If you look at a well-designed product like the Kopywriting Checklist I recently made, you may think, "Oh....but IIIIII can't do something like that!"  

Oh but my friend, you'd be very wrong.

You see, I actually designed the whole Kopywriting Checklist myself at first, and it turned out to be an utter disaster!!!!

It was so ugly I literally wrote "Voted Ugliest Checklist of 2014!" as a joke on the original cover:

Not only that, but the original product was just .....well....shitty.

I started out by just listing out random things about copywriting and then trying to awkwardly  stuff all that information onto one page of a Google Presentation (You can click "Save As PDF" and the presentation saves PERFECTLY as a PDF file).  The end result of my attempt was page-after-page of hard-to-read slides like this:

Oh dear god make it stop........

So in the beginning "The Great And Holy Neville" which you so revere has a product that:

1. Looks horrible
2. Just spouts random-ass copy facts in no useful order.

So a re-tooling of the whole product was badly needed:

What were people struggling with?

What was the major frustration for a lot of people?

Whilst brainstorming with Noah in Thailand, we stumbled upon this common scenario:

Someone is sitting at work banging their head against the desk trying to figure out what to write. Illustrated  here by a professional artist:

I imagine this guy on a tight deadline.

I imagine he's not feeling to creative right now.

I imagine his whole team will be reviewing what he wrote.

I imagine his whole team will be judging his performance.

This guy doesn't want to start studying a long course or start reading books about copywriting...NO!!  He needs a quick how-to guide that'll help him spit out a piece of copy that will hit all the psychological "sell" buttons.

This guy would be in desperate need of.......................... The Kopywriting Checklist!!!

So from this it was decided the Kopywriting Checklist would be for that guy.   It was designed to just let him go through the checklist step-by-step through the process.

So from here all I did was....

Just write out the steps.  That's it.

I imagined I was talking this dude through the process, and wrote out the steps for him to use.  Turned out it was 7 steps.  And it was all text (no images).  And it was all written in a simple Google Doc like this:

Sometimes it's really difficult to realize that something you sell, can be so simple.  So many people over-complicate it with TONS of extra information...but in reality you can boil it down to much less.

So I went through (shockingly fast because I had a super-clear vision of it) and made this Kopywriting checklist.

But then to make it pretty and useable, I needed a good designer.

I contacted Jenna from Designnosaur.  She's done some work for AppSumo before, and she's damn good....so I emailed her the document, and she literally did all the rest.

If you want to work with Jenna on a similar document, contact her here:

jenna@designnosaur.us

(She kicks ass.....and knows exactly what to do to make something look good without you giving her a million directions.  At least keep her contact info handy for the future).

Jenna took my text document and transformed it into a professional-grade ebook checklist I could be proud of, and people could easily absorb, or show in an office.....like this:

Once done, just for fun I made some of some of those "Digital Download" mockups using BoxShotKing (it was an AppSumo deal we ran, so I still have a login).  You can probably find free templates for making these also if you don't wanna pay:

Well.....that was pretty much it!

That's how you can take a concept and make it into a super-useful guide/product/freebie/download.

Hope you learned that it's not as intimidating or hard to make your first downloadable product like this, yet they're still INCREDIBLY useful to people!

P.S.  If you're going to ask, "Ok, how do I make tons of SALES for this digital product I just made?!"  That's a much larger question that will be discussed soon.

P.P.S.  Oh and by the way, if you'd like to buy the Kopywriting Checklist for a mere $10 (that's more than I pay for a glass of wine at a mid-level restaurant), you can grab it here and use it whenever you need to polish off some copy!