The Secret to Effortless Digital Product Organization: Streamline Your Creation, Launch, and Sales Like a Pro! - Dr. Tracy Davis

In this session, I’ll show you how to streamline your digital product creation, launch, and sales with simple, actionable systems.

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[00:00:00]: Hello and welcome to this presentation of the effortless digital product organization. Streamline your creation, launch and sales. So My name is Dr. Tracy and I'm going to take you on a journey of how I manage my digital product workflow. First, I'll do a quick introduction of who I am and why I'm doing this work, why organization matters in the first place, and how I track from creation to launch of my digital products. And then I'll go into some strategies and ways to market your products and give you some tips and tricks. I am Dr. Tracy.  

[00:00:39]: I am the founder of the Heart Work Hub and my goal is to help women pursue meaningful growth in life, learning and leadership without sacrificing their well being. So I focus a lot on self love, self care and personal development. But one of my project passions is digital products. I do have for Etsy stores and so I have a lot to keep track of. I have hundreds, probably if not a thousand products across all the different stores that I have. And I'm in the process now of transferring them to my own website, which I'm really excited about. So let me share with you a little bit behind the scenes on how I manage these products. First of all though, it's important to think about why organization matters.  

[00:01:22]: I will tell you, when I first started I did not manage my digital products. I would just post whatever I felt like posting. I didn't track whether the listing was optimized, I didn't track what the product was. And so after about a year I had all these products and I didn't know what I was missing from my store and I didn't know which ones were optimized and which ones weren't. So it's important to start the organization process from the beginning and, and managing well tall products and ideas can feel overwhelming. So if you have a tool to organize it, it makes it a lot easier for you from the get go. And then if you're organized you have a consistent growth and you can prevent burnout. So you can say, okay, today I'm going to work on creating two or three products and you can check that off in the creation box.  

[00:02:10]: And so the key to success is having the system to manage everything from creation to sales. So, so that you know where you are with every single product along the journey. If you're like me, I like to work on multiple things at one time and so I might be creating, spending hours creating several products and I won't necessarily list them yet, so I'll have those in that part of the Step of my process. So let's talk a little bit about the workflow. What does the workflow look like? For me, the first stage that I do in my journey is do some research. I do research on different products that might be good for my stores and I'll tell you that in a moment. Then I create the product and after I create the product, I list it. For me, the platform that I use is Etsy and my own personal website.  

[00:03:03]: And then the last step is to market the products that you are listing. So the first step is the research phase of your digital product creation journey. I use several tools to help me with this. Personally, I use Insight Factory, Pinterest and Etsy as my main source of research for finding out what you are going to want to put into your store. It really just depends on the type of product that you're creating, whether you're creating it for your community or whether you're creating it for outside sales. If you're creating it for a community, then you can do research through using your email list, through, through polls, through your Facebook group, through your school group, wherever your community might be to see what tools might be helpful for that community. For me, I'm looking for products that I can sell that people will be searching for. And so I want to find the words that are being searched right now.  

[00:04:02]: So for example, this little screenshot here of an Insight Factory shows little sprout baby shower clip art. It says it has hot sales this week and it only has 20 competing listings. And so for me, when I'm looking to list a product, I'm trying to find something that has low competition and high sales potential. Once I see that, I add it to my Google Sheet tracker. For me, I use Google for everything. I have Google Folders, Google Sheets, I manage everything with Google and, and so I have a product overview Google Sheet. And once I have an idea for a product, it goes into the item category. I put the date that I had the initial idea to put this into my tracker and then the status I put as to do when I start the creation process, then I will update that status to be ongoing until it is complete.  

[00:05:02]: And when it is complete then it goes to the done and I have a whole dropdown menu that I use for that. So now that I have my idea, I move on to the next stage of my workflow which is the create to create products. Depending on what it is that I'm creating, I mainly use Canva, ChatGPT, MidJourney and sometimes I use Creative Fabrica. But I don't use it that often. I use it to fill in pages, particularly if I'm making like a kid's activity book. For example, the one I have on the screen is something that I made to sell on Amazon kdp, not just Etsy. So that is a digital product that I made that then can be printed as a physical book, which is great. The, the across the screen you see my four columns that I have in my Google Sheet tracker.  

