you can create your course sales page, any of those different elements. They have that all in this one software for you.

Fin: 07:59 Okay. So you're saying all I need to do is go to a platform like Teachable, not sponsored-

Louise: 08:04 Not sponsored.

Fin: 08:05 ... and just put my content into their little boxes and it's all packaged, ready to go, as long as I know the content?

Louise: 08:13 Yes, exactly. Yeah. So probably the hardest part is actually the content side and getting that out of your brain and onto a video format.

Fin: 08:21 Sure. Not trying to minimize the task or anything, but as far as ... So your customers pay into Teachable and then Teachable pays you?

Louise: 08:32 Yes, yes, exactly. So it's basically just the platform that takes care of all of the moving pieces that you would need. So yeah, I definitely have a few videos on this and I have a comparison video. So that's specifically for courses. But if you just want to create an eBook or create a template or something, you can use my favorite software ever, which is called Squarespace. You can use that and easily sell those types of products as well. So I have a comparison video on that too, which I'm sure we can link to.

Fin: 09:02 Okay, great. We will link that down in the description box below. Another course software that I know of is called Udemy and I have a course out there on how to edit movies, like a GoPro video in iMovie. But this is like a two-year-old course. I still have a link below, it's like a $10 course or something. But I still make a small amount every month from that course. And why I like that platform is because all of the students on Udemy can go in and use Udemy like a search tool. So like we were talking about in the Amazon video, that Amazon is a search engine so people are already looking for products. You don't have to necessarily market them to the entire internet, it's to shoppers already. Udemy is marketing to people who have interest in learning something already.

Fin: 09:48 And then with your example with Teachable, I know that that doesn't necessarily have a bank of students right there, which is why then you are your own marketing team. Which delivers us into the third section of this video, which is how to market your digital product.

Louise: 10:05 Yeah, I mean that was such a good example. There are so many different ways that you can get the word out about your course. But yeah, Teachable is definitely, it's a standalone platform. It's not a course sharing platform or a course listing, like a Udemy. So yeah, totally different there. And I can definitely see the benefits to Udemy. I don't know too much about that. I know that when I went on there, a lot of them were really low priced courses.

Fin: 10:32 That's a good point, yeah.

Louise: 10:32 And I wanted to create more of a premium product. So that would be the thing. But then yeah, then the thing is you have to market yourself. So, I mean, of course there are so many different ways to do that. But I also like search engines, like you do. So I decided YouTube would be the best.

Fin: 10:50 All right. Louise is a fellow YouTuber here. Do you think of yourself like a YouTuber or do you think of yourself like an expert in a specific space or as like a digital product manager?

Louise: 11:06 Yeah, so I definitely do not think of myself as a YouTuber. Though I do have it in my Instagram profile because I'm like, I kind of am one. But I don't really feel like one. I more so feel like I'm an online business owner, I'm an entrepreneur and I have a product and I use YouTube to market that product, basically is how I feel. No, I'm definitely not like, you know all the common tags and stuff that YouTubers have? I'm so clueless. I feel like I'm quite out of that world. But it is a search engine and I knew that so many people would be looking for the content that I'm teaching on YouTube. So I thought it would be a really great way to get in front of people.

Louise: 11:45 And also with a course, it's really important that they know you. So I liked the idea of getting on video and they could get to know my teaching style rather than just reading a blog where they don't get to know you as well. So yes, I decided to use YouTube. And then I teach little bits and pieces. And if somebody wants to learn more, if somebody wants to learn my entire system, then they can come and purchase my course.

Fin: 12:13 Okay. So you are perfectly wrapping us up here and coming full circle to the first video in the series, when we just kind of make fun of ourselves with the travel blogger space, the travel blogger space. And we're talking about our income on our social media platforms where we outline all of that and just say that it's not necessarily a viable business option because it's so much time versus the Google Ad Sense that comes out of it. Really to say that it's a marketing platform and not necessarily the purpose of what the platform's there for. Louise is here with multiple thousands subscribers, not even considering herself as a YouTuber, which if you go to her channel you will see she looks like a beautifully professional YouTuber. But it's because she is marketing her digital product. So it's just, it's cool to hear your perspective of how you see yourself.

Louise: 13:06 Yeah, definitely. And I mean honestly, I couldn't be a digital nomad and I couldn't travel the world if I was just relying on my YouTube checks. It's just, it's not ...

Fin: 13:17 As we just go like this. We're just like that's ... that's what it is. I just don't, yeah, I just never think that the platform comes off that way, which is fine. It's the best tool in the world. And would you say that a lot of then your sales are at least coming in from your YouTube platform?

Louise: 13:32 Oh, for sure. So yeah, no, I love YouTube. It's not to say that. And obviously the extra revenue that you can make from Ad Sense is great. It's a great add on. But no, I definitely ... especially if you're not a huge YouTuber. And it takes time to build an audience. So if you're smaller, it definitely makes more sense to have your own product and be selling that. And that's going to, you know, what allows you to create this online business.

Fin: 13:57 Thank you for sharing your whole story like that. If I go and online stalk you a little bit and go see-

Louise: 14:05 Do a bit of lurking.

Fin: 14:06 ... what can I learn in your course? Which I already know what's in her course. It's my segue to say that her course may be of value to you if you're getting started because, tell us what's in it.

Louise: 14:17 Yes. Because it teaches you how to create your website from scratch. So a website is definitely super important. And I show you how you can make that a really effective marketing tool. And you can have things like a funnel in place that can do the selling for you so you're not constantly having to pitch yourself, which we don't like. It's a bit awkward to have to do that all the time. So yeah, so I teach you everything that you need to know about blogging, SEO, creating a high converting website. All of that is packaged up nicely and made simple inside of this course. Oh, and-

Fin: 14:51 Please.

Louise: 14:52 ... and you can try it first. So you can absolutely, you can get a free trial, and you can go in and you can create your first page for free. See if you like the way that I teach and then hopefully come and join the full program.

Fin: 15:03 Well, that sounds awesome. It kind of sounds like we should take your course.

Louise: 15:07 Easy. I would love that.

Fin: 15:09 Sounds like you have a strength that we don't have, that we need to learn. Louise, you were a perfect closure here on our series of how to make money and travel. And I hope that by sharing Matt with you last week and Louise with you this week, we've opened your doors a little bit to just have a little insight into, you know, we're just on the road. We're just meeting these people on the road. I know you're not meeting us in person, but there is just real, normal people out here just hustling and making real products, digital products, to just make that sacrifice for the life of travel.

Louise: 15:50 Absolutely. And now we're going to, what are we going to do? We're going to hop off and go find pepper. Right?

Fin: 15:56 Right. I guess we'll just take pepper to the beach.

Louise: 15:57 Yep.

Fin: 15:59 Thanks, see you.

Louise: 16:00 Bye.