How To Create Digital Products Using AI (Step By Step Tutorial)

Most people assume creating a digital product takes weeks of specialized expertise, expensive design software, or a deep background in the niche they want to enter. This video flips that assumption. Using ChatGPT and Midjourney, Alston walks through the complete process of going from zero to a finished, sellable 10-page adult animal coloring book in a single session. He had no prior knowledge of arts and crafts when he started.

The honest trade-off is this: ChatGPT and AI image tools do the heavy lifting on ideation and production, but you still make the judgment calls that keep the product from feeling generic. You choose which images are good enough. You rewrite the copy so it sounds like a human. You decide which testimonials you actually have permission to use (none, if you are just starting). That human layer is what separates a product that sells from one that collects dust. Here is every step Alston covers.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A repeatable ChatGPT prompt chain for finding a profitable niche and specific product type
The exact Midjourney workflow for creating coloring page images and iterating until they are usable
A three-tier sales funnel structure (front-end, order bump, upsell) with specific price ranges for each
How to write sales page headlines, order bump copy, and upsell outlines using ChatGPT
Which marketing channels move product fastest and which ones build longer-term audience
How to generate a 7-day email welcome sequence with ChatGPT and which parts you must rewrite yourself
Which sales funnel platforms support upsells and which ones do not
Not sure which digital product niche actually fits your current skills? Check finder.platformproof.com to get a clear answer before you build anything.

Step 1: Use ChatGPT to Find Your Niche and Specific Product

The process starts in ChatGPT with a single context-setting prompt: “Answer questions as an expert digital marketer and web copywriter.” This primes every response that follows. Without this, ChatGPT gives you generic answers. With it, the output is more focused and commercially useful.

From there, ask it to generate a list of the best niches for digital products. In the video, it returns seven: health and wellness, personal development, finance and investing, business and entrepreneurship, technology and software, arts and crafts, and beauty and fashion. Alston picks arts and crafts because he thinks it gets less attention than finance or business content, which means less competition at the product level.

Within arts and crafts, the next prompt is: “Create a list of product ideas for the arts and crafts niche.” The response includes DIY crafts, kids crafting tutorials, printable art, craft patterns, craft supplies, art classes, and DIY home decor. He narrows to printable art, then asks for product ideas specifically in the digital art sub-niche. The list that comes back: wall art, greeting cards, calendars, coloring pages, planners, invitations, and postcards.

He picks coloring pages. One more prompt narrows it further: “Give me ideas for coloring pages.” The output includes animals, nature scenes, characters, inspirational quotes, patterns, and holiday themes. He picks animals and arrives at his final product concept: a 10-page adult animal coloring book. The whole ideation chain took roughly five minutes and required zero prior expertise in the niche.

Step 2: Create the Product in Midjourney

With the product concept locked, the next stop is Midjourney. Midjourney has a free tier and a paid tier. Alston is on a paid plan during the video, but the free version can work for testing and smaller projects.

The first prompt he enters is: “adult coloring book bear and forest.” The results come back with color in the images, which does not work for a coloring page. The key lesson here: the output quality of any AI tool is directly tied to the precision of the input. Vague prompts produce vague results. He refines the prompt to “adult coloring book bear and forest black and white” and the images improve significantly. The bear illustrations in particular turn out well.

He names the coloring book “Wild About Bears” after asking ChatGPT to generate 10 possible names. Other options from the list: The Bare Necessities, Grin and Baird, Bear Hugs. Wild About Bears wins for its market appeal to his target audience.

Each image gets right-clicked and saved from Midjourney, then dropped into a Canva A4 document (the equivalent of standard 8.5 by 11 inch letter-size paper). The image is resized to fill the page. That is one finished coloring page. Repeat for nine more images. The cover can also be generated in Midjourney. Once all 10 pages and a cover are assembled in Canva, export the document as a PDF. That PDF is the sellable product.

The eagle prompts give him more trouble than the bears. Some images have color bleeding in, some look nothing like traditional line-art coloring pages, and some are just not good enough to sell. Iteration is built into the process. Not every Midjourney output is usable. Some prompts require three or four attempts before producing something sellable. Budget time for that and do not settle for images that are not clearly readable as coloring pages.

Step 3: Build the Three-Part Sales Funnel

Alston is explicit about the pricing structure he recommends for digital products sold through a funnel. There are three tiers, and each one has a job.

Front-end offer: The 10-page Wild About Bears coloring book, priced between $5 and $10. This is the entry point. All of your advertising spend or organic content drives people to this page. The goal is not to make all your money here. The goal is to get buyers into the funnel.

Order bump: A mini-course on how to create your own adult coloring books using Midjourney and Canva. Priced between $10 and $20. This appears on the checkout page as a one-click add-on. It sells to people who liked the product enough to want to learn the process behind it. The logic is that someone spending $5 to $10 on a coloring book might spend another $10 to $20 if they can see the upside of making their own.

