Episode #004. 5 Mindset Shifts When Creating Digital Products

Mindset is something that you have to work on as a business owner, something that you have to be concerned with. I wanted to bring this up now at the beginning of the podcast because I feel it is so important to focus on your mindset and make sure that you’re at least aware of these issues.

Because what happens is that when you are dealing with mindset, your behavior is determined by the mindset that you have.

Today, we’re going to talk about what mindset things might creep up for you as a digital product maker or creator.

Honestly, I’ve struggled with my own mindset over the years. When I first started making digital products, I thought that I had to still work full-time with clients. I’m in the process now, of letting some of those clients go and moving away from client work that I don’t like to do anymore. Instead, I’m jumping straight into doing the digital products.

When I first started making digital products, I never really thought that I could make a full time living from just creating digital products, because it seemed too easy. It seemed like, you know, I make something and then I can sell it over and over again. That’s too easy. So how is that a way for me to make full-time money? Because it has to be hard, right?

I have learned my entire life, that work is supposed to be hard, so I had that mindset belief, and I’m honestly still working on it. So it’s something that I have to deal with in my biz. You probably have your own mindset things that you have to deal with too. So, that’s why I wanted to bring it up here today. We’re going to chat about the mindset things that I’ve seen my students go through when they started down the road of making passive income from digital products.

But let’s back up a second, and think about mindset stuff. I want to talk about why it really matters. If you are a one-on-one service-based business, if you are creating custom work, like custom paintings or custom illustrations, things like that, or if you’re creating digital products, mindset is everything.

It’s going to affect whether or not you are successful in business. And any time you reach a new point in business, you also reach a new milestone. So, let’s say your first milestone is to earn a certain amount of money every month, and that money might be a lower figure. So you might say, “I want to achieve my first $1,000 month,” and then you might go from that and say, “I want to achieve my first $3,000 month.” And then from there $5,000 a month and so on. Every step of the way, every milestone, you are going to have a different struggle to deal with. (It could be the same struggle, but it’s just you have to attack it a little bit deeper.)

So, this is something that you’re going to have to deal with all along the way. Something that is going to creep up for you is thinking about your mindset and figuring out how to move past some of the things that you have in your subconscious that’s holding you back. Your mindset, like I said, is going to determine which actions you take and what you do with your time. If you are not aware of your mindset issues or you don’t want to face those issues, then it’s going to take you longer (take it from me) to get to where you want to go.

For instance, if you don’t believe that you can do something, or if you feel like it’s hard for me to start a podcast, or it’s hard for me to go on Instagram stories, or it’s hard for me to do X, Y, or Z. Whenever you have those thoughts, you’re not going to do those things. You won’t take action.

We do need to evaluate whether or not that is something that we truly want to do or if we’re just doing it because somebody else said, so that’s really important to keep in mind. But also we have to figure out if this is something that we want to do if we believe it’s going to help us to achieve our goals.

Why do we stay in inaction? Why do we keep ourselves from taking that action? Instead, we need to start making little strides towards those things that are tripping us up and getting past those fears and those things that we have in our subconscious that are keeping us stuck in one place.

So, no matter what the mindset is, it’s going to inform your actions and it is going to determine what you do. It’s extremely important for you to get your mindset right, or to know at least where it is that you struggle. And I wanted to preface this podcast with what I’m going to share with you that I’ve seen creep up for people when it comes to making digital products and when it comes to business in general. That way, when we move forward, you can understand that if you if one of these things stands out to you that it’s something that you struggle with, then you being aware of that is going to be helpful in general. Then you can start thinking about how you can tackle that mindset issue.

Let’s dive into the five mindset issues that I want to talk about today.

1) Your business shouldn’t be run solely based on your emotions.

I know as a really emotional person, that it’s just a part of who I am. I’m a really sensitive person, as well. And I have done this in the past, based my business on my emotions and my actions on my emotions.

So, when something hasn’t gone my way in the past, like a failed launch of a new digital product, I have found myself becoming reactionary. This meant that I reacted to my emotions in the moment. When something didn’t go right, I thought it was a failure. And then from that failure, I hid from doing any further actions.

This has happened over and over in my business. So, when I started recognizing this about myself, and I started thinking about why this might be happening, I was able to understand that it was because I was looking at my emotions.

Then I used my emotions as the guidance for my business rather than looking at the facts. So you might say things like, I’m such a failure, or I can’t seem to make this business thing work, or I’m not cut out for this. Or you might say maybe I should just give up or whatever you say to yourself.

When something goes wrong in your business, you find yourself saying these things, but what you really should try to do in the moment, is put those emotions aside and look at the concrete facts and data instead.

Numbers are not going to lie to you. They’re going to tell you where things went wrong. So, what went off course or what is something that you can change in the future to make things right, these are the things to focus on. Our emotions, on the other hand, they are going to tell us that you’re not good at business, or you don’t know how to launch, etc. Then you’re going to either believe that it’s true or you’re going to tell yourself that no, that’s not true. And you’ll look at the facts.

