Productizing yourself is one of the best ways to introduce leverage into your business. It allows you to divorce your time from your impact and your income. So in this article, we’re going to build on my prior article, which went over how to productize your skills or services by taking a look at my own channel and brainstorming seven different ideas of products that I could launch in the future.
As a quick refresher, there are three steps when it comes to productizing yourself, the first step is to identify what you’re good at. And then from there, you’re going to want to figure out what other people need or want and then lastly, we’re going to want to create a product that helps people get closer to those needs or wants of theirs.
Step #1: Figure out what you’re good at.
The easiest way for me to figure out what I’m good at is to simply start my videos by what has been the most popular on my YouTube channel. By doing so, I noticed that my Facebook Marketplace videos are super popular with people, and it seems like a lot of people are getting value out of it because they’ve been viewed several thousand times. On the flip side of things, it looks like my customer success videos are not doing quite as hot, even though they have been published more recently.
So I want to factor that as well in my consideration as to which topics I might be good at. Sifting through all my other content, it seems like my content around virtual assistants, as well as search engine optimization have also been pretty well-received since they’ve been released. So by doing this quick review of my channel, I’ve identified three areas in which I can productize skills that I have to help other people.
The great thing about Facebook Marketplace, virtual assistance or SEO is that I know that they all help people in terms of making money or generating revenue or doing business. And so I know it’s things that people already spend money on, which is that sweet spot that you want to think about when you’re considering which skills or services to productize yourself.
Step #2: Figure out what people want
To do this, the easiest way is to go onto Google and search different sub communities to figure out the exact phrasing that people are using. So let’s go ahead and jump into my computer and take a look at what people might be saying about virtual assistance.
The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to hop onto Google and going to search site:reddit.com hiring a virtual assistant advice. And then what you’ll see is you’ll see a collection of results, of different things that people have already posted around the idea of hiring a virtual assistant, as well as questions that people have been asking when it comes to this topic of hiring virtual assistants.
So what I can do from here is I can look at each of these headers of these threads as well as actually dig into the threads themselves to see the sorts of challenges that people often have when it comes to things related to virtual assistance. So for example, if I were to open up this first link on looking for advice, you can see that this person is talking about how they’re ready to bite the bullet and they have a lot of daily tasks, like email writing, contracts to send out, scheduling to book as well. And they’re also just talking about how they don’t really know what to do in terms of whether they should look for agencies or to post an individual ad or whether to hire from particular countries.
And so these are all phrases of things that people want to solve when it comes to the topic of virtual assistance, in which if we were to create a product for this sort of thing, it would be something that people could potentially find really valuable.
The next thing that I like to do is I like to work through specifically some of the comments and then figure out what other people have been sharing as advice. So here you can see that this person is talking about how you should really try to make sure that the tasks that you’re giving your virtual assistant are administrative and communicating things with clients. Generating leads should probably be a little bit more specialized or a higher grade of virtual assistant.
So just from going through this single thread on Reddit, I can learn a lot about my target market and I can do the same thing for other websites like Quora or hopping into Facebook groups and searching the term virtual assistants or VAs. I could do the same thing when it comes to Facebook Marketplace or SEO.
All I’d have to do is search something along the lines of site:reddit.com no luck Facebook Marketplace, or site: SEO advice needed. Something along those lines in which I would get to see what people that are facing this problem around the thing that I’m good at are saying when they are asking for help.
There are three easy things to look out for as you do this sort of process. What questions are people asking? What considerations are they thinking about? And lastly, what outcomes do they want when it comes to the skill or the service that you know really well. So after doing this sort of research for a little bit, you might notice that people that are looking for help on Facebook Marketplace want to figure out more ways to get more views for their listings, to sell more product or to reduce the number of flakes that they’re getting with potential buyers.
When it comes to virtual assistants, people might be looking for help around not having to handhold their VA’s through every single thing they test to them, or even just the process of writing some good standard operating procedures. Looking at our last example with SEO, people might be looking for help in terms of how to get more organic traffic, convert from their content marketing efforts, or even just understand and better use the content marketing tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush.
Step #3: Create a product that gets them outcomes.
Here we’re going to brainstorm some potential product ideas based off of some things on my channel that I’ve talked about and thinking about what people actually want. When I do this, I always like to think first about what the problem is that I’m trying to solve before thinking about the media format of how I would package that problem solution.
Idea #1: 10 Essential Templates for Selling More on Facebook Marketplace
My idea here is that I could pull from my past successful listings on Facebook Marketplace for these sorts of copy that I use that was effective and then put together five to 10 different templates that people could then plug and play and use for their own sales on Facebook Marketplace.
This way people could rest easy knowing that these templates would help them maximize the possibility of them ranking in the search results on Facebook Marketplace, as well as get those coveted views that help you convert to getting a sale. So in case it’s not obvious, the key outcome here is better listings on Facebook Marketplace, which would then translate to more sales.
In terms of media format, I’d probably start this out as some sort of PDF download, and then if it were popular over time, I could potentially create an interactive widget or some sort of monthly service in which people could have all sorts of different templates based on all those different categories that items have on Facebook Marketplace.
And then they could potentially pay a monthly subscription fee in order to access those templates. I think it could be really cool for example, if there was a community of hundreds of Facebook Marketplace sellers that were simply sharing their different templates of copy that have been effective at selling in different local markets.
