7 Tips to Successfully Selling Digital Products and Printables
What are digital products?
Digital products are anything that you can deliver to your customer digitally. No need to hold inventory. The customer does not have to wait to receive the product, as soon as the sell is made the customer can download your product. These can range from pdf’s to SVG files, code, images, eBooks, banners, party items etc. These are also known as printables.
Why sell digital products
Digital products are the internet’s answer to a physical store and best of all the barrier to entry is low. All you need is a one page website, called a lead page and a means to collect the money. Super simple to get started and you can make sales while you sleep.
How to get started
Step 1: First you need to decide what your first digital product will be. There are lots of resources on the internet and YouTube that can help you find a digital product to create. We created the “Ultimate List of Digital Products” to get you started and help you track sales. With a monster list of more than 60 digital product ideas, you can choose the first one you would like to pursue based upon your current digital skill sets and comfort.
Many digital products can be made using free and less than $15 a month software. Canva is by far the most versatile and easiest to use software. It runs in your browser and is being used by many creators. There are loads of tutorials on YouTube to help you get started using Canva as well.
Not sure what niche or topic to create a digital product around. Try heading over to Reddit, find a relevant subreddit for the niche you are considering, sort posts by “Top This Month”, find a question post with a lot of comments, create a digital product or lead magnet that answers the question in depth. You can check out our blogpost on How to Create an eBook for in depth tips on how to find a niche topic.
Where to sell your digital products
Step 2: Once you decide what you will create, you have to decide where you will sell it. Where your product will live. All your marketing and social media efforts will point to this one specific place where the sales will happen. You can use a website built using Square Space, our personal favorite. Many people also use WordPress. If you are selling eBooks for example you can use Gumroad , which has become the darling of the tech and Twitter money creators. There is also Amazon KDP, Nook, KOBO and Smashwords. Perhaps you want to make party items and ETSY might be the best place to sell. Shopify has been marking a mark in eCommerce and has become very popular because you can also dropship and make in person POS (point of sale) sales if you are selling prints at a farmer’s market or art house for example as part of your marketing.
Knowing where you will sell your first item id critical because you want to use the build once and sell forever strategy. Where you sell a digital product will dictate how it is made. Certain markets require custom dimensions and the margins of an eBook, for example, and you must keep this in mind as you create or your product will not be accepted for sale in their marketplace. Do your research on where you will sell and the requirements.
That being said, selling on your own site gives many advantages. Mostly, you will not have to give up a percentage of sales. This is important because you may take a “low price, sell a ton” strategy or the high price I only need to sell 3 a month to make what I need in cash flow. The disadvantage to selling only on your site is you must have a great deal of traffic to the site in order for your product to even be seen. That is where the large marketplaces have the advantage. More people are going to the large familiar sites ( such as Amazon) to find a product and you are more likely to be found. So, you also want to pay attention to whether the marketplace you have chosen allows you to sell on other sites. “Make once and sell in many places” strategy or if your item is their marketplace can not be sold anywhere else.
How to create your first digital product
Step 3: Create your first digital product. Make the most helpful product you can. Solve a problem. Give value to the customer. Make the darn thing!! OK, enough tough love. If you find it a bit too difficult to create your own digital product, but you know exactly what you want….just head over to Fiverr and hire a freelancer to make it for you. Done! Don’t feel bad about needing to hire someone to make your digital product, honestly, once you start making income from your digital creations you will most likely begin to outsource it anyway. The more you make, the greater the chance you will create one that is much sought after. The hardest part is identifying what you want the digital product to be about and what it should look like. Outsourcing the actual creation is the easiest way to just get the process going. We will do our best to keep adding posts that help to guide you on how to create some of the most popular digital products. You can find our first post on How to Create an eBook to get you started. Check the blog from time to time to see new articles that will help with your learning curve on how to create these different products.
How to set the price of your first digital product
Step 4: You now have your first digital product made and ready to sell on the platform of your choice. Now you need to set a price. Pricing has an entire field around it and can have a “throw a dart” feel at the start. You can start by looking at the price of other digital products just like yours. From there you need to decide if you will go for the higher priced “luxury” strategy or try to out compete them on sales volume with a lower price. You can always price high and lower over time if sales are poor ( everyone loves a discount). You can also raise the price if sales are going great ( you may need to add a new feature to make it worth the price increase). As you can see it is easier to lower the price than it is to raise the price on the same item. The strategy we have seen most frequently used, is to set the ultimate price based upon your goals and what you truly feel it is worth (let’s say just for example, this is $97.00) then sell it as a discounted item from this price. This way your audience can see what the worth is and the value they are getting. This would show as a product priced at $97 and discounted for the first 20 people to $47. You have probably seen this many times too. A big red slash through a price and a discounted offer. This has the benefit of allowing you to raise the price if you feel it is necessary because you priced it too low without giving the impression that you are arbitrarily raising the price from previous offers. You are getting it closer to its true value.
Step 5: So, you set your price and placed it on the market. Be sure to test it out and make sure it downloads and behaves as expected. You might be surprised how many people will find and purchase your broke ass product in the first day of listing. When you don’t want a huge number of eyes on it! Murphy’s Law. Good luck ever getting sales on that platform again if that happens. Test and test again!
