How to Use AI to Create Digital Products: $30k a Month
Table of Contents
Becky Beach’s side hustle journey began like many others—with an unhealthy relationship at a day job.
After being fired from her toxic work environment, Becky was inspired to start her own business.
She launched the blog MomBeach.com in 2015, but it took 6 long years of blood, sweat, and tears before it became a full-time income source.
When COVID-19 struck, Becky’s blog exploded from 20,000 pageviews a month to over 250,000. Riding the growth, she took the leap into full-time blogging and digital product creation.
Just two years later, Becky now earns $30,000 a month, largely from digital product sales. She sells printables, courses, planners, workbooks, and more through her website, Etsy store, and TeachersPayTeachers.
Tune into episode 582 of The Side Hustle Show to learn how to:
- Build an audience and digital products around problems you can solve
- Research demand thoroughly before creating any product
- Funnel free content into paid digital product purchases
- Drive consistent traffic to maximize your sales funnel potential
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Becky’s Path from Side Hustle to Full-Time Business
Becky started MomBeach shortly after getting fired from her toxic job. She knew she didn’t want to rely on bosses for income anymore.
However, blogging as a business was still new and unproven for her. Becky shared that her friends and family told her she was wasting time and should stick with a 9-to-5 job.
But Becky persisted because the alternative was going back to the corporate grind with controlling bosses. She had a deep drive to make it work.
In the beginning, progress was very slow. Becky made only $1 in her first month. After 6 months, she was earning just $100 a month from her blog.
It took a full year before she began ranking on Google and driving organic traffic to her posts.
For the first six years, Becky gradually tried different income models like display ads, affiliate marketing, and selling printables. Revenue grew from $1 to $5,000 but she still relied on her day job.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything almost overnight. Her monthly traffic rocketed from 20,000 to over 250,000 page views per month in early 2020.
Seeing her income from blogging, Becky made the decision to go all-in on MomBeach and quit her job.
Just years later, Becky’s monthly income now sits at $30,000 per month — a huge increase from 2015!
Let’s look at what exactly Becky is selling to earn such high revenue.
Digital Products Driving Over $30,000 a Month
When her blog first started, Becky focused on monetizing through display ads and affiliates. But after years of testing, she realized digital product sales could provide the highest income.
Now the bulk of Becky’s earnings come from digital products like:
She sells these through three main channels:
- Her own website store
- Etsy Shop
- TeachersPayTeachers
By having multiple sales channels, Becky is able to scale her reach and maximize profits. She can sell each digital product on all three platforms.
Shopify powers the product sales on Becky’s website. She uses the digital downloads app so customers instantly receive a download link after purchase.
Between these three sales platforms, Becky is able to drive over $30,000 a month selling her digital creations.
But what’s the process for researching, creating, and selling these products? Let’s break it down step-by-step.
Researching Profitable Digital Product Ideas
The first key to success is only creating products that have demand. Becky starts every product launch by validating that people actually want what she’ll be selling.
Here are the tools Becky uses to research digital product ideas:
- Pinterest – Becky browses top trends and best-selling products in the printables niche on Pinterest. This shows her what current demand looks like.
- Etsy and Etsy Tools – Becky uses Etsy research tools like Everbee and Sale Samurai to analyze product trends. These show digital product demand data like monthly searches and competition levels.
- Google Trends – For broader market data, Becky looks at Google Trends. This shows high level search volume and interest over time for relevant keywords.
- ChatGPT – Becky taps the AI tool ChatGPT to automatically generate digital product ideas for a specific niche. She gives it 10-20 ideas and then vets them herself against actual market data.
The goal is to brainstorm dozens of digital product ideas first. Becky then researches the market demand for each one. If an idea lines up well with current demand data, she’ll move forward with creating it.
Driving Traffic to Validate Product Demand
Before spending time building a digital product, Becky likes to validate demand by driving targeted traffic to a related blog post.
She’ll research keywords that her target customer would be searching for in Google around that product theme.
For example, if Becky comes up with a “money savings challenge printable” product idea, she’ll create a blog post targeting long tail keywords like:
- 30 day money savings challenge
- how to save money in 30 days
- 30 day save money challenge printable
She taps into ChatGPT to help create detailed blog post outlines around these topics quickly.
Becky will then publish this content and see how well it ranks and drives traffic. If the blog post sees strong organic traffic, it’s a good sign her printable or digital product would have demand too.
This validation traffic is key before investing time into creating the product itself.