Backend upsell: A coloring book bundle covering three different animal sub-niches. Priced between $20 and $90. This appears after the initial purchase. Buyers who just completed a transaction are the warmest audience you have. A bundle of three different coloring books at a bundled price gives them more of what they already proved they wanted.

Alston also considers wall art prints as a possible order bump or upsell after Midjourney generates a strong bear eating honey under a tree. That image is good enough to sell as a standalone print, not just as a coloring page. One Midjourney session can produce multiple products across different positions in the funnel.

For funnel software, he names three options: ClickFunnels (what he uses), WordPress with a checkout plugin, and Gumroad. One important note: Gumroad does not support upsells. If you want to capture the backend offer, you need ClickFunnels or a comparable tool. If you are testing the concept for free and are willing to skip the upsell for now, Gumroad works for the front-end and order bump.

Step 4: Write the Sales Page With ChatGPT

Back in ChatGPT, give it the full product context before asking for any copy. The prompt Alston uses specifies the product name (Wild About Bears), the format (10-page adult coloring book), and the target market: women over 60 who want to spend their free time coloring animals. That specificity changes everything about the output.

With that context set, ask ChatGPT to build a sales page outline. Then follow up with: “Write 10 headline examples.” Review each one and identify the two or three that feel most authentic to the product and the audience. Headlines like “Introducing Wild About Bears: The Ultimate Coloring Book for Animal Enthusiasts” come from giving the tool enough information to write for an actual person.

For the order bump section, ask ChatGPT to write a short order bump description for the mini-course. It produces a usable draft that you review and tighten. For the upsell, do the same: give it the product name, the price range, and the buyer context. It generates the outline. You clean it up.

One rule Alston states twice: do not include testimonials you do not have. If you are launching this product for the first time, you have no customer feedback yet. Fabricating social proof is not a gray area. It will cost you trust and, in many markets, create legal exposure. Use ChatGPT to write the structure and the copy framework. Fill in the human details yourself.

Which digital product niche fits the skills and time you already have?

The Finder at finder.platformproof.com helps you match your current situation to a specific product type before you spend time building something that does not fit.

Step 5: Market the Product

Ask ChatGPT to list the best marketing channels for your specific product. When Alston plugs in “Wild About Bears,” it returns a channel list with different time horizons and cost levels.

For the fastest results, paid advertising. Facebook ads are his specific recommendation for this product because the target market, women over 60 who want to color animals, is more active on Facebook than on TikTok or YouTube. The channel that fits your product depends on where your specific buyer actually spends time, not on which platform is currently growing fastest.

For free traffic over a longer window, TikTok and YouTube Shorts both appear on the ChatGPT-generated list. One content idea it suggests that Alston pulls out specifically: a time-lapse video of someone actually coloring in one of the pages. Print a page, set up a phone camera, record the coloring session, post it. Simple, visual, directly demonstrates the product without any selling language.

Other TikTok content ideas from the ChatGPT output: behind-the-scenes footage of the Midjourney image generation process, coloring tips for beginners, product demos showing the full book. Each of these is a real piece of content that costs nothing to create beyond time.

Step 6: Set Up Email Marketing

The final component of the system is email. Email marketing gives you a direct line to buyers and interested prospects that does not depend on any platform’s algorithm. The two-part setup: lead magnet plus email sequence.

Ask ChatGPT to generate lead magnet ideas for Wild About Bears. Options it produces: a free single coloring page, a coloring tips and tricks guide, and a free sample pack of animal images. Any of these can sit behind an opt-in form. Someone who downloads a free bear coloring page has shown they are interested in the product. They belong on the list.

Then ask ChatGPT to write a 7-day email sequence for Wild About Bears. It generates a full sequence with subject lines and body text. The sequence it produces in the video includes: a welcome email on day 1, an email on the therapeutic benefits of coloring on day 2, a product introduction with a direct purchase link, and follow-up emails covering tips and buyer stories.

The rule Alston applies to every piece of AI-generated copy applies here too: read every email before it goes out. Add one personal detail, one real example, or one sentence in your own words to each email. The AI draft gives you a starting point. Your voice is what makes people open the next email.

Honest Drawbacks

This process is faster than building a digital product from scratch without AI, but it is not frictionless. Here is what the video shows but does not always highlight directly.

Midjourney requires iteration. The eagle images in the video do not come out right on the first attempt, or the second. Some prompts take three or four rounds before producing a usable image. If you go in expecting one prompt to produce 10 perfect pages, you will be disappointed. Budget time for iteration and be willing to scrap images that are not clean enough for a coloring page.

AI copy needs rewriting. Alston says this directly: if you use ChatGPT for your entire marketing, the copy will feel bland. The tool is useful for structure and for getting a first draft on the page. It is not a substitute for knowing your buyer and speaking to them specifically.