Step 6: The product is on the market and its is working perfectly. Now you need to market the crap out of it. Just because you put it up on the world’s largest marketplace or your site is so beautiful….does not mean anyone will actually see it. You see, on average there is a 2% conversion rate in online ecommerce sales. What does that mean? if you want to sell 10 items, you need 500 people to see and interact with your content to sell it. It is a numbers game, and that is if your content is built to convert them to a sale. So you need to do all you can to optimize your content for a sale and send as many eyes as possible to your content. This is actually the toughest part of any digital content sales. Getting people to even know your amazing new digital product exists. You can take a course on digital marketing and try to ramp up your skill using Udemy for example. Canva as mentioned above has loads of social media templates to help you craft a social media presence. You may need to employ a Fiverr expert to help you with your marketing strategy, if this is not your expertise and you don’t want to tackle it yourself. There are options.
How to optimize your digital product for sales
Step 6: Optimizing your content for a sale. You now have optimized your marketing and are ready to drive traffic to your product. Is your content optimized for sales? Let’s face it, it is hard to begin to sell a product for the first time. Maybe you feel your product isn’t ready to sell. (hint: it is never ready and can always be improved). Solution: You have to make the best product you can and let the market tell you what you need to fix or change. Your customers are ready and waiting to comment on your product. Many people will do a test launch to a small number of customers to gain this honest feedback. Often times the product is given free to the first “x” number of people in exchange for comment or feedback or it is severely discounted. Maybe the fear you are feeling is based upon the fear of selling…..anything. Selling is the only way to get a good product to a customer that really needs it to solve a problem. If you give it away 100% of the time, you won’t be able to survive for long. Selling makes the world go round. Think about it. Look around you, how many things do you see in your immediate view that you bought? Even the computer or phone you are using now, you purchased in some way (perhaps through purchasing a cell phone plan). Someone sold something you needed and you were happy to pay to get it, because it solved a problem. You needed to communicate. If you have created something someone needs to solve a problem (and that is your goal when creating any digital product. Solve a problem), you are helping them by offering it up for sale and they are helping you by giving you the means to continue to help even more people. Don’t be afraid to sell. It is a good thing all around. Now that we have taken away the fear of selling let’s look deeper into how to sell.
It is interesting, what motivates a human to buy. According to Jim Edwards (2018, Copywriting secrets. Powell, OH: Author Academy Elite) , we are motivated to buy because we want to:
Make money
Save money
Save time
Avoid effort
Escape mental or physical pain
Get more comfort
Attain better health
Gain praise
Feel more loved
Increase social status
These are the motivators you need to have in your lead content in some way. Maybe the mental or physical pain your customer is feeling is the pain of trying to solve “X” problem to no avail. Here is how your digital product solves that and saves them time. See how this works? There are many marketing strategies that are employed to get people to smash that Buy button. Scarcity is the one used most often. Because it works. You see this used all the time on commercials and in content. Countdown timers til the end of the sale. Limited time or limited quantity. All these are motivators to get the customer over the conversion line to a sale. The most effective types of content that drive traffic and bring people into your content are generally educational:
Checklists or cheat sheets
Infographics
How to guides
Product overviews
Case studies, industry reports
Video training
Expert interviews
Generally, the lead content for your product sale has some form of this flow:
Pain
Pain exaggerated
Dream of what it could be
Solution
Call to Action
What you get
Sweeten the deal
Add bonuses
Handle objections (Frequently asked questions section)
Final call to action
These sections can be addressed using images or video as well, not just words. You can make Free landing pages at Carrd, you get three sites per account free. If you choose to create a full website for your digital products, our personal research has shown that you need at least 30 really good articles to generate a decent amount of traffic in a blog niche. Here is where Fiverr can come into play again. Hire a few writers to get your blog posts written in no time, if writing is not your thing. Or just put up a one page landing page that goes straight to your purchase site once they click the call to action button. No blog necessary.
How to expand your digital product sales
Step 7: You did it! You created and now have sales of your first successful digital product. Now what? Transform your digital products into other products. You could turn your successful eBook into a course. Each chapter is a portion of the course. Turn the eBook into an audiobook. Collate your printables into an eBook. Ultimately sell the website you created to sell the products and cash out. Rinse and repeat.
We created a workbook to help you along your journey! Check it out and get your copy
and get started today!
Bonus: How to sell your site
We are adding this bonus below for you because this information was really hard for us to find. We want to share it with you. We have not used any of these. Always check it out for yourself. Places to sell your website (Your digital real-estate asset):
Sell your startup projects and smaller websites Flippa
Largest Marketplace under $100k in revenue BizBuySell
Broker deals between $250K and $20 million (sites generating profits between $100K and $5 million per year) Digital Exits
Over $20 million selling price (business generates over $5 million per year in profit) Foundersib.com
Remember: Our site contains affiliate links. No medical or legal advice is given or implied. Always do your own due diligence and personal research. We strive to pass on knowledge we have gained in the hopes of helping you on your journey. What you do with that information is totally up to you. All the best!
Here is a video we found useful to help increase your knowledge base on this journey
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