Creating High-Quality Digital Products
Once Becky has validated a digital product idea against market demand data, it’s time to actually create it.
For printables and PDFs, Becky turns to Canva to handle the design work. She shared that having a background in graphic design gives her an edge here.
Becky makes sure to create designs tailored to her audience of moms and women. She adds graphics, colors, and styling that would appeal to her target customers.
Some of Becky’s tips for maximizing product sales with your design:
- Use graphics and visuals (don’t just rely on text)
- Pick color palettes that complement each other
- Add design elements your audience would enjoy
- Ensure a clean, high-quality look and feel
Becky also bundles her printables and PDFs so they are 30+ pages. She’s found that more value-packed products sell better than quick one-pagers.
For instance, her top-selling digital product is a home organization planner bundle priced at $17.
She uses ChatGPT to generate craft ideas, activity lists, trivia questions, and other printable content quickly. Becky then takes the AI output and customizes it herself before adding it into Canva.
Selling Digital Products Through Marketing Funnels
The final piece is marketing and selling Becky’s digital products effectively.
Most of her sales come from marketing funnels that start with a blog post and end on a sales page.
Here is the typical workflow:
- A reader finds one of Becky’s blog posts ranking organically on Google. Her posts solve problems for moms around topics like saving money, home organization, activities for kids, etc.
- Each blog post offers a free printable opt-in as a lead magnet. For example, a post on the 30-day money savings challenge would offer a free budget planner printable.
- After opting in with their email to get the freebie, readers are sent to a sales page. This showcases Becky’s paid product bundle at a discounted price.
- To create urgency, the discounted bundle price is only available for 20 minutes via a countdown timer. After that, the price goes back to full retail.
- For readers who don’t purchase, Becky sets up email follow-up sequences. These continue promoting the bundle deal at the discounted price even after the timer ends.
This marketing funnel system takes readers from a free blog post, to a free opt-in, and finally into a low-risk product purchase offer.
According to Becky, layered value delivery is key. Don’t give away a 300-page mega printable for free or people will less likely purchase it later. Instead, give a smaller 5-10 page freebie and sell the bigger bundle.
Driving Traffic to Power Marketing Funnels
Now that Becky has optimized funnels in place, consistent traffic is required to maximize sales.
Her main traffic sources in order are:
- Organic search (SEO)
- Facebook groups
- YouTube videos
- Email list
For SEO, Becky focuses on long-tail keywords with decent search volume but lower competition. This results in easier ranking potential.
She also leverages ChatGPT to help create content and detailed outlines around these SEO keywords quickly.
On Pinterest, Becky re-pins her content 5-7 times per day with different images, captions, and descriptions. This essentially A/B tests different variations to see what drives the most repins and clicks.
And in Facebook groups like her “Mom Bloggers and Business Owners” group, she shares her new blog content and reviews. This brings in another stream of engaged website visitors.
By driving external traffic to her funnels, Becky is able to maximize digital product sales and profits.
What’s Next for Becky?
Now that MomBeach is Becky’s full-time business, she has more freedom to focus on what she enjoys.
A VA (Virtual Assistant) handles her product creation and sales funnel management. Becky spends her time on course development and product research—playing to her strengths.
She is excited to continue expanding her use of AI for easy printable and workbook creation. Becky sees huge potential to accelerate growth even more.
She also gives you these free gifts for the Halloween!
No matter what the future holds, Becky is living proof that with persistence and grit, you can turn a side hustle into a thriving business. She hopes her story inspires others to take the leap and pursue their dreams.
The Key Takeaways
While Becky’s success may seem overwhelming as a new blogger or side hustler, she didn’t achieve it overnight.
Far from it, Becky almost quit her blog entirely after 6 months and 1 year due to seeing no results.
The key learnings from Becky’s journey are:
- Build an audience and digital products around problems you can solve
- Research demand thoroughly before creating any product
- Funnel free content into paid digital product purchases
- Drive consistent traffic to maximize your sales funnel potential
If you are just starting out, focus on providing value by solving problems for a specific audience. Start building your email list with a free opt-in like Becky did.
As your audience grows, you can tap into tools like ChatGPT to efficiently create paid digital products tailored exactly for them.
Just like Becky, you can build a life-changing income online by sticking with it long-term. She went from $1 a month to over $30,000 a month over the years.
If you also have a vision for earning from home while ditching bad bosses, take inspiration from Becky’s journey. With hard work and consistency, you can make it happen too.
Becky’s #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation
“Don’t give up.”
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