Running a small business during a public health crisis has had many unglamorous learning curves and setbacks, along with much room for pausing and pivoting. I’ve mostly taken the cruise control route myself by letting things flow, managing my energy, and not forcing myself to be productive when I simply want to get through the day. But that’s because alhumdulillah, I am not solely relying on my business income and it’s more of a hobby for me at times. Either way, I found myself dabbling with learning how to create and sell digital products earlier this year and I was unexpectedly surprised with how they helped me grow my business and diversify my skills. In this post, I wanted to share the differences between physical and digital products and how they have helped me in this unique season.

Physical products:

My main physical product is the Seeking Jannah Planner, which I sell in two different cover options. Since it is undated, I have a lot of flexibility with making sales and I’m not time-bound by dates.

After designing it and receiving my shipment, my main on-going task has been to market the product through different usage ideas, stylized photos, and Youtube videos. Showing potential buyers how the product fits into their life is key. By sharing photos of how I use my planner for weekly scheduling as well as Qur’an journaling, I’ve been able to create a little community of sisters who have discovered the joy of journaling in their own life. I’ve always wanted to do more in this area by making quality footage for IG videos, or speaking about my product on screen but …. I do what I can within my introversion bubble and it seems to work, even though my sales could possibly be higher if I was more overt in my marketing. Allah knows best.

The second on-going task has been managing shipping, which has been impacted by the public health crisis in that I only ship once per month, I no longer take international orders, and shipping charges have risen enough for me to notice the hit. Along with this, I’ve seen the challenges that Amazon poses for small businesses since we simply can’t compete with the shipping times Prime offers and most people are accustomed to receiving their orders relatively fast. This is why I started a pre-order strategy that has helped me lift the weight of shipping time expectations.

Now on the other hand, having a physical product is really special and it means a lot to see it and share it with the world. As someone who can buy several journals and use up every page of each one, I value quality journaling tools and it’s been a great joy of my adult life to create a stationary product and brand of my own. It’s something I am incredibly grateful for – that Allah (swa) sparked this idea in my mind back in 2016 and somehow, it came to be and here I am today, still shipping orders month after month. I get to package my product and receive feedback that makes my heart smile every time about how my simple planner has helped someone or many amazing women. A blessing I don’t take lightly (and frankly, I need to remember this more often when I feel tired from repeated packaging on Sunday morning wishing my sisters were next door to help me out lol).

With physical products in large quantities, you also need to consider storage. When we were in our first apartment, my planner inventory took up the entirety of our unit storage area. Allah bless my husband for carrying each of my 40+ boxes down to our storage without any drudgery, alhumdulillah. In our current home, the remaining few boxes are neatly organized by color in a small area of our basement.

Prior to our first lockdown, I had a mini bazar table at a local pop-up and within 2 days of work, I was able to sell more planners than I typically sell within a month. With a physical product, it’s always good to be on the lookout for ways to reach a more concentrated niche audience for your product and bazaars and pop-ups (used to be) great for that! Creating Facebook groups are another excellent strategy, although I haven’t actively used it myself.

Digital products:

Moving on to digital products. In this category, I’ve really enjoyed creating printable kits as well as my first mini-course using a combination of:

• Adobe InDesign for the kits

• Canva for marketing graphics

• iMovie for video editing

• Youtube for hosting

With digital products, the beauty of it lies in that it is completely passive income once you have created the product and set up your email sequence to send to customers post-purchase. I hadn’t considered how powerful this could be and the greater reach I could attain with my brand by creating digital products and oh my, I wish I had done this sooner!

Once I came up with the outline of my kits and the course, I worked diligently for a couple of weeks to put all the pieces together. For me, the greatest learning curve came with learning the Adobe InDesign software to use it for my purpose (since it can look a bit intimidating). I also took another mini-course to learn how to use the software which helped me speed up the learning + doing process all at the same time.

Marketing digital products involves much of the same process as physical ones I found, however it’s important to be crystal clear that nothing will be mailed to the customer and they will need to check their inbox for the downloads. Some downloads also expire so it’s helpful to encourage customers to save downloads to their personal drives.

I’ve found digital products require more emphasis on copyright legalities as well since it can be easy to copy and claim it as ones own. The variety of digital products you can create include anything from:

• Email courses

• Video courses

• Personal journey (this is the type I chose for my course)

• Educational content

• E-books

• Workbooks

• Planners

• Guides

• And lots more…

Once you understand the pieces involved, it’s an excellent source of passive income while sharing your gifts and knowledge with your audience … and you don’t have to ship anything!

If you’ve been considering creating a physical or digital product, I hope these thoughts are helpful and I wish you the best on your journey!

Till next time, Asma