Today, we want to help you turn your expertise into money-making templates.
Everyone is sitting on a $100,000 template.
Including you.
As a Digital Creator & Writer, you've without a doubt faced and conquered countless challenges. You've solved problems, developed strategies to overcome them, and gained a level of expertise in your niche—that even you don’t fully recognize.
This is the problem and the opportunity.
You are sitting on a goldmine. And you don’t even know it.
Which is why we are going to teach you how to recognize and package up your existing knowledge into templates that can be transformed into a profitable digital flywheel.
Let’s dive in!
Templates Are The EASIEST Way For You To Start Monetizing Your Expertise As A Digital Writer & Creator
A template is a cheat code—it’s literally anything you have had to figure out for yourself within your niche, that you can explain to someone else.
In the 90's the Nintendo 64 game console sold for $250 at GameStop. Super Mario cost $50. And directly next to the game, was a book by GameShark—with the ultimate codes to win the Super Mario 64 game. The cost? Also $50.
Here’s the lesson:
The “cheat codes” cost just as much as the game.
The most valuable thing you can give someone are the exact buttons they need to push to win whatever game is being played.
- The secret shortcut to win the Legend of Zelda
- The meal plan to lose 20 pounds
- The step-by-step guide to finish your first novel
- The cheat sheet to optimize your content strategy
- The framework to scale your online businesses
You’ve spent countless hours researching and experimenting to accomplish a goal. You know what to do to get a result. You’ve proven it. Which means you don't have to create a product from scratch. You're simply repackaging your existing knowledge into a template.
And the best part?
Templates sell for 100% margin - no physical inventory, no manufacturing costs, just pure profit.
So, whatever niche you are in, we want you to learn to create the cheat codes, templates, frameworks, or processes you’ve already created for yourself for your audience. Press these 3 buttons. And you will win!
This is how you create products that solve valuable problems for people and turn your expertise into cash.
Find Your $100K Template: The 2-Year Test
The 2-Year Test is a powerful method for identifying the problems you've solved in the past and using them as a basis for creating templates. By focusing on your past experiences, you can uncover a wealth of knowledge and expertise that can be shared with others.
To identify a template worth sharing, think back to who you were two years ago and consider the following questions:
- What problems did you face back then that you've since solved?
- What skills have you acquired or improved upon in the past two years?
- What challenges have you overcome in your personal or professional life?
- What areas of knowledge have you expanded upon or gained expertise in?
As you reflect on these questions, try to identify gaps between what life was like before and after the problem. Pinpoint the ways in which solving a problem or acquiring a skill helped you along the way.
These “solutions” can be broken down into a template that your audience will love.
For example, if you're a ghostwriter, you likely had to learn:
- How to position yourself
- How to find a client
- How to pitch a client
If you look at Ship 30 for 30, everything we teach is a direct result of solving a problem we had at one point in the past.
- How to build a daily writing habit
- How to generate ideas
- How to write effective headlines
Behind each thing you had to “learn how to” in the past 2-years is a template you can turn into a “here’s how you” for someone else.
3 Steps To Turn Your Experience Into A Profitable Product
Let’s get into it.
Step 1: Reverse-Engineer A Problem Into A Template (Then Hit Publish).
Start with a problem you identified with the 2-year test and outline the key steps you took to solve it.
Let’s walk through the example, “How to write a headline.”
- Define the problem: Clearly state the problem you are solving. Identify the desired outcome and constraints, if any. Learning to write headlines is a huge problem. You can spend a lifetime learning how to master them.
- Identify the main components: Break down the problem into smaller, manageable parts. These should be the key factors or elements that contribute to the problem or are necessary for the solution. Following our example, a headline is clear, specific, and makes a promise to the reader. It includes a specific who, what, how many, why, and a “knife twist.”
- Determine the order: Arrange the components in a logical order, considering dependencies and the sequence in which they need to be addressed to solve the problem effectively. 90% of headlines follow this order, “HOW MANY - THE WHAT - THE WHO - THE WHY - TWIST THE KNIFE”
- Create the step-by-step process: Develop a process or framework that outlines the steps needed to address each component in the correct order. This will serve as your template for solving the problem. Here’s how we did this for writing a headline!
Once you are done, review the steps and make sure it's easy to understand and follow.
A quick stress-test is to ask yourself if you would have loved to have what you just created 2-years ago! If the answer is yes, keep going. If not, keep refining until you are satisfied.
Now get some feedback. Create a simple outline and tweet it out. Generate interest. Test your ideas. Keep refining.
Step 2: Build In Public. Incrementally Expand As You Go.
Whatever is in your head should be on social, and whatever is on social should be in your newsletter, and whatever is in your newsletter should be in your course, etc.
- Write an Atomic Essay and cover the benefits of using your template.
- Record a Loom explaining your framework and post it on YouTube.
- Ship a newsletter article that provides further insights and advice.
At each step give more description, more examples, specific actions to take, tools to use, mistakes to avoid, etc. By expanding and creating on different mediums you are reaching a wider audience and providing an alternative format for those who are visual learners, or audible learners.
The mistake most people make is waiting. Don’t wait until you have a fully polished template to ship it. We falsely believe that we must have a complete thing before we can put out into the world. No, no, no.
- Build in public
- Create with your readers
- Give your readers EVERYTHING
Fight the impulse to polish before you ship. By waiting you lose the opportunity to get valuable feedback. Instead, share your knowledge freely as you go—giving it ALL away for free.
Here’s Cole (back when he had long hair), breaking down how to write headlines on video:
Step 3: Curate Your Templates Into A Profitable Product.
You might be thinking, “Wait? You just told me to give everything away for free. How am I supposed to sell it?”
This, my friends, is the great misunderstanding of the internet.
People will buy your product even when they can get it for free.
It's counterintuitive, but this is the way.
When you give things away for free. You build trust, respect, and credibility. People begin to recognize and see you as the authority in your niche.
You don't have to join Ship 30 for 30 to learn our frameworks. We tweet them out for free. The reason people pay to go through our program is because they want the community, they want the ideas and the templates organized in one easy to find referenceable place, and they want the experience.
There is no line between the things people get for free and the things people pay for (even high ticket items). The content doesn't change, but the level of access does. As a Ship 30 member you get:
- More access to an experience
- More access to you us the creators
- More access to a community of like minded individuals
- More access to the packaged, organized, and curated library of content
People pay for access and organization.
After you create one template, create another one, and then another one. Each template should be designed specifically to help your audience easily "push a button" to address their challenges and achieve desired results. Gradually, you'll build an extensive collection of targeted templates tailored to your audience's needs.
Then, package everything up into an organized library of templates and offer it for sale.
- Sell a $19.99 eBook on Gumroad that offers a comprehensive guide with your templates and actionable steps.
- Sell a $199 workshop, where you walk participants through using the templates effectively and provide personalized feedback to help them get results.
- Sell a $1,999 1:1 consulting session, where you work closely with a client, using your templates as the foundation to tackle their specific problems and help them achieve their goals.
Embrace the power of templates, share your knowledge, and get ready for people to throw money at you.
You will never reach a point where all the people on your list tell you to stop explaining what you know. So keep giving your audience everything you know as much as possible, all the time, always.
Templates are the EASIEST way for you to start monetizing your expertise!
That's it for today's Digital Writing Compass!
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