How to sell digital products online? One of the best ways to earn an income online is through selling digital products. But how can you sell a digital product online and what if you don’t have anything to sell?
I first looked at selling my own ebook online several years ago. Once I’d spent time and effort creating the book, I realised the main problem wasn’t in the building of the selling “system” – the website, sales page and payment options. No, it was in attracting people to my website where they could buy it!
So before you rush off and create your own digital product to sell online, listen up! I can save you a bit of time here. I put myself on an online course with the intention of learning some marketing skills to sell my own ebook.
But instead I found an online business model called affiliate marketing. You may have already heard of affiliate marketing but if you haven’t, it’s a business model where you can get paid for selling other people’s products and services online. The best part is that there’s already thousands of digital products for you to sell, and of far higher caliber that most people can create themselves.
So I ditched my ebook idea and instead learned affiliate marketing instead. You should too, here’s why!
How To Sell Digital Products Online – Why Use Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing lets you use existing digital products so you don’t need to create your own. Creating your own products is very difficult, especially if you have no experience. The simplest digital product of your own to create is an ebook. But selling an ebook is difficult because they are often given away for free on websites. Grab mine below:
But even if you could sell your own ebook, you wouldn’t get much from it. A few dollars, perhaps. But sell an online training course, and you can make 40% of the course cost. The first course I sold online was selling for $100 and I made $40 per sale. It was worth much more than my ebook because it offered far more value and appealed to a larger audience. My first ebook was about how to become a stuntman. Since I had become a stuntman in the early 2000’s I thought it a relevant book. But I struggled selling it. It didn’t appeal to a wide audience and nobody could find my website.
With a affiliate marketing, on the other hand, you can have your choice of product. You can sell high ticket items which offer done for you business kits, and with the ability to access mentors and coaches. Or sell products which offer software solutions for businesses. These kinds of products offer some of the greatest value to customers and often carry subscription payments. So you can earn residual income from each sale. You simply couldn’t do this with an ebook because it only offers limited value and a “one-off” purchase.
Access a free video course here to learn more about affiliate marketing and get started.
How To Sell Digital Products Online – Product Choice
The key to making an income online is the selling, or, more specifically the marketing. Before you can sell a product online you must promote (or market) it. This was something I just didn’t understand when I wrote my first ebook on how to be a stuntman. I did all the work of building the infrastructure of a selling “machine”. I built the website, and set the product up so it could be sold, on complete autopilot. But then nothing happened. Nobody knew where my website was.
An affiliate program gives you the nuts and bolts of website setup and even all the ready made selling “machinery”. This comprises of affiliate products, banners, website, email marketing templates, the whole shebang. It gives you a product to sell too, ideally one which is of high value and highly sought after already.
With a high value product, it’s much easier to sell it. It appeals to a wide audience of people and offers huge value. So although there’s a tonne of affiliate products out there to choose from, it’s worth choosing wisely. Some products sell better than others.
So choosing a high value product to sell is priority number one if you want to sell digital products online. A good, high value products offers multiple earning methods because it has multiple products to sell at different price points. This gives you a wider audience to sell to, and high ticket, mid ticket and low ticket items to sell. A training course or software product also gives you a subscription item to sell, which gives you a recurring income from your sales. This is massively useful especially if you’re a beginner. It gives you a more sustainable income more quickly from those recurring payments.
Using A Selling “System”
The most difficult part of selling, once you have chosen a high quality product to sell is in finding a marketing method which works. You can use paid advertising, search engine optimisation, social media platforms, video, email marketing and so on. The key is to attract (en-masse), a constant stream of buyers to your products. This is often done through email marketing, using a landing page and an email marketing system.
A landing page is a simple web page specifically designed for the capture of a visitor’s email address. On a normal website, there’s far more choice for a visitor. They can browse around and look through your posts, for example. But a landing page only has two options for a visitor: they can sign up to your list, or leave the website.
Landing pages have also been known as “Squeeze” pages, because they squeeze your information out of you! They can also be optimised for maximum efficiency so you spend less on advertising to attract more of the right kinds of subscribers. This is done through cross testing slightly different landing pages against each other so find the best performance over a large number of visitors.
How To Sell Digital Products Online – Why Email Marketing?
So, by using an advertising platform, you drive paid traffic towards a landing page and collect email subscribers. Why not send that traffic directly to the product you want to sell? There’s a reason for this and it’s because most online shoppers want a good look at something before they buy. So if you send traffic directly to a product online, (using your affiliate link), you will more than likely lose most of your advertising dollars when they don’t buy!