[00:05:55]: So created is that the product is done. And for that, depending on what it is, I have multiple steps that I follow. For example, if it is clip art, clip art is multiple steps to be considered complete. And I have on the desktop of my computer different folders. And so if I'm working on Clipart, the initial designs that I generate in mid journey are going to go into the folder where it's created. Then after that I have an upscale folder because I have to upscale the images. Then I have a remove background folder. So then I will put it into that folder and then I have an change to 300dpi and I put it in that folder.  

[00:06:41]: Once I have that done, then I go and I check all the images and if any image needs to be edited or fixed, then I can put it into Canva or Pixel Cut. Or if you have Photoshop, you could put it in Photoshop and that's where you do your final cleanups. So once that has been completed, all of those folders have, you know, the Clipart has moved from each folder, then I consider it to be checked and I would put done in the checked. Checked means that it is ready to be listed on whatever platform that I'm going to be using. So then the template that I call what I call template and if you decide to use a Google Sheet tracker, you can change these headings to fit what fits best for you. For me, what I call template is my customer delivery file. This is going to be how the person is going to receive the file or the product that they have ordered, which for me is a PDF. It's a PDF license that they can then download that has a link to either their Google Drive folder or their Canva template.  

[00:07:52]: If I sell them, if I'm selling a Canva template, one thing to keep in mind when you're creating your customer delivery file is to provide some sort of freebie for them to opt in so that you can get them to be part of your community. This is a big mistake that I made when I first started my digital product Journey, especially when selling on platforms Like Etsy where you're not allowed to take anyone's email addresses from there. So if someone buys from you, it's, it's def. It stays on that platform. You cannot move that into another place to send them emails or anything like that. So they have to choose on their end to opt into you and your email list. And so adding a freebie onto your customer delivery file is a way for you to get people that you've purchased from you on teachers, pay teachers or Etsy or other marketplaces to stay on your email list. Same thing, thing.  

[00:08:50]: As I think about my website, I'm going to be listing a lot more digital products on my website and I want to make sure that I'm capturing people and getting them to join my email list so that I can be messaging them and sharing updates about my products and my journey and just supporting them too. Because as I mentioned before, my main goal is to spread self love and motivation and share ways to help make our journeys a little bit easier as we pursue big dreams and big goals. The next step on my template or on my spreadsheet tracker is the mockups, the mockups column. The mockups are what you create to showcase your product. So you need to have mockups that are going to show your product being used and show it in different ways. You want to have multiple images no matter where you're posting it so that people can scroll through and see what, what it is that they would like to, you know, how it can be used. So for example, if I've got this cute little animal clip art here, I'm going to show it on the front of a card because that is one way that this clipart image can be used and I want people to see how that would be helpful for them. You can get mockups in Canva through creators, you can purchase pre made mockups, you can make your own mock ups, but these are really important part of your digital product creation and you want to make sure that you are doing that part of this step.  

[00:10:23]: Just like my customer delivery file, I have templates for mockups for planners, for social media posts, for clip arts so that I can quickly just replace the images and use the same mockup every single time for the similar types of products. You also might want to consider creating a mock up video. In Etsy in particular, you can list a video along with your images which does help draw the eye to the product a bit more. I use standard videos for each of my four Etsy stores because it was taking too much time for me to create a separate video for each one. The only product that I sell that I still make individual videos for is are my website templates. Because I do feel like the scrolling through the website pages is a really helpful way to boost that potential sale on that product. I think individual videos for your products is the best way to go. But I try to save time when I can.  

[00:11:26]: And that is one way that I streamline my approach to digital products is by using the same listing video for my Clipart images. And it's just very generic. It just says, it just has like a pop up of a couple different types of bundles that I offer and it says check back for new bundles. And, and it's just, it's an eye catching way to draw people to the listing but not take so much time where I make an individual video for every single product that I have. So that's how I do my mockups. Now once I've got my product created, my product delivery file created and my mock ups created, those all go into a folder on my desktop that says ready. And so that tells me that everything now is ready to move to the next step, which is actually putting my product online. So the next step is to list the product.  

Dr. Tracy [00:12:20]: You put the product wherever it is, whichever platform that you're utilizing. And so in my digital tracker I have my product name, I have the date that I added it to make it live and the store. So I have four stores, so I have a dropdown of which store it's going into file type. So the file type tells me it's going to be in either a PDF in a folder on my desktop, a template which is a Canva template or a Google Drive folder. If it is a set of clipart images and the video is whether I put it on there, because this is part of the optimization to make your product found. You want to have it as complete as possible. And so I have whether it's on video, whether I've posted it to Etsy. Alt text is what you put on your images to help with search.  

