I’m so excited to share a new digital product profile with you today. Margaret Rode of Websites for Good helped me get this super-affordable wordpress website off the ground in record time. Beyond her responsiveness and ability to handle all things tech, I always appreciate how she helps me find the most reasonable and affordable way to accomplish what I really want to have done.
Today, Margaret is here to share some of the details behind her new digital product – The 90-Minute Website – which is one way for entrepreneurs to get an affordable WordPress website design. One of the intriguing aspects of Margaret’s product is that she’s combined a digital product with a very specific service offering, which enables her to offer an affordable alternative to getting a new website created, and serve more people with her work.
Margaret was kind enough to answer a few questions about how this product came to be.
Laura: Where did the idea for your digital product first come from?
Margaret: I’m a web designer and developer in Evergreen, Colorado, and I work with small businesses, nonprofits, and other people that are trying to do something good in the world. I love my work and who I do it for, but for years I had to turn away people who came to me hoping for a small, effective, inexpensive website. There is only me and my two small hands, and I tended to work on larger projects to keep the bills paid. I hated saying no to these people, because often they were really beautiful people doing amazing work in the world. But I felt like I had to.
I got the idea to develop a digital product by brainstorming how I could stop saying “no” to these good people. Where was the intersection of what I was good at, and what they needed the most? My strength, I felt, was in teaching people how to “do” a website right, so the end result is something that really and truly helps get clients, donors, supporters, and fans. Was there something I could create that would help them, without necessarily investing dozens of hours of my time (that I didn’t have) in each project?
Laura: What were some of the more challenging parts of getting from idea to done, and how did you work past them?
Margaret: There were two challenging parts to getting from this initial idea to a sellable product. One was making time to create it amid my other life responsibilities. For at least a year I only daydreamed about it. I needed a jump start, and serendipitously I saw Laura Brandenburg’s Digital Product Workshop on my Facebook feed. I took the course, and it ignited me. It helped me brainstorm in a structured way, and clarified for me what I wanted it to do, and who I wanted to help.
The second challenge was coming up with the form it should take. This couldn’t just be a simple e-book. People need more personalized help because they all had different needs. So I created a hybrid digital product—a product PLUS a service bundled together.
I started with a non-geeky e-course teaching them what they need to know & gather for a website, and bundled it with a hands-on session to build their site together. (I called it the 90-Minute Website.) For them, it’s a fraction of the cost of a regular website, because they are helping to create it with me. For me, it allows me to share my expertise by putting it down into a digital product that lots of people can enjoy . . . which takes less of my time but still provides great value. They learn on their own, then I “sherpa” them to pull all the pieces together, and in just a short session we go from zero to website.
People love it, and that makes me happy through and through. Recently, one of the participants told me, “My new business idea just seemed like a lark until we launched my new website together. Now it’s all for real, no kidding. I feel like a business owner, so much clearer about my audience and what I do, and making money to boot.” I loved hearing that so much!
Laura: What did it feel like to see that first sale come in?
Margaret: As thrilling as it was to see my first sale come in—and it was almost surreal to get that “you’ve got money” email from PayPal, like magic money—it was just as thrilling to have one of my clients tell me about the first sale THEY made with their new website. So all that stuff they tell you about “doing well by doing good”? It’s absolutely, positively true. Create something good, and others will use it to create good, in an endless chain.
Laura: What would you recommend to other women who are putting together their first digital product?
Margaret: If I had any advice for other women thinking about putting together their first digital product, it would be to start with these three questions: Who do I want to help the most with this product? What do they need the most right now? (i.e. facts, instructions, a system, some sort of relief, another income stream, etc.) What is living in my brain & experience that I could capture either on paper, or on paper plus a little personal time, that would help fill that need? These are from my notes from the Digital Product Workshop, accompanied by big red Sharpie asterisks – they were my guideposts.
Laura: Congratulations, Margaret! I’m so excited that you’ve brought this offering into the world. Finding someone you can trust to help you with your website is a difficult business challenge. And I know people can trust in you.
If you need a new or improved affordable WordPress website for your online business, be sure to check out Margaret’s 90-Minute Website offer. And if you are looking for a more hands-off approach, she also has a handy guide on how to pay her less money, available on her website.