You’re going to go one way or the other. And if you go the way of your emotions, you have to understand that your emotions may lie to you at that moment. Your emotions are going to want you to believe that the problem lies within you. That it’s something wrong with you. But that’s really not the case. 

For instance, when I had a failed launch last year, last spring, I thought it was a failed launch. And I wondered what in the world happened? I sent out the normal amount of emails. I tried to talk to people about it beforehand. I had really good testimonials. 

But I allowed my emotions about it tell me that this is such a failure. I don’t know what I did wrong. And I was started blaming it on myself. But then I actually had a mentor of mine, Elise McDowell, who talked to me about my numbers. We had a conversation about my launch, and she asked me how many people went to my sales page. When I told her how many sales that I had, she’s like, “Amanda, you had the right amount of sales for what you did. So, if you look at the numbers, what happened was what was supposed to happen.”

And when I did look at the numbers, I was like, “Oh, wow, I still had sales.” But it wasn’t the number of sales that I was expecting, so I put the failure on myself. 

Sometimes when we don’t set concrete goals for ourselves, we just want to have a million sales, then we don’t get to that goal. And we think “Oh my goodness, I failed.” But if we look at actual data actual facts, then we can determine whether or not we did actually fail. And we can see where things went wrong.

I should have looked at the numbers instead of just using my emotions and going by my emotions. But instead, I was like, “This is not good. What did I do wrong?” I was putting it all on myself.

So, what I want you to get from this is that you want to look at data. And this is something that’s huge in business, you really want to operate in your business more like a scientist, or as a mathematician, sometimes. More than you do as a person who is an emotional being. I mean, you still want to have emotions in your business. You don’t want to be a robot. You want to connect to people and you want to be a person who is genuine, and all of that. But when it comes to your failures in business, I want you to take a step back and to evaluate where things went wrong, where things went right and learn the lessons that you can from that. 

You’ll want to look at the lesson that’s learned in one way or another. You’ll want to see that there’s really no such thing as failure.

If you look at it from this perspective, failure only comes through inaction. So when you get scared or you feel like something went wrong, then your inaction is what is going to cause failure because you’re staying in that fear and not taking action. It’s your job to figure out what went wrong and why. So, take notes during your launch or during your release of a new freebie, or whatever you’re doing in your business. If you put out a new freebie and people are not opting in, what I want you to do is take a look at why and try to figure out from the facts that you have. This means that you have to start to really look at your business closer than you might have in the past.

So, take notes during your launch, take notes when you’re doing a new thing in your business. Then from there, you can evaluate things and go from those hard facts rather than from your emotions. If you have a negative thought during the process, you can even write that down and think about, “why am I having this thought?” Then try to reframe it into something positive and start thinking from a positive place. Rather than saying, “what did I do wrong, everything went wrong, I’m not good at this, business is just not for me, I’m not cut out for it.”

Whatever those feelings and thoughts that you’re having, write those things down as they occur, and then start to try to bring them into something positive. That way you can start telling yourself those positive things instead and see yourself grow as a person and as a business owner by doing this work.

This is what’s going to change your business. This is how you’re going to get to your goals. This is how you’re going to start seeing success.

Being a business owner means that you’re a problem solver. It means that you’re going to look at your problems, and you’re going to figure out where things went wrong. Then you’re going to respond to those things, and try to learn from those things and make it better in the future.

2) Failure is actually an opportunity to grow and to pivot.

The next thing that I want to talk about—the second mindset—in my opinion, is that failure is actually an opportunity to grow and to pivot.

It’s a way for you to change your business and a way for you to get better and stronger to learn what you want.

Sometimes when we fail at something, it’s because we didn’t really want to do that thing in the first place. You may think, well, I have this goal and I want to do this thing, and then you don’t really put your heart and soul behind what you’re doing. That, to me, is an indicator that really that this is not something that you wanted to do in the first place.

So, failure may tell you what is actually inside and what you’re actually thinking when you’re doing things. For instance, I launched a program like I did last year, and it failed. Part of what I learned from my failed launch is that I was launching a product that I no longer really cared for. It was something that for me, I had wanted to change for a while. I knew it wasn’t serving me. Not to say that it wasn’t serving my audience. I feel like it was a good product. But I knew, internally, that it wasn’t working out the best for me. So, when I launched it, I already had some of those beliefs and I was already aware that something had to change, (I had worked with a coach too, who helped me to make a few changes but I knew the product still wasn’t aligned).

But what ended up happening was that I realized that this product wasn’t for me, it wasn’t something that I could see myself doing long-term. So, I sort of actually self-sabotaged myself a little bit in that launch (by not giving it my all). So, really the failure wasn’t actually a failure.