Idea #2: The Best Unknown High Ticket Niches for Flipping on Facebook Marketplace
My idea here would be that I could compile some of my best ideas when it comes to things that you can buy really low and then sell really high on Facebook Marketplace and then package that sort of list for people that would be interested in making more money on Facebook Marketplace. So this would probably be the product where I mentioned flipping textbooks if you’re close to a local university or even just finding Fitbits that are used or in gently use to resell.
The key outcome here for the person would be very similar to the first one in that it would be more profits or sales on Facebook Marketplace. In terms of media format, I’d probably package this in a simple PDF. That said, though, I could see the case for some video content, if there were particular nuances, like which additions to textbooks to get versus others, and so on if I were to really carve this sort of product out.
Now let’s transition to my the second skill, which is virtual assistants.
Idea #3: The All-In-One Virtual Assistant Management Template
I could build this as some sort of nicely formatted Google sheet, or as a Notion database that could be copied and then modified to your desired needs.
That said, though, in this product, I’d make sure to include things like the ideal ways to manage virtual assistant work logs or hours worked. Regardless of the format of how this product would be packaged, I’d imagine that this sort of product would cover things like how to manage your virtual assistance time logs and provide summaries that are meaningful to the business owner, or maybe even just templates in terms of creating your first standard operating procedures and making sure that those are crystal clear or even a library of standard operating procedures that could be just copied and pasted so that it could be plug and go for the business owner. And lastly, I’d imagine it could be helpful to outline 50 plus different ways in which virtual assistants can help business owners save some time.
So the key outcome here would be to help entrepreneurs in getting started with virtual assistance and scaling out their teams. And like I mentioned, the idea of media format would either be some sort of Google sheet or some sort of Notion template that could be shared.
Idea #4: Look Over My Shoulder for Creating Effective SOPs
So this builds upon the idea that when an entrepreneur is first starting out in creating their standard operating procedures, it can be a super confusing process. So I would imagine that the next time I create an SOP for my virtual assistants, what I could do is I could record my thought process and me actually documenting that and then provide that sort of library for other entrepreneurs to access.
From here, I could build upon the library later on by providing things like good SOPs versus bad SOPs just to give different examples of what is effective and what is not effective when delegating to a virtual assistant. I could see this product scaling even further to something like a monthly service in which maybe there is a monthly coaching call with fellow entrepreneurs in which they asked me a question about an SOP they want to create, I can record that live and show them how to actually do it, and then build an ongoing library that would then continue to create more and more value out of this virtual assistant look over my shoulder library. So for this fourth idea, I think the key outcome is helping entrepreneurs figure out a good SOP versus a bad SOP and writing more clear instructions for their virtual assistants. And I think in terms of the media format, I would probably do this in some sort of video format and then over time potentially make it into some sort of login portal in which there is a nicely designed library for the users.
Idea #5: 50 Content Marketing Ideas in 30 Minutes
My idea here would be to create a product in which I would help people figure out 50 different, meaningful content marketing pieces that they could start to do in order to build out their SEO strategy and figure it out in under 30 minutes.
So my goal here would be to help people sift through the hundreds of different keyword opportunities and figure out which ones are the highest leverage for them. Another goal would be to help them prioritize things like whether they should focus on top of the funnel content or middle of them funnel content.
I’m sure to make this even more jampacked, I could probably share some helpful Excel tips and tricks as well in terms of how to navigate through SEMRush exports as quickly as possible. So the key outcome here should be obvious. It’s getting a semblance of a content strategy for SEO and for the media format, it would probably be some short videos accompanied by an Excel template that could be followed along with.
Idea #6: 5X Your Content in 1 Month
The idea here would be that I would provide some sort of weekly plan and guide that would help an entrepreneur 5X, their content through repurposing.
In other words, I would create that step-by-step strategy that would kick somebody in gear and get them to start creating and repurposing on a regular basis. The key outcomes here would be all of that repurpose content that you could use for YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, whatever it is. And also the feeling that you had wins along the way as you became more and more fluent with that process of repurposing content between weeks one, two, three, and four.
For this idea, I could even see there being value in bundling it with my SOP idea for virtual assistants, just so that the entrepreneur could delegate this sort of process to a VA in the future. In terms of the media format for this sort of idea, I would probably execute it in the form of some sort of online course with modules, with video as well as supplemental PDFs.
Idea #7: 1 Hour Advanced SEMRush Guide
I would probably go over the tips that I would never share on YouTube. These would be things like how to dig into your competitor’s biggest weaknesses or highlight your biggest opportunities or just other topics that would take far too much time in a YouTube video to go over.
The key outcome of this sort of training would be to cover topics that typically would require an actual SEO consultant or some sort of professional development training in order to actually learn yourself. So it would be super tactical and much more nitty gritty than a standard YouTube video. In terms of key outcomes here, it would be making sure that people left that training feeling like they had the upper echelon of SEMRush skills. And in terms of media format, I would probably do this in a straight shot one hour video.
Big takeaways
There are two things I want you to remember from this article:
- The first one is to remember the three steps to productizing your skills or services, figure out what you’re good at, identify what people want or need, and then create a product that helps them get those outcomes.
- The second thing I want you to remember is you already have things that you can productize.
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might also benefit from learning different ideas on how to productize their skills or services.