Selling Digital Products Online
Starting an online business has never been easier. It’s not so much about starting the company as it is totally about knowing what you wish to sell and how you want to sell it. services like marketing, writing, design, and development work are among the most popular freelancers.
But then, there are things like eBooks, books, physical items, and digital goods that can be sold and purposed online through a specific sales page. Selling digital products is a great way to secure extra cash inflow.
Webmasters, bloggers, writers, and anyone with a website can become digital product sellers and even though digital selling presents a much more relaxed selling environment, we should still remind ourselves that things like presentation and support management count.
If you wish to sell online, you have a reliable hosting account that is both secure and well-managed. You can get on top quickly if there are any problems with your websites.
You will also want to make sure that your website looks good.
The digital selling platform you will use can be integrated natively into your website management platform, you have the specifications to host your own version on your website. Many of the platforms on our list are working externally, meaning that you will often get links and widgets that you can use on your website. Selling digital products is a low-cost, low-hassle way to open a new revenue stream.
Whether that stream is a trickle or a torrent will depend on how much time you invest, the quality of your products, and how well you promote them. You may have hopes of making it big or maybe you just want a passive income stream that can grow to eventually replace your job.
Whatever your reasons are, diversifying your revenue and finding new ways to earn from home is a smart move. Best of all, you get a chance to put your knowledge and talent to work helping others.
We live in a time when people can run small businesses anywhere in the world. For some creators, selling digital products can provide extra income in addition to their main job. For others, it becomes a full-time business.
What Is A Digital Product?
Digital products are any virtual item you can pay for, and download instantly. Digital products are electronic goods, content, or piece of media that can be stored in a file or sold and shared online. EBooks, audio files, website templates, PDFs, etc are all digital products. They are intangible, in the sense that you can not touch them. But they have value to the tune of a projected $331 billion industry.
Streaming movies and TV, Video games, Software, and apps are the big hitters and they are the first things you might think of when you hear “digital products”. But there are lots of other ways you can create digital products from your own knowledge, creativity, skills, and expertise and you don’t need a film crew or a team of software developers to do it.
Why Did You Need To Sell Digital Products?
Creating, marketing, and selling digital products may seem overwhelming, especially if you are not the most tech-literate person on the planet. But a big thanks to online tools like Etsy, Shopify, and Thinkific the learning curve can be surprisingly short. And there are a lot of good reasons to sell digital products online.
1. Low Investment, High Returns:
There are plenty of digital items you can put together using only time, energy, and a little focus. Online marketplace and
e-commerce tools are relatively inexpensive, compared to renting a brick-and-mortar location or building a physical inventory. This means the potential for higher profit margins.
2. More Profitable Than Physical Goods:
Digital products sell at higher margins than physical products and that margin improves over time because you don’t need to spend any money producing more units.
3. No Inventory, Shipping, Or Rent Hassles:
Besides the fact that you don’t have to cover the cost of producing, storing, or shipping physical items, you can also avoid the logistics. Selling digital products through an online platform has the potential to be radically simple which is why it’s an ideal side hustle.
4. Automated Delivery For Passive Income:
If you have already got a day job keeping you busy, digital products you sell online can keep money coming in even if most of your week is spent at your full-time gig.
5. Serve A Niche At Scale:
Sometimes, it helps to be good at something obscure. Honing in on a specific audience, with specific needs is easier than competing broadly. Lots of people want shredded abs in 30 days. A much smaller minority wants the perfect physique for water polo. That is called serving a niche.
The challenge with selling niches locally is there often is not a big enough market to sell to. But even the smallest niches are big enough to serve globally with no geographic boundaries limiting who you can sell to.
6. Benefits Of Selling Digital Products:
Selling digital products can be a great way to make more money in a short period of time.
The beauty of digital marketing is that you create them once and then, can sell them again and again means spending less time working.
Through digital marketing online, you know that there are so many people you can serve and help.
Digital product selling is work that you literally can do from anywhere in the world. The best thing is, selling digital products is how easy to make money quickly means you can literally create your product one day and start selling it the next day.
When selling a digital product, you won’t have most of the overhead costs that are associated with brick-and-mortar or even physical product-based business.
With digital products, you can often just create your product and sell directly through your website without any middleman.
How To Sell Digital Products?
Following are the four steps to creating and selling digital products online.
1. Research And Validate Your Product Ideas:
Deciding on the product can be the hardest part, but it does not have to be. All it takes is some research and validation. The easiest way to go about it is to analyze your competition and check in with your audience. After all, fans follow you for a reason there must be some unique thing about your brand that they love.
To find the thing and build your product around that. When we look at the success stories of Sellfy creators, there is one thing that stands out: “fans are vocal about what type of products they wanted to see from their favorite creators, and the creator heard them”.
Emma’s strong determination to learn and excel led to her mastering the software and eventually sharing her knowledge on Tiktok. The more she posted, the more her social media following grew. So, this is how she started successfully creating and selling excel guides to her audience.