It was a moment for me to pivot and grow.

That’s really what I want you to get from this particular mindset issue. There isn’t anything wrong with you or me when this type of thing happens. In my case, it was something wrong with my product offering. I was not aligned with my product offering.

When I discovered that, I did take a while to think about if I wanted to keep this product and just repackage it in a different way. The longer I thought about it, the more I discovered that, yes, I did want to keep this product. I wanted to continue to launch it in the future. But the issue was that I was not delivering it in a way that felt aligned.

So, that made me not want to put as much effort behind my launch. When I learned this, I realized that it really wasn’t a failure after all. It was a chance for me to grow and a chance for me to pivot in my business.

What I want you to learn from this is that sometimes we just need to take these things that we perceive as failures and look at what is behind the “failure.” Look at the lesson that we need to learn, look at what is truly going on and discover where it is coming from. For me, any sort of failure resulted because I didn’t want to launch that product again. What I didn’t realize was that I did want to relaunch, I just wanted to change it into a course instead. I didn’t realize this until after the launch and until after I had looked at all the facts. Not until I had also looked internally, at what I was going through during this launch and why I didn’t put all of my efforts into it. So, that is something else that I want you to be aware of when it comes to mindset when you are creating digital products.

When you’re launching courses, or when you’re launching a membership, which in my case, this was a membership. I realized that for me, a membership is not something that I really like to do. I actually prefer to launch courses and create courses. So, that is what happened and I would not have known that if I had not taken the time to step back and really evaluate what happened during my launch.

I want you to be aware or really read between the lines, that I want you to be aware of what’s going on in your business. Sometimes this takes you sitting down and journaling, or sitting down and really evaluating the things that you’re doing. It requires you to keep the pulse on the things that are going on in your business. So, I want you to focus on those things. And from there, you will see that there’s no such thing as failure.

It’s you moving through these things that are in your subconscious and you taking a look at what’s actually happening in your business.

3) Business does not have to be hard.

Now, I mentioned this a little at the beginning of this episode, about how I thought that business had to be hard. I felt that I had to work all the time. And if it wasn’t hard, then I couldn’t make that much money. So, this is something that I really wanted to address.

When we are growing up, and we see our parents or we see whoever has raised us working really hard for their money. Then we create digital products and make ebooks or courses, or make something for Creative Market or Skillshare, then we see that business can be fun and that it doesn’t have to be super hard to make money. And that could cause us to feel bad. Like, it can’t be this easy.

For the longest time, I thought I still had to work 12 hours each day, in order for it to be okay for me to earn money. But once I started to learn that it’s okay for me to spend a lot of time upfront to create digital products that that wasn’t a bad thing. You still do put in a lot of work.

But just because you put in that work one time, doesn’t mean that it’s not hard work. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to earn that money.

So, I want you to really look at your business as something that can be fun, as something that doesn’t have to be hard, and to really shift your mindset to that.

So if you’re struggling with feeling like “everything feels hard in my business, I feel like nothing is ever going right,” then you have to shift your mindset. If you have those types of beliefs or you feel like making money as hard, what I want you to start to say to yourself is that business gets to be fun! Business doesn’t have to be hard, it can be easy. I can make money from something that I’ve created and put a lot of hard work and effort into, and then continue to make money later on.

That doesn’t mean that what you create is any less valuable in the world, and it doesn’t mean that you didn’t put in the hard work.

Start reframing this belief and start believing that you can earn money from passive income and from digital products.

4) It’s so helpful to pay attention to your numbers and not bury your head in the sand.

The fourth mindset that I want you to start thinking about is that when it comes to business, you have to actually pay attention to your numbers and to the amount of money that’s coming in and going out of your business. And to kind of start to like those things.

I know as a creative that liking math is like not something that I’ve ever really wanted in my life. I did like it when I was a kid, when I was in middle school and high school. But then I went into college and had my algebra class and got to see like one of the first C’s I ever got in my life, so then I did not like math.

Well, now in my business, and after so many years of running my business, I started to learn that looking at my finances, at the money that’s coming in my business, looking at the money that’s going out, these are not bad things to look at. And this is not something that you should try to avoid or like stick your head in the sand.

It’s actually when I look at these things that then I can actually be more creative in my business. If I look and I see that I only have this amount of money coming into my account this month, then I can be creative and think of new ways that I can have like a cash injection in my business ways that I can make more money.

So what I think about when I think about the numbers and the math and whatever now is I try to think of it as a fun thing. Maybe try to think of it as a game. Try to think of it as a way for me to be creative, a way for me to think about things outside the box, instead of looking at it as, Oh my goodness, how am I going to even pay this bill because you know, those moments do come up. as business owners, there are times where sometimes we have more money in our account than others.

