A $528 billion dollar opportunity?

🪜 Welcome to Profit Ladder! (listen to this post)

Did you know the creator economy generated $128B in 2023? 🤯

The majority was driven by solopreneurs and full-timers with side hustles. Nuts.

Now here’s the part that you and I should care about…

With a CAGR (compounded annual growth rate) of 22.5% over the next 6 years, the market is expected hit $528B by 2030. And the biggest growth sector? B2B businesses (B2Cs not far behind).

2024 is our year to lean into this growth opportunity. To shift from viewing ourselves as founders who sell, to founders who create.

To educate and nudge you forward, today’s edition will give you a bird’s eye view of the types of no-code digital products you can create to grow your audience and income.

You’ll learn:

• Top 6 digital products (+2 bonus products)

• What each product is best for when it comes to growth

• Recommended creator platforms to use for each product

1. Newsletters

Best for

Newsletters are recurring, value-first emails you send to subscribers who have opted in to hear from you.

If you’re not yet in the newsletter game nor taking it seriously, newsletters are a foundational growth lever I recommend establishing in 2024.

While you may initially find and build your audience on rented platforms like LinkedIn, X, IG, and FB, the sooner you can move them to your owned newsletter, the better.

Before you build your course or sell your ebook, having a newsletter helps you build a relationship with your audience. Audiences that know, like, and trust you, will also buy from you.

Creator platform options

Email Service Providers (ESPs) enable you to create and publish newsletters.

There are several legacy ESPs that brands have relied on: Mailchimp, AWeber, Constant Contact.

Today, there are newer platforms that have disrupted the market — additionally enabling you to monetize your newsletter:

• beehiiv: Manage and grow your email list, with advanced analytics and customization options to tailor content for your audience
  
  The Profit Ladder newsletter runs on beehiiv… I love it
  

• Substack: A simple and powerful newsletter platform that enables you to earn by offering paid subscriptions to your email lists
  
  I have a personal newsletter there. It’s OK. The settings sorta drives me nuts.

2. (bonus) Live Courses

Best for

For creators who have accrued experience with a set of skills, methodologies, and/or frameworks, a live course is a great way to package and productize your services into highly profitable offers.

Live courses are not digital products, but they’re a phenomenal cheat code for prototyping your online courses.

Creator platform options

You have 2 options for selling your live training:

1. Marketplaces

2. Self-hosted

The difference is comparable to selling on Amazon vs selling on your own:

Marketplaces

Marketplaces provide a well-known destination for people who are shopping for training. They go to the marketplace directly, or are driven there by their web search.

Once in the marketplace, your course will need to compete against other similar courses. But the platform has done the heavy lifting of putting your course in front of thousands of potential customers. In exchange, you pay the platform a fee and/or percentage of sales.

Here are 3 marketplaces I’ve used to promote and sell my training:

• Maven: Beyond simply selling your course, they have a suite of tools to help you build demand and promote

• Udemy: While you can teach anything on Udemy, their audience is largely tech focused

• Skillshare: Similar to Udemy, you can teach anything here, but the audience is mostly creatives and entrepreneurs

Self-hosted

Alternatively, you could sell training on your own domain.

Event platforms like Eventbrite and Whova make this possible. This is best for well-established brands that don’t want or need to rely on a marketplace.

3. Online Courses

Best for

Once you’ve built up mastery teaching live cohorts, you can automate your training revenue by building an online course.

This is great for busy business owners who want to establish their thought leadership and domain authority while additionally supplementing their revenue with a new, passive income stream.

Whether live training or online courses, teaching is a powerful growth lever for getting new customers in the door. Likewise, teaching also helps nurture past and existing customers who don’t currently need your core (done-for-you) services.

The best online courses teach an important topic and additionally provide ready-to-use guides and templates. These practical resources ensure the student’s success by enabling them to apply what they’ve learned.

Creator platform options

Here are 3 online learning platforms I recommend: