Selling digital products online is one way to Escape9toFive. With a 9 to 5 job, you’re trading your time for money. So no matter how much you get paid, there’s always a finite amount of time in the day, so your income is always limited. But through selling digital products online, you can step outside of this “time for money” paradigm. Sales of products online can far outreach what you can earn trading your time in a job. That’s especially true of digital products because they can be sold internationally and with zero postage costs.
But what digital products can you sell online? Do you need your own digital products, or can you sell existing products?
Selling Digital Products Online – Affiliate Products
A clever business model was made popular by Amazon in 1996 when it opened its affiliate program. This meant that anyone could “partner” with Amazon and get paid for product promotion. While Amazon was generally known as a physical product marketplace, there’s also thousands of digital affiliate products you can promote online too.
Clickbank, for example is one of the most popular places where affiliates find and promote digital affiliate products. You don’t need to create a product of your own to benefit from this growing online trend. You only need to promote and sell existing products to make money through their sale.
There’s thousands of digital products you can sell online. Some of them even carry subscriptions which enable you to earn ongoing income from each sale you generate through recurring income. So which are the best products to promote and how can you promote them online?
Selling Digital Products Online – Best Products To Sell
If you venture to Clickbank.com you’ll find thousands of digital products to sell. There’s products in all kinds of categories, from Yoga courses to ailing back treatments! From blueprints for shed building to online money making courses! Some of these products sell better than others and so your product choice has a great deal to do with how successful you’ll be in selling them.
Not only is product choice a massive big deal when it comes to success online, but also your promotion method is a large part of it too. Get these two things right and you can write your own check with an online business.
Some of the best products to sell are those which solve the biggest problems for people. Products such as business training and software, for example is vital for those people who are attempting to switch career to make money from an online business. Business related software is particular good because it is needed to run an online business. So the people who buy and use the software will do so for potentially decades! If there’s a subscription payment attached to this kind of software, a single sale can bring in a recurring income for years!
Selling Digital Products Online – How To Sell “En Masse”
To sell a digital product can be a little more tricky than selling a physical product like you’d find on Amazon. With a digital product, it’s often a little less tangible than a physical product. So often affiliate marketers choose to sell digital products through an email list. An email list provides a digital means of communication whereby the affiliate can regularly interact with a subscriber to build trust and provide useful information. It also allows the marketer to build a large database with which to automate delivery of the product/service.
Email messages can be queued up and sent out automatically to subscribers as they join your list. Products can also be bought and delivered without you actually being present or personally dealing with any customers face to face. This makes affiliate marketing one of the most lucrative and scalable businesses that’s available today.
So why aren’t more people using affiliate marketing to escape the 9 to 5?
Selling Digital Products Online – Why So Many Fail
There’s a problem with affiliate marketing though and selling digital products online isn’t so easy. In fact the drop out rate in affiliate marketing is around 95%. That’s a huge number – only 5% actually make it work! Why such a small number? This number reflects the typical drop out rate for a normal business though. The difference with affiliate marketing is that it’s much easier to become an affiliate than it is to start a “bricks and mortar” traditional business. All you need is a laptop and internet connection, which most people have.
Because the barrier to entry with affiliate marketing is so low, more people can “have a go” and hence more drop out and/or fail.
There’s also a learning curve which needs to take place, as with any new skill. There’s many assumptions people make about earning a living online, many of which are based on an employee mindset. Since most people come to do affiliate marketing from an employee role, fewer have the right mindset to make it happen because they are not trained for entrepreneurial life.
The Entrepreneurial Mindset
In a job, you get paid for working in a role for a certain amount of hours. When you translate this to an entrepreneurial endeavour, such as building an online business, it doesn’t work the same way. In fact, you’ll likely spend a heap of time in the first instance of being an affiliate working without pay. Most affiliate marketers won’t earn anything in the first few months of their business either.
With most people living from pay check to pay check in their employee roles, this kind of working relationship isn’t acceptable. Most people simply won’t work for nothing and most won’t see the long term benefit of making an affiliate business work.
The entrepreneurial mind however sees things a little differently. They look further than a single monthly pay packet. An entrepreneur knows that if they can figure out how to sell online, they can allow automation to take over. They can theoretically make money automatically through the sale of products online, once they have “cracked” it!
The initial phase of becoming a successful affiliate marketer is where most will quit. Most try out a certain method for selling and it doesn’t work. So they quit. With a longer term vision of what affiliate marketing can do for you, you’re prepared to keep going through this period.
Summary
Selling digital products online is one of the fastest and most accessible ways for anyone to free themselves of the 9 to 5. However, there’s some time needed to learn the necessary skills for selling online. If you can overcome the barriers to entry and make your first online sale, you can repeat this success over and over again. With digital products the commission structure is much higher than with physical products. There’s no postage cost with digital products and this saving is passed to the affiliate. A digital product pays 30%-40% commission. Once you can figure out how to become profitable with such a business, it can be automated and scaled to a global audience.
If you’re ready to get started online, access this free video course.
