Progress so far…

Hello all.

I joined John Thornhill’s Online Success Coaching course in February 2025 and I immediately started watching the videos.  It is a comprehensive course covering how to create and market digital products.  The course covers everything from explaining what digital products are, to how to find a niche, create a product, market a product and how to maximise revenue from it.  This course focuses on using AI to help with each stage of the process.

As a man in his mid sixties who has only really used computers for sending emails, doing accounts and watching YouTube, I found the prospect of using AI to create and market digital products rather daunting.

So how have I done so far?

I have selected the personal development niche as this is an area where I have a lot of interest and a fair amount of knowledge.  However, when using AI and creating digital products having knowledge or experience is not necessary, and can sometimes be a hindrance.

The first step was to establish whether there is a market for the kind of products I want to create.  Many people make the mistake of spending days, weeks or months developing products that they are interested in, but for which there is not much demand.  Fortunately personal development is a good niche and my first product is an eBook and a set of tools to help people manage their time and be more productive.  The product is aimed at both students and professionals.

The ‘product’ is actually a set including an eBook, videos, prompt sheets in both docx and pdf format, some Canva designed covers, email series and sales copy.  This product will be a PLR (Private Label Rights) product which will be marketed to affiliates and JV partners for them re-brand and sell for themselves.  I have also purchased a domain for the product.

It has taken me quite while and a lot of rewatching of the course videos to ‘get my head around’ the whole concept.  If I have one minor criticism of the course material it is that the creators of the course, John Thornhill and Randy Smith, sometimes assume people watching will already know what they are talking about.  Perhaps they have been doing this so long that some of the basics seems obvious to them.  Anyway, the course is excellent and very detailed.  They also have an excellent and very responsive support service, where they each actually answer every email in detail and always very quickly.  This has given me tremendous confidence in them.

I am taking my time with the creation of each of the product elements.  I have sometimes felt completely out of my depth and overwhelmed and I have taken a break from the course for a few days.  Fortunately I am retired and do not need this to be profitable quickly.  However, if you do want to start earning quickly from digital assets, it is possible to get your first product created and launched within a couple of weeks.  I have estimated that, for a newbie, it will take about 60 hours of work.  However, once you have created and launched your first product, you could reduce the time taken to create your next product, to just a few hours.  It is the learning that takes the most time.

So far I have created the eleven elements of the product.  This comprises six elements in the ‘front end product’ and five elements in the ‘upsell product’.  I have some editing to do and I have to add some images and do some Canva designs.  I will write another update when I complete the next stage.