Studies have shown that most online shoppers will want at least 6-8 touch points with an unknown seller/product when it comes to making a purchase online. Amazon is perhaps an exception because it has built up trust over the years with customers. But Amazon doesn’t sell digital products and although you can partner with Amazon to become an affiliate for their product range, their affiliate commission rates are so low it doesn’t offer the best opportunity for third party referrals.
So, if you’re going to promote digital products online, email marketing is a good idea because it allows you those multiple touch-points with your potential customers through email messages. Once you have your subscribers email mail, you can follow up with training and information which helps build trust over time. Often marketers will sell products through email messages even months or years after someone has joined their list.
Why Use Digital Products?
So, if Amazon is so well trusted, why not sell physical products from Amazon? As I mentioned already, Amazon has an affiliate program so you can sell their products if you choose. However, physical products pay far less than digital products to affiliates. With a physical product, you have more costs involved than with their digital counterparts.
Physical products have greater manufacturing costs, handling costs and postage costs. With a digital product you can send it over the internet for free! Once a digital product is created, there’s no further manufacturing involved. So it’s much cheaper to actually deliver a digital product. This saving is passed to the affiliates who promote the product.
Since product promotion is the greatest cost for digital products (once they are created), it makes sense to pass this to the affiliates who act as advertising agents and accept the risk of paying for marketing.
This is why some digital products pay the affiliate up to 50% (but usually 30%-40%) of the cost of the item. By contrast, physical products typically pay between 1% and 10%. So you can see, promoting a product from Amazon, although popular with online consumers, is going to be less lucrative than with a digital product, all things being equal.
Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to build some trust with your subscribers over time. Since the online marketplace is a buyers marketplace, it doesn’t work trying the “hard sell” online. Just like in a shop with a pushy sales person, it’s easy to walk out and find your product elsewhere. Except with online shopping, it’s far easier to walk out of the “shop” because there’s no physical store or actual sales people holding you in a conversation.
The email marketing tactic allows you to build a rapport with your email subscribers over time by offering value driven email marketing messages. These are often messages designed to help your subscribers with a particular problem. By delivering regular value-driven messages, about a specific topic related to your product/service, you gain trust.
When a subscriber comes to make a buying decision, they think of you because you’ve already helped them and given them your time and energy. Email marketing is one of the best ways of selling digital products online, if you approach it with the right intentions.
Driving Traffic To Your Landing Page
With a small email list, you can only sell a small number of products. But with a large email list, you can sell many more! This sounds relatively obvious, but the number of affiliates who quit their businesses before reaching even 1000 subscribers on their email list is huge. To get subscribers to join your email list, you need to drive traffic towards your landing page.
This can be done through using an advertising platform such as Google Adwords, or one of the many social media platforms. However, you also need to attract the right type of person according to what you’re offering on your landing page. A good landing page has an enticing offer which is attractive to your visitors.
Get the wrong kind of visitor, and you’ll be spending money without getting subscribers. So understanding the kind of person you want to attract on to your email list is key. You want to attract your “customer avatar” or, the type of person who is likely to buy from you.
With Google Adwords, for example, you can specify the search query that gets typed into Google in order to trigger your advert. So, for example, for my landing page here (below), it would be something related to what I’m offering – information about affiliate marketing.
The Customer Journey
The customer journey from advert to landing page to email messages, to product should be a congruent one. So keywords within your advert and messages should align carefully with your product offering and your messaging. All of these factors need to also solve a major problem for your subscriber. If they are a good fit, and you convey your marketing message in a congruent way, they are likely to purchase if your product meets their needs and you have conveyed its value!
A digital product may need a little more explanation than a physical product because a digital product is often less tangible for customers. A physical product is much more tangible – what you see is what you get. An image might be enough to convey what a physical product is and does for someone. But with a digital product, it may need a little further examination before someone will commit to buy.
It’s also worth finding products which offer a guarantee, particularly if you’re selling digital items. A guarantee gives someone the peace of mind that if a certain product doesn’t meet their needs, or, if they have made a mistake in buying, they can get a refund no questions asked.
Summary
So, how to sell digital products online? Initially you’ll want to find a digital product that’s of high value that you can sell. Choose wisely because your product choice has a massive effect on whether you’ll be successful. Checkout this free course here which gives you all the tools and training needed, plus a range of products to sell.
Set up a paid advertising campaign, running targeted traffic to a landing page. Collect emails and build a large email list. Deliver value driven email messages which are aligned with helping your subscribers and your products. Keep building the list, and tweaking your marketing efforts, learning as you go!
It can take a little time and effort before you find the right marketing strategy. Keep in mind that many affiliates will quit when things don’t work on their first time running a marketing campaign. Or, if they don’t sell something right away. Just keep with it, and focus on that first online sale. Once you’ve done it once, you can do it again and again.