Gumroad does not support upsells. If you want the three-tier funnel to work as described, you need ClickFunnels or a similar tool that supports post-purchase offers. Gumroad is free and useful for testing, but the upsell revenue is where a lot of the funnel’s total value comes from.

Free marketing takes time. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are listed as free traffic options, but building an audience on either platform is a months-long project. If you need sales quickly, paid advertising is the faster path. If you have time but limited budget, free content is viable, just slower than it looks in the marketing channel list.

No testimonials at launch. A brand-new product has no reviews, no social proof, and no case studies. The sales page will be leaner than a competitor who has been in the market for six months. That is fine. Do not fabricate testimonials to fill the gap. Build them over time by delivering a good product to real buyers.

Find Your X

The process in this video works for animal coloring pages. It also works for planners, printable wall art, journaling templates, pattern packs, and dozens of other digital product types. The ChatGPT niche research chain is the same regardless of which direction you go. The Midjourney or Canva production process adapts to whatever format you choose. The funnel structure and pricing tiers hold across product categories.

The question is which direction to point that process. If you are not sure which product type fits the time you have, the skills you currently have, and the audience you are trying to reach, start at finder.platformproof.com. It is built to help you match your actual situation to a specific starting point so you are not guessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to know anything about arts and crafts to sell digital coloring pages?

No. In the video, Alston explicitly says he knows nothing about arts and crafts before starting. ChatGPT handles the niche research and product ideation. Midjourney generates the images. Your job is to select the best outputs, assemble the pages in Canva, and make the marketing decisions. Subject expertise in the niche is not required to start.

What does Midjourney cost and do I need the paid version?

Midjourney has a free tier that allows a limited number of image generations per month. Alston is on a paid plan during the video, but the free version is enough to test the process and generate a small number of images for a first product. If you plan to create multiple products or need a high volume of iterations, the paid plan becomes more practical. Check the current pricing on Midjourney’s site directly, as plans change.

Which sales platform should I start with?

Gumroad is free and handles payment processing, file delivery, and basic product pages. It is the lowest-barrier starting point. The trade-off is that Gumroad does not support post-purchase upsells, so the three-tier funnel Alston describes requires a different tool for the backend offer. ClickFunnels supports the full funnel structure including upsells. WordPress with a checkout plugin is a middle option. Start with Gumroad to validate that the product sells before investing in paid funnel software.

How do I price my front-end digital product?

In the video, Alston suggests pricing the front-end offer between $5 and $10. The goal of the front-end is not maximum revenue per unit. It is to get buyers into the funnel at a low enough price point that the purchase decision is easy. The real revenue comes from the order bump ($10 to $20) and the upsell ($20 to $90). Pricing the front-end too high reduces the number of people who enter the funnel and lowers total revenue across all three tiers.

What is an order bump and how is it different from an upsell?

An order bump is an add-on that appears on the checkout page before the buyer completes their purchase. It is a one-click addition to the current order. An upsell appears after the purchase is complete, on a separate page that the buyer lands on after confirming payment. Both require the buyer to make an additional decision. The order bump happens while the buyer’s wallet is already open. The upsell happens when they have already committed to buying once and are in a purchasing mindset.

Can I sell the same type of product across multiple niches?

Yes. Alston describes a coloring book bundle as the upsell, which covers three different animal niches instead of just bears. The production process for bears is the same as for lions, eagles, or any other subject. Once you have the Midjourney prompting workflow figured out for one niche, applying it to adjacent niches is mostly a matter of changing the prompt keywords and repeating the process. Each additional niche can be either a separate product or part of a bundle.

How long does it take to build the first product?

Based on what the video shows, the ideation phase in ChatGPT takes roughly five minutes once you have the context-setting prompt in place. Generating images in Midjourney is faster for some prompts than others. Each image generation takes about a minute to complete, and you will likely need multiple rounds per page to get usable results. Assembling 10 pages in Canva adds another 30 to 60 minutes depending on how much layout adjustment you do. A realistic first-session timeline is two to four hours from opening ChatGPT to having an exportable PDF.

Do I need a large social media following to sell this?

No. Paid advertising removes the audience requirement entirely. Facebook ads can put your front-end offer in front of your target market immediately, regardless of your follower count. The trade-off is ad spend. If you have no marketing budget, building an audience through TikTok or YouTube Shorts is the free path, but it takes longer. Etsy is another option for printable products that gets organic search traffic without requiring a personal following, though Alston does not cover it in this specific video.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Create Digital Products Using AI (Step By Step Tutorial)” on YouTube: youtu.be/BVoYCTykXOA
ChatGPT (OpenAI): used in the video for niche research, product ideation, sales copy, and email sequence generation
Midjourney: used in the video for AI image generation of coloring page illustrations
Canva: used in the video for page layout and PDF export
ClickFunnels: named in the video as the preferred sales funnel platform supporting upsells
Gumroad: named in the video as a free alternative for front-end and order bump, without upsell support

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.