When you are a digital product creator, if you are doing things based off of launching, you might find that you are having moments where your business you have plenty of money, maybe an overabundance of money. Because you had a really successful launch, and then you’ll find maybe times that where things are not going as well, because you may be left too much time in between launches, or whatever, and you don’t know you know where your money is going to come from. So when that happens, you can instead of thinking like, oh, my goodness, I just want to bury my head in the sand, I don’t even want to look at my bank account. I don’t do this. I don’t want to do that. Instead of doing that you can start to evaluate the numbers in your business.

And there’s even more to it than that. There’s really like looking at the number of people on your email list and how many people are opening up your emails. And there’s a lot of stuff that you should really start to get acquainted with the numbers in your business and really start to have fun with and really start to figure out how you can grow those things. And don’t look at it as like I don’t have enough people on my email list, I don’t have enough people who are signing up for my course or who are buying my ebook.

Instead, you have to look at it from a positive standpoint and say, Okay, well, if I increase the amount of people who are opening my emails, and the amount of people who are clicking the link in my emails, then that means that I will have more people buying my ebook or buying my course. So how do I go about doing that? And so you have to just again, reframe your thoughts and beliefs around this in a way that allows you to feel like it’s something that is enjoyable, like I can go and I can make a game out of this and I can make it fun instead of like, I don’t have enough money. Okay, what can I do? What action can I take to make things better for myself?

So, that is a fourth mindset belief that I feel like really a lot of If people struggle with, you know, they look at the number of people on their email list, for instance, and then they’re just like, I don’t know what to do about it. I’m just going to never send emails or I’m just going to avoid it altogether. Or I’m not going to focus on building up my email list. But instead, we can focus on Well, what are new ways? What are creative ways that I can do this thing. So that is really something that I want you to focus on and to work on when it comes to building your digital product business.

5) Small actions actually lead up to big results over time.

This is something that I love to talk about. I read a book, I mean, it must have been 10 years ago about the compound effect. And really, this is something Now we have to, in our businesses take into account, sometimes we get where you know, something’s not going our way. And we just decide not to take action.

So, for instance, perhaps we are not seeing results on Instagram, for instance, this could be, you know,
a scenario for us here. And instead of still taking small actions every day to improve and to put things out there, instead, we don’t take any action at all. And I can be a big proponent of doing this, but those small actions still lead to big results.

And sometimes we don’t see what is happening. And we don’t see the difference that our actions are taking until, you know, six months in the future one year in the future, it may take a long time for us to really see the results of these actions that we’re taking no matter how small if we take those small things, and we really try to do those things and do them consistently and do them over time, we will get to a point where all of a sudden, things are going to be working for us in our favor.

And we’re going to see the result of all of those small actions. So I want you to really notice this and start to be aware of how this does happen.

And one thing that I like to do for myself, in terms of this is, again, looking at what’s happening in my business, taking some notes of the things that I want to happen, the actions that I’m taking to make those things happen and then writing down when they do so really getting involved with your business in terms of writing things out. journaling, you know, no one What you want focusing on your goals, and being aware of what those goals are perhaps doing things like a 90 day cycle where you can see like, these are my goals for 90 days, and I’m going to stick to these actions for 90 days. Or maybe it’s six months, and then looking and evaluating what happened as a result.

So a lot of times I tell my clients, and I tell my students, if you just stick out with things for six months, or give yourself three months, and really see where this goes.

Maybe you’re going to like for me, for instance, I’m starting this podcast, and I’m seeing where this goes. I don’t know how this is going to end for me. I don’t know if this is going to be something that I’m going to continue to do after a year. I surely hope so because I really do enjoy it so far, but I have to see and have to evaluate but I have to stick to it. for that year or have to stick to it for those six months no matter what it is this podcast or if it’s something else, stick to it for long enough to see what happens to see the results to have enough data to go back to data to have enough information to base my decisions off of.

So if I’m not taking those consistent actions as little actions every day, and I’m not looking at those actions after a certain period of time, and I’m just making a decision, like I’m just writing one blog post and then deciding like, Well, that didn’t work for me, that is not enough time and it’s not enough action for me to determine what it’s doing for my business.

So what you want to do is absolutely take those small, consistent actions, do them over and over and over again and then evaluate after a certain period of time.

So set yourself three months, six months, a year or however long you feel is appropriate amount of time. And then take those actions as much as you can perhaps make yourself a habit tracker. So that way you can look at it and see where it’s going. And as you go on throughout that time, you can jot down your feelings and how things are going for you and reevaluate at the end.

So those are the five mindset things that I really want you to focus on moving forward with your digital product creation, whether that is for ebooks, whether that is for courses, a membership, or if you want to make templates, no matter what it is, I want you to take these five things and to really start implementing them in your business and give back to me on how you feel it’s going let me know what you feel the results are after you have started trying to shift These things in your business, I would love to hear from you.

Instagram: @amanda_creek