2. Create An Online Store With Sellfy:
Sellfy creators can choose from a vast selection of premade store themes. Once you are clear that what type of digital product you want to sell then it’s time to launch an online shop because that is exactly what Sellfy was created for. So, if you are looking for an affordable e-commerce solution to sell products then Sellfy is the great way to go. Even the Sellfy store will give you the following;
- Mobile-first design
- Full store customization
- Instant payouts
- Discount codes
- Advanced VAT and tax settings
- Multiple payment options
- Excellent customer support
- You can even sell physical products and print-on-demand alongside your digital goods and subscriptions.
Ready to open a store so you can sell online? Let’s get started:
- Choose a subscription plan and set up an account with a valid email address, or start a free trial. Keeping in mind that you can always upgrade and get access to additional features.
- Customize the look with the Store Customizer tool, or use one of Sellfy’s premade themes to get a beautiful design.
- Download Sellfy’s mobile app in the Apple Store or Google Play to keep track of your performance and receive notifications of new orders.
3. Add Your Digital Products:
After you have created an account with a verified email address, you can start uploading your products to the store. Sellfy has unlimited bandwidth and large file support, so you will never have to worry about storage. With the ability to upload files as large as 10GB, you can sell just about any type of digital product imaginable.
Following are the steps to follow while adding the product:
- Go to your dashboards product section, Choose Digital Products, and click Add new product option.
- Upload your digital products
- Add relevant products images
- Add some info in the Product Description section so that potential customers know what they are buying.
- Hit Save Product and your digital items will appear live in your shop.
4. Promote To Your Audience:
Add your shop link to your social media profiles. This is important because whenever new follower finds your social media account, they are likely to go to your bio section and see your link.
So, having a link in the bio at all times will encourage traffic to your online store from both new and existing followers. Showing what a product can do for people is better than simply telling them to buy it.
Like, award-winning textile designer Linda Skuja built her entire Instagram strategy around celebrating her customers. She would create appreciation posts, celebrate their milestones, and re-share user-generated content of her product.
She also made significant visual improvements to her feed by partnering up with a photographer. And last, but not least she made sure to post consistently and stay active.
Which Platforms Should You Choose?
If you want to sell digital products online, consider using a few of the following e-commerce platforms.
1. Sellfy:
Sellfy is perfect for those who want a simple yet powerful platform to sell digital products. Not only Sellfy is easy to set up, but you can also sell both physical and digital products. It even has a print-on-demand feature that lets you offer shirts, hoodies, hats, and mugs. It will print products as soon as orders come in and then send them to your customers.
You don’t even have to lift a finger. But going back to selling digital products, you can offer all sorts of digital content from eBooks to music files. There is even an option to sell videos on demand. Customers can stream content from your site for free. and there is no risk of piracy since Sellfy has an infrastructure in place to prevent it.
2. Pidia:
Podia is a platform for selling digital goods like online courses, webinars, memberships, and downloads. In a sense, podia is a full-service e-commerce platform. You can create a website where you can sell digital goods. There is support for email and affiliate marketing.
Plus, you can add a live chat widget to engage potential customers. Podia allows you to upload unlimited files and videos, and it also allows you to set up different payment plans, does upsells, and offers quizzes.
You can also do pre-selling to see if there is any interest in your course topic. And if you want to you can deliver content in stages so that all your students learn at the same pace.
3. Payship:
Payship focuses on helping users who want to sell digital downloads easily. You can use this platform to sell eBooks, software, and online learning resources. And not only can you sell files but you can also sell subscriptions through Payship. Payship transactions are not just secure, but they are also convenient for your customers. You can sell digital products from anywhere your e-commerce store, blog, or even your social media pages.
Customers who buy your digital products will be able to download them immediately and for their convenience, Payship will even send emails to customers where they will find the download page. And best of all Payship can digitally stamp PDF documents with your customer’s name to discourage them from illegally sharing your files.
4. Sendowl:
SendOwl is the best e-commerce platform when it comes to selling digital goods from websites and social media. All thanks to its simplicity. SendOwl let you start and customize an online store that you can then add to your blog in minutes.
You can also create social links that let you sell online using Facebook and other social media sites. The purchase and checkout process is also great. Customers can add items to their shopping cart and continue shopping at a leisurely pace. It also has flexible payment options and even better SendOwl can support multi-language and multi-currency transactions.
Conclusion:
That concludes our roundup of the best platforms to sell digital products. There is no “one glove fits all” strategy here. So take a minute and think about the types of products you want to sell, the features that matter to your business, and your final budget.
Big thanks to e-commerce tools like Sellfy, selling digital products online could not be easier. It’s a very simple and effective way to make money online in a short period of time. They can complement your existing physical goods or stand on their own to make for a successful online business, all you need is a little creativity and invested time to really flesh out your product and online strategy. Without dealing with overhead costs, you can put all your energy into making your digital goods the best they can be.