[00:13:12]: And it is also an accessibility tool that you want to make sure that you have on your website, on your listings, or any place that you're placing images, that you put an alt text description of what that image is and then all pictures. Do you maximize the amount of space that it is allowed to be taken? So for example, in Etsy you can have up to 10 photos. So, so I maximize that by putting all the pictures up. I have I think three standard photos that I use that just have something like very generic like got questions, contact me or remember this is a digital download. And that helps me with the filling up the 10 photos and also not having to create something new all the time for everything. So those are just standard there that I have in the background. So after I list the products, the next step is to market. To market the products I use mostly Pinterest, but I also sometimes advertise on Instagram, Facebook and through email.  

[00:14:18]: And so in the spreadsheet you can track where you've advertised this, your products. And so Pinterest I'll go on and I will typically utilize the same thumbnails that I put into my listing. You can optimize your thumbnail images for each of the different social media platforms because they're all just sized slightly differently. But again, when I'm thinking about saving time, I generally just use the images that I already have created for my listing to market it as well. And so I will go ahead and I will use Pinterest and I, I like Pinterest because it is a search engine. You are going to be able to use SEO friendly words. I'd use ChatGPT to write my pins for me and to create hashtags. And so that is also a time saver because I'm not going to be typing out every single thing.  

Dr. Tracy [00:15:16]: I'm just going to say, hey, I need to create a pin description with SEO friendly hashtags for a farmer's market fruit clipart set and it will go ahead and create that for me. So why organization is key. Why is it now we talk through my different my process from idea to creation to listing to launching and marketing. And it's important because we stay focused and we can avoid overwhelm by having these clear steps that we can just check. If you're like me, I love to see the boxes checked off and it's like check, check done. Yay. With the right tools like a Google Sheet tracker, you can easily track this idea and clear organization ensures nothing falls through the cracks. For example, you could start a product that had really high sales potential and completely forget that you started it if you never logged it anywhere and put it as ongoing or in progress.  

[00:16:14]: And so it's a great way to just keep yourself on a good schedule of getting work completed. So let's check out the spreadsheet tracker together and I'll give you some quick tricks, tricks and tips on how to format the columns and make it user friendly for you. And because everyone's process is just slightly different so I Showed you mine. And now you can take this spreadsheet and make it yours. So this is the tracker that you can use as a base to manage your digital product workflow. This is where you can put the product name status would be whether it's just your initial idea, whether it's in progress, whether it's done, mockups in progress or ready, depending on where you are in the process. Date added file type. I didn't create a dropdown for this.  

[00:17:06]: If you want to, it's pretty easy. You highlight the column, go to data validation down here like this. And then you can see you've already got some rules that I created. You want to add rule here and Change this to E2 so that it goes into the second box. You don't want it in the first one because it looks funky. Now we can put file type, could be PDF, could be template and you can change the color here and you can click done and you can see that it will create the drop down for you right here. I'm just going to leave that off for now so that you can choose to customize it the best way that is for you. So remove role.  

[00:17:50]: Okay. And so you can put the price of your product. Check whether or not you've included a listing video, whether it's listed wherever you are listing it, whether it's your own website, teachers pay teachers, Etsy, your alt text, whether you've included all the pictures to optimize it in the search, the link to your actual product, whether you've got it in Google Drive or it's a Canva template. And I primarily use Pinterest to market my products. Like I said, I also occasionally will post on Instagram and Facebook and send it out in email. It's something that I'm working on improving, is sending more out in those other formats. So you can also keep track of where you've posted it and always add another column if you need to. So there you have it a little bit behind behind the scenes of how I organize my digital product business from this beginner initial idea that I have, which I put right into my tracker spreadsheet column, to then whether or not I start to actually make the product.

[00:18:53]: I track whether it is in process or completed and then the process it takes to create the template, which is the delivery file, the mockups that you need and listing it in. Etsy is the platform that I showed you where you have to consider things like having alt text, all the images and tracking, then the final piece, which is marketing beyond your store through email, Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest. Thanks for watching. And as A reminder, I'm Dr. Tracy from the Heartwork Hub, and good luck with your digital product business.